Conversion optimization consultants need to be two things: smart and curious. In order to optimize website for more conversions, a consultant doesn’t just make changes. Instead, the consultant asks questions.
If you are a conversion optimization consultant or want to do some CRO work on your own website, ask these questions.
1. Who’s the audience?
CRO is a small part of the huge industry of marketing. There is a lot of overlap in field of digital marketing.
If there’s one thing that holds this unwieldy field of marketing together it’s this: audience understanding.
In order to be successful at marketing, the marketer must know their audience. Marketers accomplish nothing meaningful without first identifying their audience.
The conversion optimization expert can “fix” a website’s conversion problems only if he or she understands the audience.
The illustration from Moz below shows how the field of digital marketing understands itself in all its overlapping glory:
2. What’s the value of the product or service?
According to CRO big dog Oli Gardner, a “winning landing page” has five elements:
- A Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
- The hero shot.
- The benefits you’re offering.
- Social proof.
- A single conversion goal — your call-to-action.
That first point is critical — the USP. Here’s how Oli describes it:
The starting point of a marketing campaign revolves around your ability to define a point of differentiation. What is it about your product or service that sets it apart from the competition? You need to communicate this in a succinct way on your landing page. Try to break down your offering to its most basic level, to describe the specific benefit your customers will get by choosing your product/service.
When a conversion optimization turns her expert eye on a landing page, she wants to know one thing — what’s the big deal? Why is this important? Why should I care? What does this offer? Why is this special? Why are you selling this?
However you answer that barrage of questions, it should focus on one thing: value.
No matter how good a CRO consultant is, he can’t just make someone buy something with just a few conversion tricks — bigger buttons, snazzier graphics, etc. He has to understand the value of the product or service.
3. If this were my site, what would I do first?
Those two questions are simply the pregame warmup. We have to wrap our minds around the event as a whole before we can make any changes to specifics.
Conversion optimization is an incredible field precisely because it requires comparitively little time, little cost, and little effort. It utilizes existing resources to create substantial improvement. Sometimes, a small tweak can produce a torrential uptick in conversions.
That’s what the smart consultant wants to discover. She will identify the most obvious problem or easiest opportunity for improvement.
Here are six additional questions that will help you identify your page’s low-hanging fruit:
- Is the value proposition obvious?
- Is the headline clear and compelling?
- Are the graphics professional and motivating?
- Are there benefits focused on the user?
- Are there genuine testimonials?
- Is the CTA obvious?
A shortcoming in any one of these areas can signal a problem that is stopping up the flow of conversions. Pick the easiest one to change, decide on an improvement, A/B test the two elements, and watch your conversion rates improve.
4. What is one thing I can do to reduce friction?
Friction is public enemy number one of conversions.
Peep Laja of ConversionXL defines friction as “a psychological resistance to a given element.” Jeremy Smith calls it, more broadly, “anything that gets in the way of conversions.”
In case you haven’t realized it yet, conversion optimization is a mind game. The best CROs in the business know how to identify psychological barriers and totally demolish them.
There are several kinds of friction, and each one requires a different angle of attack.
- Design friction – Aspects of the overall design of the page that limit conversions. This could include layout, color, images, font kerning, etc.
- Copy friction – Features of the text that reduce conversions. It could be grammatically awkward, boring, too long, etc.
- Time friction – This involves page load time, as well as the time it might take to scroll through the page, fill out a form, etc.
- Cognitive friction – Cognitive friction is a catch-all category for those elements within the mind of a user that can prevent conversions. For example, if a user doesn’t trust website, doesn’t like the “feel” or anything else, this might be categorized as “cognitive friction.”
If you can look at your website from a user’s perspective, you will be better able to identify the points of friction and eliminate them.
If you don’t see any friction, look again. Every single website and landing page has friction. That’s just the way it is. Find it, and kill it.
5. How can I make the call to action stronger?
This last point is money.
The CTA of a website or landing page is where all your conversion optimization efforts come to a climax. This is where the user converts (or not). Nearly every CTA on the planet can be made stronger. You just need to figure out how to do it.
Here are a few points that will help you figure out how to make your CTA really work.
- Make it look like a button.
- Make it bigger or more obvious.
- Use a color that has more contrast.
- Use copy that is more compelling or exciting.
- Place more white space around it.
- Add trust signals near it
- Add more than one CTA to your page.
Most of massive increases in CRO come from CTA changes.
Conclusion
Conversion optimization has a very straightforward goal: make more money by improving conversions.
There are plenty of ways to do this. But it all begins with asking the right questions:
- Who is the audience?
- What’s the value of the product or service?
- If this were my site, what would I do first?
- What is one thing I can do to reduce friction?
- How can I make the call to action stronger?
Ask these questions, conduct your A/B tests, and watch your conversions rise.
What questions help you identify areas of conversion optimization?
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