CRO: What it is and how to get started
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of improving the percentage of visitors to your website who take a desired action, typically leading to a purchase. In the context of e-commerce, CRO specifically aims to optimize your online store to boost sales. As an E-commerce business, your goal is simple – to grow your online revenue. CRO is a data-driven process that involves testing and experimentation. It is also important to have a clear understanding of your customers and their needs to be successful with CRO. If you want to improve your website’s CRO, there are various actions you can take on different parts of your site. For example, you can enhance your product pages to boost sales, streamline the checkout process, improve your blog, add personal touches, use pop-up messages, apply psychological principles, and explore various other strategies. Why is CRO important? CRO is important because it can help you increase your website’s revenue and profitability. By improving your conversion rate, you can get more value from your existing traffic. CRO can also help you improve your website’s user experience and make it more likely that visitors will return to your site in the future. With a good CRO strategy, you can harvest multiple benefits: CRO will save you money Gain insights about your customer’s behavior Improve ROI and marketing efficiency Enhance your site’s usability, navigation, and user experience Make decisions based on data and insights, not instinct How to start optimizing your conversion Now you’ve learned the benefits of CRO, but where to start? We’ve broken down key steps into the following sections: process, tools and testing targets to give you an overview. Process CRO places a huge emphasis on testing and experimentation which should be conducted using the scientific method. Let’s look at the steps involved: 1) Gather data & insights Data and insights are always your starting point. At this stage, you’d want to gather both qualitative & quantitative data as much as possible, to help you get an overview of your conversion problem. Funnel & web analytics: From when the customer comes to your website to perform the action (e.g complete a checkout), the journey often involves several, interconnected steps. Like fixing a leaking pipe, you’ll want to break down the funnel and learn where your customers drop off the most. UX heuristic evaluation: Sometimes your conversion problem is as simple as it’s not user friendly enough. Is the navigation clear for customers? Is the message consistent? A UX heuristic audit gives you clues of conversion problems resulting from usability issues. Market research: Each industry has its unique landscape and consumer behavior. Doing competitive research to understand your general positioning, offering and pricing and consumer preference helps you assess conversion from a high business level. 2) Formulate hypotheses Once you consolidate all the findings, the next step is to formulate a hypothesis. We are not jumping into complicated statistical hypotheses yet, but at bare minimum, your hypothesis should consist of three important elements – reasoning, testing variable/action and the desired result. The sentence structure might look like this: “Based on (your finding), we believe we can achieve (desired result) by (testing variable/action).” Let’s try with an example: “Based on the fact that social proof gives consumers confidence in product quality, we believe we can increase more purchases by adding customer feedback on product pages.” 3) Run a test After narrowing down the hypotheses and areas you’d like to test, you’ll then move to designing and performing the tests. AB testing (single variate testing) or multivariate testing are the most common methods used. You’ll want to make sure you have proper tools to split the controlled/testing environment and accurate data tracking to help you monitor the results. 4) Analyze Now it’s time to validate your ideas with data evidence. Judging by the result, is your hypothesis correct? If not, how can you potentially explain the reason? Is there a new hypothesis? Was the experiment flawed? This is the most crucial (yet sometimes neglected) step to learn from the experiments and adjust your testing plan. 5) Reiterate and repeat Although we call it step 5 here, CRO is indeed not a linear process. Once you gain some thoughts from the previous step, it’s time to decide how to carry the next step. Was the experiment successful? Great! Can you take it to the next level? Should you move on to test other new ideas? If not, should you form a new test based on the corrected hypothesis? CRO is a cycle of continuous hypothesis, testing and learning. CRO analytic tools There are many tools to help you conduct CRO smoothly. Below we will provide a few examples: 1. Quantitative user analytic tools A quantitative analytic tool helps you understand through numerical data, what happened on your website and/or app. You can use such tools to answer: How engaged are your customers? Which User groups are engaging less? How long did your customers visit? How many pages have they