A few days ago, one of our business development managers emailed me to ask about other ideas to market one of our newly launched products. We’ve been working on this product for a month now including the process flow which customers will go through until the final conversion – registration.
We’re currently running SEM and email marketing campaigns to drive short term traffic to the site. Here’s the catch after 2-3 weeks of analytics data I’ve found out that we were only converting at around 4-5% out of more than 5 thousand visits from a single email campaign.
We can see there’s a huge drop in traffic in the middle of our registration process which needs to be addressed.
Although our BDM has insisted that we should look for other channels to drive even more traffic to the site, I say let’s fix our funnel conversion first and try to capture what we already have rather than chasing more prospects and waste the leads at the end of the funnel.
Let me share six simple strategies for small businesses to optimize their conversion funnels:
1. Analyze Your Data Carefully – A common mistake is to act on a premature data. What is considered premature data will depend on the campaigns that you are running. For example, analyzing PPC campaigns with a 3-day data is not as reliable as comparing to 2-3 week figures.
Tip: Do not, and I repeat, DO NOT forget to establish your funnels on GA before launching any online marketing campaigns. Do your diligence of tagging your URL’s for Analytics to keep track of the performance of your campaigns. You’ve heard this before, but let me repeat: you cannot improve what you can’t measure.
2. Get To Know Your Funnel – Know where your customers are dropping out of your funnel. Most of the analytics packages today have funnel sections, so it should be easy for you to. For Google Analtyics, Funnel Visualization will look like this (can be found under Goals section):
A lesser click-through rate (or higher exit rate) within a funnel should raise a concern for you. This means there’s something within that page that gives your visitors a distressing signal which lets them bounce off of your page.
Don’t attempt to fix your page yet until you have all the necessary data that will support your decision. You might end up fixing something which is not broken and my disrupt your current conversion flow.
3. Ask For What Is Needed (Not What’s Convenient) – In my experience, pages with registration forms often have a high exit rate within the funnel. Your visitors hate filling up online forms for the following reasons:
a. If they are too long
b. If you don’t remind them of what they’re registering for
c. If your form is asking for sensitive information like email address, phone number, salary, etc.
Especially for lead generation sites, online forms can get really lengthy and not to mention irritating at times because all of the fields are mandatory.
When building online forms, ask your users for what is needed for you to consider that visitor a lead or a purchasing customer. At the same don’t shorten a form which is performing well just for the sake of increasing for funnel conversion.
4. Fact Finding with Your Sales / Customer Service Team – I would consider this part vital in your conversion optimization. Your sales / customer service teams are the ones who have direct contacts with your customers. They are the direct receivers of feedbacks when your visitors visit the site, complete the registration and make the final purchase.
Talk to these teams and get to know what most of your visitors think about the usability of your site, the prices of your products, and the experience they have with your website.
5. Test Your Knowledge – You have your data, you’ve spoken with the rest of the teams, you know the issues of your site’s flow, now is the time to actually FIX it.
Whether you’re redesigning a page or restructuring your conversion flow, always be sure to test it. Even though you’ve done your diligence of fact finding in our previous steps, we’re still not sure that it will work your visitors. So always be testing.
You can go either go with Multivariate (MVT) or A/B Testing. When it’s your first time to do conversion optimization, I’d prefer you try out A/B testing because it’s simpler to implement and interpret.
Yes I know what you’re going to ask next – How do I test?
There are a couple of A/B testing tools you can use: Google Website Optimizer, SiteSpect, ProImpact 7, etc. You can find a good list of providers by Econsultancy.
6. Follow Through – Optimization is a continuous process. When you have implemented the final version / flow of your website according to the winner of your tests, monitor them from time to time.
Remember that your users evolve over time and their change may shift in so many ways. Always be aware of these changes and respond to their needs as they happen.
Recently, I completed a CRO test and implementation which gave a project 27% increase in the number of registrations and a 20% increase in conversion rate. And that inspired this blog post.
Good times 
Six Funnel Conversion Optimization Tips for SMB’s is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO