When it comes to Digital Marketing, SEO is probably the first thing that comes to mind. However, SEO isn’t the only core component of Digital Marketing. It’s 2020 now, and anyone involved in Digital Marketing cannot afford to overlook the vast canvas of Digital Marketing. In this post, we’ll highlight one of the most pivotal elements of Digital Marketing – Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
CRO is an all-pervading aspect of your Digital Marketing strategy – right from generating leads to improving the post-sale experience and boosting your brand reputation, CRO covers everything. After all, what good are your SEO, SEM, and PPC strategies if your website cannot convert traffic into leads!
If we told you that for most websites, only 2% of web traffic converts after the first visit, will you believe us?
Unfortunately, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean you cannot do anything to improve your conversion stats. As Digital Marketing has evolved drastically through the decades, so has CRO. Thanks to rapidly advancing technology, this is the time for marketers and business owners to follow the latest CRO trends and reimagine their conversion rate optimization strategy.
Today, an increasing number of marketers are realizing that conversions don’t happen in a silo – it is an ongoing process throughout the customer journey. Since each step of the customer journey plays a crucial role in influencing conversion rates, marketers dedicate a significant portion of their amount of time to analyzing the customer journey so that they can align their online offerings to suit the buyer’s intent. However, that’s easier said than done. The customer journey has now become more complex than ever – a customer’s journey from awareness about your brand to conversion involves multiple channels and devices, along with a combination of online and offline interactions.
This is precisely why your approach to CRO must expand to a broader and more holistic viewpoint.
To help you create a competitive CRO strategy in 2020, we’ve compiled the best CRO trends and CRO strategy tips that you must implement in your 2020 marketing strategy!
Actionable tips for creating the perfect CRO strategy for 2020
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Boost site speed
The first CRO aspect that any business that’s into online marketing using digital channels and platforms should focus on is the website speed. According to the latest studies, nearly 42% of people expect a webpage to load in under 2 seconds, and even one-second delay in that can lead to a 7% decrease in conversion rates!
To monitor your site speed, you can start using tools like PageSpeed Insights by Google and GTmetrix. With these advanced tools, you can get multiple snapshots of your site speed performance and identify the gaps. Many little things can come together to boost the site speed to a great extent, such as image compression, minimizing redirect chains, etc. These steps will eventually help you build a smooth and robust UX performance.
By optimizing your site’s speed, you can improve your search engine ranking, thereby driving more traffic to your site (that are most likely to convert into buyers) from organic searches. Also, by creating a fast loading site, you can ensure that the maximum bulk of your visitors stay on your site for longer, explore your offerings, and interact with your brand.
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Be mobile-friendly
As an online marketer, your aim should be to make the customer experience as smooth and seamless as possible. Naturally, you will have to implement the typical CRO strategies, like keeping the navigation structure simple and user-friendly, eliminating unnecessary buttons and menus, create a clear CTA to encourage visitors to take action. The more neat and straightforward your website, the better will be the user experience.
To ensure that users can interact and conduct business with your brand 24×7, you must optimize your website to suit mobile platforms. In essence, your CRO plan should include special considerations aimed at improving mobile UX. A huge portion of the global population prefers mobile devices to search, discover, and shop. It allows them to get information or see/buy products and services on-the-go. Thus, by optimizing your site’s mobile UX, you can capitalize on mobile traffic, which will lead to improved overall conversion rates.
When optimizing your site for mobile-friendliness, here are some factors you must consider:
- Is your menu visible even when users scroll through your site?
- Are your forms designed to pre-populate as and when necessary?
- Are your contact numbers clickable and accessible?
- Is your CTA located in an optimal position, as in, can users access it with their thumb?
- Does your chatbot get in the way of user navigation through your website?
Pay special attention to the last point – chatbots.
If you have a chatbot, great. The only thing you have to do is not let it be an obstacle for website navigation. However, if you don’t have a chatbot yet, it’s high time you incorporate one on your site. Since chatbots function as 24×7 customer service agents, they help keep the customer-brand communication window open at all times. By responding to customer requests and solving their issues, chatbots can help convert visitors to take the desired action (sign up or register/purchase from you) and even transform them into loyal customers.
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Optimize for different buyer personas
Modern-day marketing screams “personalization” and “customization.” Customers now expect and demand customization at each touchpoint of their customer journey with a brand.
The idea behind personalization is to make your customers feel valued. When a customer visits your website, it should speak to them – they should feel like your site has been tailor-made to suit their specific needs and pain points. Once you start focusing on customizing the user experience for different buyer segments, it will not only improve your brand reputation but will also increase traffic and drive sales.
Before you can customize your offerings for different buyer personas, you must identify and create the ideal buyer personas for your business. To do so, you can make use of the following tools:
- Surveys – If you can explain to your target audience how their personal information can help enhance their customer experience with your brand, they won’t mind sharing their basic personal info with you. Survey forms and questionnaires are two excellent ways to obtain relevant information (name, age, location, preferences, pain points, etc.) about your target audience. You can also use tools like SurveyMonkey and Qualaroo to get to know your customers better.
