Optimising the Customer Experience: Conversion Rate Optimisation

Cre­ative Consistency

If you’re not focus­ing on the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, you’re leav­ing mon­ey on the table – it’s as sim­ple as that. One of the sim­plest places to start with cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is to make sure your web – and mobile web – expe­ri­ences are optimised.

It costs so much mon­ey to acquire traf­fic to your site in the first place. Every time a user bounces from your site with­out inter­act­ing, you’ve wast­ed mon­ey – and you may nev­er get anoth­er chance with that prospect, either

That’s why it’s cru­cial to ensure a fric­tion­less user expe­ri­ence through­out your entire sales fun­nel. You need to make sure that every step of the con­ver­sion process is opti­mised so that once you’ve piqued a customer’s curios­i­ty with an offer, you can imme­di­ate­ly deliv­er on that promise.

In this series of arti­cles, we’re going to look at three of the things you should focus on when plan­ning to opti­mise your con­ver­sion rates. This is by no means an exhaus­tive list – but all three of these areas are cru­cial in any con­ver­sion rate opti­mi­sa­tion program.

We’ll start with what we call cre­ative con­sis­ten­cy—a clear mes­sage that per­sists from dis­play ads and emails to land­ing pages all the way to the end of the sales funnel.

Cost­ly creative

Many organ­i­sa­tions waste mon­ey on dis­play adver­tis­ing by fail­ing to tar­get the right peo­ple – or, when they find the right peo­ple, by fail­ing to put the right ads in front of them. Still more don’t seg­ment their cus­tomer base and tar­get those cus­tomers with rel­e­vant email content.

But an even greater num­ber of organ­i­sa­tions waste mon­ey by fail­ing to make sure that their land­ing pages – and the offers a prospect sees when they respond to a dis­play ad or email offer – are con­sis­tent with the mes­sages that caused those prospects to react in the first place.

Time Warn­er Cable, one of the largest pay tele­vi­sion com­pa­nies in the world, has put this idea of cre­ative con­sis­ten­cy to great use. They analysed poten­tial new cus­tomer affin­i­ty for the dif­fer­ent prod­ucts that they offer—and then pro­mot­ed pack­age offers across dis­play media and through­out the company’s web­site. Addi­tion­al­ly, the offer shown to this seg­ment would be con­sis­tent whether the con­sumer was being exposed to a dis­play media ban­ner, com­ing to a land­ing page, or view­ing the Time Warn­er Cable home­page. The result of this tar­get­ing and expe­ri­ence con­sis­ten­cy was a 20 per­cent improve­ment in the new cus­tomer con­ver­sion rate. You can read more about the ben­e­fits they saw here.

At Adobe, we’ve found – in many stud­ies, as well as through the work that we do one-on-one with our cus­tomers – that opti­mised land­ing pages dra­mat­i­cal­ly improve con­ver­sion rates; espe­cial­ly when they’re used as part of a con­sis­tent cus­tomer journey.

The pow­er of personalisation

For exam­ple, if a user is on The Tele­graph web­site and responds to an advert for a cred­it card fea­tur­ing a spe­cif­ic offer, they should see the same cre­ative, the same mes­sages and the same offer when they land on the bank’s web­site. In fact, if they don’t see con­sis­tent mes­sag­ing when they arrive on the bank’s web­site, then they’re very like­ly to leave imme­di­ate­ly – and their impres­sion of the bank’s brand is diminished.

Tak­ing this idea even fur­ther, the bank’s cre­ative and mes­sag­ing should not only per­sist through­out that ses­sion with the user – they should be remem­bered and recre­at­ed each time the cus­tomer returns to the site. After all, this is exact­ly the lev­el of per­son­alised expe­ri­ence you’d expect if you dealt with real peo­ple in the bank’s branches.

This approach was exact­ly the one we took when we opti­mised RBS’s sales cam­paign – and as Giles Richard­son, Head of Ana­lyt­ics at RBS, tells us in this video, users were 70 to 80 per­cent more like­ly to engage with the prod­uct when the on-site cre­ative and mes­sag­ing were consistent.

But con­sis­tent land­ing pages are just the begin­ning of land­ing page optimisation.

You’ve still got a lot of deci­sions to make in terms of lay­out and con­tent: how to group sec­tions of the page togeth­er, how to best reflect the fea­tures and func­tions of your prod­ucts, how to rep­re­sent your offer graph­i­cal­ly, and how to struc­ture the flow of the page as a whole.

The only way to get hard data on these things is through A/B test­ing – com­par­ing dif­fer­ent ver­sions of a page to find out which ver­sion gen­er­ates more con­ver­sions; and mul­ti­vari­ate test­ing – exam­in­ing which spe­cif­ic ele­ments on the page actu­al­ly con­tribute to conversions.

We’ll explore those two steps in more detail in the next arti­cle in this series. See you there.

Anoth­er sub­hed here, maybe, just to break up the content?