What’s more pointless than laying your bed?

Driving traffic that doesn’t even stop to shop.

This AMA session with conversion rate optimization specialist (what a bloody mouthful 😅) Will Laurenson, CEO & Lead CRO Consultant at Customers Who Click, will let you ask ALL your questions about

👉Conversion

👉Engagement

👉Retention

…and virtually anything else related to baptizing customers in your brand.

🗣️: What is a good conversion rate?

💬 Will: There's not really a set answer to this apart from 'one that is always improving' - it varies massively per industry really. I've worked with clients where 0.8% is great for them and others where we're looking for 4-5%.

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🗣️: What are your recommended Web traffic analytics tools?

💬 Will: Google Analytics does a great job of helping you identify where in the funnel customers are dropping off. What I then recommend doing is using tools like Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar to analyze heatmaps and session recordings to try to work out what it is exactly that is causing the drop off - then you need to go and speak to customers to find out WHY they dropped off.

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🗣️: Please share some of your conversion rate optimization best practices.

💬 Will:

a. Make sure you test for long enough. Don't end tests after 2 days because they're performing well or badly, it's going to take at least 7 days, and for most sites up to around 21-30 to be confident of a result. Of course, if after a week you've had a decent amount of traffic and the test is losing heavily you might want to end it and reconsider, but make sure you hit statistical significance with enough traffic.

b. speak to customers - this is absolutely essential. If you don't speak to customers, read reviews, send out email surveys, etc you'll never really understand why they're looking to buy, and what's holding them back.

c. It depends a bit on how your funnel is performing, but for the majority of sites, it's going to be product pages. This is where your customer's questions are dealt with, and if they're not answered they'll drop off, if they are answered then you have a good chance of getting the sale.  So if you had to pick 1 page to focus on, make it the PDP, and if you've got 1 product making up 30%+ of your revenue, focus on that exclusively at first.

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🗣️: What are the most effective marketing conversion strategies based on your experience and how do you deal with declining conversion?

💬 Will: The most effective strategy has been to focus on these 3 core things:

1. Usability of the website - how easily can customers find and buy what they need?

2. Anxiety - does the website answer all their questions and concerns about both the products and the business itself?

3. Motivation - does the website actually excite the customer about the outcome they'll receive from your products.

People like a website that is easy to use, it's a delight, partly because so many are bad.

If you can answer all their questions and concerns, they're ready to buy. So the last part is just getting them excited about the product, it's not enough to just answer the questions, they then have to feel desperate to have your product in their hands

Part 2:

Identify the reason for declining conversion. You can keep working on the above, but chances are if conversion is going down there is either a problem or you're scaling paid channels.

Are certain channels or campaigns performing worse?  Are you getting less higher-quality traffic? E.g. is your SEO dropping? PPC? email, referral, etc? These normally convert higher, so if they're a small proportion of traffic, you'll see conversion start to drop.

So if you're scaling up ad spend, particularly on push channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok, you're going to see conversion come down a bit because those channels don't perform as well - this isn't necessarily a problem.

But if traffic is stable and the mix is stable, but conversion is dropping, you might want to check whether the website is working properly across browsers, have you added any widgets or anything to the website that might affect performance.

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🗣️: How do you increase conversion optimization? (can be technical or a different approach perhaps) and this one should be timely.

💬 Will: First up, if you've got the traffic, A/B testing is the way to move forward. But you need to have done the research first. Read reviews for your business and competitors, read up on the category on forums like Reddit, send out surveys to your customers, and get them on calls. Find out why they want to buy, and what's holding them back from buying, and come up with test ideas that will help with those 2 points.

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🗣️: What are the best ways to drive revenue & growth this season with conversion rate optimization?

💬 Will: As above really, the best way to get results is with a research and data-driven approach. If you just start randomly testing because someone in the company thought itd be a good idea, or if you just start adding widgets and apps from the Shopify store, you're unlikely to see many results.

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🗣️: How do you create a conversion funnel for the first time?

💬 Will: A good place to start is the enhanced e-commerce report in Google Analytics, it'll give you a good feel for where drop-off occurs in your funnel.

A good way to look at it is if you're happy with an overall conversion rate of 3% and you don't feel that's too bad, have a look into the funnel to see where there's a sharp drop-off - that'll be the place to target.

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🗣️: Why is conversion rate optimization important in eCommerce?

💬 Will: Everyone is spending more and more, advertising costs are going up, and the costs of pretty much everything else are as well so you need to make your marketing budget work harder, and the best way to do that is website optimization - that's where customer decisions are made.  You get their interest with the advert, which gets them to click, but the sale happens on the website so it makes sense to invest there to improve your chances.

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🗣️: How can we develop an action plan after getting our CRO test results?

💬 Will: Your action plan should come from the research really, that should tell you what's important to customers and where you should focus your testing efforts.

Once you've got results, you need to analyze them - if the test was a positive result, great, how do you take this to the next level and iterate on it?

If the test is negative, why didn't it work when your data and research pointed you in this direction?  How can you redesign the test to make it work.

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🗣️: What should I look into before hiring a Conversion rate optimization agency or consultant?

💬 Will: What's their process. Ask them bluntly - if we signed on and started working together tomorrow, how would you approach improving our conversion rates?

If they don't immediately talk about research - massive red flag.

Any agency promising crazy results again is another red flag - that said, I do offer a guarantee but that's different, mine is a money-back guarantee if I don't hit targets.

If their pitch starts with 'we can get you a 30% improvement in conversions and they haven't seen any of your data, done any research, etc - big red flag, ditch them - they'll take your money for 6 months.

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🗣️: What’s the key to having a successful conversion strategy?

💬 Will: Research. It all needs to be based on research. If you're not speaking to customers, understanding why they buy, and why they didn't complete a purchase, you'll never be able to properly optimize.

The key is to convince someone that the product is going to change their life and that you're the right business to buy it from.  and to do this, you need to understand how the customer wants the product to change their life.