Some ways to optimise your conversion rate are obvious and we can use our own experiences to pinpoint issues with websites or the wider business which may hinder the conversion rate and stop people making a purchase. For example, if a certain product doesn’t have many positive reviews or any reviews at all, we immediately don’t trust it. A lack of trust can also be generated by a website not having linked social media pages or from bad reviews externally. 

But assuming your website has lots of positive reviews, has social media pages that are regularly updated and looks like a website that you, yourself would trust, how can you be sure of what the problem is?

What you need is a way to test your website with your target audience to create accurate data. Below, we’ll discuss the 5 different steps within a conversion rate optimisation framework that will help you successfully convert your visits into sales.  

The process is devised around a conversion rate optimisation framework with 3 stages; discovery, experiment and review and within each of these stages are several steps that you need to go through. 

Step One: Data Gathering

The first phase in the discovery section of the conversion optimisation framework is data gathering. You should be able to gather data from 3 areas:

• The Company 
• The Website
• The Customer

We’ll look at each of these in order. 

The Company

First of all, you’ll need to consider the goals of the company. What is your company wanting to achieve? What’s the Unique Selling Point (USP)? Do the staff within your company understand the needs of the customers? 

USP

Every company should have a USP. This is what sets you apart from other businesses doing the same thing. However, what really converts more customers to make a purchase is if your business can provide something that other, similar businesses aren’t able to do. 

For example, can you offer free next day delivery? Can you offer a more personalised customer service platform? Can you offer free advice? Find something that really sets you apart from everyone else and try this. If it doesn’t work, you can always try something else. But make sure you always stand out from the crowd. Doing the same thing that everyone else does means that people aren’t likely to choose you and your conversion rate will remain quite low. 

Objections

You should visit the sales department within your business. They spend their days trying to convert people into customers and will know what the common objections to their sales pitches are. 

They can advise you on why they can’t convert people right now, so you know what isn’t working. And equally, they can give you the sales pitch that they’ve used on the occasions that it has worked, because clearly you’re doing something right there too and you need to keep doing it. 

Customer Service

It’s easy to go directly to the sales department and ask for feedback, but that only gives you data from the customers that are already purchasing or that have turned you down. While that’s great information to gather regarding existing customers and their needs, what you really need to do is visit your customer service department. They’re the ones that will understand the issues that arise first-hand and will be able to tell you what they don’t like about the company. Take all of that feedback on board, it’s valuable. 

While your USPs are incredibly important, what customers really like is the feel of a company. Studies have shown that a higher conversion rate directly correlates with a company that people feel they can trust. It’s all about the culture that’s built up internally and how this is displayed to the outside world. Do your staff understand that it’s their behaviour that can directly influence your conversion rate? When you ask your customers why they’re loyal to your business, of course, it’s because they like your products, but it’s more than that. Most customers return because they feel the service was excellent, the staff were friendly and the user experience on your website was easy. That can matter even more to your customer than the product that they’ve purchased. 

Micro-Conversions

You’re reading this article because you have one main goal; to increase your conversion rate for sales through your website. You want to transform visitors into customers and those customers into repeat customers. Although this is your large conversion goal and the reason you need to look into the conversion rate optimisation framework, you should also take note of the smaller goals that might help you get there. 

Micro-conversions are smaller wins through your website that might eventually contribute to the wider goal. For example, if you have a newsletter, you might see that people who sign up to that mailing list actually convert into customers more often than those that don’t. Therefore, getting someone to sign up to the mailing list should be a small win, and classed as a micro-conversion. 

Once you’ve got your larger conversion targets in place, you could also do smaller-scale tests regarding your newsletter to see if you’re able to convert more people to sign up. 

The Website

Now, you’ll need to focus specifically on the website to see what effect that is having on your conversion rate. 

A good starting point is to map out your whole website with a diagram. Look at the parts that you feel need improvement from the data already gathered. Then you’ll need to dive into the analytics. Usually, websites, whether custom-built or on a host platform, will have an analytics section. This is so you can track where your traffic is coming from, where your customers are going when they visit the website and where the drop off points are. You’ll also be able to see how long they spend on your website and what the current traffic breakdown is over the day. There might be certain times of day or days of the week where your traffic is higher, and you’ll need to investigate why that is. 

The amount of traffic you receive may affect the time it takes to do your research because you need enough figures to analyse effectively. 

It’s also a good idea to take a look at Google Analytics. There’s some information there that you wouldn’t necessarily get from your own website, for example, you can find out the demographic of the visitors to your site. Do they match your target audience? You can also find out what devices your visitors are using to access your website. It might be that most of them visit via mobile, in which case you might need to focus on developing your mobile website or even develop an app. 

