I’ll keep this short. Digital marketers obsess about all the ways to bring potential customers to their online home. Tactics like social media, search, display, email… the list goes on, are all effective and important. But after almost 20 years in this digital game I can tell you that there is one tactic that stands head and shoulders as the most impactful, and yet possibly the least used.

That tactic is conversion optimisation and its effectiveness to deliver a return on investment is in most cases, second to none.

In the example of your website, conversion optimisation is about understanding what objective you want the site to achieve for your business and then optimising the site to deliver on that objective. When people visit your site, most of them will leave without taking any action. However, one way or another, you have paid for them to visit you. So each one who leaves is a waste of money. Most websites convert their visitors to their desired objective at less than 1%. In most cases, with a little effort, you could get this to 5-10%. That’s 10 times more business without spending any more money buying traffic. Ten times more business! No advert is going to deliver that so reliably and over the long term, not even close.

Conversion rate optimisation is about changing all the elements of your site, from the broad user experience right down to the size of the font, the colour of a button or the words used in a call-to-action. It’s a process of testing each of these elements to find the perfect blend which turns your site into a delight for your visitors and makes them want to do business with you. It can be a little technical and finickity, but it’s not hard. It’s just a never-ending journey, so it takes the discipline and consistency of wanting to be better every day, and most importantly it requires a boundlessly creative mind to think of ideas about what you could tweak to bring an improvement to your conversion rate.

If you want to learn more about conversion optimisation, you can download our Digital Marketing textbook here (and watch this space for an update in the coming weeks).

You can also learn about conversion optimisation and more in our Digital Marketing course which starts next week. Sign up now because you want to get a head start on 2018!