Follow these steps to convert customers to action like never before

We’ve covered a lot of ground since beginning the Digital Economist blog series. Here’s a quick recap of what we’ve discussed thus far. In part one, we provided a bird’s eye view of the four key pillars of a strong digital customer acquisition strategy. In part two, we ran through the building blocks of customer segmentation — underscoring the importance of knowing exactly who your most profitable customers are. And in part three, we explained how creating value propositions tailored precisely to your customer segments can serve as your most powerful tools for persuasion. All of that helped set the stage for what we’re about to do now: creating conversion journeys that inspire your most profitable customers to take meaningful action — the kind that will grow your business over time.

Now that you know who your most profitable customers are and how you can motivate them to act, it’s time to architect a clear path that leads towards a purchase decision. This part of the process is important because as markets become increasingly saturated and competitive, digital acquisition costs ultimately rise. Optimizing how you convert your most profitable customers to take real and meaningful action is really the best way to keep costs down in the long-term.

Here’s the challenge: there’s almost an unlimited number of journeys a customer can take to arrive at a specific endpoint. There’s equally an unlimited number of ways they can slip up, get distracted, or even get lost along the way. It’s up to you to create the path of least resistance. However, doing that requires optimizing your conversion journeys with precision. This is by no means a one-size-fits-all exercise. You need to optimize conversion for each of your customer segments and then track and measure performance by segment and by channel to more clearly understand LTV (lifetime value) and CAC (customer acquisition cost) at an individual level.

Unfortunately, this is the hard part. Will you get it right on the first try? Maybe not. Good news for you, though, we’ve developed a three-step plan to help you get there. Let’s dive in.

Step 1: Question

As a starting point, you need to come up with a way to spark initial action (aka, getting potential customers to convert). Part of this involves thinking about what could potentially act as roadblocks in that process as well. To do this, you need to build a case:

1. Drive Value and Action: Start by helping customers understand what they stand to gain by purchasing your product and service. Identify the need at hand (“problem statement”), then show how the product or service being offered will specifically address that need (“value proposition”). Then, follow it up quickly with a clear action step that allows them to take advantage of the offer (“call-to-action”).
2. Make People Believe: Just because you say your products and services can address a specific need doesn’t necessarily mean that alone will convince potential customers to act. You need to backup your promise with proof points —the same proof points you came up with when you created your value propositions. These are the bits of persuasion that will get customers to believe that what you’re saying is verifiably true.
3. Minimize Pain: If you still haven’t gotten a customer across the finish line, here’s your opportunity to make a hard (and more emotional) sell. Make the upside of taking action abundantly clear. Depending on the product or service you offer, appeal to people’s sense of patience (or lack thereof) and need for instant gratification, unwillingness to change, or general aversion to risk. Do they think that it’ll take too long to see results? Is there a potential loss of time or money involved? Help assuage their fears and apprehensions head on, and you’ll give them one less reasons to avoid taking action.

Step 2: Hypothesize

Now that you’ve crafted a bullet-proof sales pitch, you need to understand what exactly is stopping potential customers from taking action. As with all parts of the digital customer acquisition process, this involves a bit of trial and error. In other words, hypothesize and test your assumptions. Here are some easy ways to go about it:

• Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. If you were your target customer, would the pitch work on you? Is it convincing? You need to ask yourself both why and why not. This is a quick way to gut check. If your pitch doesn’t persuade you to act, what would make the situation different for a potential customer? (Hint: Nothing!)
• Ask for feedback. Why make assumptions — regardless of how educated those guesses are — when you can solicit feedback directly from customers? Customer support chat on your website are actually a great way to get indirect feedback. Customers will usually start up a chat because they have an issue or concern to deal with. If you pay close attention to what happens during those conversations, you’ll likely uncover specific pain points or confusion around value propositions. This just requires you to do a little digging after each customer conversation. Now, if you want direct feedback, it’s simple enough to send customers online surveys on specific points. This basically turns your customer base into a living, breathing focus group.
• Measure what’s actually happening. The great thing about this digital world we live in is that we can essentially track every action along a customer’s journey in near granular detail. Make sure your web analytics tools are set up so that you can see and track where people are engaging the most and dropping off along the journey you’ve created. While you’re at it, be sure to take a close look at what you’re asking customers to do at each step of the way and what conversion is happening. This can shed light into what customers need to believe in order to take action at each of those steps. You’ve got the data, so make good use of it.

Step 3: Test and Learn

We wouldn’t be proper Digital Economists if we didn’t continuously test and measures our assumptions to refine our digital customer acquisition efforts at every step of the way. Building conversion journeys is no exception to this rule. So, based on the hypotheses you reach above — regardless of how you get there – you need to create, test, measure, and learn from a real-life digital scenarios. The easiest way to do this is by mocking up a user experience (UX) flow, identifying the points where it’s essential to communicate a clear value proposition and adding in the right call-to-action steps or qualifying opt-ins. Once you’ve laid out the flow, convert it to a branded user interface (UI) that you can code into a landing page. Then use your web analytics tools to help you measure the effectiveness of those test flows. And then start all over again with new hypotheses. The more you test, the more you’ll know. And the more you know about what works and what doesn’t, the more effective your conversion journeys will be.

