All conversion rate optimisation activity should be born out of data insights. It’s a mantra I find myself repeating over and over again, and with good reason.
But if these data insights are so critical, then where do you go to find them?
I’ve collated a list of nine sources of data insights that will help you to plan an effective optimisation roadmap.
1. Your analytics platform
This is a great place to start identifying drop-off points in the sales funnel, bounce rates, and where visitors to your site are coming from. Whether it’s a free tool such as Google Analytics, or a higher cost platform like Adobe Analytics (formerly Omniture), you will be able to hone in on problem areas to investigate further through testing.
2. Your testing platform
If you’ve already started A/B testing, then you will already have some invaluable data from the experiments that you’ve run. Testing tools may not provide the in-depth analysis that your analytics platform does, but most worth their salt will allow you to break down results by segment or another dimension of your choice. Better still if you have integrated your testing platform with your analytics platform.
3. Survey websites
There’s an old adage – if you don’t ask you won’t get.
It’s surprising what information you can get out of your customers and prospects if you just ask them for it. Often visitors to your site are bursting to give you feedback about annoying little things that have stopped them buying something they want from you, and usually it’s just a case of catching them at the right time.
Survey tools like Survey Monkey are great for this, as you can email the questions via a link to your respondents, and it’s free. Sometimes you might need to provide an incentive if you want to maximise the number of responses.
4. Web chat
If you don’t have this already, it’s definitely worth a look. Clients I have worked with have had great success getting insights from web chat, which allows customers to ask questions to a sales agent directly from your web page via an instant messaging tool. A transcript of the conversation is then dropped into a database, giving you easy access to tons of great information about the questions your customers are asking. Chats are usually categorised into themes, so you don’t have to search through reams of data to get what you want.
5. Session recordings
Tools like SessionCam and ClickTale allow you to record your website visitors’ sessions and replay them on your own screen. More formally known as Customer Engagement Analysis tools, they are a fantastic way to get first-hand insight into every single interaction that these visitors carry out on your site. The more sophisticated tools also have heatmapping functionality, so you can see where people are interacting most frequently on your pages, and where they are dropping off the site. This is an invaluable source of information which, when combined with funnel reports, can make the prioritisation of experiments much easier.
6. Your sales team
Your company’s sales team has direct access to your customers, which means that they can be a great source of anecdotal feedback. It’s staggering, though, how few companies actually take the time to consult their sales force to get this critical information from them. As it’s straight from the horse’s mouth it is often the purest form of data insight, and whilst it might not always be information specifically about your website, frequently it can uncover issues with your overarching business processes – which can in themselves lead to new experiment ideas.
7. Customer focus groups
These days customer focus groups tend to be viewed as slightly ‘old hat’, and have traditionally been used more in offline marketing to gather thoughts and opinions about a company’s products and services. They do still have their place though, and can be an efficient way to get a number of opinions in a short period of time. Combining them with user experience (UX) testing can be a very effective way of collecting feedback on specific web pages or customer journeys.
8. Call centre staff
One of the greatest assets a company has is its call centre staff, and the information collected by call centre operators can be like gold dust. So few companies are structured in a way that allows this critical information to flow between the different teams and departments, but those that are tend to reap the rewards. If you can, try to catch up regularly with members of your call centre staff to maintain this valuable feedback loop.
9. Social media
The beauty of social media is that it is so immediate, which means that you can gather feedback hot off the press. Another benefit is that your audience will generally be made up of both customers and prospects, so you can get a broad view of what people at different stages of the sales cycle think of your products and services. Don’t forget that you can set up polls on Twitter to ask specific questions of your target audience.
