How To Optimize Conversions in 2023

Artificial intelligence has put "change" on autopilot. Change - that which defines life - is now accelerated and (supposedly) more predictable.?

And marketing? The usher of this change. The concierge if you please, there to welcome and soften the blow of this new robotic member of society.?

…Moreover, to inform / convince overwhelmed, confused laypeople of its value.

?But that requires the marketing professionals to be aware and convinced themselves - not just of how to make Chat GPT write a blog post. It requires knowledge of how AI can actually directly optimize the bottom line - and upsize KPIs.

Yes, it’s all about the CONVERSION and optimizing all touchpoints along the way…but it’s also about garnering insights and attending to touchpoints POST conversion.

Here’s a revamp of how to optimize conversion rates along your funnels, with the trusty assistance of AI.?

1. Get a grip on your conversions: Know them, and each of their value in relation to your bottom line. Map the customer journeys out where decisions can be made in detail – email, social, website, direct purchases. Use Chat GPT to illustrate it. Examples to come.
2. Baseline espionage: ”Baselines” mean nothing nowadays outside of the context of your competitors. Don’t reinvent the wheel – look at your industry landscape. Analyze what your top competitors are doing, so you can plan. Elbow AI for insights.
3. Know your ideal person AND optimum journey. Garner historical insights: don’t just profile – enhance. Aggregate as much information as possible on your top 10% customers, and augment with AI. Find patterns - what is the most common conversion path taken?
4. Create goals and A/B Test: Based on your work on #s 2-3, craft your plan. AI can do some heavy lifting here, particularly with creating variations of collateral. Once you have your starting points, test one variable at a time. Examples to come!
5. Track or it don’t mean jack: Record results, go with the winner and monitor. Simple Chat GPT prompts can summarize insights for you (again, examples to come!)

To come are actionable, specific examples of tools and processes to integrate AI into your conversion optimization.

Cut and dry: the goal of conversion work is to create the best experience for customers – before, during AND after sale. That is direct cause and effect – another thing that defines life.

The correlation is the tough part, but AI can draw some of that for you. If you can believe it, AI can achieve it!

Map It Out

Do you actually know ALL of your customer conversion touchpoints? Ok…how about their relative value to your bottom line?

To do this, you have to have a grip not only on where your conversions ARE specifically, but the different paths, and which should be prioritized.

Conversion Rundown

Conversions are the points where customers exchange value with you. It is an ask that is fulfilled – earned via your tantalizing marketing prowess.

Here’s a simple list of conversion funnels:

1. Email – Open->click (link in email), click -> landing page cvr
2. Social – Impression ->engagement, impression -> click (off site), click->landing page cvr
3. Website – click -> newsletter/download/contact us
4. Direct purchase to post-conversion – upsell/downsell, return business.

Grading Conversions

Knowing them isn't enough - you need to grade them, because they don’t all bear the same weight to your business. And, not only should you know your conversion points inside and out, but you should also have insight into multi-touch conversion paths.

You should understand what combos are more promising than others, for instance: someone who signed up for a newsletter AND registered for a webinar, or someone who purchased AND submitted a feedback email.

Examples / Considerations for Conversions:

• Opt-in for purchase discount: If first time customers get 20% off, but your marketing emails go to spam – then that conversion doesn’t punch your bottom line without sizeable scale.
• Newsletter subscribe: If you have a newsletter but only publish it monthly, or don’t have meaningful CTAs in them to further nurture people, how much value does that actually have?
• Free download: If your “free download” is only tangentially related to your business, designed purely to get emails, how useful will it be to converting the right people?
• Subscribe to a podcast or channel: This is sexy. These people are YOUR people. I’d grade this pretty high.
• Register for a webinar: A dime a dozen. Attendance is much more meaningful.
• Attend webinar: Depending on how you designed your presentation, this could score quite high on your priority list to master.
• Schedule a call: Worth focusing on optimizing to ensure they actually MAKE the call.
• Actually make the call: Bird in hand! Though the bird still has wings and can fly away.
• Purchase doorbuster/tripwire offer: Hoorah! They are officially a customer. But they bought your cheapest stuff.
• Purchase upsell: Now we’re talking. 10/10. This is the cream of the crop conversion for you…if you don’t consider retention..
• Purchase downsell: Still a win – they made the initial purchase, and went for the lower-grade upsell. Not quite as valuable but still gold.
• Purchase month to month subscription vs. annual: Month to month implies hesitation of long term commitment. Annual though? Bingo.
• Post-conversion: Highly underrated. If you have a purchase, but they don’t respond to your follow up, did it even happen?

