Larger corporates have exactly the same problems and challenges with their online services as smaller businesses. This can be the case when the solution requires several teams to work together.
It is important to step back and look at the bigger picture, which might involve areas outside of a particular role’s remit.
Step 1: Understand the product
Ensure you properly understand what you are selling, how many units you are looking to sell, what your current sales levels are and - if you can - learn your ideal profit margin. Ultimately, if you gain an understanding of what a sensible cost per sale is you can make more informed decisions.
Then ensure you can answer the following questions:
- What are the benefits of the product?
- Why should you buy the product?
- Why is this product better than the competition?
- What are the price variations, and why would a customer pick a particular option?
Step 2: Get under the skin of the customer
Too often sellers get wrapped up in their detailed knowledge of the industry and benefits of the product while forgetting to put themselves in the shoes of their customers.
What is important to you is necessarily what is important to your customer.
Ask yourself who is the ideal customer for this product? Be realistic - who is the most likely person to buy? Get a clear picture of them in your head or, even better, give them a name.
Do not be afraid to get specific at this stage - the more detail the better.
- What is their age and gender?
- What stage of life are they?
- What is their employment status, likely job role and level of income?
- What language do they use?
- What questions would they ask?
- What problems are they trying to solve?
- What are their concerns and worries?
- If you were talking to them what would you say to convert them?
- Can you get a group together for a brainstorming session? If you can include a customer or two, then even better.
You should then be able to answer questions about the product and the website sales process from your customer’s perspective. Be rigorous. Try not to be swayed by industry knowledge, technical concerns and limitations with the current solution.
Step 3: Understand the competition
Your ideal customer will be checking out the competition and you should too, particularly what search terms they use to solve their problem.
- Who else are they finding?
- How does their proposition differ from yours?
- How to they rank in search results?
- What strategies are they using to attract visitors to their site?
- Are they using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising?
- What is the performance of their webpage? (You can use Google PageSpeed Insights.)
- How well does their page work on mobile?
- Are they using different language to yours?
- Are they speaking to your ideal customer using terms they are more likely to understand?
- How does their quote / enquiry system work compared to yours? Is it simpler or more complicated?
Step 4: Design a strategy
Don’t expect to stumble on any obvious answers and avoid implementing anything just because it feels like a good idea.
Figure out what your key measurables are and ensure you can easily track any improvements you make.
This may include:
- Search engine rankings
- Visits to the landing page
- Sources of those visits
- Ensure you can track every click within the process
- Number of enquiries
- Number of conversions
It is important that the site / page is getting sufficient visits for your figures to be statistically significant. If the traffic is low, consider a budget for paying for additional traffic using pay-per-click (PPC) to ensure you have enough visitors to be worth measuring, even if the cost per customer acquisition is not initially justifiable.
Here are Eonic Digital, we tend to look to track these on a monthly basis, although with enough traffic on a large site weekly might be better.
Only now can you start thinking about what changes to implement.
A/B testing is a powerful tool. Consider using a platform such as Google Optimise to measure the effect of making specific changes.
Platforms such as Crazy Egg track mouse moves and customer clicks. This information is often insightful about what might be causing issues for customers.
Make sure every change you make is aligned with what is better for your target customer.
Don’t be afraid to take the best ideas from your competitors. Look at how you can further improve on them and make them more targeted to your ideal customer.
Step 5: Implement, measure, consider, repeat
Implement changes one at a time and record what change you made and when.
Consider how a mobile user accesses the site. Look for statistical differences between mobile and desktop conversions.
Once there is sufficient time/data for the effect of a change to be evaluated, either keep the change or reject it.
Small changes over time can have an extremely powerful, cumulative effect.
There is no magic solution – the process is more a steady, considered and measured approach to change and improvement.
If you would like to speak to the team at Eonic Digital about your online insurance processes, reach out to our Digital Success Consultant Trevor for a conversation.