At a particular stage of the company’s growth, you may get the impression that your business has reached its limit. Your traffic and sales figures do not change and you have been in a permanent plateau state for some time. Or another situation: you invest the same amount of resources for promotion as before and despite that you lose in terms of the same traffic, sales or average order value. What should you do in such a situation? We’ve prepared a list of options, what you can look at and work with to determine the next steps of growth.
These recommendations might be useful both for those already in such a situation and for future works.
We are the team of the RocketCROLab agency, with a focus on conversion optimization and performance-based marketing. Each specialist has a broad experience of work both on the clients’ side and within agencies. We decided to make a specific explanatory list because we periodically face the need to explain to clients who come to us, the possible next steps.
Do a small research. For example: place an order on your website, on competitors’ website and on reference site (you may still be a long way from Amazon, but there’s nothing wrong with reading and applying their solutions on your website). Whether the process is different, whether registration is required, what notifications you received by mail or phone, how quickly you were contacted to confirm your order? Similarly, if you do not complete the order, check and record how you will “catch up” advertising, remarketing, mailings, what they offer? What discounts, special offers?
Ask people you know to do the same and hire out staff people who will walk through your site’s sales process. They will be able to record and share their thoughts and experiences about interaction. For each step, starting from entering a query in the search engine (you can even ask a question to yourself as a potential client: what I am looking for, why I am looking for it, what problems this product should solve), what is essential for you to check and enter the result on your site and on the competitors’ site.
A million materials in all languages have been written and video made in these areas on the Web. If to speak in general about these tools, then no insights are waiting for you here, everything has long been known. But we will add something.
Have you conducted a personal and third-party audit? Do you buy all the traffic, which requests your competitors are shown for, what price are you willing to pay for the client? It may be worth increasing it, calculate the LTV of the client. Maybe your client will not make a profit from the first sale, sometimes it takes even more than 2 sales or takes 6 months to wait. But this client stays with you for a year. Try to use additional campaign customization tools such as K50. For many businesses, such a tool can give further budget optimization.
Similar issues. Review your target audience; some TA groups may be interested in your product as well, gather your audience, and launch Look A Like campaigns.
Search engine optimization is one of the most painful topics for businesses as the result is not fast, and investments are continuously needed. Here you need to clench your teeth and work with this tool regularly. After an audit, be sure you accurately met all the technical requirements of an SEO specialist.
In our opinion, the most undervalued conversion improvement tool, although in some cases it can give a good jump in growth after the first tests. But suppose we talk about projects with a long history. In that case, the result may be less significant and the growth may be measured in 5-10% of the results of the previous period, which also pleases companies that have not recorded the increase in general before.
What does this tool give you?
Surprisingly, many businesses, including large ones, use only a part of its capabilities and, at best, set up a series of welcome letters, sending emails with an order confirmation and regular promo mailings. While with the help of Email marketing, you can set up automatic mailings to:
Here it can be a business/commodity or a key person in this business. It is essential to understand that this approach may have a delayed result, but it is a mistake not to use it if you have such many tools for work. Banner networks, YouTube, Social networks, Telegram, news sources, platforms can be several, depending on where your TA is ‘living’. This tool is designed more for the upper stage of the funnel – acquaintance with the brand. Therefore, do not wait for a quick result. But when your TA is ready, they will immediately remember about you.
Basic ideas for publications:
What you will get with regular work in this direction:
Advertising is not always a problem, and marketing is also about the product. You may have exhausted the volume of your market. More likely, there is something better or different in the market than your product by some criteria. There is a way out – improve yourself, talk to salespeople, talk to customers, and offer something that may be of interest to your CA and the audience bordering on yours. Ask the right questions and get the correct answers. Of course, before implementing new features, it is desirable to conduct a survey, A-B test.
