Despite having great offers and value propositions for their prospects, many businesses still struggle to achieve their end objectives of generating leads and improving sales. What could be the problem? Optimization.
Optimization is key to improving conversions for your online business. When you optimize your offers and the experience intended for your target audience, you will eliminate friction that may be keeping your conversation rates low.
However, optimization is not a magic pill for improving leads and sales. In fact, if you do not have any goals or idea of what you are doing, optimization can lead to negative results. Your lead channels can stifle conversions, customer experience disrupted and sales frozen.
When it comes to conversions, any actions you take should be based on concrete data. Before starting any conversion optimization, find out why leads are not taking the action you desire. You can find this information by carrying out a survey on your website. From there, develop a hypothesis on what can be done to improve lead action. Finally, split test different optimizations to get the winning formula.
How to Optimize The Right Way
Most companies that optimize their offers, sadly, do not get it right. They are either doing so without an end-goal or are falling into the common testing pitfalls due to lack of a clear plan. Knowing and avoiding the common pitfalls will make it easy for you to achieve your objectives. Below are four pertinent steps you should have in mind when optimizing your website.
1. Set Your Goals
Any optimization should be done to achieve a particular goal. Blind optimization is just gambling with data. You can use your campaign data to tweak your efforts for better results. For example, if you are getting a lot of traffic but with poor conversions rates, you may want to know what is making users not convert.
Some of the questions you can ask with regards to the data include:
i) Is your offer relevant?
ii) Is it difficult to sign up on your landing page?
iii) Are there distractions keeping users from signing up?
After identifying hypothetical underlying problems, you can address them one by one or simultaneously.
2. Build Your Experience
Customers are attracted to brands because of a unique and valuable experience they get when interacting with them. Put more effort in building a valuable user experience than you do on conversions. Remember, generating leads at the front is not important if you cannot get the leads to buy at the back. Your experience is what makes customers trust you, buy your products and become your brand ambassadors.
Avoid the mistake of optimizing your front end and failing to keep your promise on the backend. Otherwise, you will end up with improved leads that will be not be willing to move to the next step of the sales funnel or take the action you desire.
3. Optimize Widely
When carrying out optimization tasks, most businesses concentrate on images and copy on the landing pages. In fact, many bloggers advise business owners to concentrate on the navigation links, copy on landing pages, CTA buttons and lead capture forms However, concentrating on these micro elements can blind you from the big picture. It is easy to get caught up with optimizing minute details that improve conversions.
For fast results that will give you a clear picture on customer conversions, optimize something large and noticeable. For example, you can test two landing pages with completely different designs. Also, think bigger than the micro elements for conversions. You can optimize your whole discovery processes. For example, if you are signing up leads to try your offer, reduce the number of steps they would need to fulfill to get that offer.
Any difficulties to conversion should be eliminated in your optimization process. The easier you make it for your prospects to discover what you want them to do, the better. If this means having to change your whole landing page design or simply a simple part of your copy, then go for it.
4. Use Advanced Metrics
Don’t just measure for the sake of it. Any activity you decide to measure should help you achieve a particular goal. There are many metrics you can measure but this does not mean all of them are important. Determine which metrics make sense for your business and focus your attention on them.
For example, would you rather measure traffic to your website or engagement levels? While traffic can seem like an important metric, engagement is more important when it comes to achieving your objective. Would you rather have 3000 visitors who consume your content and go away or just 1000 visitors who engage more with your content? In this case, engagement is more meaningful to measure since it is is likely to result to future sales.
Optimization makes sense when it helps you achieve your lead generation and sales objectives. The key to effective optimization is having a set of clear goals and a plan on how to implement various techniques. Every optimization task should be done with your end goal in mind. Moreover, any decisions to optimize should be backed by concrete data rather than intuition.
