This is part of chapter 6 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which is available on Amazon.
Conversion rate optimization is one of the most important elements of a Bullseye marketing program. Starting serious marketing efforts without first optimizing your website for conversions is like turning on a spigot and trying to fill a bucket that’s full of holes.
You should always have an objective for people coming to your website. At a minimum, you want to get their contact information and permission to send them updates (aka market to them). Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of constantly improving the rate of people completing your desired actions, whether it’s making a purchase, downloading an ebook, signing up for a webinar, or something else.
The logic of conversion rate optimization is simple: it’s much easier, faster, and cheaper to get twice as many of the people who are already coming to a website to do something than it is to double the number of people coming to the site.
As you’ll see, doubling your conversion rate is not as hard as you might think. And when you do double it, you’ve also cut in half the cost of those web leads or sales. Do I have your attention now?
For example, ecommerce companies know that the vast majority of people who come to their site won’t actually buy something on their first visit, but their lifetime value as a customer will be several times higher if they can get that site visitor’s email address and market to them. So right on their home page many ecommerce sites will interrupt the first time visitor’s buying experience and give them an incentive to provide their email address or text information.
Of course, it’s even better if the site visitors also buy. So ecommerce sites run countless tests regarding pricing, images, colors, layout, and so forth, to encourage that, too. Those all are part of conversion rate optimization.
Direct Marketing Success Factors
Many digital marketing programs are forms of direct marketing. And, in order, the three most important components contributing to the success of direct marketing campaigns are:
- List or audience
- Offer
- Creative
Before going deeper into CRO and other marketing tactics, let’s consider each for a moment because they will impact much of what we do.
List: A direct marketing list is traditionally just that: a list of thousands or millions of people and their addresses and other information. In large-scale consumer direct marketing programs, marketers enrich those lists with such additional information as the consumer’s approximate income, credit rating, type of car that they drive, magazines that they subscribe to, and so on. In a B2B campaign, additional data may include the size and location of the prospect’s company, company’s industry, previous business relationship with the company, title of the person, and much, much more. Some direct marketers add thousands of data points to each profile and use advanced analytics to target their messages.
I’m generally using the term “list” more broadly. I consider a list to be that traditional kind, such as for email marketing and direct mail, but also more broadly your audience. You need to get in front of the right people and get them your website to have Bullseye marketing success.
It’s not always easy. You need to know which industry sites, social media channels, conferences, blogs, magazines, and other communication channels that your customers use. With today’s fractured media landscape, that can be difficult to find out. When interviewing customers about where they get their professional information I’ve had more than one answer, “Google” or “Twitter” – not real helpful.
Offer: Once you’ve found your audience, you need to get them to act. To get people to give up something you value (their money, or their contact information), you need to give them something that they value. That may simply be your product or service, but often it is a discount, information, entertainment – value comes in many forms. You need to understand your customers to know what will move them to act. You then use calls to action — such as “Click here to do X” or “Take advantage of our 10% discount; offer good today only” — to get them act on your offer
Creative: Direct markers have always tested different creative: messages, colors, photos, layouts, and so on.
Just changing the color of a button, or changing the button text from “Submit” to “Download your free ebook” or adding the word “free” to a headline, or redesigning your landing page can make a significant difference. Superior creative can double your conversion rates, or more.
Your landing page copy can make a big difference. Some tried and true techniques are:
- bandwagon effect (“Being used by 150,000 people!”)
- halo effect (“Brought to you by the people who made [last year’s great product, movie, etc.]”)
- scarcity (“Only X left!”, “Offer good today only!”)
- social proof, such as reviews and testimonials
- use the word “you” in your copy
- describe benefits not features
- use the word “because” – studies have shown that providing even the feeblest reason increases cooperation
- include emotional trigger words
Doubling your conversion rates with better creative is huge, of course. But getting in front of the right audience with a superior offer can produce conversion rate improvements of several hundred percent.
And that translates into dropping the cost per lead by 75% or more.
Now let’s look at a few specific CRO opportunities.
Website conversion rate optimization
You need to get the most from the people who are visiting your website. That’s a core principle in Phase 1 of Bullseye Marketing.
But most people who visit your website will come and go without leaving a trace. It’s not unusual for only one percent or fewer of site visitors to do something. We want to significantly improve on that.
Most people will start on your home page or a page that’s especially well optimized for search. In my experience, the three most popular pages for a corporate site are
- home page
- top product/service pages
- the careers page.
Since we’re concerned with marketing and revenue, we’re not going to worry about the careers page. But if someone has enough interest in you to come to your site and go to one of your product/service pages, it’s a good idea to do what you can to get them to start interacting with you.