The idea is to find patterns in your traffic behaviour. If you notice that a lot of your traffic seems to drop off your website at a certain page, then you know that page needs work. 

Cancellation & Refunds

What most companies don’t realise is that data regarding cancellation rates or refunds is invaluable. Normally websites don’t come in-built with this information and it can’t be pulled from Google Analytics either because it’s technically offline data. However, you can get data on this by actually asking your customers. When they select to cancel or to have a refund for the product, there’s no harm in asking them why. You can make this mandatory too, so you get all the data you need from there. Although you might have already lost that customer, they might bring up information regarding changes that allow you to convert others in the future. 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

No matter what you decide to test, search engine optimisation is important. There’s no point having the best website in the world if no one can find it. To make your conversion rate the best it can be, you’ll need to rank highly on the popular search engines such as Google.

To do this you can use keywords within your writing. Your home page should contain the keywords that you would expect your customers to be searching for when they’re looking for a business like yours. Include your USP in here too to make it unique and ensure that you hit exactly the right people. 

For example, if you sell birthday cards, simply having ‘birthday cards’ on the homepage of your website won’t do much good as you’ll still be quite far down the list. However, if your USP is ‘Movie themed birthday cards’ then you’re likely to rank quite highly in the search engine if people search for that phrase. It’s also great as you know you’re going to pull in the people that want the specific product that you sell. You should start to see your conversion rate rise. 

The Customer

The third and most important thing that you need to consider when you’re looking at your conversion rate optimisation framework is your customers. 

While you might have already spoken to your customer service department regarding the trends that customers call about, there’s nothing like hearing it from the horse’s mouth. Of course, you’re not going to call up every customer and ask for feedback, but there are lots of more convenient ways to get this information. 

Google Consumer Surveys

You can ask Google to run surveys regarding your website after your customer has visited, as long as you have a relevant question to ask. Conversion rate optimisation experts can really help you find the right questions based on the data that you’ve already pulled together. The only issue here is that you can only ask a limited amount of questions as Google doesn’t want to overload your potential customer base and put them off, and rightly so. 

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

If you’re trying to convert returning customers to your website, it’d be a good idea to set up customer satisfaction surveys. These can be emailed out to your customers after their first purchase and any feedback will give you an idea of how your product is being received. Alternatively, you could put a survey on the checkout or confirmation page of your website to gain insight from there too. Try not to get too defensive, nothing is ever perfect, so expect some people to give negative feedback. 

If you’re unsure how to create a satisfaction survey for yourself, there are lots of great survey tools out there to help you build something that appears either, whilst your visitor is still on your website, or just before they leave. 

Survey Monkey

Survey Monkey is a good all-rounder for a mailing list. This can be used for slightly larger surveys that you intend to email out if you’ve managed to capture email addresses. It’s not as customisable as on-site survey tools, but it does the job and gets you the data you need. 

Usertesting.com

If you’re wanting the most honest answers from conversion rate optimisation experts, then you should consider user testing. This may come at a higher cost, but the results are really helpful. Usertesting.com recruits people from your target group to make purchases on your website and feedback on any pain points that they come across along the way. It’s a fresh pair of eyes on your website and the results will tell you exactly what you need to know.

Customer Support

So, you know you need to get the information directly from your customers to make sure you have accurate data. You’ve launched customer satisfaction surveys all over the place, but what about the organic information that you already have? 

Your customer support platform is the perfect way to get true and honest feedback and the beauty is, you’d already collected it without realising. Look at the emails or live chat transcripts that you already have from your existing customers. What did they like and what did they want to change? The easiest way to increase your conversion rate is to make your existing customers happy. If they’re content, others will follow. 

The next step in your discovery process is to work out what you should be testing. Don’t just jump into testing right away because you feel you know what might work. You’ve just spent a decent amount of time gathering your data, so use it wisely. If you are unsure, consider hiring a Conversion Rate Optimisation Consultant who can guide you through the process.

Step 2: List Hypotheses

What do you want to test?

Go back through all of your data and look for the common trends in dropouts for your website or the pages that people don’t spend a lot of time on. 

Look at the customer satisfaction surveys and note down any trends with your free text fields. Do people have a common issue with your payment page? Perhaps you need to test ways to make this seem more secure?

Make sure you have a key section in mind that you want to test to make sure you know what your end goal is. 

Who do you want to test?

The next stage is to consider who you need to test to get some accurate and usable results. 

