A proven process for growing online businesses using conversion rate optimization

If your conversion rate is high but you don’t know how to increase it any further, you’ll find this useful. It’s an overview of the Conversion Rate Experts Methodology (CRE Methodology™), which we use on all of our clients.

Beyond best practices

Someone suggested we write an article about best practices for conversion. You know the kind of thing: magic buttons that convert, “killer” copywriting words, winning layouts, etc.. Unfortunately, that little box of tricks doesn’t take you very far. In fact, it sometimes takes you nowhere. It’s the marketing equivalent of secret chat-up lines for seducing the opposite sex. It’s what people want the answer to be.

The real best practice isn’t a particular type of page element at all. It’s a well-defined, systematic process—a series of things you need to do.

The CRE Methodology™ is significantly different from what most people are doing. We’ve mentioned it in conference talks, but this is the first time we’ve published an overview of it. It doesn’t involve shoot-from-the-hip guesswork, and it doesn’t have the excitement and appeal of magic buttons. In fact, in many respects it looks a lot like hard work. It requires intelligence, experience, craft and expertise in a wide range of disciplines. But experience has shown that it works, time and time again. It’s what we do every day for our clients.

And we’re proud of the fact that it has been adopted by some of the web’s most sophisticated companies; we’ve spent the past few years working with clients like Apple, Sony, Google, Vodafone, SEOmoz, SEO Book and some outstanding, forward-looking small businesses. Double-digit improvements are the norm.

In summary, it works.

Here it is.

The CRE Methodology™ for growing businesses

Step 1: The Rules of the Game (and how to win at it): Coming up with your strategy, your long-term goals, and how you’ll measure success

Many marketers start out by creating a list of things to test. We advise you to resist the urge at this stage. Here are a few reasons why:

You need to find out (not guess) which parts of your business are underperforming and why

Most clients come to us with a preconceived idea of what should be worked on. Ironically, the opportunities usually lie elsewhere—in their blind spots. First, we insist on discussing the client’s strategy and vision for the business. You need to define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will ensure you meet your goals.

You don’t know why people aren’t converting yet

At this point you also don’t know why your visitors aren’t converting, so any suggestions you make would be theoretical rather than based on evidence. From our experience, evidence-based recommendations are much more likely to give breakthrough results than glib “best practice” ones.

You need to experience your business as a customer with a fresh pair of eyes

It is important to have customer empathy and to understand the thought processes your visitors are going through. To “walk in their shoes.” If you’re looking at your website from a marketer’s perspective, you’ll act like a marketer. So, if you aren’t already, you need to become a customer of your own site. (You’d be amazed how many people have never done this.)

Step 2: Understanding (and tuning) existing traffic sources

It’s impossible to critique a website without knowing where its visitors are coming from, which landing pages they arrive on, and how they navigate around the site.

Take a bird’s-eye view of your business, identifying the areas that appear to hold the greatest opportunity.

Seek to understand your entire conversion funnel, starting with the initial ad impression where someone first encounters your business and finishing with the thank-you page and beyond (there’s often a lot of opportunity in optimizing post-sale events such as referral programs, up-sells and email marketing). To sketch your conversion funnel, map out every action that a prospect has to take to become your customer. Use whatever works best for you: scribble on a whiteboard (tip: you can create huge whiteboards using adhesive film or this paint) or use software (Omnigraffle for Mac is particularly good because it has a physics engine that does the layout automatically.)

Aim to work on the areas of your business that will have the biggest impact on your goals. Also prioritize your efforts on parts of your business that are easiest to make changes to.

The best way to visualize this process is by thinking about blocked arteries and missing links. Just as an artery in your body is the highway that carries large volumes of blood, an artery in your business is a high-volume pathway that leads to sales. Once you have identified your business’s arteries, search for blockages in them—that is, aspects of them that are underperforming.

Missing links are parts of your conversion funnel that have not been created yet. For example:

• turning a one-step sale into a multi-step sale
• adding a well-placed refer-a-friend program
• adding an effective email autoresponder sequence
• adding a series of post-sale offers
• growing a customer community
• rolling out successes into other media (online and offline)

Step 3: Understanding your visitors (particularly the non-converting ones)

Don’t guess what the blockages are. Find out. This usually requires some research, aimed at understanding your visitors and their intentions.

The key question is, “Why isn’t the visitor converting?”

The answer typically comes from research in these core areas:

1. Understanding different visitor types and intentions
2. Identifying user experience problems
3. Gathering and understanding visitors’ objections

This may sound like a lot of work, but it shouldn’t take long.

1. Understanding different visitor types and intentions

It doesn’t matter how good your website or product is if you’re asking the wrong people to do the wrong thing at the wrong time—which is why you need to start with an understanding of your different visitor types and visitor intentions. The process typically revolves around your web analytics platform and customer database.

Seek to understand your different traffic sources and how they behave. Here are a few things you should consider:

• New visitors vs. repeat visitors
• Which referring sources of traffic convert best?
• Do you have distinct visitor types, based on either the visitors’ situations, their past experiences or their intentions?
• Branded keywords vs. generic keywords

Understanding these different visitors will give you clarity about how to organize your conversion funnel so that you’re showing the right content, with the right call to action, to the right visitors, at the right time in their buying journey.

2. Identifying problems with user experience

All websites have some visitors who don’t convert simply because there is something that prevents them from doing so. They’re willing but not able. Consider the following:

• Does the site load correctly in the browsers your visitors use?
• Do the pages load fast enough?
• Is it easy for users to navigate through the site and know what they need to do?
• Is the copywriting clear or confusing?
• Are forms easy to use?
• Do the users get error messages that confuse or deter them?

There are many tools and techniques for identifying user experience issues. Once you’ve identified the problems, you can design tests to overcome them.

