How to boost your marketing ROI by reducing a single point of friction

Conversion Optimisation is perhaps the most important ongoing effort related to your website. So much effort is expended developing content and driving people to your domain, but if your website doesn’t get them to engage with you then it’s all for naught. By implementing an ongoing conversion optimisation strategy, you can increase the ROI of all of your digital marketing channels. This post is a high-level guide to conversion optimisation. Following these steps will help you increase your conversion rate and get into the habit of making targeted improvements over time.

Before you even launch your site, give yourself visibility into your visitors’ behaviour. If you’re on WordPress, there are a host of plugins that can help you track how visitors interact with your website. Some of those plugins will even allow you to watch visitors engage with your site in real time! Others provide heat maps, which help you understand where people click and scroll on your website. By deploying tools like these, you give yourself the ability to understand the behaviour you are creating with your site’s design.

Focus on specific actions within your marketing funnel

Once you’ve given yourself the ability to monitor site interaction, make sure that your site is built to inspire specific actions that fit within your marketing funnel and strategy. Hiring a digital marketing agency at this stage can help you build a website that provides maximum benefit to conversions at every stage of your marketing funnel. Bravr’s internal web development and marketing teams boast a strong portfolio of successful websites, and they’ve been in the business for over a decade.

Be patient!

Once your site is live, it’s important that you allow time for trends to emerge. Understand that larger sample sizes paint a more accurate picture, and resist the urge to make constant changes to your copy and layout. Give your existing design a week or longer to perform, and analyse the results once a significant volume of traffic has interacted with your current version of your site.

It’s OK to call an expert

An increased conversion rate can be a huge profit driver for your business, so don’t hesitate to call in help. There’s been a great deal of scientific study on how humans interact with websites, and an experienced digital marketer will be able to help you make the right improvements based on that existing research and your current results. Companies like Bravr have entire teams dedicated to helping clients tackle conversion optimisation. Taking advantage of their experience can save you months of failed optimization attempts.

Don’t get crazy, now.

Once you’ve gathered the performance results of your current design, your next challenge is resisting the urge to make sweeping changes to your site. Make a list of potential improvements based on the interaction you monitored, and rank those changes in order of perceived benefit. Rather than implementing all of your changes at once, stick to one or two changes at a time. If you make a dozen changes all at once, it’ll be impossible to know the impact each change had on your conversion rate.

Test, Change, Repeat

If your CMS supports it, test your changes against your original design to see how the two versions compare with one another. If you move the CTA on your home page and change from a form to a button on another page, performing split tests on each page will let you quantify the impact that each change has versus the original design. If a change has a positive impact, keep it. If not, go back to the original version and implement one of the other changes on your list. Remember that there’s more than one way to solve most problems, so consider an alternate implementation of an existing change as well. (Purple button didn’t help? Try orange!)

Never Stop Optimising

Never abandon the process of conversion optimisation. Web design trends are constantly evolving, and no website drives consistent conversions long-term without improvement. If you’ve reached your target conversion percentage, continue to test potential improvements on a small portion of your traffic. You can always expand to a full 1:1 test if a particular improvement drives your conversion rate way up in limited tests. This allows you to constantly seek an improved conversion rate without significantly impacting your traffic.