Marketing Week Live (MWL), well it’s probably one of the most hyped marketing events in the UK. As you can imagine it got very busy, so don’t make the mistake of wearing heels.
The time I spent at MWL this year was valuable, as I spent the day attending sessions, and connecting with existing and potential suppliers that Napier could work with. As a word of advice, if you are considering attending next year, then remember its beneficial to get to the talks at least 15 minutes early. Or you risk the chance of sitting on the floor or standing at the back peering over everyone.
Winning with Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
During my time at MWL, I attended an interesting talk from Deepak Lamba, CRO Consultant at VWO. The talk highlighted the key pillars of a successful conversion optimisation rate (CRO) program, and also brought to our attention how different the customer journey is now, compared to how it used to be. Once upon a time, there was a simple customer journey that went in a linear click-based pattern, it looked something like this:
Now it’s a little different, people now shop in more ways than they ever have before. On average, there are about 10 touch points before a contact becomes a qualified lead. So, when we begin to imagine what this looks like, we see this:
The reason for this is simple, people now shop across many different platforms at the time they wish. People are now more likely to pop back and continue shopping from a different platform to before; making it incredibly hard to track customers from start to finish. We have moved on from measuring petty clicks and into a new exciting era of measuring impact. Now it is all about tying marketing revenue with deep insights into customer journey and touch points. Touchpoints that lead to sales. Many companies are still not taking a structured approach for testing, for reasons such as no optimisation roadmap/ framework, lack of understanding of A/B testing, and lack of buy-in from leadership teams.
Now to reveal the key pillars of a successful CRO program (Research, Hypothesis, Prioritise, Test, Measure/ Learn):
This lovely simplistic method for testing may take you back to your school science lessons and testing. It really gives a good framework for planning out your program from start to finish. To begin your research, you must understand your trail. For eCommerce organisations the map of your audience trail might look like this:
What methods would we use to measure the effectiveness of a conversion rate optimisation program?
- Heatmaps: The simple answer, they visually show which parts on page people are mostly looking at/ using, this identifies which pages are selling.
- Scroll maps: They tell you how long people are scrolling down the page; And which pages are keeping customers engaged the longest.
- Session replays: A very easy feature to use, they enable businesses to record, save and replay interactions their visitors have on the site. They will help you understand why a customer may have left the website without doing anything.
- Surveys: For insight into the effect of word of mouth on your direct traffic.
- Form analytics: To help you build an understanding of how visitors interact with every form field.
