Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO has become a significantly daily term and practice for marketers and eCommerce business owners.
However, CONVERSIONS are not the only ‘C’ that you can optimize – you can also make the CONVERSATIONS on your website efficient.
For most eCommerce businesses, starting and nurturing conversations can be as vital as motivating conversions.
First, let’s differentiate the two C’s.
What is a conversion?
A conversion can be anything that you want your website users to do. For example, a conversion can mean sending you their email address, proceeding to complete a purchase, subscribing to your service, or signing up for a discovery meeting that can lead to another conversion.
To accomplish the conversion, a user must click or tap your Call-to-Action or CTA button.
The ultimate conversion, which is what most people mean when they speak of the term, is when a user purchases something on your website.
A user who eventually buys something on your website is CONVERTED into a customer.
What leads users to conversion are the elements and processes you set up on your website. These elements are the best outcomes of your A/B test and are canned queues that lead people to the CTA.
What is a conversation?
A conversation is an engagement or dialogue between you and your user that can lead to a conversion. It provides the needed human touch that gives users a way to get to know you and your brand while gaining valuable information or assistance in order to trust you with any long-term relationship or investment.
You can learn how to leverage a conversation with a user by studying behaviour and queues in the dialogue.
Conversations, like conversions, can rely on user behaviour tracking but also heavily depends on user feedback. Effectively, conversations are a two-way communication process after dialogue is triggered. Conversations are active and reactive, unlike some conversion queues, which are passive and static.
Since conversations consider feedback, they are unique and almost unmeasurable, leading many to disagree about whether you can optimize them or not.
Can you optimize conversations?
Yes, at a scale.
First of all, conversations won’t happen on your website if it is lousy, and CRO helps you to avoid that. Hence, conversion optimization is an indirect step towards conversation optimization.
Nobody wants to talk in a place that is far from conducive to dialogue.
On the other hand, you can implement a number of strategies to directly optimize your conversations on your eCommerce website.
How do you optimize conversations?
Conversations go both ways and whether you or the user can start one. So, you can be active and not wait for the user to make the first move and initiate a conversation.
What you can do is distribute content that invites your audience to engage with your brand. This is one of the first steps for you to know your audience and engage them on a personal level.
You can communicate via your chatbots, forms, or other interactive features and elements.
Open with questions that focus on the needs and wants of your audience as consumers.
You can also give them content worth sharing, which could be your ticket to going viral – one share has the potential to get you millions of visitors and leads.
Simply give your audience some food for thought, whether the content is original or not. Take note that using other people’s materials that validate your brand and product can help fortify your credibility.
Here are strategies you can implement to effectively engage your audience and customers in conversations that lead to conversions.
- Help them decide.
Remember that when you give your users options and decisions to evaluate, the chances are that some of them will require some amount of guidance.
Some of them will appreciate the process more if you walk them through the advantages and disadvantages of a choice. And some of them will appreciate it if you give them hints or assurances that the decision they are making is reasonable or valuable.
The conversation you will start by doing this will be best as a precursor to conversion.
Make this conversation available via all communication channels, including chat, email, or phone. One way is to have your chatbot open the dialogue and offer opportunities to engage via other channels.
You can automate the bot to trigger when the user has been hovering around similar products, performing actions that imply product comparison.
- Leverage preference and readiness.
There are many preference options for your users when it comes to conversation or communication channels. And while the primary channels are chat, email, and phone, there are other options like a contact form, quiz,survey, or a traditional sales representative.
See which channels are most preferred by what type of user.
Also, keep an efficient log of user decision-making to quantify, average, and predict future conversations.
Study the queues and hints that predict when a user is ready to discuss the possibility of buying the ticket. By doing so, you can make the conversation, whatever way it is carried out, seamless, without jumping to out-of-place offers.
- Track the phone.
In digital marketing, phone tracking usually gets left behind for no good reason.
The common issue with phone tracking is that it usually doesn’t integrate with other tracking tools that monitor email, contact forms, chat, and other actions that involve a click or tap.
However, if you want to track conversations on the phone, you can.
You can use a click-to-call-back functionality. Instead of inviting a user to call you, place a “Have Us Call You” CTA on appropriate pages.
When the users click or tap, sending their phone numbers, they will receive a call and you can engage them in a conversation.
Most importantly, the click or tap binds all of the data of a user’s visit on your page to the call, including pages or content viewed, user behaviour, the heatmap, mouse tracking, and other vital information.
The data can inform the consequent conversation, resulting in the right offers and reactions.
You can also use dynamic phone numbers by leveraging platforms such as callrail.com, retreaver.com, or INVOCA.
These platforms insert unique phone numbers into web page content so that you can associate a phone call back to a tactic even without requiring a click.
- Systematically and appropriately continue or drop conversations.
You have to determine which conversations are valuable and which ones have no potential.
Remember that speed is a vital part of the eCommerce game, and not all conversations are worth your time.
Make sure that agents and chatbots learn which conversations are worth continuing based on well-analyzed queues.
Don’t Dismiss the Need to Improve Your Business Conversations.
Our increasingly changing eCommerce landscape may suggest that we veer away from offline communication and focus on more efficiently simple to scale clicks and taps.
However, as a business dealing with human interaction, any conversation on any channel, digital or not, should be taken into consideration when it comes to funnelling leads towards conversion.
You have to maximize all channels and opportunities to bring people to your ultimate CTA. However, the technical work required to operate all integrations and implement strategies is not a walk in the park.
A business owner like you would already be too busy with operations, quality management, and other vital areas of your enterprise. You will need an extra hand if you are to maximize how you leverage your conversations for conversion.
It would be best if you collaborate with an expert marketing team like Kasandz.com that can effectively work on your CRO for both conversion and conversation.
Do things the smart way by handing everything to an expert and avoiding mistakes and losing time.
FAQs
Is conversation optimization part of CRO?
Yes, conversation optimization can be considered as a part of conversion rate optimization. This is because some parts of your website can be conversation-based like your chatbots and copy.
Will CRO boost my sales?
Conversion rate optimization can help boost your sales by leading people to make purchases on your website. However, you will only be able to convert those who visit your website.
So if you want to really boost your sales, you have to do SEO or search engine optimization to bring people from search engines to your website. And you should also do email marketing and PPC.
The best way is to hand all of these powerful marketing methods to an expert like KAMG.
Can I do CRO by myself?
Yes, you can do conversion rate optimization by yourself but the result will highly depend on how much time you spend doing it.
You will have to find the right tools for A/B testing, user analytics, automation, and other technical requisites.
If you are a business owner, you might already be too busy running your eCommerce’s operations, human resources, production, and other tasks.
It would be best if you had a senior expert CRO team like KAMG to focus on your marketing.
