Struggling to Grow Conversions? Here’s How to Take Web Optimization to the Next Level
12 enero, 2016
We know that A/B testing has its problems, and after all it is just «a randomized experiment with two variants, A and B«. Your site might have hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of daily visitors, and you are just testing out two variants? This approach can (and should!) be avoided by increasing the number of tests. But here’s the catch: just increasing the amount of tests or testing everything isn’t going to cut it in the long run, what you need is to understand that optimization is a process, not just bunch of standalone actions.
For this process to be fruitful, you need to constantly learn by iterating the process. This goes hand in hand with the topic: knowledge becomes almost obsolete without adequate speed to accompany it. If you are not fast enough in manoeuvring your site around your customers’ needs, to customers that’s almost the same as not personalizing at all. You’ve probably bought something online just to note that when you’re visiting the site again, they’re still advertising the same or substitute products to you. So they learned something about you, but not enough because they didn’t adapt fast enough to their customers’ unique situation.
There’s a need for speed in optimization process!
Embrace the culture of speed
Like François said in a Frosmo Friday video a while back: «your organization should implement a culture and processes to allow your eCommerce team to experiment things.» This type of trial-and-error approach is no doubt prime example of learning during the process, but it is fruitless and even harmful if you can’t achieve and maintain it with high enough speed! The team responsible for a company’s online experience should be able to be creative without stiff systems or interdepartmental bureaucracy dragging them down. Speed in optimization equals growth in conversions. There’s just no denying it.
But increasing your company’s speed in this process requires more than just flipping a switch. Here’s a handy checklist of the components which affect your speed:
● How easily can you understand the behaviour of your website visitors and segment them?
● Can you change the content and/or layout based on segments to take advantage of business opportunities?
● How quickly can you make these changes and how much control do you have over the personalization process?
● How much time and how many resources does it take to run through one iteration of the optimization process?
Use the above as a checklist to take your company’s pulse when it comes to adapting to customer needs, fast. The easier and faster you can do the above, the more relevant you’ll become and remain. This means people will remember your site. They’ll remember how easy it was to find what they were looking for. Different tools will provide different combinations of what’s technologically possible, in terms of speed, but also in terms of which part of the optimization process is covered.
Your website is as unique as the visitor who is looking at it. Do you treat it as such?
Changes to your website have traditionally been done through IT involvement or CMS software, both with limitations in terms of the time it takes and/or what can be modified. So why limit your customers’ experiences to standard features and external timetables?