30-Minute Webinar: Conquer Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Key Takeaways

good morning everyone and thank you for so much for coming to our wearaware webinar around conquering cro tips tests and measurement um my name is anna younker i'm a senior digital strategist here at wareware so that means i help our clients leverage all their just digital assets to help meet their business goals and i'm here with my colleague hi i'm tim frost i'm a creative director here at whereaware and like this says today we'll be talking about cro and i did do a quick google search so um we're talking about marketing cro which is conversion rate optimization not um the native token of the kronos blockchain so if you're here to learn about blockchain you have landed in the wrong place so we're talking about conversion rate optimization uh before we jump in today i do have uh some housekeeping notes just about the um about the presentation you can ask any questions if you'd like through the chat or through the question feature in go to webinar so we'll try and get to those questions at the end and we will be sending out this deck after the webinar so along with a recording so you can don't take any notes we'll send that out after the fact just keep a lookout for that um so before we jump in i also wanted to say that after the webinar we will be sending out this 25 plus list of optimization ideas you know we only have about 30 minutes today so not a ton of time and there's really a lot we could be covering so we want to make sure that we you know you will have this documented list of like 25 more ideas that you can work through along with kind of notes on the process that we're going to talk through so again you'll be getting this afterwards as a takeaway so a couple things will be coming your way after the webinar so with that i'll hand it off to tim thanks anna uh we'll take a brief second to explain who we are so where where is a customer experience agency driving smart growth through digital strategy and activation and we are a full service partner meaning we help clients develop winning strategies and execute them across the multitude of platforms so that could be website design and development it could be email marketing seo ppc um as well as campaigns and then what we're talking about today is cro so we will help you identify the smart strategies to engage with your audience online and achieve your business goals and here's a few of our clients so we are in as you can see some of these logos industries from e-commerce banking retail technology b2b so we've got proven experience a wide a large range so this variety means we can apply these learnings uh to solve unique challenges for any and all clients and so anna back to you great so today we're going to kind of talk through conversion rate optimization from the perspective mia and she is our marketer she's a marketing consultant and like many of us you know she's getting ready and preparing to launch a new campaign so for mia she is in she's a marketing consultant and she's putting together this ebook for restaurant marketers so she spent a ton of time and energy putting together this great content to help get some more leads right as a lead generation is her goal she has put together this landing page with the hopes of collecting you know prospective clients and here you can see the page where she's hoping to get them to submit information and download her new ebook so in addition to putting time and energy into creating this content she's launching this big multi-channel campaign you know with paid advertising she's putting content out there on social she's put together an email campaign to support this ebook and ultimately driving all this traffic to the landing page so this landing page is really a high value page on her site so we talk about conversion rate optimization and we want to understand what are the highest value pages so for mia and our conversations today this is something that she's really putting all the effort into and you know wants the goal of getting more leads so she has some targets for how she wants it to perform and you know let's see tim how how did she do you know right away from her for initial campaign sure oh two percent uh after launching this campaign i think you know me is probably a little bit disappointed for all the time and effort and the amount of work she put into not just the e-book but promoting this campaign it probably didn't meet her expectations right this means only two percent who got to that landing page decided that it was worth giving up their information and then downloading so at this point she's pretty disappointed um in how the campaign's done so far yeah and how how like how do we know that she's disappointed right so we've pulled some industry stats knowing that she's pretty disappointed we want to help her out so here we can see that the median average is 4.6 rate 4.6 conversion rate so we look at agencies that are on the far left at a 2.4 and we look at restaurants which are on the highest side at just under 10 so largely what this is telling us is there's probably a really good opportunity to convert more traffic at a higher rate if we can make some adjustments and some changes to the work and what she's doing and how she's promoting herself so let's see if we can help mia turn this campaign around yeah like like tim said we know that we've already put a lot of effort into or me has put a lot of effort into her campaign into the content she's created probably invested money into those paid campaigns across social and paid so using this conversion rate optimization this process of like incrementally increasing conversions from your site will really help her get more out of her campaign and thus you know help her reach her business goals so instead of starting over and you know starting from scratch that's we're going to start making using cro to help mia with her campaign and as we think about cro really you know it is really numbers focused we're talking about conversion rates we're talking about you know probably bounce rates click through rates whatever your kpis are um to help you you know have your customers engage more but really it is about your customers and you have to figure out what is helping them you know what are their pain points what's driving them or frustrating them and how can you improve that because that's really what's going to help improve your conversions not just making one change on your site you know it's a process and a continual process at that so keep that in mind so how can we you know get started we're talking about for all these conversion rates tim well let's let's explain how we would get started with some of our clients so as you mentioned anna optimization really should be thought of as an ongoing process right there's a lot of different places you could start uh across the customer life cycle and sort of where you are in your campaign and how you're driving traffic so everything from audience and how you're targeting them to the specific content that you're sending or promoting as well as you