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In Part 1 and Part 2 we covered lessons from previous recessions and how to make sure you hit the mark with your current strategy during economic uncertainty. By now you should have at least a few valuable insights or confirmed your current strategies or trains of thought. Our last objective is to tie the whole series together and give companies some actionable items instead of just data to ponder.
Stick to tried and true strategies that deliver the highest return on your investment and are the cheapest to launch. Email marketing continues to bring home the ROI trophy each year. If you need help maximizing return on your email marketing campaigns, then check our page on email marketing.
It’s imperative that your messaging speaks directly to your audience's pain points, provides value, and drives them to a page designed to convert. You can’t just email prospects and hope they know what to do once they read your content.
If you're utilizing other digital marketing platforms, identify which ones are driving the highest conversion rates and allocate more budget to those while pulling back on others. If you’re on the display network, make sure you’re measuring customer interactions to create powerful remarketing campaigns. If you’re not sure what to do next, bring in outside help. Now is not the time to stop your marketing efforts. Now is the time to create a lean and efficient marketing machine that measures and delivers on your organization's goals.
Budgets will be cut, and heads may roll. Providing value and measurable results are a must.
Companies need marketing teams to respond on a dime to whatever is thrown their way. They’ll need a broad skill set, and can operate without a playbook, but have the agility and speed to operate in the gray to drive results.
That means you know your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Double down on your strengths, and outsource your weaknesses. Going back to Part 1, speed of response was a huge factor in boosting performance during the last recession. For example, if your team needs two weeks to figure out how to launch a campaign in a new venue, then you need outside support.
Get outside help to fill in the gaps until you can hire and train the right people. The purpose of speed and agility is to be able to quickly capitalize on opportunities during economic times when your competitors may be slower to respond. In past recessions, first movers were rewarded significantly more than their competitors compared to periods of economic boom.
There are a couple of easy ways to tell if your website isn’t converting an appropriate amount of your traffic. We’ll start with the easiest and broadest methods, and then go a bit more granular if you want to dig deeper into your traffic.
This is going to be a really obvious one, but I want to speak about it anyways. You should definitely benchmark your conversion rates with industry averages, and make sure to segment your by traffic source. Not all traffic sources are created equally, and the conversion rates will vary depending on where they’re coming from.
Your website's conversion rate average provides good insight into your user experience, and whether or not people can find what they’re looking for. In order to act on this information, it needs to be MECE. MECE is a term used in consulting circles and stands for Mutually Exclusive, and Collectively Exhaustive.
If your average site conversion rate is below the industry average, then break down your traffic sources until they are mutually exclusive (i.e. there is no overlap between segments) and collectively exhausted (there is no traffic that is unaccounted for).
If your traffic sources account for why conversion rates are low (i.e. 90% of traffic is paid traffic and accounts for slightly lower performance) then addressing user experience issues may not be your first concern. If there isn’t any other logical explanation for why conversion rates are low, then it's likely you have a user experience issue.
Average Conversion Rate by Industry
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Let's dive into the nitty-gritty of boosting conversion rates, sharing some invaluable insights without giving away all our top-secret strategies. After all, we're here to help you understand the theory behind conversion rates.
The Genesis: Your Product or Service
Your business revolves around offering a product or service, and there's a good reason why people choose you. Beyond fulfilling a basic need, your offering resonates on an emotional level. To elevate your conversion rates, we must delve deep into your customers' psyche and comprehend the emotions driving their decision to opt for your company.
Customer Understanding 101
To kickstart this journey, we need to accompany your existing customers throughout their buying process. A straightforward approach to uncovering the path to a purchase is by simply asking your customers after they convert. We aim to unearth the pain points preceding their discovery of a solution, the emotional triggers guiding their choices, any hesitations or concerns they encounter, and their post-solution sentiments.
A plethora of questions can be posed to gain these vital insights. For a detailed list of ideal surveys and survey questions, check here. Once armed with this treasure trove of information, we can tailor your copywriting to effectively address and emphasize the crucial pain points and emotions involved in the purchase decision. Your copy and pages should revolve around what your customers deem most significant.
Beyond delving into customer emotions, your secondary objective is identifying the most critical value proposition for your customers, be it exceptional customer service, competitive pricing, top-notch quality, user-friendliness, eco-friendliness, or even the undeniable charm of your CEO. While you might have your suspicions, obtaining this information directly from your customers eliminates any guesswork.
Building Trust and Dispelling Doubts
Selecting your company entails an unspoken agreement that transcends a mere monetary transaction. It essentially says, "I choose you, and in return, you won't disappoint me."
For new customers, establishing trust and alleviating any reservations prior to purchase simplifies the decision-making process. On the internet, where skepticism is the default stance, building trust is crucial. The most effective method for this is providing social proof. If you tell people you're trustworthy, they might not believe you. However, when others vouch for your trustworthiness, the narrative changes.
There’s an agreement that happens when your customers choose your company that goes beyond the exchange of money for goods and services. It’s the unwritten rule of doing business, and goes, “I’ll choose your company, and in return, you won’t screw me.”
If your customers are new to you, establishing as much trust as possible and relieving any hesitance before the purchase will help make the decision infinitely easier for your prospects.
The Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic have taught us valuable lessons that are important for companies to take to heart. Recessions aren’t unique and are all typically characterized by capital restraints, and tough labor markets.
While I’m not a master of macroeconomics like our friends at McKinsey, I do understand that my skill sets are aligned with their findings in what successful companies did to thrive in past recessions.
Part 1 and Part 2 will deal with findings from our research, while Part 3 is dedicated to actionable insights that companies can take to help navigate and thrive in uncertain economic times.
Improving profit margin beats improving revenue. Analysis of the past recession shows that companies that focused on improving their profit margins grew faster than their peers who focused on growth.
What McKinsey calls “optionality in the balance sheet” can be simplified to capital liquidity. Essentially, it stems from the first finding. A combination of increasing your margins, building your working capital, and decreasing your debt allows companies to be more flexible and respond faster to opportunities.
Being able to focus on growth and profit margins has an exponential effect. Increasing our margins and working capital gives us the flexibility to increase growth by exercising our options faster than the competition with our improved liquidity.
Companies that improved their margins AND were able to grow revenues experienced a “1+1=3” effect. This isn’t terribly hard to wrap our heads around, as this strategy tends to be successful no matter the economic climate. However, in tough times, it boosted companies ahead of their peers even more.
This McKinsey graph illustrates the point extremely well. Companies that improved margins outperformed companies that just focused on growth. But, companies that were able to capture market share while improving efficiency got an even greater boost to performance.
Media Contour is proud to announce that we’ll be regular contributors to UX Magazine. Our series of interviews with industry leaders and innovators will be featured within the magazine. We’re incredibly grateful with such an honor, and very happy to be part of the UX Magazine family. If you’re not familiar with UX Mag, it’s an online magazine dedicated design excellence, usability, technological evolution, interface design and other areas.Our interview series has already included some big names. We have spoken with Jessica DuVerneay, Steve Portigal, Susan Weinschenk, Christopher Noessel, Alberta Soranzo and Maggie Hendrie and Don Norman thus far, and there are more slated.
Expertise.com scored 460 Web Developers in Los Angeles and Picked the Top 20: Media Contour is proud to have made that list. Congratulations team!
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