You Ask, I Answer: Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies?

In today's episode, Oxhot asks, can you recommend your go-to strategy for conversion rate optimization that can give results in a short time? Well, I I like I dislike questions like this because the intent of the question is looking for a shortcut. And as with all things, there are after a certain point there are no shortcuts to take. But there are some things that we can think about that will help us accelerate our processes, uh, make us more efficient and make us more effective. So let's talk about those.

Conversion rate optimization is all about knowing what converts, right? What converts uh really comes from Bob Stone's 1968 direct marketing framework. Uh he posited way back in the day, uh, that direct mail, because this is obviously paper mail, was all about three things. List, offer, creative. Have the right list, have the right offer, have the right creative.

And Bob's framework, he emphasized that too many direct marketers were spending so much time on creative, but really it was right list, right offer before you start meddling with a creative. If you have the wrong list of people, meaning people who are not qualified buyers for your direct mail, uh you will get terrible results no matter what you do. Um likewise, if it's the right off if it's the wrong offer, the right people for the wrong offer, they're not gonna buy it. But then back then and today, people spend a whole bunch of time on the creative, the graphics, the font, the colors, this, that, and the other thing, and it's not as impactful. And we see this all the time with digital, especially with website optimization.

People install great tools, like Google Optimize is a great tool, and doubly so because it's free, and people spend so much time you know testing like button colors and things like that. If you've got the wrong list, in this case your audience, you've got the wrong audience, then nothing else matters, right? You've got to have the right audience of people that you want to be in front of. You've got to have the right offer. What is the thing that the audience desperately wants to buy?

And then, yes, you use website optimization software to test uh the creative. The good news is today, machine learning uh and artificial intelligence can help us streamline the conversion rate optimization process, especially on the list side when it comes to sources. If you look in, for example, Google Analytics, you will see a source and a medium for every visitor that comes to your website for the most part. Inside that source medium, that's a really good starting point for who is on your list, meaning where you're getting your traffic from using machine learning techniques like Markov chain modeling or Shapley game theory, you can construct a model that shows these are the sequences that people come to us from, and knowing that you can learn what your most valuable sources are. Where's the source of your list based on the conversions that you have set up in Google Analytics?

Now, once you do something like that, once you set up something like that, then you are in a great position to begin optimizing your list. If, for example, 40% of your conversions come from organic search, well, then guess what? Of course, you'd better improve your SEO, right? I was working on a customer mapping yesterday, and 18% of the conversions came from a paid search, and 14% came from organic search. And it was a clear opportunity to say then look, improve your organic SEO, and you won't need to spend as much.

You'll still need to spend, but you won't need to spend as much on paid search. So that's one example of being able to use machine learning to tune these things up. Same with offers. What is an offer? It is the thing that you're pitching to the audience that you want them to buy.

How do you know what they want to buy? Use techniques like topic modeling on social media content, survey data, use um predictive analytics to do what uh I call content forecasting to figure out what and when people are going to be most interested in the problem that you solve for them, right? So let's say people are searching for espresso shop near me, right? When in the next 52 weeks are people going to search for that the most? Use predictive analytics to forecast that, and that's when you time your offers for you know, try this espresso shop.

Conversion rate optimization very often ignores time. Uh very, very often, the people who are doing CRO sort of treat the audience as a monolithic construct that does not change when we all know there's tremendous seasonality in uh in what's what people do, right? You search for iced coffee, unless you're a new englander, um, only during the war months. We we're here, we're weird in New England. We drink iced coffee all year round.

We had like 20 feet of snow outside, and we're we're tunneling our way through the snow to get to uh a coffee shop. But these tools, content forecasting tools, can help us streamline that part of the CRO process. And finally, of course, is the creative side, and that's where well-established tools like Google Optimize can play an important role in helping us test and improve our creative. But do not start with creative. Of the three aspects in Stone's framework, it is the least important, and it is where you will get incremental percentage uh performance increases, but not like life changing.

Life changing is all about getting that right list of people, getting in front of them, and then rolling out your offers that matter to them. So that's that's how you do this. Conversion rate optimization is all about tuning the numbers, and no technology is better for tuning the numbers than machine learning. So make sure that if you're not already, you're using machine learning techniques and technologies to do your conversion rate optimization, to do that audience analysis, to do that driver analysis of what drives people to be a part of your audience and are you getting them from the right places to do that offer tuning, and then of course to do what you put out for creative. So that's the that's my go-to strategy for CRO.

It's one of many. It is not the right answer, but it is one of many. As always, please leave comments below and uh subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

Visit trustinsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.