You need to understand your demographic, which we now know that you can pull from Google Analytics. Once you’ve got this you also need to understand why they come to your website. What is it that they’re looking for when they search for your product? And what is their mindset when they click on your site? If you specialise in selling craft items, do you get an uplift in people on your website at Christmas, for example? Their goal might be to buy Christmas presents. If you’re a florist, does your demographic differ by gender or do you get an increase in traffic around Valentine’s day?

The trick is to understand the customer and what they need out of a purchase. You must use websites yourself in the same way, so consider yourself a customer on competitor’s websites and understand what you need from them too, to gain a different perspective. 

You’re never going to be able to segment everyone perfectly because your data isn’t that detailed and the conversion rate optimisation process doesn’t allow for you to check into every single potential customer, but you’ll still be able to get a good idea of the mindset of the wider part of your customer base. 

If you’re able to segment the different types of people and the different reasons that they access your website, you should be able to create test pages to send them to. 

Creating a test page is just generating a copy of your original page with your main URL but changing certain aspects of that page to test the differences in traffic and conversion. You’ll even be able to direct certain segments to your test page and others to your standard pages so you can compare the difference. Optimizely offers a great feature for this and will provide a conversion rate optimisation consultant to help you along the way. 

Which pages do you want to test? 

Obviously, you’ll need to decide which pages you’re testing with. If you’re conducting A/B testing by sending some customers to your original website and others to amended pages as discussed earlier, you’ll need to make sure that the pages have the same or similar information and products available on them. 

It’s no good sending some of your traffic to a page listing a product for £100 and the other half of your traffic to a page with something worth £5. Your customer base for those products is likely to be very different, meaning that you won’t get accurate readings. 

You need to know your exact hypothesis before you make the decision of which pages to test. Use your data from the previous phase to determine the demographic of your traffic, the reasons for their visit and the reasons that they leave the site without making a purchase. Identify the problem pages with the highest amount of traffic first, as testing these will have the biggest positive effect. 

Now that you’ve gathered all of your data and you know exactly what you want to test, you’re ready to move to the next step of the conversion rate optimisation process: testing.

Step Three: Wireframe Test Design

If you have control over your website yourself using a website building platform, you might not need to create a wireframe test design. These are made specifically to allow owners and investors of a company to see exactly what’s being changed and why. However, it is still good practice to create one so that you know you’re on top of everything. It also helps to remind you of your hypothesis so that you keep in mind why you’re testing. If you don’t constantly refer back to your hypothesis, it’s easy to lose your way and test things without data-driven reasons. 

A wireframe allows you to see, at a glance:

• What you’re planning to test

• Why you’re planning to test it

• How you plan to test 

• How long your tests will take

• How much traffic you need to test to make your results significant

• How you will record and measure your results

The things you need to ask yourself are:

Am I testing my hypothesis?

Make sure that what you intend to change will actually provide useful results. Use your data and customer feedback. If your data shows that people generally don’t like your payments page, don’t test your product pages just because you don’t like the look of them. 

Do my intended changes still comply with my brand?

If you have a large website, branding is important. You’ll need to make sure that your branding matches on your test pages. If not, you may come out with skewed results. Your conversion rate might improve on your test pages, but it might be because your traffic prefers the different branding, rather than the thing that you’re actually trying to test. 

Am I physically able to complete my changes with the technology I have?

Discuss with your tech team or your website provider before you set any decisions in stone. While most things are possible, the time frames might greatly differ depending on what you’re wanting to test and how you’re wanting to test it. 

There are lots of great wireframe templates and tools that you can use to help you along the way. If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed, take a look at Balsamiq or Mockingbird.

At this point in the conversion rate optimisation process, you have successfully gathered your data, created hypotheses, and planned what you’re going to test. Now it is time to design your testing.

Step Four: Implement Design

The next step is to design your testing. There are lots of conversion rate optimisation experts out there who will help you to conduct split tests by developing and amending a copy of your current website and offering different domains to each visitor during their search. The way you do this will depend on where the majority of your traffic comes from and how complex your website is. Don’t forget that you might want to test each website on the different browsers to see if the uptake is different. Different demographics do tend to gravitate to certain browsers. 

Conversion rate optimisation consultants are the best place to go to ensure you’re doing everything correctly. Companies such as Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) are recommended for this type of work, but there are others out there too. 

Using a consultancy service will allow someone who is a conversion rate optimisation expert to walk you through your testing, even if your website is more complex to ensure the design and links all work correctly. They can also assist in directing a certain percentage of your traffic to specific test pages depending on what you’re wanting to test. Ultimately, you can test as many pages as you like, but bear in mind that the more you test at the same time, the less accurate your results are likely to be, as you can’t be sure which test the results relate to. 

