A lot of business owners treat conversion rate optimization (or CRO) is something like a mystical art. With a series of tweaks, designs, and split tests, you can turn a higher percentage of website visitors into actual leads or customers. And if those methods don’t work, you can always resort to chanting and crystals.
For all the confusion around CRO, however, making the most of your web traffic largely comes down to common sense. To show you how, here are three incredibly simple things you can do to increase your websites profitability right now:
#1: Know Your Market
It kind of goes without saying that it’s hard to generate conversions on your website if you don’t truly understand who your potential customers are what they want from you. Even so, a lot of marketers seem to lose sight of the obvious when looking through their sales funnels. Concentrate on your buyers, and their needs, and CRO gets a lot easier.
Who are your typical customers? Are they individuals or businesses? Is there a typical geographic or demographic attribute? Are they small businesses or large?
Why do they buy the product or service? Understanding why a customer may need or want a product or service will help you match benefits to your UVP.
What are their challenges? If you can gather information about their obstacles in purchasing, you can tailor your offers to offer solutions.
When do they buy? If you can advertise at just the right time, you have an exponentially better chance of increasing sales.
Who is their current or previous supplier? Customers are not usually reluctant to tell about experiences (good and bad) with their provider.
The more you understand your typical or ideal customer – the better you can develop and fine-tune a UVP (unique value proposition). Your UVP is the reason customers buy from you and not your competitor. Think about it, if your prospects see no value in buying from you – they will just buy from any provider. But, if you make them see how and why you are better… then you can dominate the marketplace.
Your UVP can be anything that conveys value to your customer. Use the information you’ve gathered about your ideal customer to develop the strongest possible UVP. Perhaps your competitors all sell widgets, but you package the best widgets together for one flat fee. This is a UVP. Perhaps you offer free shipping when all others charge a fee – this is a UVP.
#2: Devise a Stronger Offer
When you have new visitors coming to your website, you need to give them something to make them buy, stay, or come back. That’s something has to have a great deal of value (UVP) for the visitor if they’re going to give up something in return. It only makes sense, then, that the easiest way to improve CRO is by developing a new offer or UVP that visitors to your website simply can’t pass up.
#3: Start Testing One Landing Page Element at a Time
A lot of CRO revolves around testing new headlines, photos, and other landing page elements. That’s great, but unless your landing pages are failing miserably, resist the urge to tinker with everything at once. You can’t know what’s working and what isn’t until you’ve isolated different parts of your sales funnel to see how visitors respond to the changes.
Once your Internet marketing plan is firing on all cylinders, you can (and should) try all kinds of theories and analytical tools to keep customers coming back. When you’re just getting started, though, don’t forget the most basic CRO is common sense – follow your instincts and you’ll find the profits.
When you need expert Internet marketing help that’s focused on your business, contact the team at G3 Group in Baltimore for a free consultation!
