Actions to improve traffic, sales and CRO (2)

In the first part, we focused on actions to get more and better traffic.  Today, we will focus on sales and CRO, which is ultimately what makes the difference in everything related to profitability.  We will monetize your store with these actions to improve your sales and CRO.

It stands for Conversion Rate Optimization, and basically, it consists of a series of strategies, tactics, and techniques that help us increase the ratio of goals met by our users.  Here is some more information about it. 

Obviously, in terms of eCommerce, the main objective will always be conversion to sale.  We leave this other post in case you want to know in more detail what’s the CRO and how it works. But for what we’ll talk about today, this explanation is enough. 

Continuing with the scenario presented in the previous post, we know we already have some visits, our traffic is consistent and it’s on a growth trend. 

Now, we need to involve the CRO. This philosophy gives us even more sales while maintaining the same traffic, so the logic says more traffic with better conversion equals much more profit.

There’s nothing more efficient to test a product or sales channel than a user test.  This tactic consists in observing directly the interaction. 

It is important to choose a good audience segmentation that includes both potential customers and non-potential customers (yet).  Ask them to do some tasks on the web and check if they are able to complete them successfully and how long they take. 

The goal is to find usability or accessibility errors or friction points, so you shouldn’t mediate or influence their navigation.  Limit yourself to observe and take notes (if possible, use a software to record their screen and audio).

This is a little fuzzier, but precisely because it’s much freer, you can reach very interesting side conclusions. 

This is a lifetime technique of “traditional” marketing, which consists in gathering some members from our target audience in a room, and with minimal restraint, let the conversation about the product, service or channel (ECommerce) flow. 

You’ll be able to get interesting Insights applicable to virtually anything: From the product itself to the after-sales service including the web and communication.

Don’t think they stopped working. Obviously, I’m not suggesting you should send door-to-door pollsters: we are talking about online surveys. 

It’s easy to integrate them into a web and are very useful. With just a couple of questions, you’ll be getting information of great relevance for decision making. 

It’s incredible how many CRO tools you can find on the market and that can actually help you in this regard.  You can try Typeform or Survey Monkey, I’m sure you’ll love them.

It’s a deferred observation technique, and more along the lines the renowned big data. 

 Heatmapping involves collecting visually where the attention of the page lies, the parts concentring the majority of clicks, the tracking of the mouse or how far is the average scroll in the page.  This is reflected as spot colors on the page itself so we can identify hot and cold spots. 

Eye Tracking is more advanced because it follows the users’ pupils to record where they look, even tracing the path of those looks.  The visual representation is very similar to the heatmapping. 

Obviously, the first tactic is a lot cheaper to implement than the second, since it doesn’t require sensors or direct intervention over the user.  

You can find a lot of Softwares for this.  We recommend Yandex Metrica if you’re new to this (it’s free and has a lot of options).

If you want to efficiently implement a CRO strategy, you can’t forget this mantra: Study, create hypotheses, test and start again. 

 You have a lot more data than you can imagine at your fingertips, and any of this information can lead you to the key to improving your sales and CRO. 

As we know, you already have an analytics tool.  My recommendation is that you go beyond the visits or the page views. That data only tells you what happened, but not why. 

Use all the information you can get from Analytics (Or the tool you use) and cross it with the rest of the proposals we have mentioned in this post. 

If the data tells you the landing page is not converting customers, and your users say they don’t understand the process during a test or focus group, the hypothesis you’ll reach will be different than if a survey reveals your users are not interested in a certain product or the scroll map indicates the button is far below what users usually scroll. 

This brings us to the last tip to improve sales and convert better: Do many A/B tests, multivariable tests or any kind of tests.  Hypotheses are worthless if you don’t test them.