know making incremental improvements to to get better outcomes right so how do we know where to start good news is we've got a process for that so to help you now narrow down these options uh it's important to have a cro process and that kind of sounds like a no-brainer but in our research 60 percent of marketers or running optimizations had no process or is very unstructured and that can create opportunity for error for you know start and stop or a lack of follow-through and applying those findings um to the next thing so we've built a simple process brainstorm define design and build and then analyzing share all right so let's go to step number one brainstorm so here's where the quant and qual we're going to analyze you know surveys what kind of data do we have where can we find how anna mentioned hitting those kpis which are key performance indicators um what are we trying to achieve now let's go take a look at how that web page is doing why no one's filling out a form let's understand what the users are and aren't doing let's document some benchmarks and then let's measure and increase and set some targets of where we would like to be in the future yeah and i think for this part it's really important to get cross teams like tim and i work really closely you know across creative and strategy to really think about um some opportunities as well as you know other developers um to find some of these ideas and also the benchmarks like mia said you know right now we know hers at two percent so where can we go from there what and the industry shows us that there's opportunity exactly all right so let's look at that some data and again this is where anna and i would collaborate so where do we optimize first how do we find the data that it tells us where we should start or what we can optimize for so here's looking at some some page data uh on the upper right right like we're looking at who's going to the pages are they clicking trying to find friction points then there's things like heat mapping tools and scroll maps to see okay are people clicking on the things we want or are they being distracted and then sort of bouncing if this is a multi or omnichannel campaign then we can look at how are those ad units doing are they driving the traffic that we want and then also looking at device user types looking at all the data so that we're making informed decisions not just shooting from the hip and hoping it sticks so now that we've looked at this data we can kind of help me understand okay where should she go from here so here's a list based on that previous um audience activity and experience some things that we could measure right so web trip web traffic page view so this maps back to your end goals right so if i'm looking at you know for e-commerce and it's new and repeat traffic and we see that repeat traffic is not spending more than we should then go look at average order value so you can kind of see how these compound or can relate to each other but this is just a general list to get you started all right next all right so we're starting to look at mia's data and now we're going back and looking at the landing page and starting to ask some questions for her how could i make this page more welcoming compelling right we've we've got their eyeballs on the ad or the ppc and we've driven them we've driven them to this right we know in her campaign but only two percent have decided to fill out the form and download so you know looking at it at first glance it's kind of generic and i'm not sure you know is it is it the right thing am i really willing to sort of give up my information to get this piece i'm not sure she's convinced her audience yet yeah and to that point maybe when we were looking at the data it had a higher bounce rate on this page so potentially she could start by looking at her audience right what if we segmented better i don't know what if her ads are targeting what audiences they're using but maybe start there and test updating that to be more focused on that restaurant audience and by honing in on that right audience it could help us reduce that bounce rate and maybe then improve the conversion rate just because we're maybe not bringing in any like more unqualified traffic so focusing on the right traffic first so that's potentially one one change you could make i agree that's a perfect place to start right let's let's just personalize it by the audience right so we know we're going after the restaurant marketers let's you know add get our copywriter and rewrite a headline here it's just adding one word but it could be more than that uh and let's speak directly to what they're gonna get um and then maybe showing a minor change right the ad unit we use this beautiful food imagery let's let's reuse it here on the landing page so when they see that add and click it they know they're going to the exact same place depending on the platform you're using this could be potentially powered by ai or if you're doing it more manually you know with some of the tools we use you can do this kind of dynamically but either way personalize it for sure to help improve that conversion rate and then okay what about this section i see this wall of text what i like to say here underneath what are some ways um you know if mira was clearly stating this for restaurant marketers it's not very easy to see maybe if we updated the visuals and made these points stand out a little bit more this change could help i agree let's let's take this back to design a little bit and see how we can break up that copy so that it's more digestible maybe we can add some icons right how do we make it more appealing and so they can glance at it and decide do i really want to read more into this farther down the page or is this enough and i can i'm ready to go ahead and convert and then also you know we know that stats and facts right knowing other people have tried it and it worked can be a powerful tool as well so let's let's get a a testimonial from someone else who's downloaded this and had great results and see if that can also help and then you know as we're looking at this some further i still think there's maybe some ways that we can impact and draft results right yeah this form looks like maybe it's a little bit long i don't know if there's ways we could reduce the number of fields maybe there's some that aren't as relevant but definitely taking a look and if we looked at that data and saw there was a drop off maybe in incompletion halfway through the form that could definitely tell us that people don't want to give up this information yet i 100 agree uh she's kind of asking a lot of questions and some things that are kind of personal like it's hard to see but you know she's asking industry and company and revenue and we already know the industry because she's targeting the restaurant marketers and the company maybe we could get that later or through the email she should know and revenue seems like it's sensitive material at this stage in the funnel that we just probably don't need yet maybe she can get that in the future or once someone has you know felt the real value in