By Martin Harper, co-founder of Quickfire Digital
I don’t suffer fools gladly – and it’s why I have never been a fan of those fluffy customer personas which some marketing agencies charge silly money for.
You know the ones I mean: Meet Fiona. She’s a mother of two teenagers, drives a Range Rover, likes to go for long country walks with her two dalmatians and enjoys listening to opera when she’s not socialising with her besties at pilates.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the notion of attempting to humanise your website users; it’s just that I’d prefer to generate information which can actually be useful.
This is why we need to focus on customer needs rather than abstract traits.
Meet Fiona. She visits your website twice a week, uses Chrome on her Android smartphone, reads a lot of your supporting content, often browses through your new season’s collections and buys once in every 10 visits.
There is still an amount of synthesising involved to create this type of persona, but now I’m armed with something a little more tangible.
When you boil down CRO to its most basic point, it is about removing barriers to purchase. Now, some of those barriers, such as price, have to exist for a business to function – you can’t sell every product for a penny – so the challenge is breaking down your different customers’ needs and, therefore, what areas of your website fail to meet those, or put up unnecessary barriers.
Some of those needs will be emotional, some will be educational, others technical. For example, a fashion store will want to meet emotional needs by promoting how a dress or a pair of shoes might make you feel; and high-end jewellery shops often tell a story about the history of its brand, the craftsmanship of its staff and delve into detail about how a timepiece operates.
But the technical aspects of customer needs are often neglected. Do you know how customers using a certain device, and a chosen browser are seeing and using your site? And are they having their path to conversion blocked by something?
Let’s go back to Fiona. Firstly, she’s in your most important bracket of customers – she’s loyal and she spends a lot with you. You certainly do not want to risk losing her.
She reads a lot of supporting content – so can you spot any barriers here on the path to conversion? Maybe, your website’s PDP (product details page) contains a link to a size guide which is stored on a separate URL, therefore taking Fiona out of the direct buying journey, thus creating a barrier to conversion. Consider if the guide could be contained within a pop-up which, when closed, means she remains on the product page.
We know she browses using Chrome on an Android phone. If that size guide does sit within a pop-up, how does it display in that browser, on that device? If Fiona can’t access the information she needs, you’ve got yourself another barrier.
How do your store’s filters operate on mobile? Is the search function easy to use and does it pick up synonyms and misspells?
Fiona’s a good customer of yours, buying approximately 10 times a year. But she visits 100 times a year. What can you do to remove any conversion barriers within those other 90 visits? If cost is a barrier, can you reward her loyalty with you through a dedicated programme or personalised offers? Can she create a wishlist of products and be given a timed discount for buying one of those?
If she’s spotted a product that she likes but her size is out of stock, can she be notified when it’s back in your inventory?
When it comes to the practical application of CRO, I like to break it down into five areas:
- Analyse – use a combination of tools to help you: Google Analytics, your e-commerce platform, user behaviour software such as Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar. Your job here is to gather data and begin building a picture e.g. conversion rate by browser
- Hypothesise – at this point you’re looking to come up with a reason for why areas of your website are weak – where and why do barriers exist?
- Solution – what is the plan to remove or at least reduce those barriers?
- Execute – make the changes necessary
- Test and record – what’s the impact?
Pro tip: Take a look at Microsoft Clarity. It’s free, pretty intuitive and loaded with information once you get comfortable under the bonnet. It really comes into its own through the use of filters, allowing you to analyse the usage of your site in a range of scenarios. Plus, you can bring out your inner voyeur by watching recordings of how real users navigate your store.
It even has its own breakdown of personas, called user intent, which categorises users into high, medium and low intent.
