Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few years (and, in 2020, it’s certainly been tempting), you’ll have stumbled across endless advice when it comes to CRO. Experts across the web offer tons of ways to use CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) to send leads whizzing through to your checkout and, now, it’s time to put aside everything you thought you knew about CRO and, get on board with CJO.
A journey of a thousand miles
Within the modern brand, marketing gurus spend a huge amount of time tinkering with landing pages and employing different CRO techniques to try to improve leads and, therefore, profit.
Many work on the basis that the idea is to focus on the landing page in order to reel in as many leads as possible and then offer something of value in the hope that leads turn into customers. Although this can, of course, work, it’s by no means the most effective way of getting strong loyal customers.
Many marketers use any method they can lay their hands on to turn new leads into new customers. This is, of course, a good idea (and kind of what business is all about) but, you want more than that. For your business to grow and succeed, what you’re after is loyal customers who come back to you time and time again and, for that, you need to get the road crew out and start working on your customer journey optimisation.
CJO (Customer Journey Optimisation) tackles this issue by drilling a little deeper into what makes a customer loyal. CJO works by dismissing the practice of optimising call to action (CTA) buttons in favour of concentrating on the personality of the landing page visitor.
And how, pray, does it do such a thing? It does this by creating a framework of six levels in order to provide more than a one dimensional view of the visitor. These six levels are as follows:
Research
When it comes to researching your visitors, you need so much more than the simple demographics that you may currently be relying on says Max Babych from SPD LOAD
Although these are important, your visitor is so much more than a gender, age, location or salary bracket. In order to begin with CJO, you need to know what the visitor wants, what their pain points are and, what their attitudes are to certain things. Only then can you start to gain an in-depth understanding of who the visitor is and how your product and service can be properly targeted to them.
You can do this by putting together an empathy map which will help you to understand your visitor better and to find customer segments which you may otherwise have missed.
Engineer
Right, so now you’ve got some shiny new customer segments, what are you going to do with them? Use ‘em, that’s what! This second level is all about taking a close look at your website and your landing pages and is possibly the most important stage in the entire process.
First things first, you want to make sure that your landing pages are targeted at the customer segments that you’ve identified during the first level. Your landing page should be super-focussed, super-concise and, contain a very clear CTA (call to action). Keep text to a minimum and focus on the customer segment’s desires and pain points.
Next up is your website. Having a top notch landing page is great but, it won’t do you any good unless your website is also up to snuff. Even if your landing page CTA doesn’t lead visitors to your website, they’re going to end up there anyway if they are considering becoming a customer.
The common thinking is that you have around six seconds to engage a website visitor before they go spinning off elsewhere – which means you need to get it right. As with your landing pages, you’ll need to make sure that your website is geared towards the customer segments you’re hoping to entice into becoming customers.
With both your website and your landing pages, the first commandments is test, test again and, then, test some more.
Reach out
If you’ve been around the block a couple of times with marketing and with SEO, you’ve no doubt been told to emulate (we’d never accuse you of copying, obviously) your competitor’s adverts and communications. We’ll let you into a secret; your customers are not ‘one size fits all’.
Although you may be reaching out to similar demographics to your competitors, reproducing their keywords and message may actually be counterproductive in the long run. If you’ve been following CJO levels one and two, you will, by now, have new customer segments to focus on with your outreach.
This means getting up close and personal and, creating different messaging – and different landing pages for each segment.
Educate
I bet you were wondering when we were going to mention content, right? Now is the time. Having got your ducks in a row in levels one to three, you can now concentrate on creating brilliant content to attract and educate your visitors. Content is, of course, super important as it offers perceived value to the visitor and, therefore, entices them to find out more about you and your brand.
We shouldn’t need to say this but, when putting together your content, make sure that it…..yep, you guessed it….is targeted to your new, all-important customer segments and, includes information which hits on their desires and pain points.
The conversion
You’ve come a long way baby…….having put in all the hard work, it’s now time to turn those leads into customers. The great thing here is that, if you’ve paved the conversion journey properly, you don’t need to go for a big salesy push. At this stage, all you should really need to do is to present your great value options and, then, leave the rest to your visitor.
All you really need to do now is to make sure that the user experience for your opt-in or checkout is clear, concise and hassle free.
…..And engage
So, your visitor has taken the bait, handed over their cash and become a bona fide customer; your job is done, right? Before you put your feet up and relax, you have one more really important job to do and, that is to engage with your brand new customer. Today’s technology gives you endless ways of doing this, including social media and email.
Where possible, sign new customers up to these platforms so that you can keep them up to date with all the great new stuff you have coming up. It’s also a good idea to set up Thank You / Welcome messages for new customers in order to make them feel valued.
Remember – retaining existing customers costs about five times less than bagging one new one!
When it comes to turning leads into customers, we’re absolutely not suggesting that you ditch the CRO techniques that you may be using – and which may have worked for you in the past.
Having said that, marketing and SEO move super-fast and, in 2020, it’s all about offering a solid user experience and personalising the process if you’re looking to secure loyal, long-term clients.
