So you’ve got your SEO strategy in the bag and your PPC campaigns are running swimmingly. You check in on your analytics and your are driving traffic to your site from all the places you want, and expect, it to come from. But you go and check out some other reports and notice some alarming numbers: high bounce rates on your landing pages, low time spent on site, and few page views by visitors. Your site is not converting your visitors into customers. It is time to look at a conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy. In this article, we will take a brief look at what exactly conversion rate optimization is as well as a few tips on adding a personal touch to your site that can improve your conversion rate.
CRO: The Basics
To put it simply, CRO encompasses a number of tactics to improve two types of actions on site. The first are micro-conversions which are usually good indicators of visitor engagement on site and the varying stages of a visitor’s purchase decision. Micro-conversions include form submissions, email subscriptions, a particular number of pages visited per session, items added to a cart, and so on. Micro-conversions will be specific goals that indicate that your users are finding your site useful.
The second conversion action are a little more straightforward. These conversion actions are revenue driven, such as an item purchase or order of services.
As previously mentioned, there are a number of key metrics that indicate your conversion success (apart from revenue). High bounce rates can indicate that a searcher comes across your site and does not find the relevant information that they need. While, a low time spent on site and few page views could indicate that your page content does not engage the visitor enough to keep them interested in your site content.
Let’s take a look at two strategies that can help with improving your pages visited and time spent on site by adding a personal touch to your page content. All too often, CRO can be heavily focused on metrics and analytics data. But before you get into improving these numbers get to know your customers a little better. Here are two ways of personalizing customer interaction to improve your conversion rate.
Survey/Feedback
Show your customers you care and you’re willing to listen to feedback. Instead of thinking about your nameless customers as numbers and analytics data begin with understanding who your customers are, what their site needs are, and how you can address their needs.
You can use a quick survey tool such as Qualaroo to prompt your visitors to answer a few questions. The great thing about this tool is that it’s non-intrusive and the questions can be completed quickly by the user. I’ve noticed Inbound.org using this tool to ask users how they can improve their site by asking a few simple questions. It’s important to be specific with your questioning. For example, ask users what will improve their experience on site with some specific suggestions (i.e. more relevant content, better selection of items to purchase, a more engaging UX, etc).
Show your Customers Who You Are
Our second tip is a simple one but can go a long way in improving your visitor’s site engagement, put a face (or faces) to your site. Personalize your site by featuring who the people are behind the website. It can go along way to show your customers the people from which they’re purchasing from. Whether it’s creating a public persona of a key employee, such as a recognizable CEO, or creating an employee page that allows visitors to see the staff behind your site.
A tool like CrazyEgg can you help to visualize hotspots on your site by showing you where your users’ mouse clicks and hovers over on the page. You can use this tool to measure the effectiveness of your image placements. Test a few different spots on site, feature your employees on your home page, include employee profiles, and even have employees engaged with your products or services. While we may have only brushed the surface of CRO, these two tips should go a long with improving your customer relationship. Look for an improvement in your time spent on site, the number of page views by visitor, and hopefully, an increase in revenue as well.
The original author of this blog post is Steve Rosenfeld. Andrew Stager also contributed to this article.
