Marie Despringhere, UK Country Manager, Optimizely, outlines five top tips to help businesses achieve greater Conversion Rate Optimisation success.
The 7th Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) report by eConsultancy revealed some very encouraging signs of CRO maturity in the UK market, with conversion rates improving for 70% of the 6,000 online businesses that responded. However, the report also highlighted the key challenges still facing organisations today such as poor integration between systems, conflict of interest between different departments and a lack of resources, budget and strategy.
To help break down some of the more common and often frustrating barriers disclosed within the report, Marie Despringhere, UK Country Manager, Optimizely, outlines five top tips to help businesses achieve greater CRO success this year.
1. Recruit experienced CRO team members and incentivise them
The biggest internal barrier to success is finding experienced people to fill CRO roles, which can be difficult since CRO is still in its infancy in comparison to markets like SEO and web analytics. However, it is essential to understand the impact their expertise will have on the bottom line of your business. Consider offering a competitive salary or incentives for when employees hit a target conversion rate result, or a certain percentage of the uplift in revenue to make your proposition more attractive.
Putting in place all the resources and processes necessary for a successful CRO team can take some time even for the most experienced people, so consider using the services of an experienced CRO agency to shorten the time to success.
2. Use a combination of tools that reduce integration issues
The second most-cited barrier, ‘poor integration between systems’ has increased by 6% since 2014. Problems between A/B testing tools, CMS platforms or web analytics tools are some of the most prevalent and frustrating integration issues. To help eliminate this, first you should use a testing platform that integrates seamlessly with other platforms/tools to ensure you can make the most of the data.
3. ‘Borrow’ budget from other departments to increase CRO budget
The third biggest barrier to CRO success is lack of budget. To increase the budget for CRO, consider ‘borrowing’ or shifting a small percentage away from acquisition departments like SEO or PPC and towards CRO. Put simply, if you are spending money to bring the visitor to your site, but not spending money to convert that visitor into a customer, you are wasting money. To help you convince your boss and senior management on increasing the CRO budget, it’s also essential to show the potential impact that suggested test ideas have on ROI, not just on conversion rate.
4. Build a CRO culture and structure to improve success
Businesses that adopt a structured CRO approach are much more likely to see better CRO results. There are a variety of ways to do this. First of all, it’s vital to internally educate your teams on the benefits of CRO and the impact on revenue. Quarterly review sessions are ideal for education, but also consider setting up regular testing update emails with latest results and news to build a buzz.
Secondly, finding an executive level CRO sponsor to help evangelise CRO and break down barriers will also be highly valuable – ideally someone with a keen interest in optimisation and A/B testing. This will also help push CRO culture from the top down instead of just pushing from the bottom up.
5. Personalisation is possible – walk before you run
Website personalisation was cited as the most difficult CRO method to implement, yet 94% of respondents said it was valuable. To help you achieve faster results from website personalisation and keep the excitement and momentum high behind it within your organisation, start with the basics first instead of jumping straight into full 1-1 personalisation. An effective way to start is using homepage affinity targeted tests to show more relevant content based on visitor’s previous activity.
And remember, A/B testing and CRO needn’t be complicated, but having the right processes in place is vital to make the strategy a success. There may be barriers to overcome, but building a data driven culture, , budgeting effectively and communicating results will help you on the way to optimisation success.
By Marie Despringhere
UK Country Manager
Optimizely