viewed? How many customers go through a specific funnel? Where do they drop off? What are the most popular paths of your customers? What products or pages receive the most attention? Some of our best picks for quantitative user analytic tools include: Google Analytics 4 Google Analytics is the most commonly used analytics platform in the world. Recently, Google introduced the new Google Analytics 4 (the Universal Analytics , i.e. old GA, will be sunsetted by Jul 1, 2023. If you haven’t migrated to GA4 yet, let us give you a hand). Not only can you analyze traffic, but the new GA4 also offers enhanced insights on customer journeys and makes it easier to do funnel analysis, path exploration etc. Best of all, it’s free! Mixpanel Mixpanel is a powerful self-service, event-based analytics tool that provides valuable customer insights with the ease of data visualization. It is one of the popular analytic tools. They currently help the world answer 81 million product
Apple Mail is wasting your email marketing spend (and how Ematic fixes it)
If you’re an email marketer, you may have noticed a much higher open rate since the iOS 15 update back in late 2021. Unfortunately, it’s not that your hooks and one-liners are suddenly capturing a higher number of customers–it’s because of a change in Apple Mail functionality that Apple pushed two years ago. As of September 2021, Apple Mail is automatically reading and opening all emails received as part of a privacy protocol. This means open metrics are no longer accurate–it’s possible that a number of your open metrics are just Apple Mail users whose Apple Mail apps automatically read the emails. The users themselves probably haven’t even seen the emails! The use of Apple Mail has thrown a wrench in the works of email marketers everywhere. Due to the open metrics receiving false positives, Apple Mail users are being advanced to the next phase of email marketers’ email journeys without ever having interacted with the email, leading to them receiving more and more followup emails and traveling further down the email journey. It’s frustrating for both sides, because: For email marketers, they’re investing resources and time emailing and following up on false leads, and; For users, who are now being bombarded with emails and follow-up emails, because now there’s no way to tell whether a user is genuinely interested, or it’s just Apple Mail’s new protocol at work. It’s not possible to tell if a user is using Apple Mail, because the app leaves no data footprint. The email is simply being marked as read, and the user isn’t interacting with the emails at all. This leads to a host of issues for the email marketer: There’s no way to accurately measure the success of an email marketing campaign. With inflated data, an email marketing campaign may look like it’s succeeding when it’s not. Segmenting mailing lists also becomes difficult. Open events used to be a reliable way to separate interested from uninterested users. Without it, it becomes harder to prune mailing lists (by removing uninterested users). With mailing list hygiene now requiring more maintenance, more resources are needed in maintaining an accurate list of interested and uninterested users, resulting in more overhead. The bottom line: marketers are wasting huge sums of money sending email to “engaged users” who aren’t in fact engaged at all, OR they’re losing opportunities by suppressing suspected Apple Mail users entirely, when there are still plenty of active, engaged users in that audience. Hi-iQ: Our Solution to the Apple Mail Issue What is Hi-iQ and How Does It Work? Hi-iQ is our flagship AI product. It is a robust, self-learning algorithm designed to seamlessly integrate with your email database through a simple integration. It operates daily, automatically by retrieving the latest subscriber behaviour towards your past Email campaigns and suggests the most updated targeting whenever you’re scheduling a campaign. By understanding each subscriber’s behaviour, Hi-iQ not only distinguishes between various levels of engagement but also effectively identifies those influenced by Apple Mail’s privacy policy—commonly known as “fake openers.” This ensures that your marketing efforts are far from blind shots in the dark. Moreover, Hi-iQ doesn’t simply flag Apple Mail users and remove them from your list. Instead, it continuously monitors these users, regulating them back into your campaigns at a lower frequency. The aim? To capture those moments when a flagged user eventually shows real engagement. If this occurs, Hi-iQ immediately adjusts its data, recognizing this as a genuine interaction. How Does This Help Me as an Email Marketer? With Hi-iQ, you’re unburdening your team from the cumbersome task of sifting through possibly misleading data. You’re also no longer operating in a data fog; instead, you have precise insights into who is genuinely interacting with your emails. But the real magic happens when you consider long-term impact. It not only helps you identify genuine engagement but also adapts continually based on user behavior. This ensures that you always stay connected to users who truly care and have