Online marketing professionals understand that improving conversion rates is their highest priority. Continuous optimization helps online marketing professionals increase online activity and sales every day. But how is it done? And does continuous optimization really mean continuous, as in forever? Of course! It doesn’t ever stop. In fact, you must continually change in order to evolve with your customers and deliver a customer experience that is effective and personal.

This brief guide summarizes the theories offered in the white paper “The Conversion Imperative” by John Lovett, sponsored by Adobe. You’ll learn:

• Eight ways to build commitment-based customer relationships with ongoing optimization.
• The seven step path to make better data-driven decisions with continuous optimization.

What is conversion optimization?

The process that includes both measuring and influencing each visitor’s progress toward an outcome that strengthens their relationship with your organization.

Your site’s visitors are just not that into you...but could be: Eight ways to attract, engage, and form customer relationships using ongoing optimization. 

Attract

1. Know who’s most important. (Hint: It’s not you!) It’s about delivering relevant, personalized experiences.

2. Pay attention to your customers. Quantify, test, and refine to piqué their interest from the start.

Engage 

3. Make it personal. Test, target, and personalize to keep them interested and coming back.

4. Be accessible. Offer multiple touchpoints across web, mobile, and social networks.

5. Build trust. Employ permission-based marketing.

Foster commitment

6. Be a good listener. Interpret quantitative analytics and qualitative customer feedback.

7. Don’t expect them to ask for what they want. More than half (54%) of businesses use recommendations. Are you?

8. Continuously improve through optimization. Strong customer relationships require work, but are worth it.

The conversion imperative: A seven step path to data-driven decisions using continuous optimization. 

Obtain efficiency and discern what works.

1. Become a Conversion concierge. Understand the motivations and the behavioral cues that you get from your data, and offer relevant choices to your customers.

2. Use all available data. The more data you have, the more relevant you can be.

3. Explore the data and propose a hypothesis. The next great idea frequently comes from within the data. Employ technology for heavy lifting . How do you respond in real time to customer behaviors? Invest in technologies that offer real time creation, analysis, testing, and customization of your organization’s digital experience.

4. Test your theories. Testing is a proven method for gaining incremental lift, and lends valuable insight on the data.

5. Use segments for targeting. Some visitors are worth more than others. Spend more time optimizing your website by targeting your messaging toward your most profitable customers.

6. Validate and communicate your results. You should welcome failures in your optimization efforts just as much as successes. Learning from your optimization efforts builds understanding and support across the enterprise.

7. Welcome customer feedback. Customer feedback is a great way to close the loop on your theories, strengthen customer relationships, and add to the data behind your optimization efforts.

Why conversion optimization?

Guesswork marketing doesn’t cut it:

• Average online conversion rates hover around 3%
• Acquisition spending trumps optimization spending 9 to 1

What are the risks of not optimizing?

Delivering bad online experiences fail to attract, engage, and convert visitors into loyal customers.