If you are not getting the return on investment (ROI) that you would like from your digital platforms, you need to optimize them.
If you are not optimizing, you are likely not getting a good ROI. You are playing the lottery with the efficacy of your digital platforms.
Conversion rate optimization can help you fix that. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of visitors who take a desired action.
Desired actions are defined as goals measuring key performance metrics that represent important business goals. A conversion indicates a visitor completed a goal. If you sell products, the primary goal is for users to make a purchase. Here are examples of goals that you want to measure the success rate for:
- Purchasing a product
- Requesting a quote
- Subscribing to a service
- Signing up for email lists
- Creating an account
Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization focuses on optimizing the customers journey from acquisition to a goal conversion. This is usually modeled as a funnel where activities:
- prior to engaging with a system being optimized are called acquisition.
- engaging with a system are called behavior
- resulting in reaching a business goal are called a conversion
Stages in the funnel are continuously monitored and analyzed to determine if changes to a system have a positive effect on conversion. This process of analyzing the funnel is called funnel analysis.
Evergreen Optimization
We call optimizations that are lasting evergreen. They continue to work even if you are optimizing things any more.
On site optimization are generally evergreen. If you improve the usability of your site, every subsequent user will benefit from the improvement. The same thing can be said if you add content that better enables your customers to make a decision. Therefore optimization is both a good long term and short term investment.
Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization represent marketing strategies that are evergreen. They are evergreen, because they continue to deliver results and grow even if your level of effort has been reduced. Content that you create for search engine optimization will continue to rise in ranking as your web site grows in importance. Communities that you create for your products, can also continue to grow through the efforts of your customers. Both strategies require your hard work to grow to success and that success is not immediate. That work will pay dividends and gives you an advantage over those who are not putting a concerted effort to do the same. Evergreen marketing is the most cost effective strategy to gain new users.
Online advertising on the other hand is not evergreen. Once the ads you paid for are no longer running, you are not gaining new customers from them.