No one explained to me the correlation between the perfect audience and conversion rate optimization. I remember landing my first marketing job, I was excited and ready to put into action what I had learned in my digital marketing course. I remember in the meeting confidently requesting the buyer persona and being shocked when they didn’t have one. So I took it upon myself to create my own. I remember his name was Big Bob, a rich, single guy blah blah blah… I saved it and never looked at it again.
Table of Contents
Why Companies Don’t End Up Using Their Buyer Persona?
How Does Conversion Rate Optimization Connect To A Buyer Persona?
The problem, for me at least, the other departments didn’t involve me in the landing page A/B testing at all. I could suggest things to test but another department had full control. It wasn’t until I created my site that I realized the secret link between the buyer persona and A/B testing. Doing your CRO changing a header, color, or paragraph is the slowest way to test your site and see what works. You should always be thinking about how can I prove or disprove my idea of the main audience.
Want to make more revenue?
What’s The Recommended Way To Start The Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Experiment?
Let’s say your persona is a single male that is an analytical thinker, DIYer, with little regard for money, and loves to feel he is receiving brand-new and unique products. Now imagine we are instant boiling water taps. So on the control page, we might have content leading toward how easy our tap is to install yourself with a step-by-step guild and a video. The page would go on to discuss our tap USPs and the limited availability. We would provide a lot of stats including the temperature, pressure, and so on. Be the first to own this tap.
So what we did was match certain customer attributes with elements on our control page:
- Analytical thinker = Lot of stats including the temperature, pressure, and so on.
- DIYer = How easy our tap is to install yourself with a step-by-step guild and a video.
- Loves to feel he is receiving brand-new and unique products = Our tap USPs and the limited availability.
- Little regard for money = We would not offer a discount or mention competitor prices.
What Goes In Our Persona On The Conversion Rate Experiment Page?
In our experiment, we could assume that really our main audience is really busy single mothers who hates DIY, want to save money, and care more about status. So in this case our content would be more in line with providing everything the plumber would need to be able to install in 30 mins. We would show how much money would be saved in a year from using our hot tap instead of filling a kettle. Maybe we would have a video of a woman showing off her beautiful kitchen and how impressed her friends are seeing her make 5 cups of coffee all in seconds. The safety aspect is that you need to press a button at the same time as turning the tap on to get really hot water. Lastly the amount of time she will save in the morning with instant hot water. Email sign-up for discounts and offers.
So what we did was match certain customer attributes with elements on our test page:
- Hates DIY = Everything the plumber would need to be able to install in 30 mins.
- Who wants to save money = How much money would be saved in a year from using our hot tap instead of filling a kettle?
- Care more about status = a video of a woman showing off her beautiful kitchen and how impressed her friends are seeing her make 5 cups of coffee all in seconds.
- Busy=time she will save in the morning with instant hot water
- Single mothers = The safety aspect is that you need to press a button at the same time as turning the tap on to get the boiling water.
Want to make more revenue?
How Do You Know What Page Is Winning Experiment?
So from our control and experiment, we would look at the page with the highest our macro conversions (normally transactions). Let our experiment run for a while and get a few thousand high-intent customers and whatever the outcome, make amendments to your customer persona and repeat. This makes more sense than changing an image or paragraph right? The point of this experiment is to see how your customers react to a change in the content.
Can We Still Do Conversion Rate Optimization If We Are Not an eCommerce Site?
Your company may have other goals like watch time, subscriptions, calls, & more. It’s no problem, this system fits almost all business types.
What Website Does This Works Best For Conversion Rate Optimization?
This works well for sites with fewer products and services, but even if you have a massive eCommerce website, try it on your products with the most impressions. Regardless of the type of products/services you sell, if you suffer from a lack of impressions, there may be another option. If you have similar pages that use the same templates, you can have pages in groups to AB product pages in mass. It’s a bit more work and not as accurate but it’s a great solution.
Main Benefits of AB Testing Big Changes?
When you log every change. You have enough traffic to test things every other day. After 1 year you’ll have 182 changes under your belt. What system do you have in place to ensure you don’t do duplicate experiments? Having a custom persona and the list of personas that didn’t work will make it easy to make sure you keep going in the right direction.
What Requirements Are There For AB Testing?
Just one! Qualified traffic or AKA users with high purchase intent. Now, this is key. Using Google, Microsoft, Meta Ads, etc to bring highly qualified traffic to your pages. The higher the quality the better the results. You can also use SEO with highly relevant keywords and any other marketing efforts, as long as you know the traffic quality. If the quality is poor then this will still work but less accurately. I work a lot with Google Ads, so I will work a lot on the search terms and ads first before I waste my time/client’s money on CRO.
Want to make more revenue?
What Are The Drawbacks Of Doing Conversion Rate Optimization?
Some conversions might be lost due to low conversion rates but remember, this is just for a short period and you can cancel experiments at any time. Remember the long-term goal is to create a highly relevant landing page and to fully understand the people that want your products/services.
How Would This Affect Microsoft and Google Ads?
