Our methodology
Personalize. Monetize. Optimize. Grow your ecommerce store
with OptiMonk’s proven Conversion Optimization methodology.
What is Conversion Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is any solution about increasing the percentage of website visitors that complete a desired action.
We call the action they take a “conversion,” and it could be anything from buying a product to signing up for a newsletter or registering for a webinar.
But when we’re talking about ecommerce conversion rates, we’re usually referring to purchases.
The Conversion Optimization Process
Creating A Plan
You cannot solve a problem that is unknown. The first step to getting and keeping your customers is to suss out where they run into problems on your site. We analyze the current onsite journey of your visitors, find bottlenecks and uncover opportunities to provide a better customer experience along their journey. We collect customer data, analyze the data, and create hypotheses.
The endgame of your analysis is to understand your market and your customers in depth. We start off with a Customer Discovery interview to help you mine gold dust on your customers.
We look at the journey from a customer perspective and try to answer the following questions:
- Is the value proposition / USP clear?
- How would I feel if I were a customer of the website?
- Are there moments of confusion for visitors?
- What is the value the customer is looking for?
- How can we better help them achieve their goals?
- How could the overall experience be improved?
Once you understand your market, it’s time to pool all the data you’ve collected in step one and find the leaks where your store is losing money.
In step two, we go full-on detective — we uncover the problems with your onsite journey and learn how you can revamp your onsite experience to grow your customer base.
Google Analytics reports are a great place to start. It is very easy to get lost among the hundreds of reports Google Analytics provide, so we usually start with the largest sources and the most visited landing pages, and look for segments that convert suboptimally compared to others.
We look for:
- Negative swings in conversion
- Significant & distinctive segments
- Behaviour patterns
- Outlier customer segment
What are the biggest issues with your onsite journey? Confusing checkout process? The usual high rate of cart abandoners? A bad user experience on your product pages?
To help you uncover the main issues and biggest opportunities on your website, we use a Website Personalization Worksheet with several guided questions such as
- Do you have a high cart abandonment rate? (above 60%)
- Do you have regular special offers with discounts?
Based on your answers, the worksheet will help you identify countless website personalization opportunities targeted at your specific problems.
Launching Personalized Campaigns
We know the problems. We know the opportunities. Now we are ready to put everything into practice and optimize your store.
After the brainstorming session, you’ll likely be overwhelmed by the amount of ideas generated. At this stage of the process, the more ideas we have, the better — as many as 5-7 messages for each opportunity is an awesome place to start.
This is where priorization will come into the picture. We rely on the RICE scoring formula to help us with that. In your worksheet, we assigned specific scores to each idea based on our experience running countless campaigns. Still, you may decide on changing these if one or more opportunities are more important for you.
At the end of the process, you’ll be left with a nicely prioritized idea backlog that is ready to be implemented.
The next step is to set up your Theme and Segments for your campaigns. You’re likely to come back to use these again and again in future campaigns so it’s worth dedicating some time at the beginning to setting them up precisely.
Your Theme is basically a branded template family in OptiMonk encompassing a template for every goal you can think of matching your brand perfectly. Your theme will be set up the first time you create an OptiMonk account by defining your brand colors, fonts, corner roundings and preferred style. After that, every time you want to create a campaign, you can start off with templates that are already branded.
Segments are a set of targeting rules for a given campaign that defines who will see your message. The goal of this step is to create the previously defined segments in OptiMonk and save them so you can create new messages for them quickly in the future.
Brainstorm? Check. Journey plan? Check. Now it’s time to create your messages. We like to keep this stage simple and drop our messages into a suitable template based on our already-setup Theme. Pick a Segment and launch!
Evaluation & Optimization
Let’s find the message/tactic that work best for you! In this phrase, we set up experiments, then evaluate the results.
We’ve got the messages, now it’s time to test them.
Will a popup work better than an embedded campaign? Do you actually have to offer a higher discount for visitors to convert or will a small offer with a countdown create enough FOMO? Will a simple headline change impact your conversions?
We want to test anything we can think of to be absolutely sure that we find the best combination of onsite messages for you site.
Of course, you can’t test everything at once. We encourage working in sprints, always picking a couple of ideas to test and constantly iterating with your campaigns. Optimize what’s already working, implement new ideas from you backlog and test them agianst each other.
Our next task is to evaluate your new messages’ performance. What impact have they had on your conversions, sign-ups, subscribers, orders, and revenue?
Testing involves a super-speedy smoke test on the first day to measure their impact. We then test monthly, bi-weekly, weekly, or daily — depending on your levels of traffic. This helps us pinpoint where we can level up their performance.
We use Google Analytics to track results accurately.
Learn & Repeat
The Website Personalization process doesn’t end here.
Based on our results, we have proven or disproven several our starting hypothesis. We have learned a ton about what’s working and what’s isn’t when it comes to converting and keeping your customers. And we’ll have a bunch of new ideas to try. It’s time to go back to Opportunity Prioritization to begin a new cycle.
Website Personalization is a cyclical process. We usually run these cycles as a 2-to-4-week sprint.
This timeline gives us enough time to test our hypotheses and assumptions. Once a sprint is over, we hit repeat on the cycle and get back to analysis, brainstorming, planning, and ideation.
Become a Certified Conversion Optimization Expert
Are you ready to take things to the next level? Deep dive into conversion optimization and get certified!