Many agencies conduct audits of advertising sources or analytics free of charge at the pre-sale stage (most likely not as deep as one would like, but in some cases, it may be enough for a start). Choose several agencies and freelancers, send them a request, fill in a brief (the questions in brief may be useful to you too) and in return, they will send you an audit and a cooperation offer. You will find something useful for you.
Many agencies conduct audits of advertising sources or analytics free of charge at the pre-sale stage (most likely not as deep as one would like, but in some cases, it may be enough for a start). Choose several agencies and freelancers, send them a request, fill in a brief (the questions in brief may be useful to you too) and in return, they will send you an audit and a cooperation offer. You will find something useful for you.
Whether you’re a business owner or a top manager, if you’re dissatisfied with the current business trend and want to improve it, if you’re aiming for growth, prepare to dive into the matter. In this way, you will be able to focus as much as possible on the improvement work and involve your subordinates and colleagues in this issue, because this game is not a single player. Still, an entire team and it is vital that everyone works together.
Try to describe them in as much detail as possible, so that if your colleagues or contractors read these records, they can understand their essence. Abstracts do not work, so if you return to any of the items in a month, you may no longer remember the details put into it when you wrote it. You will need some more time and effort to get back to the essence of the writing.
You need to keep and set the rhythm, always be in touch to look for compromises. In the text, we offered a variant with an independent audit. We are aware that the owner or CEO may not know all the nuances of specific instruments, but nothing prevents him from conducting this audit with a specialist.
If you find mistakes or inconsistencies, do not rush to throw yourself at a responsible specialist with claims. It is essential to understand that there are always areas for improvement. The more extensive or older the project, the more they will be. The optimal solution here can only be a dialogue and control of the tasks.
The above items are not a step-by-step instruction to work. You can follow the proposed list, work with colleagues in parallel on several tasks, or preliminarily discuss your weaknesses and start with the most obvious or easy to measure, where the most profit you can potentially get. The exception may be large companies’ work, where indeed, there may be some limit on the volume of paid and organic traffic; in such cases, you can exclude working with these sources and instead focus on the user or product side.
Make a list of ideas, assign them a rating, and run a survey among your visitors or clients, whether the proposed solution will be useful to them, whether they will buy it. The second option is to run an A-B test.
To implement these options, you can try to do it internally or connect an external contractor. It would help if you had someone on your side who will control this process and make decisions.
It is also essential to understand that there is no simple solution to business growth. You need to dive into the data, extract insight, implement ideas and hypotheses, and, if you fail, do not despair and continue trying.
As you can see, all the limitations can be quite conditional and there are many options for what to do next.
We do not publish obvious services such as Google Ads, Google Analytics, etc., as we assume that you are already familiar with them.
Services:
similarweb.com – will show you the traffic statistics of your competitors. The data is approximate, but it should be enough to obtain insights;
serpstat.com – a good tool for deeper analysis of keywords, both for competitors and for your website;
trymyui.com – service allows you to “assign” a specialist to conduct a user testing according to your scenario and get a report based on it;
google optimize – a tool to run A-B tests;
hotjar.com – a powerful tool for collecting data about user behavior on your site. It does: video recording of sessions, heat, click and scroll maps, allows you to build funnels, conduct surveys;
klaviyo.com – email service, with the ability to easily and quickly integration for most popular CMS, wide and easy to configure functionality;
esputnik.com – also email service, but for more complex and loaded projects.
What’s worth reading:
Also, we expect that you are already familiar with well-known professional resources, so we publish links to several very worthy resources.
conversion-rate-experts.com – the leading agency in its niche, provide a lot of useful content and case studies worthy of attention of everyone who seeks to growth business. And also, by filling out the form you will receive a link to their book and additional materials.
cxl.com – agency, runs a large and cool blog, and offers its courses in different areas.
baymard.com – the whole Institute, which conducts its research in the field of user experience and publishes it on the website (partly free of charge).
If you still have any questions about how to properly run conversion rate optimization or about digital marketing or you need any help in GA and GTM setup, just send us a message or schedule a free 30-minute call with us. We really want to help you.
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