Marketing Shortcuts are Short-Term: Why CRO Matters

A reliance on marketing shortcuts due to a swell in responsibilities and aggressive goals for marketing teams is helping in the short-term but hurting companies in the long-term.

When a marketing team is challenged with increasing their KPI’s, the majority of marketers often looks at ways to send more traffic through their conversion funnel. The reasons are simple. If we’re off by 10 leads and our funnel converts at 2%, we just need to send 500 more visitors through the funnel.

This same routine typically repeats itself over and over again as more aggressive goals begin to strain the efficiency of your funnel, requiring more and more budget for additional top of funnel visitors.

While this solves the short-term, over the long-term this adds up in terms of budget costs and the inevitable discovery they’ve hit a plateau with “good traffic”.

More often than not, client’s come to us asking us how they can get more “converting” traffic once they’ve hit this plateau and our answer is usually “When is the last time you looked at your conversion funnel?”

Digging into the Conversion Experience

Most marketers dig into the conversion experience only when they realize that their traffic performance is dwindling and they’re in danger of missing their department goals.  The inherent danger of that is that by this point, this quickest fix is throwing more traffic at the problem and the most common way to do that is to pay for it.  You slide just over your monthly/quarterly/annual goal, now with a tighter budget and the problem compounds.  More money spent on throwing users into a broken conversion funnel.

So how do you fix this?

Create a Testing Plan

Trouble with conversion rate optimization is that most marketer’s don’t know where to start.  Traffic is the easiest so we always start there but we forget that the biggest reason users don’t convert is because we didn’t let them. The landing page didn’t load on mobile.  The email didn’t tell them where to go if they’re interested.  The sign-up form asked them questions they didn’t think were relevant for your offer. Sales didn’t call them back for a week and your competitor called them back the same day.

The list goes on.  Truth is, start somewhere.  The below infographic from KISSmetrics is a great starting point.

Source: Online Testing Essentials: An infographic on what online marketing activities to test.