Both of these marketing platforms have something called landing page experience. These make up more than ⅓ of the quality score on the keywords. This is important because it will affect your cost per click, ad position, impression share, and click-through rate. I’m not saying it will negatively affect your account, it can go either way. There are different ways to do this test as both companies offer experiments. That’s a built-in version of conversion rate optimization free in the platform making it easy as long as you have ads running. The macro conversions will always take priority, but if you notice the previously mentioned metric being negatively affected, try to make sure the keywords and ad text are also on the landing page if it makes sense.
How Long Do I Need For An AB Experiment?
Never think about the time when it comes to landing page experiments. Look at the impressions. I prefer to ensure we get 200 high-quality unique users, that spent over 30 seconds on the site. If you can’t ensure the quality because you’re not running any paid advertising and only relying on poor keyword organic traffic, then look for 500 users that spent more than 30 seconds on your site. Look at your data holistically and make decisions based on your outcomes.
What Would Be The Best You Could Hope For When Doing Conversion Rate Optimization?
That depends on a few factors:
- Is the customer having to make a payment?
- Low-ticket item, less than $50?
- Medium ticket?
- High ticket?
- The average revenue per conversion.
- Business to business or business to customer?
- Product/service environmental factors like weather or time until Christmas.
- Traffic Quality.
- How much time is required for the conversion, for example for a subscription might only be an email address compared to a 30-question form?
- What is the accuracy of your conversion tracking? If you have server-side tracking you might have higher accuracy than compared to browser-side.
There is no correct answer to this question. Try to remember CRO is heavily related to game theory. We are not playing the finite game aiming for one target then we win, we are always fighting an infinite battle to simply do better than we did before.
Want to make more revenue?
What Tools Can I Use For AB Testing?
There are 2 tools that really come to mind, but of course, I’m sure there are others.
- Google Optimize – A free tool that allows you to have 5 experiments happening at one time. It’s perfect for small to medium businesses. There is a paid version too costing over $100k per year.
- Optimizely – A paid tool that is perfect for medium to large businesses with unlimited experiments and a whole host of other tools.
- Google and Microsoft Ads both
What Are The Minimum Requirements For Conversion Rate Optimization?
- You need to have conversion tracking set up to ensure your reaching your goals. Only use one or two goals in your experiment.
- Purchases, subscriptions, form completions, calls, texts, etc. Just ensure they are reaching a business goal.
- Ensure there is enough quality traffic on the page or group of similar pages to be able statistically relevant.
Where Can I Get Conversion Rate Optimization Services?
Extra Large Marketing provides CRO services, find out more!
What Attributes Goes Into The Buyer Persona?
The key at first is to pick 3-4 to start with and test them out. Make 2-3 personas of 3-4 attributes and then get into your conversion rate optimization mode. Make sure you remember you update them every time an experiment concludes.
- Income
- Age
- Gender
- Mental state
- Parental status
- Employment status
- Spirituality
- Religion
- Emotional vs analytical
- How do your users view them self in the world
- Fears and/vs rewards
- Feature and benefits they are looking for
- Anything else you can think of
What Things Can I AB Test?
In the beginning, I would test some high-level things like emotional vs analytical. It’s pretty easy to do because analytical users love stats. Where emotional customers will care more about how it will make them feel having the product/service? Then once I’m clear about that I would move on to fears and rewards. Do the users care more about being saved from their fears or the rewards they are certain to receive? Once you’ve tried this a few times you’ll get the hang of it.
Will Conversion Rate Optimizing Affect My SEO?
It’s important to remember that a page you are A/B testing most likely isn’t an SEO pillar page, but rather a conversion page, according to Rand Fishkin of Moz. Such pages rarely need to serve both SEO and conversion goals. He gives the example of Moz’s pricing page, which he says doesn’t have to rank for “SEO tools”. Instead, it’s “built to convert. It’s a pricing page—you can choose your price. It doesn’t need to target any search keywords.” Thus, A/B testing on the page content won’t negatively impact your SEO.
Want to make more revenue?
Can I still Do An AB Test When It’s B2B?
Yes, you can! Conversion rate optimization Is not going to be as specific as B2C but you’ll be surprised how good it is. Often you want to stay away from things like age and parental status and focus more on fears, benefits, and expectations. The B2B customer might not be so interested in saving money but more in ease of use and time-saving benefits.
Also, Consider Your Business!
How does your product or service compare to the competition?
- Where do you fall price-wise?
- What are your unique selling points?
- How big is your brand and how likely are your customer to have heard of you?
- What is the risk vs reward?
- What is your aftercare like?
- What’s your delivery time?
- If your customers are not buying on Amazon, why?
- Are you a local, national, or international brand?
- What is your quality?
- Have you tried testing the price after doing some conversion rate optimizations?
What Can I Do If I Have Very Little Or Low-Quality Traffic?
There is a site called Amazon Mechanical Turk. It’s a micro jobs website where you can request people to review your pages for $0.05 per person to look at the variations and tell you what page they preferred and why. You can request certain things from the user like location and interests although this could change the cost. It might not be as accurate as conversion rate optimization, but just remember the buyer persona and what will give you the best returns.
Conclusion
Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been doing this for a while, there’s no reason to think that you won’t be able to make more profit on your products or services. In fact, if you do it right, the Possibilities are endless! Inflation is a thing so make sure you keep testing those prices.
Want to make more revenue?