Luckily, these odds can be improved with conversion optimization. And, with the help of AI.

AI Tools For Mapping Your Funnels

Spreadsheets can only go so far in mapping. I recommend visually planning - and though Chat GPT can’t spit out visuals (yet), it can still help you map out your marketing funnels.?

I use Whimsical – a great free tool for mapping out your funnels.

Once you have a handle on your funnel, you know where you can dig and analyze - look at the data, overlay where your customers came through, then get the dirt on them.

In addition to Whimsical, a non-AI tool, here’s how AI can help:

• Have Chat GPT generate a totally new journey for you to compare and get inspiration: “You are a marketing expert with 20 years of ]subject] experience. Craft me an [email/social/website] marketing funnel outline with conversion touchpoints based on the [keyword] industry. What information do you need me to provide in order to give me a robust customer journey outline???
• Have Chat GPT predict blindspots: What are common reasons for unsubscribes to emails? How many content emails should I send before providing a CTA? How many emails should be in a follow up sequence, and how frequent should I send them? How many fields should I have in my landing page form?
• Outline your funnel and feed it to Chat GPT asking it to simplify it, or make it more robust. “Take this list of steps in a customer journey and provide baseline conversion rates to expect,” or “provide an ideal order for each step in this conversion path”
• Ask Chat GPT to provide best practices/things to avoid for each particular conversion type
• Ask Chat GPT to program a chat bot for your site, designed to improve conversions.

You can get super creative with this. Eventually, it will be able to literally spit out a visual map for you, too, but until then, have it do the heavy lifting.

You can understand the diminishing returns as prospects go further down the funnel. The more touch points, the more opportunities for drop-off.?

Knowing where conversions are a dime-a-dozen - meaningless in the context of real fuel for your business - and which actually mirror direct impact, will accelerate you towards prioritizing what to focus on and optimize.

Redefine What a “Baseline” Means

Our supposed “Baselines” are outdated.

Today's unprecedented expansion of transparency and data have informed us how they're expiring faster than ever. These conclusions become irrelevant very fast without serious, frequent and tech-assisted analysis..

..and that's a problem if you want to optimize conversions in your business. You’re likely complacent operating with old info, leaving money on the table.

*Frequent, enhanced analysis of your 1st-party data is CRUCIAL; but doing it right is much more intensive (and fruitful) than ever before, deserving of a dedicated post*

That’s why I argue that when planning for conversion optimization throughout your business, you should start by looking at the industry landscape.?

We need to reexamine who "The Jones'" are in this AI-chaperoned reality.

Shifting Goalposts

The industry landscape bar is also constantly rising as AI blitzes. We could go as far to say that goalposts are shifting - if not unfairly, certainly at a scale that’s hard to keep up with using old tricks.

So, here's a spotlight on "industry standard espionage - AKA supercharged spying on competitors.

Get a grip, find the gap where there isn’t focus and THEN you can start baselining yourself.

First, know who your competitors are. You can start by simply asking Chat GPT using one key example you already know. Next, reverse engineer - analyze and dissect what they're doing, so you can plan your strategy for what YOU should be doing.

You can use Chat GPT to ask about some these parameters straight up (i.e. “what is the most popular content on (competitor.com )?"

But tools like SEM Rush are powered by AI, and make it their bread and butter.

What To Tag:

1. How they generate traffic: Uncover traffic share and marketing mix, and what sites people visit before and after they hit
2. Top offers and their cvr on product pages: Note their UI and messaging.
3. Trends and audience data: Spot seasonality, identify in-market audience and interests to build a better audience fit.
4. Assess organic strategy: What keywords are they targeting that bring the bacon? What pages rank in Google’s SERPS?
5. Examine advertising strategies: What ads are live now, for what products?
6. Content and socials: What content is popular on x competitors site? Measure “share of voice” to compare your position to competitors. Track what competitor content drives the most people onto site, branded hashtags and keywords, topics that generate attention and backlinks, and even complaints.
7. Partner channel marketing: Who are their affiliates, dealers and distributors?

SEM Rush is a super rich tool for these insights, but alternatives include Mentionlytics, Hootsuite, Brandwatch and Keyhole. Mix and match with Chat GPT to give you your industry barings!

Know Your Customer AND Their Journeys

Your ideal customer is more than a "buyer persona,” it’s a journey. And your target audience is also more than your? first-party data.

Yes, it’s important to ID who your customer is, and create a profile of their demographics, psychographics, pain points, interests, and motivations. But that’s 2D.

