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As an agency working in performance/growth marketing in Egypt for the past 5 years, constantly learning and updating our knowledge base, we have been introducing CRO and growth marketing tactics and services to our client base. The latter resulting in great retention rates that keep our bottom line happy. It has been very common amongst marketers that content is king, but we have been proving to our clients through measurable statistics that CRO is content on steroids.
What use is heavy traffic on your website if there are no conversions? CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimization is the idea and study of transforming views into clicks and clicks into purchases, or the equivalent of purchases, whether it being signing up, leaving an email, subscription, etc.. There are many tools and strategies for conversion optimization, but first, any business owner in Egypt and around the world must know what the best method is for their business. The reason we are writing this blog post specifically to Egypt is because from our humble experience we have noticed that most agencies in Egypt don’t offer conversion rate optimization as a service. The following is of course not corroborated by data, as are most things in Egypt, but as a performance and growth marketing agency we strongly believe this is due to the overwhelming number of awareness and creative production agencies, in contrast to technical marketing ones , that take away the spotlight and advertising/marketing budgets towards what is at the end of the day an awareness effort, with no causal impact on the bottom line, which makes technical marketing a sort of unappealing brother, which finally makes marketers flock towards creative posts rather than upgrade their skill set to meet the demands of a data driven world; it’s a vicious cycle. Of course this is all changing in a post-covid ecommerce driven Egypt. The concerted effort from online learning platforms, most notably all the effort in digital education spearheaded by ITIDA and Udacity, are definitely changing this equation.
With all of the above in mind, the following post was written in this vein, so that it can serve as a starting point for more marketers in Egypt to realize the importance of this crucial service.
Like any store, many potential customers visit and walk through the front door, but many leave without actually buying anything. CRO is the process of increasing the number of buyers in relation to the number of visitors. If you have 2000 visitors on your website, and 100 actually convert, then your conversion rate is 1% (which is great by the way). The challenging question for anyone is how to make this number/ratio bigger, how do you make more people take the desired action that you want them to?
CRO is definitely not a simple process because of many reasons, people are unpredictable, their behaviors change, and the desired action from customers vary on the type of your business. The optimum conversion would usually be a purchase, but depending on your business, there are many other factors that you want to track.
Every aspect of marketing is entirely useless unless it produces conversions.
Gaining traffic is hard, and a website/store that has huge traffic should surely be a profitable one, but not without CRO. Instead of throwing more money into the business to gain more traffic, CRO allows you to make this huge traffic worth it by turning your existing traffic into real conversions, traffic is worthless without CRO. Moving your customers down the funnel is the key point here, when a customer lands on your page or is aware of it, they are at the top of the funnel, how you nurture them and move them down the funnel in order for them to finally make a desired action is the definition of a conversion.
Conversion Rate Optimization could be done in various ways, including many different elements that complement each other and contribute to the best possible potential.
In order to optimize conversion rates, you must understand your target audience. A seller should always put themselves in the buyer’s shoes from start to finish, consider everything that might cross their minds. Buyers will always consider competitors, doubt quality, lose interest mid journey and simply be misled, that’s why one must also consider the buyer’s journey. Of course each customer has their own unique buying journey, however, studying data and analytics will help you determine the most common journeys and the best actions that lead to a sale. Some buyers, if not all, get irritated from friction, or extra steps that might bore them or make them reconsider buying just because of an extra step or effort, which brings us to a critical part, where you want to gather information with the least friction.
As much as human behavior is not a quantitative element, running hypotheses and A/B tests can help predict and determine human online behavior. A/B tests are built on launching and comparing different formats against each other and simply seeing which do better. CRO is not an easy or direct process, but it is one that’s worth investing in and studying as it ensures better results in the long run.
At some point you will have a website with great content and good SEO, but how do you start converting?
Conversions, or customers taking the desired actions on your page, are derived from one main thing, understanding your customer. Understanding your customer makes you tailor their journey to maximize their comfort and enjoyment so that they would always go to the next step, and there are some great, data driven methods that are proven to work.
The Quantitative Method
This method, also known as the Analytics Method, gives you solid figures on how people behave on your site using web analytics tools such as Google Analytics. These tools track your conversions and give you details on:
- Where people land first on your website
- Which pages they engage with the most
- Which platform referred them to your website
- Age, demographics, gender, interest
- What devices they are using
- When and where they decided to leave your website
The Qualitative Method
This people-focused method is more subjective. You will need the data from the quantitative method to identify who you should be asking. You can’t optimize for all users, so you must optimize for the ideal user.
Ways to get are listed below:
Heatmaps
Heatmaps give you an understanding of where and how much time does your customer spend on a page. A tool like this helps in visualizing your page according to customer interest and interaction allows you to think and plan better for optimizing their experience, and also gives you the needed information to know where is best to place your CTA and buttons.
Session Recording
A much more advanced and complex way to study your customers, this tool practically gives you a recording of your customer’s screen when on your page. This allows you to track the most common journeys customers choose, how they jump between pages, when they decide to leave, and more. This tool gives you maximum information about your page’s performance, and leaves it all to human judgement, you decide what went wrong and made your customer leave, or vice versa, which feature, link or structure made them convert.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is one of the most common ways to find out what works better for your web page. It is the process of testing two variants of the same webpage to different groups of customers at the same time, and studying which one performs better, the version with more conversions clearly wins. A/B Testing is always your ultimate deciding point whenever stuck between options as the results are based on real-time, real-customers’ behavior.
Onsite Survey
The best and most direct way to figure out what your customers need is to ask them. Onsite Surveys are a good tool to ask your customers critical questions about their experience with your web page while they’re on it. Always keep in mind that surveys are a double-edged sword, most customers hate being interrupted and would be irritated if questions keep popping up and might even affect their already good experience, but using the above tools, if you place and time your surveys right, the responses will be of enormous value to your understanding of your customers.
The many tools used in both methods offer useful and complementary information that, once gathered, are your guide to know everything about your customers, their relationship with your website and what needs to be changed in order to have better results.
To put it simply, one does not go without the other. General traffic without CRO will see huge traffic on any page or website but with minimum conversions, no matter how much more money you spend on ads, it will only increase your traffic, but conversions will remain the same. CRO is the essence of convincing your already existing traffic that they are, in fact, in the right place.
Contact us now to learn more about our CRO services in Egypt and get the best tailored experience.