PPC is an extremely competitive marketing channel which more often than not makes it expensive. Eventually, you could reach a point where the cost outweighs the ROI. So how do you get more customers?
Table of contents:
Optimise your site to reduce customer acquisition costs
The trick is to stop thinking that acquiring new customers is the solution and instead capitalise on the customers you already have. By focusing on improving the onsite journey to increase the number of people converting, will in turn reduce the amount you need to spend on customer acquisition to achieve the same result.
You may already be running a fully-fledged optimisation programme (or maybe you’ve dipped your toes in the water to see what might happen), but the success of an optimisation programme lies in the rich research and insights you gather, that in turn create strong hypotheses.
By working more closely with your optimisation colleagues, or through the undertaking of an optimisation programme, differences in user behaviour seen through referral sources can identify potential areas for significant improvement in the conversion and retention of your customers.
Examples where we have reduced acquisition costs while maximising sales:
- PPC landing page optimisation featuring personalisation for search terms
- Dedicated user journeys for high-value segments of traffic
- Shift of focus to optimisation for lifetime value of a customer over session conversion for high-value long tail search
The learning from the above tests should be available to all and fed back into business processes and marketing efforts. This leads us nicely to the next change you can make…
Develop a CRO strategy that impacts all areas of your business
Conversion Optimisation is a science. Through the triangulation of data, guess work is eliminated and subjective opinions are replaced with data proven theories. Therefore, engaging in an optimisation programme is a solid strategy that can be applied business wide.
Before you spend any more money pushing for traffic, spamming your customers with endless emails or blindly placing promotions live without the metrics in place to measure success, stop and ask yourself this question –
Are you tracking everything you need to effectively measure your KPIs?
In most cases, we find that the answer is no. In some cases, it’s not for the want of trying but by not being able to join up data between online and the offline. There are solutions to this but by understanding your conversion journey you’ll be able to visualise paths and identify events that could be tracked to help support your analysis and reporting.
Through the analysis of your conversion funnel, your optimisation research will identify where your customers are dropping out, but it can also highlight unknown areas of success that you were not previously aware of. Combined with market and competitor research, you could find areas to improve your processes or create new services that could have a significant impact on the conversion of your web customers.
Once you’ve identified these innovative hypotheses for optimisation you’ll see your wider business finds new directions for growth.
Ways to gain radical growth
- Grow where your competitors can’t – by improving your own website to gain more market share
- Join up data to identify optimisation for growth through all marketing channels
- Replacing a big idea with a minimum viable product which can be tested online, allows you to measure intent for a new service/product on the web before investing heavily
Online marketing is often considered to be an acquisition focused sector, and Conversion Optimisation is often considered to be centred around a/b testing, but there is much more to these areas of expertise. Especially when the two work together, you get much more value for your pound.
Joining up the Data – by JD Hancock. Flickr