this ebook and then have a follow-up conversation then it's time to capture that more data so here on the left you know again we took it back to the design drawing board and we made some changes we showed a cover of the e-book that you're going to get and we simplified the form fields because we know less form fields people are more likely to complete that form and we also made the cta the call to action button we changed the copy as well as made it a little bit bolder so it's very clear what we want you to do on this page and you know since this is a landing page and we want mark we want the users to take a very specific action download this ebook i think there's another opportunity here to remove the page navigation right we don't necessarily need everyone going to the rest of mia's products on our site we want them to convert and convert and get this piece of content so let's see if we can remove those main nav and remove some points of distraction great so we've gone through a great kind of like an initial brainstorming session for mia and for that one of the key pages on her site and the next part in our process would be to define and this is where you kind of have to think like a scientist go back to your high school biology days or maybe you are currently a scientist which is great but you know get that hypothesis ready you know what do you expect to happen what um what would the test be validating for us maybe our observation was here that the high drop off rates on that form so maybe by reducing the form fields we'll reduce the drop-off rate and increase the conversion um you know to be over four percent or something we know what the two percent was our target what are we trying to achieve here uh again setting those key performance indicators or kpis around success and how you'll measure it and also time frames around how long this experiment will run and people ask a lot of times like how long should i run an experiment and it largely goes back to how much traffic you have how many variations you're using so you know if you know all those factors you can kind of estimate a time frame so um yeah most of the time you can get that information and get going and really start thinking like that scientist so when you're defining things as well it's really important to build out that plan and prioritize so you've got all these ideas with tim and your team you've got everybody together everybody knows like as their questions they want to answer their ideas their hypotheses so then you have to understand how what's that going to take what's the effort to get this test into into action and what's the impact that it's going to have on our site so what are those like low effort things like what if we just change this button will that help us get to the next level or in the high impact so really prioritize those get your backlog going also you can outlook group it by types of page or area on the site that you're going to be working on put those observations in we know there's a drop off in the form field what's your hypothesis we think by reducing that it will increase then you know outline what your variation will be your kpis you know and that get it all organized like tim said most people don't have a process or document so this is like a great place to just get going and you know visit again and again and put things on a schedule so plan it out so you don't have any gaps in your tests once you complete one test you know which one's going to be coming up next so get that plan in place yes how do we help people prioritize what tests to run and in what order oh well i mean you can think about like we said going back to their business goals and which ones we think are going to have the the highest impact with the lowest effort so i mean we work with our teams to kind of understand that depending on the tools you're using the pages you're optimizing the elements you're testing you know so however you do that with your team that's how we kind of work perfect thank you um and step three so designing and building the fun part we get to work with tim and tim's team on building that content updating assets you know actually getting things ready to launch so this could be setting up your testing tools or confirming your tracking you're gonna be tracking results are those ready to be tracked so making sure that you just have everything set up for that program and lastly launching it fun it's like have a little party you send out um your birthday invitations now you're just waiting for everybody to show up which is exciting so as we were building this tim and i you know we kind of threw out all these little pieces and parts for our updates for mia along the way our marketing consultant here who's got this ebook ready she's getting ready to get leads uh the version on the left you know is the original the version on the right goes through some of the recommendations we made along the way now depending on the testing tool you're using and kind of the capabilities you have you may be running these kind of one at a time more like traditional a b testing right you're going to test the headline at one time don't change anything else think like a scientist only change one thing at a time maybe that's what you have available or maybe within your tool you could do a true kind of split test and test these pages against each other like a tool like optimizely definitely has that feature redirect test where you can test two completely different versions um but you know if so as you build these out think about you know the capabilities of your platforms what you're testing what the goals are and um yeah run the test so let's see here the last part is to analyze and share and you know maybe the most important part right what did you find out from your tests and how can you use that to you know improve your future results or apply your learnings across different channels to you know get you closer to achieving that goal um did you were you successful or not that's fairly important because most tests you know maybe they're not that successful you know if you're only running successful tests i would challenge you to try bigger tests maybe you're not testing big enough changes or or something else but definitely don't be afraid to fail because failed tests can tell you just as much as a successful test right it tells you what not to do for sure but maybe also to then what changes what other things should you not be doing based on that test or that you know assumption or result and really important sharing those across the organization to build that culture of experimentation because just you know running one test and then it failed and then you stop and that was a you know not successful is not kind of the case you want to learn from it and share and build upon that so definitely finding ways to apply those findings and an easy way to share is just you know putting um putting a simple slide together what you changed why you changed it the result what you learned and then your next steps so um in this example you know for mia maybe we have the original we tested a split test