Digital marketing efforts aim to convert casual internet users into loyal customers. But how do you ensure that you achieve this goal? The answer is conversion optimization.
*Updated 8/19/2024
This blog post will discuss optimizing your conversion process to achieve quality conversion rates, ensuring all parts of your conversion process are well-designed.
This can be helped using tools such as contact form templates. But first, let's briefly discuss what conversion is and the steps of the conversion optimization process.
Four Key Steps of Conversion Optimization
We'll discuss each in more detail below, or you click above to skip ahead. But first, let's answer an important question.
What Is A Conversion in Marketing?
Conversion in marketing is turning a casual internet user into a paying customer. It's getting someone to take the desired action on your website by subscribing to your email list or purchasing a product.
There are 5 key steps to the conversion funnel:
5 basic steps of the conversion funnel
- Awareness: The first step is to get people to become aware of your brand. You can do this through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media, and content marketing.
- Interest: Once people know your brand, they will become interested in what you offer. They will visit your website and might compare you to other products. At this stage, it is essential to provide customers with relevant and valuable information that solves their problems.
- Consideration: In this step, customers consider your product a potential solution to their problems.
- Intent: This is when customers have decided that your product is the right solution for them.
- Buy: This is the final step, where customers buy from your company. But conversion doesn’t end here. You must retain your customers by following up with them and offering excellent customer service.
Image Source: Unbounce
Now that you understand the conversion process let’s discuss optimizing for better conversion rates.
Conversion Optimization in 4 Steps
- Research
- Testing
- Implementation
- Analysis
The conversion optimization process has four main steps: research, testing, implementation, and analysis. With all these steps, you must plan an effective content strategy to help people understand how to use a product or market a new service.
Image Source: Medium
1. Research
Research is the first step of conversion optimization. It’s vital to understand your target audience. Once you know this information, you can create targeted content that will speak directly to potential customers.
For example, if you're selling products to mothers, you'll want to create content that discusses the benefits of your products for busy moms.
But if you're selling products to students, you'll want to create content that addresses studying and staying organized.
If you need to increase your sales, make sure to learn more about eCommerce image optimization, as it will make it easier for you to grab the attention of your target audience.
Common strategies used for target audience research include surveys, interviews, focus groups, and competitor analysis.
You can also use Google Analytics to segment your website visitors and see which groups are converting at a higher rate. Similarly, mobile app analytics can provide valuable insights into user behavior, helping you tailor your app's content and functionality to better meet customer needs.
Another good way to research your audience is to create buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional characters that represent your ideal customer.
They consider information like demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. Creating buyer personas can help you better understand your target audience and what content will resonate with them.
2. Testing
The next step is to test different elements on your website to see what works best, including testing other headlines, calls-to-action, or images. You can also try free shipping or a discount for first-time customers.
You usually accomplish this using A/B testing, which compares two web page versions to see which one performs better. Once you've found the best elements, you can implement them on your website.
3. Implementation
So, by this point in the CRO journey, you've done your research and come up with strategies in the first two phases. You've identified problem areas, and you've crafted solutions that are like golden keys to unlock higher conversion rates.
Now, it's time to put those solutions into action. Implementation is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. You take all those great ideas and actually make them happen on your website or landing pages.
This phase involves making changes to your website based on your research and strategy.
But here's the kicker – it's not a one-and-done deal. Conversion Rate Optimization is an ongoing process.
You'll monitor how the changes you've made affect your conversion rates, gather data, and continuously refine your approach. It's a bit like gardening. You plant the seeds, nurture the plants, and keep tending to them to make sure they grow and flourish.
In a nutshell, the implementation phase of CRO is all about turning your brilliant ideas into reality and then keeping a close eye on how those changes impact your conversion rates. Which brings us to the 4th and final phase, analysis.
4. Analysis
Finally, you need to analyze the results of your efforts, which will help you understand what's working and what's not working so that you can continue to improve your conversion rates.
One way to analyze your efforts is to calculate conversion rate lift, the percentage increase in conversion rate you've achieved due to your optimization efforts.
Final Words
Remember, there are four basic steps of conversion rate optimization. The process begins with research, where you study your target audience and develop content and offers that resonate with them.
You then create multiple marketing elements and test them to see what works best. Finally, you analyze your optimization efforts to see if you’re going in the right direction. Happy marketing!
Author Bio
Hey, it's Mick and I'm the Growth Marketing Manager at POWR. My marketing career spans two decades, primarily in growth marketing in the healthcare space, with stints in broadcast television, advertising and copy editing.
I went to the College of Journalism at the University of Louisiana - Monroe and a storyteller at my core. My wife Elizabeth, son Gavin, and pup Jolene currently call Lafayette, Louisiana home.
Follow me on LinkedIn.
