Game Changing Marketing Technology

While I was watching the 2009 Omniture Conversion Survey webinar, I couldn’t help but marvel at some of the statistics. Out of the 1100+ respondents that do some sort of website testing, less than half of them do so ‘frequently’. Ack! How can that be? Testing your conversion experiences leads to…well, more conversions. Continuous testing works.

Here are 5 reasons every organization needs to be testing landing pages … now!

1. Users tell you exactly what they want and what converts them (no more guessing!)
2. Correct the leak(s) in your conversion funnel
3. Support your business objectives for growth (more customers, lower cost per acquisition, etc)
4. Gain competitive advantage over companies who aren’t testing
5. No more wasting time/money/traffic on things that don’t work

In a world with so many advanced resources at our fingertips, there is no reason every organization shouldn’t have real-time, system-based performance data to lift conversion rates. There are hundreds of reasons to start testing now—what are your reasons?

The great thing about conversion rate optimization is that it produces numbers—really good numbers. In fact, one of the most frustrating things you may be facing is that conversion rate optimization seems like such an obvious slam dunk, but you aren’t getting executive sponsorship. 

While you can be successful doing a little optimization here or there on a project basis, with executive sponsorship you can take optimization out to a bigger stage within your company. As your company adopts an optimization-focused culture, the results will be even bigger return.

Here are four ways you can pitch your executives:

1. Proof of Concepts—to show what the ROI could be (lower cost per acquisition, increased revenue, increased leads, etc.). Run a pilot, or even just use our ROI calculator to model various conversion lifts and their impact.
2. ROI Analysis—present case studies and whitepapers that show what other companies have been able to achieve. 
3. Customize the Pitch—use your inside knowledge of your organization & your executives’ hot buttons to customize how you pitch CRO. Conversion rate optimization can be done in support of almost any sales & marketing goals, so tie it into overall corporate objectives. 
4. Don’t give up - If you pitch it once and they don’t say ‘yes’, then keep on pitching. Conversion rate optimization has a lot of momentum and sooner or later they will start taking it seriously. When they do, you want to be at the ready with the plan to make it happen.

The webinar this week was focused on what the CMO should know about landing page optimization. Part of this included why the CMO should create an LPO team, and who should be on that team. 

Many companies are struggling with low conversion rates because they delegate post-click marketing to one person who already has a lot on his or her plate. It becomes an after thought, or the thing that keeps slipping further down the to do list. We’ve seen that with a dedicated and focused team in place companies realize an increase in conversion rates. And higher conversion rates can mean lower cost per acquisition, higher ROI and more revenue.

Here’s who you need to have on your LPO team:

1. The Driver: this might be a project manager but it is probably a director-level role. Someone has to take the lead and coordinate the different elements of the LPO initiative.
2. The Designer: understands how to marry aesthetics and the direct-response nature of landing pages.
3. The Copywriter: writes good, clean copy that converts.
4. The Techie: rather than a person, I think this role needs to be filled from software (to create, test & optimize the landing pages).
5. The Strategist: dreams up plans, and knows how them implemented quickly.
6. The Analyst: works hand in hand with the strategies; knows what data to look for (conversions, micro-conversions, user behavior) and how to interpret that data to make improvements.

Your team may have more or less people than this. You may have some of these roles filled and not others. The point isn’t so much about the warm bodies filling chairs as it is about the roles that need to be filled in order to have an effective landing page initiative that gets results.