Conversion top tips for 2020

If you found this blog via our social media, or by revisiting our website - Thanks! You just improved our conversion rate.

Calculating conversion rate is simple, right? Let’s say you have a small ecommerce site receiving 100 visits a month, leading to 2 purchases, resulting in a 2% conversion rate.

However, often people take several weeks or even months to convert, and this is certainly true for member organisations, so we need to find ways to track across campaigns.

In a broader sense, conversions aren't just about money. Often, they’re directly tied to changing what people feel and know about your organisation and offering, as well as how they transact with you. However, these conversions are notoriously hard (and often expensive) to fully assess.

1 - Know, Feel, Do

At the heart of all persuasive communication is the “Know, Feel, Do” model. The receiver of any given message is likely waiting for the answer to three questions:

KNOW: What is it you want me to know?
FEEL: Why is it important to me?
DO: Given this information, what do you want me to do?

You can swiftly improve the resonance of your digital communications if you use this model effectively. Here’s how:

Know
Get to the point - what does a potential conversion need to know? This will differ depending on the context, and how engaged they already are with your organisation.

Feel
Show users you care about their needs. This appeals to human nature, which wants to be in control of making decisions and creating its own buy-in.

Do
Be clear about what you want people to do next. Once someone has decided to convert, the tools to implement this change should be right there for them.

This communicative framework goes beyond marketing strategy and CRO. Apply it well, and you’ll have developed a working understanding of the focal tenets of behavioural communication.

2 - Micro & Macro

Tracking conversions can be disheartening if you focus only on the "big-hitters" like subscription renewals, order completions, or membership upgrades. Why?

While those big hitter conversions may be cyclical, campaign-driven or sporadic, smaller conversion actions should be ongoing.

By splitting conversion actions into micro (less momentous, more frequent) and macro ("Ultimate Win", less frequent) conversions, you'll be able to track how engaged your user base is, and pinpoint segments most likely to convert in future.

3 - Steps to Success

There’s really no underselling the value of good, chunky analysis and well-performed research. Business research is crucial to ensure you:

Understand your company’s USP(s)
Have considered any previous CRO learnings
Have identified your macro and micro conversions
Have developed effective user personas and narrowed down your audiences

Insight generation involves thinking broadly and contextually about your research. For membership organisations, considering what point members are on their journey and considering their motivation to respond is key to successful conversion.

Developing successful CRO processes involves hypothesising, experimenting, and reviewing your results... usually multiple times.

Once you've formed a decent hypothesis, you can move onto the experiment phase. A/B split, multivariate, and tree testing are all common experiments used to user-test the impact of changing variables on conversion.

4 - Think persuasively & playfully

There's no underestimating the power of persuasive, playful copy and imagery when it comes to inciting conversion action.

Consider context and timing when employing more "out-there" strategies, but don't be afraid to stand out - you should be looking to grab attention, draw on awareness, and linger in people's minds.

Consider this example below taken from the Webby Awards homepage. The photo subject is facing the camera, with an ambiguous facial expression - this can be powerful as users tend to interpret ambiguity in a way that resonates with them personally.