Let's find out what the experts think...

Last year here at Cicada, we worked with a number of new clients who had nice-looking websites produced by designers they know and trust. As we worked with these customers on the 'discovery process' at the start of the projects,  the same issue arose time and time again... While our clients thought their websites looked good, they couldn’t understand why they just weren’t doing well enough at getting visitors and converting them into leads. We had a good idea why this was, but to bring more oomph to our argument, we spoke to four experts in effective site design to find out their views on the differences between a brochure website that looks great, into one that delivers enquiries for your business. Our four interviewees are from different professional backgrounds within the digital industry, and we were intrigued…

Examples and tips to improve your conversion funnel for your persona?

Visualizing your conversion funnels, personalizing them for your buyer personas, optimizing their CTAs, landing pages, and other elements requires knowing things you may not know and testing new concepts. Conversion funnels are the freeway systems of website infrastructure, with landing pages as on-ramps and exit pages as off-ramps; but also with a variety of bridges, underpasses, toll booths, and traffic cameras throughout. MarketingSherpa shocks us with the statistic that only 68% of B2B marketers have identified their funnel. And, naturally, in order to optimize your funnel and explore the things that you do not yet know about funnels, you first need to define what your funnel is.

The Basics: What is your conversion funnel?

Theoretically, your funnel is the series of steps prospects take on their journey to becoming your customers. Graphically,…

Recommendations and examples of using style guides to support a CRO programme

When we kick-off a Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) programme with a new client we always try and find out what existing guides or tools they have that we can use during our programme. These may be branding guidelines, style guidelines, UI Pattern libraries, etc. For example, here is a really good description of how Envato, who run the Tuts+ sites, carry out Style guide Driven Development. However, the responses we get from clients are wide-ranging. As Mark Boulton (@MarkBoulton) pointed out recently: We're not going to dive into that debate around whether style guidelines are a help or hindrance here, instead I wanted to give recommendations from a CRO angle and investigate how we can…

Site relaunch conversion rate disaster recovery

Developing a persuasive and effective e-commerce website for relaunch involves team work and months of planning. But what happens if your new site actually converts at a lower rate than the one it replaces? After being approached by clients in exactly this situation the team at AWA Digital developed a programme to quickly regain the conversion rates of the old website - and start improving it. Called the Conversion Disaster Recovery Plan, it incorporates tools and the systematic application of techniques including research, analysis and split-testing. The step-by-step plan is designed to elicit the underlying reasons why visitors to the new site buy less, uncover where the real problems lie and develop test pages to overcome them. Based on AWA's extensive experience of Conversion Rate Optimisation, the Plan is summarised below as a flowchart and recommended tools to get feedback from customers and assess their behaviour.

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Making the case for optimising your mobile site with split-testing

Websites that use split-testing regularly will gain an increasing advantage over their competitors. By steadily increasing their conversion rate, they’re able to get higher returns for the same advertising spend and that means they can invest more in advertising and grow their market share.

Today, split-testing is especially relevant for mobile commerce. We’re at a stage where many companies will have a mobile version of their website that they serve to visitors from smartphone or tablets. But a lack either of focus or understanding of the opportunity means that very few websites are split-testing their mobile sites. And as mobile commerce grows, companies that split-test have a huge advantage.

But mobile conversion optimisation is hard. It forces you to focus on priorities. With limited screen real estate, you need to ensure that your content is well structured, persuasive and accessible.

8 Tips for mobile conversion rate optimisation

Here are…

5 ideas to help your journey to nirvana

Optimisation, it’s an important and hot topic. Whether SEO, advertising, email or conversion rate. We want more, we have to. Is it possible to reach an ‘optimised’ place, is it ever done, can we ever arrive at an optimised nirvana of continuous optimisation as we suggested in our recent 7 Steps to Digital Nirvana infographic? Whenever I talk to people, and listen to myself talking sometimes, you’d think that we are seeking a destination, a place where it’s all done. We're optimised! We asked about how optimised businesses are in their digital optimisation in our recent research on managing digital marketing - it's good to see a fair proportion in the top 2 categories, but the majority don't optimise continuously.

My experience is that in reality we never arrive. It’s a little…

A tutorial with examples and ideas of what to test

Prominently displaying why users should buy from you rather than a competitor is extremely important for any business look to increases online sales, particularly in retail, but it applies across many other sites. As Bryan Eisenberg, author of Always Be Testing can Call To Action explains in this punchy clip, testing value propositions can have a massive impact on conversion. [youtubevideoembedder id="ps7bB9-ksMY"] Bryan Eisenberg On Unique Value Propositions (1m45s) >> As Bryan says: "If you're not doing this, you're wasting your time" Given this, value propositions are something that I love to test. Smart Insights have covered the importance and examples of value propositions in other posts on their hub page, here I'm going to focus on testing, looking at retail Ecommerce examples.  I will looking at testing and optimisation point of view, starting with a review of…

Five techniques Conversion Optimisation Experts use to get the most value from their CRO efforts

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) can be frustrating when you have setup a CRO programme and are working hard on it, but not getting the results you expected. This article details five tips we find are important to apply to get your CRO efforts back on track. We have used this approach to deliver double, and sometimes triple-digit, sales increases. Implement this advice into your CRO programme and transform your business.

5 Tips to improve CRO

Tip 1: Avoid ‘best practice’

If you get your ideas for what to test on your website from downloading an expensive report then it’s odds-on you are seeing mixed results. What works on one site isn’tt guaranteed to work on your site and the tactics involved in persuading visitors to purchase varies enormously from site to site. You need to get into the mind-set of your…

What’s wrong with endless button colour testing?

Disclosure: We DO test buttons. Size, prominence, copy, positioning and very occasionally, colour. However, in many cases there are higher value tests that we could be running. There will almost always be constraints that limit the number of tests that you can run, based on design & developer effort, a limited number of conversions, limitations of your tools, etc. Therefore prioritising your tests is absolutely crucial. Where can you get the most bang for your buck? In this post I will share the most important things to consider when choosing what to test.

Selecting What to Test

If you've been working on Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) projects for any length of time you'll know that there is a huge range of ways to capture insights on user behaviour. No matter which tools/techniques you use, here are the three…

New research shows effectiveness and best practices for CRO across 7 key CRO techniques

Do you know the RedEye annual Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) report? It has now been produced for 5 years in conjunction with Econsultancy. Since the name was changed it has been instrumental in encouraging adoption of CRO and highlighting best practices. The latest practices in CRO are shown by the infographic below which summarises the popularity and effectiveness of different CRO techniques. Use it to review your approach. Ask... 1. Does your company have someone responsible for CRO? Encouragingly, 79% of businesses do? 2. Is there a structured programme of testing and improvements? This is poor, only 26% of companies do suggesting defined responsibility doesn't mean there is a programme in place. 3. Are you using A/B testing? This is the most popular method of structured testing with prioritisation of tests important to success. 4. Should we run usability tests? It's rated as highly valuable by 55%,…