Maximizing Your Conversions, Part 2: Using Customer Data and Testing To Optimize For Higher Conversion Rates

Just a second. If you haven’t read part 1 of Maximizing your conversions that I put out before this, go do that now.

If you have, then we’re cool. Otherwise, please do.

Anyway, welcome back, and this is part 2…

Kind of obvious, right?

Okay, serious now.

So, after going over the customer journey and how you could get started making your own for your business, brand, offer, or service…

Now we’ll discover how to make the most of your customer's data to make the customer journey personalized as well as test to increase conversions.

So...Utilizing Customer Data. Uhh, how exactly?

Sure, you’re getting oh-so-many types of data.

From the traffic, average time spent, and bounce rate on your website to the ROI on your ads and more, you're getting different types of data from different places.

The emails that you’re sending out to your list.

The blog posts that you’re putting up on your blog.

The new giveaways that are being downloaded from your landing page.

The number of people that are clicking on the upsell that you placed on the ‘Pay Now’ page.

But where do you start?

Well, like so many things, decide on what you want to achieve.

What do you want your eventual outcome to be?

What action do you want them to take?

Do you want them to sign up?

Download something? Buy something?

Spend more time?

Click through multiple links?

Go through your entire sales page?

Defining the ideal action you want your customers to take makes it a tangible goal.

Now, let's figure out what data can help you get there.

Suppose you want more sign-ups for your email newsletter, from where you send them various types of value and promo-centric content to increase their brand awareness, stay in touch with them as well as subtly introduce them to your offers.

There are many things you could do:

When paying for their cart, they could opt in simply by checking a checkbox on the payment page.

You could either create a valuable document or use something you already have in exchange for them signing up.

You could have a pop-up that asks them for their email after they’ve spent a certain amount of time on your website.

You could make a post on social media about an upcoming newsletter edition to drive people to sign up.

From there, you could see which channel is driving better signups, analyze why it’s performing well, and either double down on that or apply the principles to the other channels as well.

Ask yourself specific questions, such as 'What is the increase in email opens for subscribers from a specific channel?' and 'How does the value offered in exchange for their email affect their overall lifetime value (LTV), email open rate, and unsubscribe rate?'

That’s where the data will help you find out where you have better chances of making good progress.

Maybe more traffic spends time on your website AND converts yet the same people who signed up for your email newsletter don’t so much as open the emails that get sent out. Time to pivot maybe?

This is just one example.

Maybe changing the design of your landing page could reduce the time spent on your website and also increase conversions.

Maybe restructuring your offer to make delivery free could drive more sales.

Maybe, just maybe, you could-

“Hold on Drew. You went from using customer data to figuring out what might work to better drive an action. What’s going on?”

Well, this is the prequel to the part where we cover testing to optimize conversions.

To turn maybes into grounded, definite “Yes,” “No,” or “Depends on external factors” requires testing.

After you’ve started to gather various types of data generated because of your customers as well as general traffic and potential leads AND you’ve identified the specific action you want them to take AND you’ve started working on various ways to drive them to that action

From working on your messages and promotions…

To the overall customer experience you deliver…

You need to test. This is where you’ll optimize your conversion rate.

So yeah. Testing.?

Let’s just keep things simple and continue with the example for the newsletter signups.

(However, this can be applied to everything from different types of ads and website copy to CTA modifications and payment page upsell variations. It’s all about testing, testing, testing, and seeing what works.)

So, you want to do CRO, or conversion rate optimization.

But, how exactly?

You test.

(However, there’s something to note before we get into this.

When testing, you make subtle changes to track and figure out what change had what effect.

Back to testing…)

The first thing you do? Decide on the metrics you’ll be wanting to improve.

Here, we can have the CTR from those clicking the landing page to those signing up as well as time spent on the landing page.

So, one page could be the usual short sales page to get them to sign up for the newsletter, ideally talking about what they get when they sign up.

The other could be a variation where either?

the offer is different

the headline is different

the background is different

the page design is different

the cta is positioned differently

the long-form copy isn’t present

or any other change that might possibly drive more conversions.

(In this case, the conversion is from visitor to subscriber.)

Maybe it’s about adding or modifying various components, such as your credentials (more creds mean more trust), testimonials, case studies, etc.?

Now that you have two different things driving the same action, it’s time to put it to the test.

Again, it’s about making subtle, trackable changes. You might want to change the headline and top-of-fold copy, but if you’re changing color schematics, design, font size, background colors, etc, you won’t be able to pinpoint what change brought on a positive or negative effect on your metrics.

Now, when that’s all in place, all you need is traffic to validate your theory.

Ideally, you can start making decisions on even the lowest of figures.

However, the more traffic you have, the better you’ll be able to arrive at a statistically significant result.

From there, you can choose to continuously test different variables, changing them to various extents, running tests for various periods and traffic volume, and so on to get an idea of if a change is worth going permanently.

To Recap…

You’ll use the customer and general traffic data you already have, decide on the action you want to drive, set things accordingly to get results, and then analyze before-and-after analytics to get a better idea of what’s working. That’s where you’ll be using customer data most effectively.

Then, you’ll want to test different variations, each with subtle, simple changes and modifications to see what changes could potentially have the most significant impacts. From there, you could keep iterating and coming up with various variations or settle on the variations that deliver the ideal result that you’re aiming for.

All in all, it’s all about studying, analyzing, testing, doing, and repeating things to make them better and drive better results.

With this done, combined with Part 1 on the customer journey, you’re more than adequately armed to make the most of your data and efforts.

As usual, I’m here to help you out with anything you need help with. Ads, SEM, SEO or just simply “I’m stuck. What do I do”. Feel free to reach out anytime.

See you in the next edition

Drew