Josh Garofalo, Sway Copy
“Many businesses spend too much money trying to fill a ‘leaky bucket.’ Right now, they’re getting sales because they’re driving traffic to their online store. So, the best path to more sales has to be more traffic, right?”
“Maybe, but not always. If there are deeper holes in your conversion funnel, it will be more cost effective to fix those first and then drive a lot of traffic to your funnel (or do both simultaneously).”
“For example, do you treat your transactional emails as an afterthought, or do you put some love into them because you know customers will open them? Are your emails sent on a schedule you set yourself, or do you use tools like Customer.io to send emails that are triggered by what your customers do (or don’t do) in your store? Are you obsessed with your homepage and ad copy, or are you optimizing the copy closest to the purchase? Is your checkout process difficult, or have you made buying as easy as possible?”
“By cleaning up the pages and flows closest to the transaction, you can get more sales from the same traffic, and many more sales when you open the floodgates of traffic.”
It’s true that you need a certain amount of traffic to properly test. (We’ll cover that in more depth later.) But conversion rate optimization (CRO) and growth encompass much more than just testing.
Sending more and more people to a site or landing page that is “losing” potential customers is a temporary solution, a band-aid.
With CRO, you can increase your online store's canada phone number format revenue without increasing traffic. Later, when you decide to focus on attracting more visitors, they will be more valuable because not as many will be lost in the process. If you're paying for ads, this is even better news.
1. Copywriting
Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers and Airstory highlights that copywriting is as data-driven as any other CRO discipline:
Joanna Wiebe, Copy Hackers and Airstory
“Conversion copywriting is just as data-driven as any other CRO discipline. Conversion copywriters ask questions of the analytics team, review raw data from the research team, contribute to wireframing discussions with the UX team, and work on hypotheses alongside the CRO lead.”
“Conversion copywriters don’t just stare into space, dreaming up nice one-liners; they identify compelling copy based on voice-of-the-customer data and strategically arrange that copy on the page, in emails, and throughout the funnel. They eagerly consume A/B test results and are curious about what motivates people to behave the way they do. There’s more science than art to our work.”
Josh agrees, adding that copywriting is about much more than just writing: