Your website is your digital storefront. We hear this all the time, but we rarely consider how difficult online shopping still is these days. Imagine focusing your energies on marketing to drive customers to a bricks and mortar store, but once they arrived, they encountered an overwhelming maze of options: half a dozen sales promotions, heaps of items they don’t need, and a painfully slow checkout process that feels like an endurance test. Countless e-commerce websites still do this very thing
. But there’s a solution: conversion optimisation provides a much better way to win over new customers, and keep them coming back.
Rather than relentlessly focusing on traffic generation and SEO, optimising your site for increased conversions helps you exponentially increase revenue and results from the same amount of traffic – while in turn maximising your digital ad spend.
How to test and refine your value proposition
So where do you begin?
Before all else, put yourself in your ideal customer’s place and consider your value proposition: Why should I buy from you versus one of your competitors? What is the one area in which you excel that your rivals can’t match, that your customers care about most?
Next, examine how you express this value proposition across all your channels, from ads and traffic drivers to the site to post-purchase email messaging and customer support. The message needs to be clear and consistent.
In essence, the message needs to stay front and centre in your customer’s mind as they journey through the buying process. That includes copy, tone, images, and the experience your site provides for visitors.
The benefit of testing and refining your value proposition is that it can make a significant impact without a laborious site redesign. That also makes it an excellent starting point for conversion optimisation and testing, if you’re new to the process.
Bear in mind the visitor experience
In tandem with developing a stronger, clearer value proposition and testing it on your site, there are several user experience aspects to be aware of as well, such as how intuitive and frictionless the browsing and buying process is for visitors.
That’s an entirely separate article, but keep in mind that, for instance, highlighting “Hassle Free Returns” on a website with a cumbersome checkout process creates an incongruous experience. Make sure those aspects align for a seamless experience.
Use this framework as a starting point to increase results from the traffic you’re already getting, and it will lead you into other areas to test. You don’t need to try and climb the entire optimisation mountain at once, but this strategy will help you get up to base camp, where you can prepare your next move.
Hunter Boyle is founder and CEO of Optimization Copilot and will be speaking at Inside Retail Academy’s Conversion Rate Optimisation Seminar in Sydney on June 17. More information on the event can be found here.
