Planning a Conversion Strategy

To get the most out of your conversion efforts, you need to have an organized strategy that aligns with your company’s business goals.

The role of a conversion optimization plan is to identify and prioritize all web page test opportunities and ensure:

• • Business goal alignment
  • Brand alignment
  • Rigorous review of web analytics insights
  • All traffic-driving methods in sync with the plan

• Alignment of offers and calls to action with the plan
• Traffic volumes significant enough for recommended tests
• Testing and measurement tools in place

With this strategic process in place, you can manage the campaign and align it with your goals and brand, all while delivering strong ROI.

Here’s an example of how a bank might set up goals, key performance indicators (KPI), and a strategy and hypothesis to test.

The Business Goal

Our primary goal is to make the personal banking section more engaging and in line with the “Bank Local. Bank Smart.” tagline. By doing so, we hope to achieve a greater number of conversions.

Our Main Key Performance Indicator or KPI is an increased conversion rate of leads from the various services/sign-ups from the personal banking section.

Strategy/Hypothesis

Initially through a reworking of the existing web page layout and by using more persuasive copy and images, we hope to make the personal banking section convert better quickly.

Long-term: The lack of content supporting the “Bank Smart” theme is a serious conversion issue. Customers are used to websites with better content.

Prioritize and Know What to Test for the Biggest Impact

In order to properly prioritize what to test, at McDougall Interactive we use a system we learned from Bryan Eisenberg, who wrote the book Always Be Testing.

Consider the following three factors when determining what to test:

• Time
• Impact
• Resources

Then calculate on a scale of 1 to 5 what level of time, impact, or resources each test would take, with 5 being the best and 1 being the worst.

Here are some examples:

Test redoing the website navigation

•  Time 2 (It will take quite a bit of time)
• Impact 5 (It will have a strong impact)
• Resources 2 (It will require lots of resources)

2 x 5 is 10 x 2 is a total score of 20

Change the headline from features to benefits

• Time 5 (It will take a small amount of time)
• Impact 5 (It will have a strong impact)
• Resources 5 (It will require very little resources)

 5 x 5 is 25 x 5 is a total score of 125 or the best possible score

You can see from this example that it is possible to prioritize nicely. You just need to list all the things you want to test in a spreadsheet and then do the math. If you have 100 test options, you can boil it down to a schedule of testing at least several per month (top companies do dozens of tests a month or more) and come up with a six-month testing calendar.