What are you waiting for?

As you can see, creating effective conversion journeys requires a bit of trial and error. You won’t necessarily get it right the first time, but with patience and the right amount of testing and measuring, you will be able to turn your digital marketing efforts into a conversion machine.  

Want to learn more about how we help clients with their conversion journeys? Check out the NewHomeGuide.com case study and read more about how we helped them achieve 124% conversion rate improvement YoY.

Why the most overlooked part of digital marketing is actually your most powerful tool

You’ve built a brand. You’ve taken the time to develop your website and digital presence. You’ve crafted an SEO strategy. You’ve identified your target audience – aka, your most profitable customers. You’ve created a unique message to resonate specifically with that audience and haven’t wasted a single minute getting that message out there via digital advertising. Right now, you’re probably thinking that you’ve got everything moving full steam ahead – and, in many ways, getting this far puts you way ahead of the curve. But there’s one part of this digital marketing equation that you’ve probably overlooked: conversion rate optimization.

Defined as the art and science of getting people to act once they arrive on your website, conversion rate optimization is, more or less, the operational side of digital marketing. It’s not as “sexy” as all that outbound, creative work you’ve been doing to build the side of your brand that your customers see. However, what you may not realize is that conversion rate optimization can actually make a huge impact on how you grow. It provides insights into which of your marketing tactics – on your website and via digital advertising – are driving your business goals forward versus those that are underperforming. So, in essence, conversion rate optimization can make all of your marketing efforts a lot more effective.

Why then, in spite of all the clearly defined benefits of conversion rate optimization, does it tend to be the forgotten part of digital marketing? One of the biggest reasons is because it’s hard work. For all intents and purposes, it’s purely scientific. You create a hypothesis. You test that hypothesis against a control. You measure the effectiveness of both variables over a period of time. You draw conclusions from that test and then implement changes on your website or in your digital advertising efforts based on what proved to be most effective. And then, you start that process all over again with a new hypothesis.

This essentially means that the work of conversion rate optimization is never really “done.” Sorry, you don’t get instant gratification. It requires time and patience. The very ongoing nature of conversion rate optimization can feel daunting because there is a never ending number of factors to test – and in various orders – to see how your can maximize the effectiveness of your digital presence. And while each test is an opportunity to learn something new, sometimes the end result doesn’t even support your initial hypothesis. But you have to embrace this ongoing test-measure-repeat cadence to see how even small changes can drive serious performance gains (i.e. doubling conversion rates). With conversion rate optimization, you have to trust the data because data doesn’t lie – even if your creative sensibilities hoped for a different outcome.

Another reason why conversion rate optimization doesn’t always see the light of day in many organizations is due to a lack of alignment between the marketing and tech teams. Simply put, marketing must convince the tech folks – who typically have the final decision – to buy into it and actually agree to allocate resources to support it. The challenge is that the tech team has its own priorities, which likely have nothing to do with increasing conversion rates. When it comes to your brand’s website, what only matters to them is whether it’s working or not. “If it’s not broke, then don’t fix it” is typically the mentality of a task-focused tech team. All those little, never-ending, and time-consuming iterations that you need them to deploy and manage can be easily perceived as a massive headache in the making. So, it’s no surprise that convincing them on this front can feel like an uphill battle.

But, as a marketer, conversion matters to you because you know that being able to convert more leads into actual customers is the best way to deliver long-term business value through marketing. It’s also the most measurable way to demonstrate the success of your marketing efforts. After all, conversion rate optimization can make all those results stronger. But you can’t do it all on your own. You need strategists to come up with a non-stop supply of hypotheses, design support for all those iterations you’re testing, the ability to deploy and test new variables quickly, as well as the data to help you see what’s working. So, when you can’t get the support internally, it’s a massive roadblock to results.

We know this at LQ. That’s why we’ve taken an entirely different approach to conversion rate optimization. We know just how important it is for brands to do this kind of work. So, to help ease the pain, we oftentimes offer our expert services on a pay-for-performance basis. Not only is this a huge incentive for us to help brands drive real performance gains – which is what we love to do most – but it’s one way we can demonstrate how we “talk the talk and walk the walk.” This is one of the biggest reasons why Microsoft Bing named us “Optimizer of the Year.” We challenge ourselves every day to take new approaches to conversion rate optimization to help our customers create a better and more compelling brand story. It may seem like the “blue collar” work of digital marketing, but it’s not really; it’s just as important – if not more – than all of your other marketing tactics. We know the large rewards that stem from it. If you want to learn more about what it entails, we’d be happy to help.

Long story short: if you think you’re doing everything possible to reach, target, and engage prospects and eventually turn them into loyal customers, there’s a good chance you’ve missed the most critical part of the digital marketing equation: conversion rate optimization. Sure, it’s not the sexiest, but it delivers real, measurable results and makes all that sexy and fun creative work you do more effective in the long run. After all, why invest in your digital presence if you aren’t willing to take the time to make it as strong and effective as it can possibly be?