If you already have a fairly high traffic amount at the moment, but just need to focus on the conversion of that traffic, it’s best just to send a small portion of your current traffic to your test design. Stick to 10%-20%. You don’t want to lose your traffic flow if the test group don’t like the new design. 

If you choose to use Optimizely or VWO, which are recommended by conversion rate optimisation experts, you can also link your test site to Google Analytics. This allows you to see the average order price for both your standard and test websites and also allows you to see the split of demographics by conversion. From this, you’ll see what types of people prefer your test version and who might prefer your older version. 

Don’t be disheartened if your test site doesn’t have much effect or if you find your conversion actually decreases in comparison to your usual website. You can always try again. There is an unlimited number of tests that you can do, so just keep at it, you’ll find one that works eventually. 

You might even find that your conversion decreases, but your order value actually increases, indicating that the types of customers who are wanting to spend more money prefer this test version. Don’t overlook wins like this; they could be crucial to you understanding your customer base. You may even want to change the angle of your website so that it works to convert more of this type of customer. 

Within the implementing phase you should have:

• Obtained sign off for testing from your client or investor (if required)

• Started to test the variations of your website against your hypothesis

• Tested your website on multiple browsers

• Tested different versions of your site by demographic

• Review

We have arrived at the last step of the conversion rate framework! Now it’s time to see if all of your hard work has paid off. 

Step Five: Data Validation

Firstly, you need to make sure that you’ve reached statistical significance before you decide to review your testing. This means that you need to have enough results to allow you to make an informed decision. It’s no good deciding that you’re going to change your whole website based on 10 people that might have been through to your test website. The results won’t be reflective of the population and you could end up making a mistake. 

As we discussed before, it’d be a good idea to set a goal number of users to reach that will allow you to make this decision with confidence. If your website is smaller, the significance of each individual user is likely to be higher because they’re representative of your total traffic. If you’ve got a large, more corporate website, you’ll need to see a lot more traffic through your test site to gain statistical significance. 

Successful Hypothesis?

So, was your hypothesis correct? If your changes had a positive effect on your conversion, then you made the right choice. Now all you need to do is roll out the changes to the rest of your potential customers. 

If you’ve chosen to use a consultant, then you’ll be able to just amend your split so that 100% of your visitors see the new website in the short term. You can do this in one day and it’s great for a quick fix. Just remember to keep an eye on your conversion rate and traffic in the meantime to make sure that you don’t end up with an unexpected drop.

Longer-term, however, you can’t just keep sending the whole of your traffic to a test site and have your actual website sitting there in the background. Apart from anything else, the longer you use the test site, the more it will cost you. You need to think about making those changes to your normal website. If you use a platform for a smaller website, then those changes might be easy enough to make yourself. However, larger websites may take developer time and consideration. Make sure you communicate exactly what you want to achieve from the change and get an estimate of how long the change will take to make. Then you’ll have a rough time frame for when you can turn off your test website. 

I’d recommend leaving the test site running alongside your new website for a week or so, just in case the change creates any issues with your wider website at first.

Unsuccessful Hypothesis?

As we talked about earlier on, not every test is successful in achieving the results that you wanted. Don’t be too disheartened by this. While most companies won’t discuss their failed attempts at changes, unsuccessful attempts happen much more than you realise and it’s nothing to worry about. Just get up, dust yourself off and try again. 

The important thing is to learn from your mistakes. Go back to the drawing board and review the process again. 

Was your data correct in the first place? It’s easy to make assumptions from data if you don’t look at it initially from an impartial viewpoint. If you know you want to change an aspect of the website because you don’t particularly like it, it’s easier to make the results reflect your argument too if you’re selective with the data. Have a look at what you’d decided on, is this actually what the data told you, or is this what you wanted the data to tell you? 

If you think the data was skewed in any way due to the way that you tested, then get more data. It might take a little longer, but it’s better to get it right. 

Don’t ever think that you’ve wasted your time if your hypothesis doesn’t quite pan out the way you expected. Keep your data and note down the tests you did against the demographics you used. Although it hasn’t worked out this time, you’ll know not to do this again in the future and you’ll still have learned a lot from the data you collected. 

Just get back to the drawing board and try something else. 

Conclusion

And that’s it! You have successfully completed your first test towards successful conversion rate optimisation. It’s not a one-time-only process and as such, conversion optimisation will be a constant goal for your website. As we said, no business is ever perfect and as society changes, your customer base is also likely to change. You should never be completely happy with your conversion rate, and that’s a good thing. It means that you’re aware that you need to keep on your toes and aim for constant improvement. 

Well done for taking the first steps towards increasing that conversion rate!