How to Optimize Your Conversion Rate in 2022
Decrease your churn rate and boost your customer retention rates with these five easy steps
All the best companies have one thing in common, they don’t let the grind of growing their userbase distract them from the importance of scaling what they already have through community building, and it’s easy to understand why - losing a customer costs money. Every year, companies lose an average of $1.6 trillion to customer churn!
It’s true, one of the many compounding advantages of customer loyalty is a huge drop in cost per lead (CPL) since acquiring a new customer can cost anywhere between five and 25 times more than retaining an existing one. That’s why more and more companies are investing in conversion rate optimization (CRO), which can be quickly defined as the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website.
Among the many benefits of that practice is scaling your revenue stream, since repeat purchasers not only spend more on each transaction, but bring in more business through direct referrals.
Here are five ways you could optimize your conversion rate
Identify your main drivers and barriers to conversion
About 20% of your customers make 80% of your sales - analyzing their journey could be a great starting point to understanding their main drivers and barriers to conversion. This could easily be the breaking point of many starting businesses, who are still struggling to find their brand identity.
Communicating your product or service with clear and concise copy is the first step, as one of the first barriers to conversion is a customer not understanding what your brand is all about and thus getting lost in the onboarding material or failing to check out.
Experiencing the conversion funnel as the customer would help companies figure out which parts to tweak and which to cut out entirely to decrease drop-off rates, recapturing those who didn’t make it to the end of each conversion funnel by eliminating their barriers to conversion.
Build user-centric channels
Personalizing your channels to your customer’s specific journey comes from a deep understanding of their specific persona and objectives. Not only does personalization mean the difference between a diluted brand and a powerful brand voice, but it also has a significant impact on your customer retention rate.
Whether you’re communicating with your customer through blog, email or direct sales outreach, it is important to care for the nuances of their journey and contextualize their brand experience through that insight. Today, brands owe 10-30% of their revenue growth to ‘personalization’ as 70% of consumers say they will shop exclusively with brands that personally understand them.
Start a subscription service or loyalty program
Another easy way to enhance your conversion rate is to entice your customers through a point system or a rewards program. This helps them visualize their own buying journey and take control of their place on it, often making more purchases to climb to the top of the scoreboard or get a specific reward.
eCommerce stores can also implement a cashback program, giving customers a portion of their money back with each bulk purchase to entice repeat purchases.
For services, a tiered conversion funnel can take the shape of a subscription service, whereby customers opt-in to receive your content on a regular basis in exchange for a fee. This subscription service ensures that your customers are coming back on a set schedule.
Engage your buyers with responsive live-chat
One of the quickest ways to decrease customer drop-offs is to introduce interactive touchpoints to their buying journey. This could mean not waiting to recapture lost customers with follow-up, but to proactively help them as they navigate it with responsive live chat.
Smart implementations of live chat build an automated flow of responses based on customer input or trigger at certain touchpoints or after a set time of inactivity at a step of the funnel. This decreases human overhead and ensures that your customer doesn’t drop off before getting what they want.
Reengage inactive customers with cross-selling strategies
You do not have to wait until you lose your customer to get them back, you can re-engage inactive customers by cross-selling them to similar products or upselling them to a bundle purchase that would solve their problem.
With the right plan, you can easily recapture lost leads before they cross over to the point of no return, at which stage it would require further investment to re-acquire them.
Got more tricks up your sleeve? Share your quick customer retention hacks in the comments below!