Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies for the Entire Customer Journey

Discovering how you can boost conversion rates at every stage of your sales process is like being given the keys to Aladdin’s Cave.

Jeff Coyle, MarketMuse’s Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, and Russell Wojcik, Content Marketing & Operations Manager at Claravine, join in this MarketMuse webinar to discuss the treasure trove of marketing strategies they’ve successfully used to boost ROI, becoming hyper-competitive.

When you use conversion rate optimization at every step of your customer’s journey, you suddenly have more cash available to invest in better resources than your competitors can afford. Your business becomes unstoppable.

Russell and Jeff freely share their hard-won knowledge and wisdom as they take you through the customer journey from beginning to end, looking at how to optimize different funnels at every stage. They share crucial information about:

• More effective customer persona research
• Organizing content
• Internal linking
• Grouping content for different buckets using attribution
• The best KPIs to measure
• The value of heat mapping and session recordings
• Predictive lead scoring to guide prospects
• The value of testing
• How to boost amplification on social media

Show Notes

You can quickly discover what’s working or not working when you practice conversion optimization (CRO) strategies throughout your entire customer journey. With these insights, you can fix what’s broken and create a better customer experience.

A successful CRO strategy starts with digging deep into your customer persona. Once you know precisely whom you’re targeting, you can successfully plan for long-range content creation. Tracking and data evaluation gives detailed intel on your successes and failures.

Organizing Content

“I love using [a] table of contents,” said Russel who uses them to help organize content for readers.

A table of contents guides readers through a website or a pillar piece of long, general content. When they can click through to precisely what they’re interested in, you get a KPI to measure.

Subsequently, you can create supporting content that goes into more depth for high-interest areas to then build internal linking around.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is huge because you can take people deeper.

“Go to Google and use their site operator function – site, colon, your website.com. And then your keyword. Google will show you internal link opportunities,” Russell Wojcik said.

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How to Group Content for Different Buckets Using Attribution

When you know what type of visitor downloaded which content, you can group content for them. Instead of having many different funnels, you can have a great marketing resources page – a collection of gated content.

“That’s going to be a more valuable conversion for whoever finds that because now they didn’t find just the one gated asset. They found the one they were looking for, and then they found the next four that they didn’t even know they were looking for,” said Russell Wojcik.

The Best KPIs to Measure

“Traffic means nothing if it doesn’t convert,” said Russell Wojcik.

All teams need to use the same KPIs. Content, marketing, and sales all need to be looking at core business metrics that will be slightly different for different industries. Some important KPIs are:

• ROI
• Conversion value
• Signups
• Upgrades
• Retention
• Churn

The Value of Heat Mapping and Session Recordings

A common mistake is thinking that all of your user journeys are linear. Heat mapping and session recordings show exactly which pages users visited, how much they consumed, and where they left.

Many user journeys are meandering explorations. They’ll land on a piece of content, go to the home page, check the about page, and then look at other pages as they build a big picture and develop trust. Often users go to entirely unexpected places.

Heat mapping and session recordings let you see actual visitor behavior. You may notice that a content piece is getting a lot of attention. You can then move that content up in your conversion funnel or build more content around it.

Measuring drop-offs on each funnel page and knowing where they exited tells you what content needs improving.

Predictive Lead Scoring Lets You Guide Prospects

Use predictive lead scoring to determine if a prospect will buy a self-service offering or be a high-value or enterprise customer. You can then show them the appropriate content at the right time.

Sorting out who is a retail customer who will buy small amounts from a wholesale B2B prospect enables you to channel users into the appropriate funnel. Your sales team can spend their resources on high-value customers while letting retail customers purchase from your shopping cart.

Madkudu and similar applications help predict user intention and behavior.

The Value of Testing

“Never go into it thinking I have the right idea 100 percent. Almost everything you come up with isn’t the highest level of optimization,” said Jeff Coyle.

Testing is valuable because your conversion rate always goes up. When you get into a testing mindset, you can start testing everything. Headlines, cost-to-serve, content – you can improve everything. That’s the beauty of conversion rate optimization.

“Take email, for example. Email hosting, email body, subject line testing, landing page testing – the cool part about doing testing well, is it always goes up,” said Jeff Coyle.

Testing sparks creativity. You get ideas about repurposing things, testing in different formats, and content creation.

How to Boost Amplification on Social Media

Social media amplification gives you eyeballs you can’t get through your followers. Measuring amplification tells you how many additional actions you get when using your in-house network to like/share posts.

“Hot tip. If you have 40 people in your company, all your posts should have at least 40 likes. On a LinkedIn post, it might get you 500 to a thousand views,” Jeff Coyle shared.

Featured Guest

Russell focuses on the optimal balance of opportunity, effectiveness, and effort regarding content strategy. With experience marketing everything from luxury hotels to fireworks to SaaS products and beyond, Russell delivers valuable brand and product attention by developing carefully prioritized, full-journey content.

“I’m committed to understanding customers, providing value-rich content that meets their needs, creating exceptional online user experiences, rising up search rankings, and driving revenue for my clients,” Russell Wojcik shares.

Discover more about Russell on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Takeaways

• Improving customer persona research gains you deeper insights into customers’ minds and emotions. With this data, you can create better content and deliver it at the right time and place.
• Organizing content with a table of contents lets users get to what they are looking for fast. You can track them to know what content is performing well and give them more of it.
• Internal linking lets you guide users deeper into the content.
• The best KPIs to measure are not inbound traffic but are core business metrics. All teams need to use the same KPIs.
• Tracking, heat mapping, and session recordings give you exciting insights into actual user behavior rather than relying on test ruins. Customer journeys are often non-linear because many users meander.
• Predictive lead scoring allows you to guide prospects into the appropriate funnel. Your sales team can then concentrate on high-value customers.
• The value of A/B testing is that conversion rates always go up.
• Boosting amplification on social media using your internal network to like posts gets you views that you can’t get from your followers.

Resources

SparkToro

Rand Fishkin

Mouseflow

WhatIs.com

Google Analytics

MadKudu