We want 3D when it comes to building your “ICP” - Ideal Customer Profile - AKA knowing your ideal customer and how to speak to them, and figuring out who would actually benefit most from your offering.

3D is their customer journey - their conversion path - their granular decisions that brought them to ultimately buy. This information is equally crucial to understanding how to reach more of these people.

Both still are not enough either to truly optimize conversion rate - you must enhance the data to squeeze all the juice out of this lemon.

Scope Your Top 10%

The obvious starting point for analysis are your customers. The top 10%, to be exact.

It’s subjective what this means to you: is it those with the highest LTV? Those who converted most quickly? Took the upsells? Referred more business?

Your goal is to obsess over these people and dive into their activity so you can monitor for anomalies.

When looking at your top user activity, look for:

1. What they look like

This includes: location, job title, age, industry, education, gender, familial structure, interests, buying behavior, company information (size, growth, etc.) You can get this info from your site pixels and? marketing platforms.

2. What are their challenges and pain points?

You can use #1 to guide this and inform your research. If they’re a salesperson, they might struggle with transparency and communication with marketing teams, or streamlining their sales processes.

Use Chat GPT to generate a list of common pain points using the data you have.

3. How did they get to you?

You’ll want to analyze their conversion paths AND their comtent engagement. Most automation platforms have this info built-in.

Specifically, what do these paths have in common with other top-users?

4. What happened AFTER they purchased?

Did they continue to engage with your brand? How consistently?

Enrich And Enhance

After diving into all of these parameters, it's enhancement time. I use Apollo.io as my data enhancer, but you can use Fuerza.Ai , IntentData.io, Inc. or Cole information https://lnkd.in/g7NKJVk3 .

You want to aggregate as many data points on your top customers as possible. This data will help you to understand not just a persona, but an INDIVIDUAL.

It will allow you to tailor messaging for the HR director and the Talent Lead (subtle but important differences). Optimizations start with knowing who to optimize for.

Now, Follow The Science (A/B Test)

YoHow u only got one shot (in the dark): at the very beginning. All startups begin this way.

You can do your competitive analyses, blah blah but the road to finding your true ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) requires action and iteration.

There’s no way around the fact that you must take the leap, pay attention and test. From there, AI can assist you in the science that follows to refine your strategy.

Next is creating goals and SOPS.

Test Along Your Funnel

Every step of your funnel is worthy of constant testing, not just ads. Chat GPT can help by generating multiple variations of text marketing collateral for you.

You just need to isolate one variable at a time (per the scientific method):

• Website headlines and banners
• Ad copy?
• Email subject lines
• Text length - short vs. long form
• Calls to action?
• Message tone and style

There is a slew of A/B testing platforms, like Google Optimize 360 and Optimizely , but you can cut costs and sharpen your AI tongue by delegating to Chat GPT.

Example Prompts

Here are some simple prompts to get you started:

“ Take this website headline and create 3-5 variations to be used in split testing for marketing efforts. The company is in the x industry, it targets x, and solves problems x, y, z.”

“Take this longform website copy and provide 3-5 shorter landing page messages for x offer."

“Generate 5-10 email subject lines for a campaign for x product. Use x language."

AI And Asset Creation

Another way AI can help you in your testing journey is handling the asset creation itself. Chat GPT can only provide text - but these tools can help you put content on autopilot:

• HeyGen :Clone your voice easily from recorded audio, then literally clone yourself in video.
• Syllabi.io : Ai-generated video scripts for you (you can also use Chat GPT)

Between the two, you can make endless video content to test without the time suck of creating multiple, slightly different videos to test.

Run That Sh**

Once you have your arsenal of marketing assets to test against each other, run ONE ELEMENT AT A TIME. Meaning, don't test a new subject line with a new call to action at the same time.

Give each at least a week’s worth of data to draw conclusions, and go with the winner when you move into the next round of A/B testing for the next variable.

We can’t get complacent with our content if we want to optimize it. That’s why all of the above is an ongoing thing. As you test, record all of your data. Hone in on what hits, apply it to your future content and voila!

From there, you monitor and pivot as necessary.

Roundup

Conversion optimization is always going to be a thing. It has been and always will be a crucial and perpetual focus, with or without AI.

From mapping out your funnels, to really KNOWING your audience, to establishing your baselines via competitive and industry landscape analysis and finally creating and testing your assets, AI will only become more helpful with time.

Just remember 1) you have to have the structure and SOPs to maximize your conversion optimization and 2) you should never let AI take over without your oversight.?

Your intuition, problem solving and creative spark cannot be duplicated or recycled!

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