5 principles for getting enduring value from your CRO program
And breathe.
You’ve walked into the lion’s den and emerged victorious. Or in this case, pitched the business case for a conversion rate optimisation (CRO) program and secured buy-in from all the major stakeholders.
However, this is only the beginning of your CRO journey. The boardroom has likely set stretch key performance indicators (KPIs) and long-term business goals - all with the aim of delivering sustainable business value through increased traffic and conversions.
For the success of your project you need to put the right building blocks into place, regardless of whether you’re entrusting the process to an in-house team or external agency. Drawing from our extensive experience, we’ve identified five key principles that should underpin a best-in-class CRO strategy:
- Understand and optimise the customer journey
- Leverage psychological principles
- Prioritise data-driven decisions
- Focus on first-party data
- Continuous testing and learning
Understand and optimise the customer journey
Capturing a prospect’s attention is the first stage. The real challenge lies in converting a visitor into a repeat customer once they’ve found your website. Mapping out the customer journey enables you to identify the main touchpoints - and more importantly, any areas of friction preventing a seamless transition from awareness to loyalty.
If you want to consistently deliver a premium user experience (UX), you first need to understand any blockers. Is your homepage plagued by an excessive number of images? Are your product descriptions over-complicated? Does your checkout process suffer from slow loading speeds? Optimising these pain points should help users progress deeper into your website.
And remember - don’t get in your own way. More than three-in-four customers acknowledge they’re more likely to recommend businesses that provide simple experiences. Keeping the journey streamlined will help get the conversion ball rolling.
Leverage psychological principles
Each customer has their own unique preferences and expectations. However, there are universal truths - inherent motivations and biases - that you can tap into to tip the CRO scales in your favour.
Social proof is one such psychological principle -. 84% of customers value product reviews from previous buyers, compared to 48% for professional reviewers. Testimonials and similar user-generated content (UGC) helps build credibility and foster trust.
You’ll be hard pressed to find a customer immune to FOMO, or fear of missing out. They all want to be that person that finds a needle in a haystack. This is where scarcity emerges as a vital instrument in the CRO toolkit.
Genuine limited-time offers, exclusive rewards and low stock messages all create a sense of urgency in the customer, significantly increasing the chance of conversion. Similarly, a sign-up form may appear to be a barrier to entry - but in reality, it drives up the perceived value of a product or service to incentivise an immediate purchase.
Prioritise data-driven decisions
How can you deliver a premium user experience (UX) if you don’t listen to your users?
The best-laid CRO program will fall apart if it isn’t anchored by tangible insights - and where better to get the relevant data than straight from the horse’s mouth. Opening a line of dialogue with your customers can unearth problems that your analytics may have missed.
Feedback forms, usability tests and surveys allow you to collate information from both existing customers and those that fell through the cracks. The responses paint a clear picture of your customers’ needs. On a more granular level, analytics tools highlight high-performance elements and sections that are negatively impacting your conversion rate. These can be remedied using the cornerstone of any CRO framework - A/B testing.
Focus on first-party data
At the time of writing, the future of third-party cookies remains murky (with the latest news being that Google is scrapping its deprecation plans). But this level of uncertainty should demonstrate the importance of using your own dataset rather than relying on external sources.
First-party data tells a story that’s unique to your users, as opposed to providing a generic profile. These insights enable you to deliver a bespoke (and more importantly, relevant) experience, providing a strong foundation to forge relationships with visitors.
Whether you monitor user actions in real-time via heatmaps and session recordings to learn how people interact with, and navigate around, your website, or you simply use a net promoter score (NPS) survey, the results remain the same. Developing a comprehensive understanding around customer behaviours paves the way to create the personalised experience they crave.
A word of warning, however. The onus is on you to ensure that your data collection practices comply with privacy regulations. This also means being transparent about how you intend to use their data; honesty and authenticity are traits that customers value in their retailers.
Continuous testing and learning
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the perfect CRO formula. Even if you find a strategy that delivers satisfactory traffic and conversions, this won’t last if you rest on your laurels.
If there’s one principle to live by, it’s to experiment, experiment - and experiment again. Nurturing a test-heavy mentality across your team and trialling new hypotheses enables you to stay one step ahead of evolving trends and shifting user behaviours.
However, each experiment should be anchored by previous learnings. Creating a roadmap will ensure that whilst you continue to identify new optimisation opportunities, you have the time and resources necessary to analyse the outcomes and implement the relevant changes.
Preparing to embark on your first CRO journey and want to ensure that it drives long-term sustainable growth, rather than simply be a flash-in-the-pan project? Get in touch with us today to hear how Eclipse can guide the kick-off phase so that it delivers enduring value.
