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Conversion optimization, which is increasing the percentage of your web visitors that convert into customers or take a desired action, is a modern must-do in internet marketing. Marketers from all industries with a wide array of calls to action can leverage conversion optimization for impact, including retailers looking for visitors to purchase a product, professional services seeking leads, and nonprofits asking for donations.
While the benefits are strong, the process does have its challenges. Marketers who are new to conversion optimization should be prepared for the following common speed bumps and plan accordingly, knowing that there are certain tradeoffs and tools that can be used to overcome them.
Challenge #1: Gaining Brand Approval
Brand marketing and design teams can find themselves in conflict with one another when developing page designs for testing. It’s important to keep in mind that while brand consistency and voice is incredibly valuable, it is equally valuable that you test different copy, images and landing page styles for the potential of higher conversion. Brand teams may unknowingly prevent optimization teams from testing new and innovative ways to gain customer interest and attention in an effort to ensure everything passes the brand approval process.
Challenge #2: Securing Development Resources
Once teams have aligned on the designs they’d like to test, standard A/B testing procedures call for development resources to build the pages. For many, securing valuable dev hours can be a challenge to begin with, and then prioritizing the conversion optimization test over other development priorities. Oftentimes, it can take a month or more to build designs for testing, slowing the process significantly.
Challenge #3: Meeting Compliance Standards
For some companies, especially in the financial services world, every public-facing word has to be approved by legal. Often, this is a back-and-forth process with marketing pushing for better offers and excitement and legal trying to tone down offers and features. Unfortunately, the boldness of the new designs and content for conversion testing can be made less impactful when submitted through this approval process.
Challenge #4: Committing to Big Changes
The three challenges above can snowball and make larger design tests intimidating, and at times, downright insurmountable. As a result, many marketers begin circumventing the brand, legal and dev bottlenecks by only testing smaller items that won’t require as much attention, such as the color of a button or a new line of copy. As you may suspect, small incremental testing leads to incremental conversion lift results. In order to get high-impact improvement, marketers will ideally test at the edges of their comfort zone and get creative with ways to attract and engage their target audience.
Challenge #5: Taking Too Long to Reach Significance
Once approved, coded, and ready for live testing, marketers face the big question: when will my test reach a high enough significance for me to be able to trust the results? The answer depends on how much web traffic your page gets, and a number of other factors, including how many page variations you’re testing (which divides your traffic per page up even further). Because of this, marketers are often faced with several weeks or even many months of live testing before they see results. Avoid calling the test results before reaching significance in order to speed up the process, as last-minute fluctuations in results can happen. Going with what you think will likely win defeats the purpose of conversion optimization testing to begin with.
Conversion optimization has changed to landscape of marketing, providing valuable real world, actionable results for those who use it to improve their landing pages. But the above challenges can prevent marketers from having the flexibility to test the new, creative concepts that could result in significant conversion improvement.
WEVO helps marketers overcome the above challenges, and many more, when it comes to optimizing conversion for landing pages by leveraging crowdsourcing and machine learning to predict test outcomes in just days, before ever going live.
Interested in learning more about WEVO? Contact us here.
