How to optimize your conversion process as a startup.
This article is the fifth in a series of weekly articles that detail what I learn in my currently ongoing Growth mini-degree scholarship with the the CXL institute.
When running growth for a startup, a huge chunk of your work is in getting your leads to convert and activating them as customers for your product.
As such, you’ll come up with hypotheses and run growth experiments aimed at validating them. Now, when running your growth experiments aimed towards conversion, you’ll want to ensure that your entire process is optimized.
For example, let’s say you work with an e-commerce marketplace and your objective is to increase conversion by 20% in 6 months. Your task here is to optimize conversion. To do that, you need to ensure that your process for optimizing conversion is optimized.
To properly understand what an optimal conversion process looks like, let’s first define the things that do not count as optimization.
Things that do not count as optimization;
- Implementing listicles: A lot of people when trying to optimize conversion just google stuff straight off the bat, googling “conversion optimization” and whatnot and when you do something like that, you’ll get a lot of results for sure. Stuff like “100 tactics to improve your conversion” etc.
The problem is that you don’t have the time to test out 100 varying ideas up and down. Another problem is that these articles mostly serve as SEO boosters for people just trying to get traffic to their website, not people who actually know what they are doing.
2. Best practices: The thing is there are best practices for everything, tweaks you can make to your landing page etc. but the major problem with best practices is that they are also common practices so essentially, you are just doing what everyone else is doing. While it’s a good starting point. It’s not optimization.
3. Design trends: From time to time, new flashing things pop up that you can supposedly implement on your website to optimize conversion. There was a time the fad was “video backgrounds” and you were seen as cool if you had stuff like that on your landing page.
Thing is, just hopping on design trends no matter how cool they seem is never a good idea.
4. Market leaders: If you are running growth for an e-commerce website and you are trying to optimize conversion. Should you just copy what market leaders like Amazon are doing? The answer is no because like everyone knows, the success of Amazon is built on many other things so copying their cosmetical stuff like copy, design, etc. isn’t optimization. It’s just naive.
How optimization should be done:
If you always have to ask yourself “What should we test next?” That’s a major signal that your optimization process is broken. It’s a symptom of a missing process because conversion optimization is a process.
Simply put, “Conversion optimization is a systematic way of finding opportunities for growth and developing data-based ideas for how to build upon these opportunities.”
If you can’t describe your optimization work as a process, then you are not really clear on what you are doing
What a good optimization process looks like:
- It tells you where your problems are in your website or app.
- It helps you understand why these problems are problems
- A good process helps you come up with hypotheses on how you can fix the problems spotted.
- It should help you prioritize your ideas or solution to the identified problem.
How to build a good optimization process:
- Know what matters to your users: When trying to build your optimization process, you’ll want to start out by knowing what matters to your users. What kind of pain point does your product solve for them? What emotion does it satisfy?
Once you are clear on that, it’s easy to fit your messaging in such a way that it resonates with them. You can highlight features they care about not stuff that doesn’t matter to them
2. Know what your users are doing: With analytics tools like Google Analytics & Hotjar. You can easily track what your users are doing on your site or app and this is really important because when you know what your users are doing, what activities they are spending time on. It gives you insights into what can be optimized.
3. Figure out the real problem by researching: You could say a good way to figure out the problem would be by testing — With testing, you test if this thing or that thing is a problem. eg you change your signup process and then see what works and see if your ideas make it better.
You can do that continuously but you run into the same problem of having 100 random ideas you have no way to prioritize. So if you’re just drawing random stuff, you know, your odds of having a high win rate are very low. So instead of just testing, you need to start with research instead.
Conversion research is the foundation of everything. Research is what helps us identify where the problems are, what the problems are, and so on.
Having established the importance of research, You need to start your optimization process with a list of questions like;
- What do users want?
- What do they need?
- Where are the problems?
- Who is the target audience?
So you have filters on the sidebar in the e-commerce site. You know, filter products by size, color, price, and so on, while all these features are there, are they being used? Which one is used the most? If they use it, are they more likely to convert, less likely to convert, no difference?
All these questions inform what kind of data you should be gathering that helps you answer every single one of these questions and typically you want to come up with at least 100 questions on every single thing the users can do on your website, everything they can read.
You need to ask a challenging question. You need to challenge your assumptions.
4. Create effective tests: This means making effective changes wherever the traffic is landing on to drive up conversion which is the major goal for most businesses. eg your website, landing pages. It is important not to be testing things that make no difference else you won’t be getting results and you would be wasting time.
The key thing is to know what to test so it would have a positive impact and while doing that, you need to reduce the cost of optimization. It is important to note that you cannot be slow. You cannot be brainstorming for five months about one test hypothesis. You need to be fast.