- Social listening – In an age dominated by social media, it is natural for people to be vocal on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. You can monitor these social media channels to see what your users are saying about you. Follow all their comments, posts, mentions, and shares related to your brand and products/services. Tools like Mention or Keyhole will further ease your task of social listening, thereby letting you understand your customers better.
- Intent research – Another crucial determinant of your buyer personas is customer intent or buyer intent. It refers to the purpose behind a particular action of a customer during their journey toward making a purchase from you. ThinkwithGoogle is the perfect tool for researching a customer’s intent to understand the triggers that lead to a purchase.
Once you conduct a comprehensive research about the various segments of your customers, you can classify them according to their tastes, buying habits, pain points, and so on. Naturally, you can tweak your marketing strategies to fit the unique needs of the different buyer personas.
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Leverage the Market Basket Analysis
As a marketer, you’re probably aware of the Market Basket Analysis (MBA). To put it in plain words, the concept of Market Basket Analysis aims to uncover the associations between products by identifying the combinations of products that frequently co-exist in transactions. In other words, MBA enables marketers to identify the relationships between the products purchased by their customers.
For instance, if we talk about a supermarket or an e-commerce brand, there are plenty of product categories to consider, like clothing, accessories, electronics items, personal care items, food & grocery items, etc. MBA seeks to find out the relationship between the various product categories to find out which items complement each other. Moreover, the MBA also helps marketers to find out if certain product segments sell more on a particular day, at what time slots, and so on.
By using the insights offered by the Market Basket Analysis, you can:
- Group products that can co-occur naturally in your store’s layout design to boost the chances of cross-selling.
- Encourage product promotion through online recommendation engines (for example, customers who purchased this product also viewed this product).
- Create targeted marketing campaigns by sending out promotional coupons to customers for products associated with their recent purchases.
This will not only provide a huge boost to your sales, but it will also help in customer retention. And since the Market Basket Analysis will help you collect relevant customer data, it will also help drive more conversions.
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Harness the power of retargeting
Retargeting is a proven and effective approach to boost CRO. As we said earlier, only 2% of your traffic converts after the first visit. Over 97% of the visitors who land on your site for the first time leave without purchasing anything from you. What do you do then?
You retarget them to come back to you.
To retarget the visitors who left your site, you can add pixels to the links that you share on various channels and track your visitors and their online buying habits. In this way, you can reach out to them by creating such marketing campaigns that appeal to them – in other words, the campaigns should have a USP that can help alleviate the pain points and needs of your visitors who have interacted with your links before. Retargeting helps expand your brand visibility, thereby enabling you to reach the people who have already expressed interest in your products/services.
Tools like MailChimp and Rocketlink can generate multiple relevant ads that will display on the right channels at the right time, thus, helping drive conversion.
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Don’t forget to entertain and engage
After all the efforts to drive your potential customers to your site and successfully converting them into “customers,” it’s time to strive to maintain their attention continually. Only by doing so can you ensure that they will remain your loyal customers. So, then how do you keep your audience and customers engaged and interested throughout their customer journey?
You create interactive, informative, and entertaining online experiences for them. Use animations, GIFs, short videos (maybe even add captions), attractive layouts, and bold colors that can immediately draw visitors’ attention and compel them to stay long enough on your website. However, remember that whatever form of content you put on your site must be in sync with your brand image, vision, and goals. That’s when your audience will be convinced about your credibility.
Don’t be afraid to show your humorous side – but, of course, do it with a professional taste. Most importantly, be authentic and share your values with your target audience. Transparency is a highly valued quality in the industry right now.
Last but not least, always encourage your visitors (even existing customers) to take some form of action on your site before leaving. Make it clear to them what you want them to do through a well-structured CTA.
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Respect and uphold the privacy of your customers
It is a well-established fact that conversions require users to share some basic personal information with companies and organizations. However, with the increasing instances of data breaches along with other privacy concerns, users have now become increasingly cautious about how and with whom they share their personal data online. This is where you must establish your brand as credible and reliable by assuring users and customers that their data will be protected at all costs. Today, it has become more important than ever to take strict privacy measures to protect the integrity of user data. The goal is to create a safe, secure, and enjoyable user experience.
Here are four measures that you can take to protect user privacy:
Get consent – Give your users the choice of opting-in. Let them know about the tools you use to monitor their data, the kind of data you collect, and the purpose behind doing so. Keep things transparent.
Use the right tools to protect data – When you collect user data, you must also use the tools to protect it from breach and misuse. Tools like Privacy Perfect are great for protecting the integrity of user data.
Do not store all types of data – As a marketer, you should only collect the data that’s relevant to your marketing policy. Avoid storing any type of data that violates the norms of personal space and privacy unless you specifically plan to add it to your marketing and branding policy.
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To conclude, if you wish to stay on top of the CRO game, you must stay updated with the latest CRO trends. Also, of course, make sure to implement these is CRO strategy tips while crafting your 2020 CRO strategy!
