Stop Leaving Site Conversions & Revenue on the Table

Amongst rising customer acquisition costs, increased competition and inflation, brands are facing challenges in growing e-commerce revenue. As a result, many of our recent conversations with clients and prospects have focused on improving site experiences, reducing friction and boosting conversion rates to drive more value from media and commerce investments. In particular, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) has become critical for many brands in turning browsers into buyers and making every click count.

Opportunity

Brands must be positioned to not only drive online traffic via demand generation initiatives, but also convert that traffic onsite. At Astound, we work with our clients to offset the historical imbalance between traffic acquisition and traffic conversion. Across the digital marketing landscape, companies generally spend just 1% of budget on conversion initiatives, the rest going to their tech stack, partners and traffic generation activities like paid media or SEO. Most brands have a significant opportunity to change this mindset—shifting priority to experience and conversion—to capture more demand from existing investments.

What to Look For

There are a number of triggers that present an opportunity for your brand to focus more on site experience to boost revenue. These include:

• Low Conversion Rate
  Have you seen a decrease in site conversion rate? Incremental lifts through testing your checkout/lead forms can help move the needle.

• Rising Media Costs
  You may be driving a lot of site traffic through paid channels, but Quality Scores will suffer (and CPCs will rise) if that traffic is bouncing due to poor site experiences. Improve return on ad spend, prove the value of your media, and make every dollar go further by focusing on an optimized site experience.

• Planned Redesign
  If you’re planning to make front-end website changes that you haven’t yet quantified the value of, A/B testing can validate your thinking. After the redesign, testing should also be employed to evaluate and continually improve design decisions.

• Audience Testing/Personalization
  If you’re planning on including more targeted content or personalization on your site per different audience segments, testing can help inform this plan, ensuring you get the most out of your personalization platform.

• New Tech
  Are you fully utilizing technology that you’ve already licensed, like Dynamic Yield, Salesforce Marketing Cloud/Interaction Studio, Adobe Target or Optimizely? One of the most common things we see at Astound is that brands are far from fully leveraging the power of their tech stacks, which not only leaves revenue on the table in terms of lower conversion rates, but also in terms of your tech investment.

Approach

Site experience and conversion optimization requires a consultative approach. Gains can be made in a short timeframe, but the most successful brands employ ongoing, continuous optimization informed by data; there’s always a new plateau to surpass. In other words, never stop testing. A typical approach includes:

1. Discover - Research & Analysis: Leverage qualitative and quantitative analytics and research methods to gain insights related to the customer journey on your site. This includes a site assessment, usability analysis and workshops.

2. Define - Recommendations & Road Map: Construct a strategy focused on opportunities identified during discovery. Prioritize categories for testing, minimizing risk to existing performance while also identifying experiments that lead to lifts and insights.

3. Test, Learn, Repeat - Continuous Optimization: Execute site modifications to drive growth using A/B and multivariate statistical testing methods that measure incremental impact. Never be satisfied and let data control all decisions.

How Astound Can Help

Astound can help perpetually optimize your site’s conversion rates. This includes improving checkout/lead form conversion with ongoing tests; increasing lead volume with compelling content, design experiences and optimal layout; driving additional value with add-ons, bundles, cross-sells, and upsells; and encouraging retention, engagement and repeat visits/bookings through email and loyalty program opt-ins. If you lack technical resources for experience or conversion optimization, Astound can bring design, development, and QA resources specifically focused on testing, enabling speed to market.

We employ optimization programs for some of the world’s most respected brands, and can help you too. For Astound Digital clients, even small lifts in conversion rates have led to millions in incremental revenue. To illustrate, a consumer electronics client boosted conversion rates by 14%, leading to a 22% increase in average order value.