To do that, you need to spread offers and calls to action all over your site.
Here are a few companies that demonstrate how.
Jeff Bezos knows more about Internet business than anyone. When he bought The Washington Post it was losing money, partly because it was giving its great writing away for free. So he put up a paywall. This is what the home page looks like now if you’re not a paying subscriber.
Conversion optimization is not subtle, although it is not always as in-your-face as this.
But it worked: within a couple of years The Post was once again profitable.
For a company like Slack that delivers its software via the Internet, it’s a no-brainer: let people buy your software, or at least sign up for the free version of your software, right on your home page.
SaaS software companies are one of the few types of firms that can use their home page as a prime, CRO landing page.
Dell EMC sells high-end computer memory and other systems; a single deal can be worth tens of millions of dollars. They think that getting people to their conference is so significant that they will sometimes devote their entire home page to promoting it.
A primary marketing goal for many medical institutions is to get more appointments scheduled with new patients. So Cleveland Clinic, a premier institution, on most website pages provides multiple ways for people to move the conversation forward:
- A phone number
- That orange appointments button
- Live chat
Even subtle changes to a regular web page – like an orange button versus a grey one — can make a big difference. Or the location of the Contact Us button: make sure that there’s one at the top of your page, it will produce far better results than one in the footer.
The key point is to make it as easy as possible for people to connect with you in whatever way they prefer.
Chat pop-ups are proving to be a very effective way for companies to start to engage one-to-one with people visiting their websites, especially with those people on pages that suggest stronger buying intent like a pricing page.
And some companies are automating at least part of these conversations with chatbots. The chatbots can be programmed with branching conversations to qualify a visitor and move the appropriate ones on to a live salesperson, or save the salesperson’s time and get the visitor the information that they need instead. Or direct them to support if that’s what they need. These chatbots only cost a few hundred dollars a month, making them far less expensive than a person, can be trained quickly and don’t mind working 24/7.
Many companies use pop-ups to promote their next event or latest offering. Gartner is a leading tech analyst firm; it serves many large companies who buy its reports for thousands of dollars apiece, or pay tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a subscription. Here it uses a home page pop-up to promote an upcoming conference.
Often pop-ups are launched when a person is about to leave your site. These can be triggered by the cursor moving toward the URL address box (presumably to type in a different site) or, if they just arrived, to the Back button. These “exit intent pop-ups” display a “Wait! Don’t go yet!” offer such as this one:
While you may not use these devices on every page of your site – you might exempt your career pages, for example — they can significantly increase business from people who are showing real interest in the products and services that you’re offering.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are a special kind of website page. They are the pages with forms that you direct people to from your website buttons, ads, social media posts, direct mail, and other calls to action.
When people come to your landing pages, often at considerable expense to you, you want them to fill in the form with accurate information, immediately do business with you, or give you permission to market to them. That is the sole purpose of a landing page.
Several guidelines for the creation of effective landing pages are:
- The landing page should make it easy for the person to take advantage of the offer that the person clicked on to get to the page (they may have also come from a direct mail piece and typed in a URL, and possibly even a personalized URL or PURL).
- Usually, the landing page will have a prominent headline with explanatory text on one side and the form on the other side; pages with the text on the top and the form below tend not to perform as well.
- Only one subject and offer per landing page. Don’t try to do too much. You can experiment with secondary offers far down at the bottom of the page, but don’t make them so prominent that they’re competing with your primary offer and goal.
- You should not have the website navigation on the landing page. Various studies have shown that you’ll get a higher conversion rate without navigation giving the person an easy way to move on to other parts of the site. Only the company logo should be on the top and clickable to get to the full website.[i]
- You can test such creative options as:
- including a phone number
- different wording, images, and colors
- different call-to-action button colors, designs, and text (for example, Get your free ebook” instead of “Download”).
This basic landing page checks the boxes.
These days some marketers get quite cute – even taunting — with their button text, such as this on a form offering a free industry report:
I also recommend that you ask people to provide an email address and then send them a download link or other information, rather than giving them all the information online after filling out the form. First, for you that guarantees that they’ll put in a valid email address, not something like a@a.com; and for them they’ll have a link that they can use to download the materials to their desktop and mobile devices – wherever they want to read them – and even do so more than once.
Test, test, test. You may be surprised at what can make a difference – digital marketers usually are!
You’ll also want to test to make sure that your landing pages look good and work well on smartphones. Since the mobile screen is so much smaller, you have far fewer options. The first absolute rule is that you need a mobile-ready website, typically a responsive site. The mobile landing page text and form fields should be large enough that they’re easily read and completed.
