Why conversion optimisation needs flexible solutions!

Conversions is a critical element to any business that wants to take their online strategy seriously, they can either make or break your business. What is the point of having thousands or millions of customers on your website if it does not convert them into sales or leads?

Digital platforms being a place to simply “display information” or be a “catalogue” is over. If you intend your digital platforms to be that, then you are not taking your online strategy seriously. Most businesses want more from their digital strategies and understand that their customers demand more and therefore require more to convert into a leads or sales.

So, I have a question to all the marketing, digital, transformational, e-commerce, CTOs and CIOs out there. When you are looking into conversion strategies how often do you ask, “How flexible is this solution?”. If the answer is “not often” or “never” then you need to start.

Flexibility is one of the most important factors when deciding what software, solution or company to partner with to increase your conversions. Think about the logic, if it’s not flexible; it’s not adaptable, testable and certainly not optimisable! In that case how do you your solution is working to its full potential? For example, let’s pretend I sell you a software that increases your conversions to 3%, we are all smiling, hi-fiving, the bottles are popping, 3% is a great conversion, isn’t it? Who says 3% is where your full potential sits. Why not 4,5 or 6%? Having flexible systems would allow you to explore this further, easily with minimal cost and effort, effectively giving your business flexibility. Make a change, good/bad, adapt, get to 3.2%, make a change, good/bad, adapt get to 3.5%, etc.

When I initially started scoping the Preezie software I had a few critical components that could not be overlooked. One of those is flexibility, having the ability to change any element of your configuration on the fly, in real time without the involvement of developers was at the fore front for my software, which is difficult given the level of intelligence it has. It is not efficient to implement systems or software that take days, weeks or months to change and adapt, while costing countless development dollars, however many business are still doing it. The more flexible the system is, the faster it can adapt/change, the faster you can optimise and improve your results.

In the end the proof is in the pudding, so a real-life example should do the trick from one of our clients, Carryboy.

Preezie configured a Product Selector tool for Carryboy, see below:

Initially we started off with 5 questions and a welcome screen, so users could understand what the selector tool does. We didn’t want to overwhelm customers. We ran our initial setup for 2 weeks and once we were satisfied with the traffic we recorded our bench mark results.

From here Carryboy wanted to ask another question, the question was “What state are you in?”. Having this question would allow Carryboy to send leads to the correct person within the company immediately. Due to the flexibility of the system we could easily add this question into the system and algorithm within 10 minutes, we started tracking results immediately.

1 week later and with no change in conversion rates we knew that adding the additional question was not affecting drop offs.

At this point, 3 weeks in, we also knew 15% of people who came on the Carryboy website completed the selector tool (answering all 6 questions and seeing recommended products). We were all happy with this.

Converts at 15%

As you should, we created a optimisation plan with several phases, and we were ready for phase 1. This phase was to test the system without the welcome screen and go straight into question 1 of the selector tool. So, with 1 simple click, we removed the “Welcome screen” as seen below.

Converts at 30%

Immediately the conversion rates doubled and now sit at 30%. We literally doubled conversions in 30 seconds with 1 click, well 2 if you include the save button ??

  1 click doubled conversions

It is safe to say that if we requested “time” and “money” from Carryboy to “investigate” the removal of the welcome screen we would have got a solid “no”, we were only 3 weeks in, its not okay to ask for cash to optimise your system 3 weeks in (in my opinion). This is how it would have ran if the system was custom, or the system was not flexible enough to adapt and make changes.

The Preezie system gave us the ability to make changes and test those changes immediately without any development time or cost. This allowed us to add an additional question and remove the welcome screen, giving Carryboy better business insights, saving administration time and doubled their original conversion rates. We managed to do all this within 4 weeks of having the system up with no cost and less then 10 minutes of time. (This could be completed even faster if traffic volumes are higher.)

The idea behind conversion optimisation is to study, implement, measure, optimise. You need to continue this process repeatedly in a never-ending loop. However, the faster and easier the system makes this the better it is for your business and conversions, in other words the more flexibility the system is the better it is for you.