so we know this variation did a lot better we could say maybe it hit our four pers you know we increased our conversion rate to four percent um from the two percent so that was the winning variation and you know you can set up regularly scheduled kind of results sharing times with your teams depending or just send out an email to any you know yourself or any stakeholders in the process to say hey here's the results here's what we did i think just just making sure you're kind of communicating those and why it matters and what you're doing next so and this works for all kinds of tests right anna like it could be for your best performing pdp or email or you could use this kind of format for anything and share it company-wide to other departments and other people as here here's what's performing best on any platform right and so for today what's really important is that you're testing to learn not all tests are going to be successful but you can't be afraid to fail because you can learn just as much from those tests that aren't successful as the ones that are and and then when you could do when you have those tests is to apply learnings across channel with the goal of really improving that customer experience because that's ultimately what's going to help you achieve those business goals very true anna and thank you so before we reach the end of our time we wanted to introduce a few tools that you can use to accelerate that success and some of those are here on this page right so we know that cro can be cross channel and can cover everything from social ppc display email and your website so here are a few specific ones um that we use and obviously some of those other platforms like social pbc have them built in their testing opportunities you just have to help supply the additional copy or the ad units and it helps build it for yourself so those are easy ones some of these on this page are more specific tools to help you on the website for instance you know everybody should know google and google optimize and in the earlier screen in the deck we showed some heat maps and things from like mouse flow but hotjar does a lot of the same uh and some of the big cmss have built-in tools as well yeah and the stats pretty impressive yes if you're using a cro tool average roi is 223 percent so definitely if you haven't started using something to understand cerro get get started there's a variety out there but yeah we wouldn't be remiss if we didn't mention our sort of platinum partner here which is optimizely it can be known as the world's number one sort of digital laboratory it helps marketers and creative teams and development teams sort of optimize from everything from e-commerce to b2b um making sort of what we're talking about here digital experimentation easy uh and out of marketers reached not needing you know technology to help every time which can be a barrier so the benefit of optimizely is it allows us you know to see this data real time and be making fast changes to you know experiment create that culture of experimentation run tests optimize apply those findings to other places on our website that hopefully create a budgetal a better digital experience for your customers in which case then you know makes you look good and has better roi so if you're interested in hearing more about optimizely's you know dxp or experimentation capabilities we would love to chat with you and that is all we have for today but wait actually um we wanted to thank you for taking time out of your day to meet with us and to listen to us talk uh and if you want to hear or have more conversations on how we can help you or support you through your cro and experimentation like anna mentioned we're going to send out this checklist and the recording later um and now we have a few minutes left i think so if there's any questions um let's take a look hold on all right it looks like we have um from ben it says our site is really hard to update how can they still practice uh conversion rate optimization yeah so you can run tests on lots of different platforms email you can test obviously subject line headline images depending on if you're you know e-commerce is it product shots or lifestyles better ppc which is easy and typically you know can run fast and not as expensive but then there's also other ways that for instance on a website you can use tools like unbounce like if your technology team has it's harder to stand up landing pages there are other third-party tools that you can use that we've used that can help stand up landing pages for campaigns um very fast um bonnie asked if this would be a good tool for b2c2 because i know we're talking from elite our example today was mostly from a lead gem perspective but of course yeah yeah testing is just helping to better understand your audience and what's going to motivate them to take the action that you want so and also making sure that they have the right content at whatever point in their journey so yes a lot of these tools are are both b2b and b2c great thanks and then from liz says have you run test that didn't work yes i have um they my hypothesis has been proven wrong many times but you know i think the goal there is that we go in with a an educated hypothesis and based on our experience we can make the best hypothesis that we can but ultimately audiences are unique and different for every site and for every you know industry so it's important that's why it's important to test for your own site in your own industry even if you see these other stats that say this this works for this way in this industry you know your audience is different um you know tim and i have a joke that we both thought this one cta would work really well and it completely failed and you know the other cta one we're like oh well that didn't work well um and then recently we've also done with a like a b2b ecommerce retailer we did some user tests or user kind of interviews to understand to kind of confirm some of the pain points they thought were on their site specifically around the core areas of their site right like checkout sign in those kind of areas and we found some that kind of confirmed where we knew there were pain points but then it also brought up some other opportunities where you know our client was like oh everyone knows about this area of our site or this like really good feature that's very helpful but i would say like six out of seven or eight people we talked to were like no actually we didn't know about that and we told them they're like thank you so much for telling me i'm gonna start looking for this on other sites this is so helpful so you know i think um you can learn just as much from that you know process and understanding what you might not know or see from your user's perspective is really important let me see any other questions someone nope i think that's all so yeah like tim mentioned we're gonna be sending out a recording of this uh presentation today if you have any questions about experimentation or practice you can email saleswearwear.com but again thank you so much for taking your time today and happy experimenting