As marketers, we often find ourselves researching best practices when trying to achieve an end goal. And when it comes to conversions – our ultimate goal for traffic on our websites – it is tempting to look for ‘best practice’ advice from anywhere and everywhere.
The only problem is that there’s a lot of misinformation and split opinions out there that can leave you stuck on who to believe.
And just because a strategy, technique or method worked for someone else….
Doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you too.
Here, we’ll debunk 5 common Conversion and CRO myths.
Myth #1 – Conversions only mean sales 💰
Obviously, a conversion can mean a sale, but let’s not limit ourselves here.
As a modern marketer, you’re probably already aware that most customers won’t convert after a single touchpoint. So restricting conversions to mean sales & sales only is a serious injustice to your customer journeys.
It also creates a very narrow view of your attribution, meaning you might over-value the channel that brought in the final sale, but under-value channels that contributed to it earlier in the journey.
Most (eventual) customers will move through a series of different website touchpoints before they even consider buying.
At Leadoo, we have some customers with sales cycles can last a year or more. Meaning they could involve 20-30 site touchpoints and 5-10 different conversion types. Read about how we tripled ICE InsureTech’s leads here – despite their particularly long sales cycles.
Unfortunately, some marketers will focus too heavily on desired outcomes and miss out on tonnes of vital data points in between.
So, instead of hard pressing for sales as the end goal, why not open yourself up to the idea of a conversion being…
- A subscription to a mailing list or a newsletter?
- An opt in/download for a free eGuide, eBook or information pack?
- An enquiry through a contact form, live chat, or phone call?
- Or even a registration for a free trial, demo, webinar or other events!
Myth #2 – More traffic = more conversions.
More traffic does give you more conversion opportunities on paper, however, it doesn’t guarantee an increase in conversions.
Also, if you’re paying to acquire traffic from external sources like Google or Social Ads but don’t have the right conversion strategy in place, you’ll find yourself wasting money on sessions that don’t ultimately convert.
As a matter of fact, we’ve seen a large portion of customers end up with more conversions from a similar – or on some occasions even lower – traffic levels after implementing Leadoo.
This is due to them having the right conversion strategy in place and a good understanding of their customer journeys.
They were able to become more targeted and purposeful in acquiring users, helped those users get to where they needed to go quicker onsite, and had the right tools in place to ultimately convert them.
Read about how we helped D-Tech increase conversions by more than 500% despite year-on-year traffic dropping slightly. After all, quality traffic = quality conversions.
Myth #3 – CRO only involves onsite testing work.
Conversion Rate Optimization is often thought about as getting many website visitors as possible to take conversion actions.
So ‘CRO tactics’ commonly involve making aesthetic changes to websites, testing different calls-to-action, visuals, or page types against each other to see which leads to the most conversions.
But true CRO isn’t just onsite tweaks & tests. It involves truly understanding customers and getting down to the nitty gritty.
The best way to optimise a customer journey is to ask yourself the following questions:
- What is my ideal customer trying to achieve when they visit my website?
- How do I give them what they’re looking for as fast as possible?
- Does the journey my website take them on give them everything they need to make an informed purchase?
Hopefully, once answered, those questions will give you insight on what changes you need to make to maximise impact.
(Unfortunately, making your CTA buttons bigger and brighter isn’t enough 😉)
Myth #4 – CRO ends after a site conversion.
Marketers might be tempted to simply pass website leads into a CRM platform or directly to sales and then forget about them.
But just because someone completed a conversion action doesn’t mean…
- They’re ready to buy OR…
- Their buying journey has ended.
Understanding true lead engagement takes time. Ultimately your best chance of being able to grasp buyer lifecycles is if you’re tracking users every step of the way, pre and post conversion actions.
If you’re interested in turning your website into a well oiled lead machine, you should probably look into Leadoo.
Myth #5 – Conversion strategies can be copied.
It’s tempting to study competitors and even more tempting to copy their approach to conversion optimization.
While there are best practices when it comes to CRO, there is no one size fits all approach for converting leads to paying customers.
All websites have different traffic sources, target audiences, technical specs, and marketing budgets behind them.
You aren’t your competitors, so why try and convert your own customers like they do?