3. Gathering and understanding visitors’ objections

Next, seek to understand why most of your users aren’t persuaded. But those people come and go without trace! How do you know what they wanted? How do you know what would have persuaded them to take action?

If you owned a real-life bricks-and-mortar store, it would be easy: You’d hear their objections. You’d be able to ask questions. You’d hear what they muttered as they headed for the door.

Capturing the voice of the customer is more difficult with the web, but it can be done. Start by implementing appropriate feedback mechanisms for capturing the most common objections. Then gather, record and analyze the feedback.

We call this the Objection/Counter-Objection (O/CO) approach; identify (not guess) your customers’ objections, then present them with strong counter-objections.

Step 4: Market intelligence

No business exists in a vacuum. Study your marketplace—for example, your competitors, any expert commentators, and what your customers are saying in social media and review sites—and then explore possibilities for improving your positioning by building upon your company’s core strengths.

You can get a wealth of information about your marketplace using tools like Google Alerts, SEOmoz PRO, Twitter Search and Yahoo! Answers.

Step 5: Spotting the hidden wealth in your business

Each of our clients has had elements within their business that would have been highly persuasive to their prospects—but which the prospects never saw. The key is to identify all of these persuasion assets, then present them to the prospect at the right time in the buying process.

Sometimes, the challenge lies in creating a wish-list of persuasive assets that your company needs to acquire.

Step 6: Creating your experimental strategy

It’s a myth that you can transform a business by making what we call “meek tweaks.” Extraordinary improvements come from extraordinary ideas. Take all of the ideas you’ve generated from the research, and prioritize those big, bold, targeted ones that will grow your business in the shortest time. Bold changes give you more profit, and you get quicker, larger returns (it’s statistics thing). And they’re usually more fun. If you carry out “meek tweaking,” on the other hand, your tests seldom reach significance, you get disheartened and, most upsettingly of all, you lose the commitment of your colleagues.

After collating all the ideas, prioritize them based on three simple metrics:

1. How likely is it to double your conversion rate?

Asking this question helps to ensure that you’re prioritizing the big opportunities. Bigger, bolder tests should be given a high priority; meek tweaks need to be demoted.

2. How easy it is to implement the test?

Look for the quick wins with the biggest financial impact, so changes that are easy to implement are given a higher priority.

3. Has this idea worked before?

Once you’re testing, you’ll quickly start learning what your visitors respond to. Every test we develop is documented so that we can review and prioritize ideas that are inspired by winning tests.

Step 7: Designing your experimental web pages (your “challengers”)

This is the point at which you’ll create the content that you’ll be testing.

Note that novices usually begin at this stage. They base their designs on guesswork and so-called “best practices,” and then they get disheartened when their tests fail. Our experience has shown that the significant wins come from basing the new content upon insights that were gleaned from the previous six stages.

First, create a wireframe of the new page (or page element). The wireframe must be designed to be more persuasive, believable and user-friendly than the existing version. Pay particular attention to critical copy elements such as the headline, introductory paragraphs and calls to action. Carry out several usability tests on the wireframe and discuss them with anyone who has an empathic understanding of your customers.

Step 8: Carrying out experiments on your website

There are many software platforms for tracking and testing, each of which has its own benefits. If you don’t already have one in place, you may wish to use Which Multivariate—our comparison website for multivariate testing platforms—to identify which you should use, based on your needs.

Once the split-testing platform is in place, run through and verify that everything is set up properly. Then, for each split test, follow a procedure that ensures that all team members understand what the test is:

• why you’re running it;
• how it fits into the site;
• how it aligns with the business goals;
• and how you’ll measure success.

These experiment plans create a valuable archive of your business’s evolution.

Once a test is started, the software takes over. All split-testing software automatically calculates when one version of the page has generated statistically significantly more conversions than the others, at which point you can end the test and promote the winning version to be your new “control”.

Step 9: Transferring your winning campaigns into other media

Diversifying your customer acquisition channels gives your business more stability. Your increased conversion rate will mean you can profitably invest more in advertising channels such as SEO, PPC, social media, affiliate marketing and offline media.

Also, explore how the insights from your winning experiments can be implemented in other parts of your marketing funnel. For example:

• A winning appeal in a landing page test can provide a winning headline for your AdWords campaigns (or vice versa)
• A winning landing page can be adapted for space advertising in offline media
• If a particular offer performs well in your own marketing materials, your affiliates may benefit from using it too

Each win often reveals new opportunities

The CRE Methodology™ is iterative; subsequent experimental plans will be based on the outcome of the previous experiments. Each improvement builds upon the success of the previous ones. Each time your conversion rate is increased, it becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to compete. Also, as your conversion rate grows, more opportunities present themselves. After each split-test, it’s important to “zoom out” and look at the whole conversion funnel again, to determine which part of the business you should focus on next.

Conclusion

As this overview has shown, the CRE Methodology™ is not about best-practice page elements; it’s a process of activities that encompasses a wide range of disciplines. Although it sounds less appealing than applying “magic buttons”, we don’t know of an easier, more reliable, way to grow an online business.

What you should do next

If you’d like to learn more about conversion

If you’d like to learn more about how to grow your business, read the following case studies, which show our process in action:

• How we made an extra £14 million a year for a travel company
• How we made $1 million for SEOmoz—with one landing page and a few emails
• How we doubled the sales of a web app.
• How we increased the conversion rate of Voices.com by over 400%

These how-to guides will come in useful too.

If you’d like to outsource or delegate your conversion activities

If you’d rather find out right away how we might help your company to increase its conversion rate and profits, just get in touch with us for a friendly chat with one of our consultants, during which we’ll identify the biggest opportunities for you to grow your business using conversion rate optimization.