Monitor, profile, segment and target, says Duckett
Traditional ideas of conversion and purchase funnels are outdated. To truly optimise conversion rates, companies need to shift focus onto the customer and their individual life-cycle with the brand or business.
By Malcolm Duckett, CEO and co-founder of Magiq
Rather than the traditional ‘purchase funnel’, online shoppers now research, select, compare and review their options in an almost infinite variety of ways.
Site owners now need to bear in mind visitors’ individual site histories. If someone has visited a site more than five times, but hasn’t yet registered, then a trick is being missed.
The consumer clearly has an interest in the brand – it’s high time the brand gets interested in them.
The technology available today enables site owners to cost-effectively target visitors on an individual level, and dramatically improve their conversion rates. This article will detail the five key techniques site owners can use to easily optimise conversion rates, including:
• Personalising landing pages
• Reaching out to unregistered visitors
• Capitalising on abandoned baskets
• Targeting brand lovers
• Using role specific personalisation
Get to know visitors
When someone lands on a page, site owners can use the latest marketing automation technologies to see if they’re a first timer, where they are in the world and, if they came searching for something, what it is that they are looking for.
All of this information can increase user personalisation, moving the relationship along and improving conversion.
In one example, using Magiq’s lifecycle marketing tools, marketing and ecommerce community Econsultancy targeted registered users with a simple personalised banner promoting the value of a small business subscription.
This technique converted over 9.3 per cent of free users into paid subscribers within a 90 day period, and influenced over £37,000 of sales. Comparatively the untargeted control group had a conversion rate of just 1.4 per cent (a 657 per cent improvement).
On the other hand, when targeting new or unregistered users site owners can bridge the gap between knowing nothing about them and bringing them into the brand’s orbit by bringing up a simple one-drop-down-form on their website.
This functions not only as a great ice breaker for the relationship between the brand and the consumer, but also enables far more sophisticated and individual-level targeting.
Abandoned baskets are an opportunity
It’s important that site owners recognise that an abandoned basket is not a sign of failure. Rather it’s the signature of an opportunity. A visitor who picks up, inspects and drops an item in their basket is demonstrating a level of interest in the item that no business can ignore.
An abandoned basket email acts as a reminder to the visitor, and can persuade them to make a purchase by containing offers and deals to entice the shopper back. Conversion rates in the 40 per cent bracket are not uncommon in such basket abandonment campaigns.
Monitor, profile, segment and target
Site owners should also be monitoring for the people who look at particular branded items multiple times, and use this knowledge to offer them brand-specific communications.
These are the site’s brand lovers, and effectively targeting them can vastly increase consumer response, as it communicates with them on subjects, topics and products that they are passionate about.
Once site visitors have been profiled and segmented, that insight can be used to personalise web pages, emails or even inform sales calls.
Relevant, personalised subject lines on emails and personal messages in banners gives visitors the feeling that the business cares about them as an individual, bringing them yet another step closer to a conversion.
Measurement is crucial
To effectively enhance conversion rates, site owners must measure them. Comparing conversion rates of visitors in the control group, who are not targeted, with conversion rates of visitors who are targeted tells us the relative performance and success, or otherwise, of the programs.
Once businesses have solid data on the factors successfully influencing conversion, they can target visitors to encourage those behaviours, creating much more efficient websites and dramatically reducing the amount of conversion opportunities that are lost.
As with everything in marketing, great results don’t come for free, but neither are they blind chance.
Modern marketing automation solutions enable businesses of any size to cost-effectively market like megabrands, helping them to emulate big business success in digital terms by dramatically improving and increasing conversion rates.
For more information visit: www.magiq.com
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