On the left is what an Oracle form looked like on its site before it was responsive, and on the right is the mobile-friendly version of the same form. The latter is far easier to deal with on a small, smartphone screen.
And one part of the tips I outlined above may be changing: increasingly sites use an initial page with the information, offer and a big yes button (of some sort) which then takes the person to the page with just the form. Shouldn’t that cut responses in half? Maybe not: it’s often intended to create a superior mobile experience and eliminate the need for the person to scroll down to a form on their phone. The extra click is easier.
A rough rule of thumb is that landing pages usually have a conversion rate of only about 3%, but if the creative design, wording, etc., are optimized you can double that to perhaps 6%. Right there you’ve doubled your leads while cutting your cost per lead in half.
However, a superior offer can dramatically improve on that with some companies reporting 50% or higher landing page form completions with great offers.
How much information should you ask for?
If you’re asking people to fill out a form, how much information can you ask for? At what point will you drive them away?
It depends on the value of your offer. If people think of it as a very valuable offer, they may be willing to provide quite a lot of information. This form by tech analyst firm Gartner requires a dozen pieces of information to get their report.
I once worked with a company that needed a lot of information for the first sales call. I wondered if we couldn’t pre-qualify prospects, and speed up the work of the salespeople by asking prospects those questions in advance of a call. So I created a form with over 20 fields to it. These were detailed questions about what they wanted to do, how soon they needed it, etc. etc. It would take a person at least 5-10 minutes to fill out the whole thing.
And many people did. Just in case someone didn’t want to bother, we gave them an out at the very top: we told them that they could call us (phone number provided) or use a link to go to a much shorter form and fill that out — but few people did. We got four times more qualified leads from that very long form than from the short one.
Why?
I think a major reason was that we called it a “fee request form.” Many people probably thought that if they filled it out, they would get a proposal or information on our fees; that was our offer. And they may have thought that they would not need to talk with a salesperson; lots of people don’t want to talk with a salesperson.
From a sales point of view, we knew that if someone was going to take the time to fill out our very long form they were probably fairly serious.
So my recommendation, based on industry data and my experience, is to go to the extremes. Either use a very short form – possibly only initially asking for just their email address — to get lots of signups to build your database, or use a very long form that by its very nature will put you in touch with only the most serious prospects.
A third option is to use progressive profiling. With progressive profiling, you start with one or a few questions and each time the person requests something else from your site you ask just a few more questions. Over time you build up a rich profile of the person. Many marketing automation programs provide progressive profiling.
Marketing apps
Interactive marketing apps are an advanced form of conversion optimization. They are based on the idea that people may value an experience with your company that is more enjoyable than filling out a form. You only have to look at how many people take and share Buzzfeed quizzes to realize how much people like interactive content.
Marketing apps bring a kind of gamified experience to marketing and can include quizzes, assessments, configurators, ROI calculators, games, interactive infographics, graders, and more.
When WordStream was sold, founder Larry Kim wrote on LinkedIn, “My most spectacular growth hack is the AdWords Grader. We showcase the product by grading AdWords account performance.” People used the HubSpot Website Grader over four million times,making it one of their strongest lead generation tools.
Thank You pages
Once the person has filled out a form and submitted it you’re done with them for now, right? Wrong! You’ve got a very interested person in front of you. Offer them even more.
The Thank You page is a great opportunity to say more than “Thank you, the webinar registration information has been emailed to you.” You now can give them more information, show a couple more offers, even provide a “Would you like to talk to a rep right now?” button.
You can also include social sharing buttons: make it easy for people to tell their friends about the valuable offer that they were smart enough to take advantage of.
Call tracking
So far I’ve focused primarily on the digital conversion experience, but of course there are other options such as business reply mail envelopes, postcards, and a telephone number.
When a prospect calls your company, they are likely to be more highly motivated than if they filled out a form. Call tracking is a way for you to improve the call experience over time and to understand which of your campaigns are generating leads.
With call tracking your company gets a pool of unique phone numbers. You then use different ones throughout your campaigns: one for mail, one for billboards, one on your website, and so on. You can even dynamically include unique numbers on different AdWords ads and track responses at the keyword and ad level. The numbers all forward to your regular sales or customer support lines, but you have reports on which channel they came from.
That’s the campaign analytics part. The conversion optimization part is that you can record the calls (“this call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes”). You then can use the recordings to review how your business development reps — the people who answered the calls — did, and to train them to improve in the future.
Now that you know some of the most effective ways to improve your conversion rates, you’re probably going to be looking at website, offers, landing pages and even business phone calls differently than before. Great! There’s a lot to gain by being critical and running many tests to see what actually works for your company.
