7 reasons why conversion optimization is useful for business growth

Sean Ellis, the guy who earns growth hacking, the executive director of Qualaroo, noted that in many firms conversion conversion optimization (CRO - conversion rate optimization) is not involved at all, but if they do, it is not enough.

According to Sean and his own experience with brands such as Dropbox, Eventbrite and LogMeIn, CRO is the most powerful business growth driver.

At a recent webinar, Sean shared his thoughts on how to associate a CRO with a business and build support for it, because this is key.

Seven reasons why CRO is useful for business development
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1.CRO increases the desire / intention to purchase the product.

- Increase conversion dynamics. Think about how you can arouse a desire that motivates your potential customers to perform a targeted action.

- Focus on user expectations. Expectations are one of the most powerful factors that a marketer must work with. For example, Google is fully built on the understanding and suggestion of what people expect from the Internet.

Everyone who comes to your site has any expectations, there is some reason why he appeared here. If you manage to grasp and understand this reason, you can make a profit on this and adapt your product to this idea.

- Understand the needs of the market. To maximize the conversion, you must take into account the expectations of the target audience and do not forget to increase interest in using your service.

To understand customer expectations, you can ask them directly:

Page Level Expectations: “Does this page make you want to [register] [for a product]?”
General expectations: “How will you benefit from this [product]?”

When someone takes a targeted action, ask him why he actually signed up for your service.

When you have accumulated enough answers to these questions, you can begin to make adjustments to your communication plan with users.

2.CRO reduces frustration / doubt

Sean defines CRO as "desire minus resistance . " Those. The conversion rate is a function of how much people want to use your product, and how much resistance they encounter when trying to get it. This means that if the desire level is high, people will agree to some resistance, but if the desire is not enough, with the slightest resistance, the conversion process is immediately interrupted.

Therefore, the main thing is to stimulate desire and eliminate obstacles.

If your struggle with interference, resistance and friction becomes noticeable, this will improve your company's reputation, which is strategically important.

Here are some more reasons why you should reduce friction during the conversion process:

- The accumulated disappointment is dangerous. If you are trying to promote your business, but inside there is something that seriously slows you down, you will disappoint a lot of people today and create problems for yourself in the future.
- Those who are disappointed rarely return. Find out what is stopping people from immediately, as soon as they get to your site. Ask something like:
Have you encountered any problems before [when registering, making a purchase, paying for it]?
(So ​​you can find out things that apply to your site)

Is there something that prevents you from registering?

When you relate the answers to these questions to the analytical or other data you have, you will get an idea of ​​the reasons for the leakage of the conversion - maybe in some browser you can’t make a purchase, or you somehow didn’t react to the client’s complaint.

3. CRO increases business development.

When you have increased desire and coped with resistance, you need to accelerate.

- The sooner you get into a CRO, the more prospects. CRO is one of the most inexpensive ways to promote a business. He will teach you to value every penny spent and organize your expenses more efficiently. Accelerated development has one more plus - this is an important factor for attracting additional capital.
- A good example is contagious. Whenever you improve something with CRO, your colleagues see that information gathering and testing are useful things. As a result, there are less disputes and fuss about this. In addition, the CRO helps to understand what functionality is important for the product being tested.

4. CRO increases the number of viable campaigns.

Sean said that when they worked with LogMeIn, they did not even think of expanding the business until the conversion process went absolutely smoothly. For several months, they conducted various tests that were designed to improve conversion at every point, from the first visit to successful remote access. First, they threw all their strength to increase the conversion rate and only then returned to the issue of expansion. They tried a lot of channels that had not worked before - and suddenly they started working.

Before optimization, each dollar invested was returned to them by about 90 cents. After optimization, they could observe a 1000 percent increase in the number of visits. This directly correlated with the situation with orders: for each dollar invested in the framework of this campaign, they began to receive 9.

Thus, Sean experienced firsthand that:

- Improved conversion increases the number of successful campaigns. The effect affects not only one specific campaign, but also those who previously did not work at all. This also contributes to the acceleration of development.
- 10-fold increase in conversion = 100-fold improvement in growth rates.
- After a successful CRO, you need to repeat the test. If you have tested many campaigns and some of them did not work, return to them after you have significant success in the CRO , because there is a high probability that now these things will work. There is also a great chance that your competitors were not so agile and could not make any channels effectively earn - take and gain an advantage in the market.
- If a visitor has matured to such an extent that he has already reached MHX (must have experience - he understood that he certainly needs it), you have a high retention rate. For startups, it is very important to determine the level of “mastheva”, that is, the percentage of people who say that they would be very upset if they could not use this product anymore. Find a piece that people need, so that they can call all your product necessary. When they get to this chip, they are likely to sit firmly.
- CRO is a tool that maximizes the percentage of people with MHX.
- Realize your MHX to meet user expectations . A very important condition for growth is the ability to retain people who came to you for the first time. CRO is designed to create a sense of necessity among users, and in order to achieve this, you need to understand what this need is. Then build and run tests that relate to promises and MHX. If your promises do not correspond to what your product can actually give, you cause false expectations, frustration, that is, your product most likely will not satisfy customers.

5. CRO helps to keep users

We will have to spend a lot of time developing various filters to find out which of them correctly identify users who need such “need”. If you succeed in getting the right people to get the right experience - it's great! Your business will grow.

6.CRO makes word of mouth louder

- Word of mouth is undoubtedly the most powerful growth stimulator. If you take all areas of business and everything that was achieved in them, the role of word of mouth in all this will be in the first place. In most of the fast-growing companies in which Sean had a chance to work or that he studied, the dominant growth channel was word of mouth.
- More MHX = louder word of mouth. Word of mouth should work as a conductor of information about how beautiful your product is. Whenever someone reaches the mastheva, word of mouth starts to sound louder.

- Some products work better on word of mouth, others worse. For example, if you sell diapers for adults, “Masthev” will be for those who are unlikely to scream at every corner, as it is wonderful. There are many such things that people consider necessary, but which they are reluctant to talk about.

- Optimize referral programs. Try different methods of attracting people to referral programs - various options for invitations and messages that need to be sent through different channels.

One of the methods is that the benefit is mutual - both yours and the client. For example, Dropbox has a program in which users recommend the service to someone else, and a newbie gets 250 MB of space, and the recommended one - 250 MB in addition to their existing one.

Sean noted that in the case of Dropbox, it was very important that even before the launch of the referral program, information was transmitted by word of mouth, that, they say, there is such a wonderful service. Therefore, the program itself worked as a catalyst for an ongoing reaction. If you have weak positions on the word of mouth, you will not achieve anything by artificially trying to raise your rating on it.

7. Double bets on successful CRO.

If you start testing and see improvements, this is the surest sign that you need to dig further in the same direction.
- If something can be improved, most likely, it can be improved still. Constantly analyze where the signals of improvements come from, and focus your resources on the appropriate fronts.
- If something fails to improve, switch to something else. If you have started testing and do not see any changes in a particular area, there is a possibility that everything is already quite optimized there.

If you can't get Google AdWords to work for you, spending time on Google AdWords hardly makes sense. Perhaps you have a relatively new product, for which there are just not enough related search queries, and you just have to generate demand, and not try to spud it.

Focus more on your top pages, better sources, and custom segments where conversion is most likely. Improve what works, and do not get stuck where you are incompetent.

Sean does not get tired of repeating that CRO is a continuous improvement process, and the easiest thing to do is to improve what has broken. You often do not even know that something is broken until you begin to fix it. And when something can be fixed, it can probably be fixed even better - so it makes sense not to stop there and try to get a coconut from a higher branch.