Any business that has been active for a while will start to develop certain complexities and some of them may be hurting your business. Whether it is the way that a customer signs up for your newsletter, the system you have for accepting payments or even just the way they find information on your site. When one of these things is less than ideal it can be easy to forget ignore but eventually they will pile up and you can end up with a bad experience that simply won't convert
What do you want your customer to do?
Many businesses will share the same kind of goals; subscribe to our emails, contact us, and not least, “buy our stuff” but the actual route for doing this will look different in almost every company you look at. To really understand how your customer experiences your processes, you need to take some time out every now and then to look at your core business objectives and then go through the full process that a potential customer would have to go through.
Actively observe, even obsess, about every little detail as you go through the experience and you might be surprised at what you find. We recently ran a full audit of the processes on one site where several of the optin forms lead to pages that no longer existed and on a few pages the primary “BUY NOW” CTA (call to action) buttons on a site were simply broken, i.e. you clicked them and nothing happened, nothing at all, talk about a conversion killer!
Even if your problems aren't that bad, if you haven't checked in on your customer journeys in a while there is likely to be something. Perhaps you are linking to old or no longer relevant content or support articles? Are the dates or statistics on some of your content starting to look a little stale? Is there an opportunity to consolidate similar content or even remove entire steps from the journey to make things easier on your customers.
Breathing New Life Into Your Customer Journeys
Once you've been through the process of updating, fact checking, simplifying and reducing steps relentlessly there is one final thing that you may not be undertaking which can really help you to take things to the next level. That is of course the process of split-testing for conversion optimisation.
Now that you know your customer journey is solid. You can begin to actually optimise the process further. So many businesses focus on trying to bring in huge numbers of traffic to their site whilst placing relatively little focus on actually maximising the impact for your existing traffic numbers. You can start to test even with just one or two elements such as:
- Your page and section headlines
- The size, colour and location of your CTAs
- Short vs Long Form Content
- The alignment and whitespace of your content
- Your website copywriting itself
Even if you've tested these things in the past, the simple fact is your processes may have changed throughout your review, the web is constantly evolving regardless, common devices adapt, your business will have been evolving and the type of customers using your business can change too. Like they say in the financial markets; your past performance may not be indicative of future success.
If you take some time out every now and then to review your customer journeys, you will be able to squash bugs, cut out conversion killers and constantly take steps to improve the value of existing traffic to your site even if your audience doesn't grow. However in reality when you take the chance to review these things, you'll probably do things that naturally grow your audience anyway so it is a win either way.