great potential for your business. By streamlining your list and targeting genuinely interested users, you’re likely to see reduced email costs and a higher ROI, all without having to compromise on your email performance metrics. A Case Study Leflair, an ecommerce platform, sends out email marketing campaign blasts to their user base on a daily basis. Since the Apple change in late 2021, Leflair has posted an average monthly send volume of 4 to 4.5 million emails. This would suggest a high cost of maintaining their email services. In August 2023, Ematic Solutions tested the new Hi-iQ feature on the client’s account. In late August, Hi-iQ was applied; by September, it was up and running. When comparing August 2023 to September 2023, Leflair sent a little under 3 million emails, or a 38% reduction in total send volume, and a corresponding 59% reduction in open rate. This would later lead to savings of 35.29% and an increase in click rate due to a smaller, more accurate target audience. We know the Hi-iQ plugin works because the number of unique clicks remained flat at the average baseline despite the reduction in send volume. Overall, due to maintaining results while reducing inputs, this translates into a stable revenue for Leflair’s email marketing channels. Effectively, the brand’s ROI can be said to have improved due to lower costs. Get Hi-iQ today With the growing number of Apple Mail users, it’s crucial for email marketers to respond to Apple Mail’s privacy protocol. Otherwise, open events cannot be accurately tracked, which in turn can affect the numbers and statistics of email marketers. With that said, we’re happy to announce that our Hi-iQ email solution is available today, featuring wide-reaching viability and compatibility with multiple email platforms, including Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Campaign Monitor, Iterable, Mailjet, and more!
Mastering SEO in Malaysia: A Comprehensive Guide
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Understanding Search Intent: Top vs. Bottom of Funnel Keywords in SEO
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New Design Services On The Way
We’re excited to announce that we’ve recently expanded our capabilities to offer a wide range of design services to complement our existing data-driven optimization disciplines. Many people recognize us for our strong, data-driven, tech-enabled approach to digital marketing. We take pride in holding our ground. However, we understand that in today’s competitive digital world, it’s not enough to rely solely on data-driven optimization to achieve success. Without effective creative designs, your digital performance will only go so far. That’s why we’re now offering a full suite of design services to help you create visually appealing and persuasive websites, marketing materials, logos, and more. Our talented designers work hand-in-hand with our consulting team and development team to create the most effective marketing communication and UI/UX solutions for web, iOS, and Android. We take pride in following modern trends and applying proven approaches to design, prototyping, and product validation to provide you with the best possible design solutions for your brand. By complementing our data-driven optimization with creativity, we’re confident that we can help you achieve real impact and stand out from the competition. Whether you need a flexible expansion when your designers are busy or professional help to provide a design solution for your brand, we’ve got you covered. So why wait? Let’s work together to take your digital performance to the next level. We’ll share more details on each of them in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out!
10-year Anniversary Brings a New-Look Ematic Solutions
The rebrand is a promising evolution that not only pays homage to our heritage and our progress but also propels us to a brighter future.
Collaborative Ads
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What is Zero, First, Second, and Third-Party Data?
One of the more pronounced benefits of going into online marketing is how you can track, analyze, and understand your customers as well as how they respond to your product. All of this information is called “data,” and when you’re deep enough into collecting data while journeying into online marketing, you might have stumbled upon the terms “zero,” “first,” “second,” and “third-party” data. What exactly are they, and why do you need to know the difference?
Ask the experts: Tips for marketing channel optimization
The quest to effective marketing is a never-ending journey. Marketing tactics may vary depending on the company and industry, but one thing that all marketers have in common though, is the desire to improve ROI from their marketing efforts.
Achieving cross-channel marketing synergy
Perfect parts don’t make a perfect whole. By breaking down marketing silos and creating cross-channel synergy, companies can build a stronger brand identity, create a more cohesive and consistent brand experience for customers, avoid duplication of effort and, as a result, achieve a higher return on investment for their marketing efforts.
