Remember when conversion optimization could get 20 – 30% increases in conversion rate by making simple changes such as a button’s color, a headline, or place a phone number in the top right corner of a page? Ahh, the good ol’ day. Well they’re pretty long gone – now with what the economy in shambles and more tech savvy shoppers. Companies that still rely on changing a button and adding bolded text <here> are failing to recognize that those surface changes will not impact conversion rates as they used to.

So, now with the current situation and struggles, what can we do to ensure that we maintain and grow current conversion rates?

First and most important is planning what and how you want to optimize. This includes the entire approach from knowing the market (persona development), to analytics assessment, to optimization prioritization, and finally to filtering projects based on highest level of impact and lowest levels of effort.

Understanding Your Market: I was sifting through our blogs to see how many posts cited: the importance of understanding the market and persona development; I soon realized that any post about conversion optimization had referenced the importance of understanding the market in some way, shape or form.

I will reiterate, because we can’t stress this enough: the more you know about your market, persona traits, online behaviors, demographics, psychographics, etc., the more you can cater the site to address their needs.

But what can I add that’s different?

A practical tip:

If you know your market well enough, you know what they’re concerned about. Typically, customer/client concerns tend to flare-up right before they contact you or during the checkout. Place an assurance center that addresses their Fears, Uncertainties, or Doubts (FUDs) there.

Analytics Assessment: This goes hand in hand with understanding your market, because trying to understand the market requires a deep look at trends online, segmenting data and traffic, and measuring different marketing initiatives and their success/failure.

Yeah, we know that, right?

A practical tip:

Looking at the analytics closely requires a deep analysis of the navigation summary and various trends there. For instance, during checkout, ensure that users aren’t bouncing back and forth from the 1^st page to the 2^nd page and back again. That can tell you a number of different things, but something to consider is that maybe there’s information presented in the 1^st page of the checkout that users need to verify after getting to the 2^nd, 3^rd, and sometimes 4^th page of the checkout. Eliminating the bouncing around through the checkout has increased client’s cart abandonment rates 35%.

Optimization Prioritization: Once you have the information about your market and the analytics assessment, you can start to prioritize areas of optimization based on exit, bounce or conversion rates. List the areas with as much detail as possible and reasons why they need to change. Map out different scenarios based on your market information, and make informed decisions about what to test.

A practical tip: Reduce testing scenarios. Testing a million scenarios will get you results, but only after hundreds of thousands of impressions on the page, and in many cases a couple of years. If you’ve done your research well enough you will know to test only a few scenarios for specific elements throughout the page.

Conversion Optimization is part art, part science. If you do not have experience, you have a lot of tools that will help you master the science portion for conversion optimization projects throughout your site. The most important thing to remember is that optimization must be a consistent strategy like any marketing effort or initiative at your company. Additionally, always consider optimization to be an iterative process. It’s something that you will revisit time and time again.