The Holidays Are Here, Are You Really Ready?

There seems to be a lot of noise in the Digital Marketing world at the moment. Sometimes, it can be difficult to sort out which technologies and companies can really help you achieve your goals as an eCommerce site. Can more traffic really be the endgame? Will a new site really help more people find what they want from you? Why do so many SEOs keep calling you with an offer to be on Page One of Google for the keywords of your choice?

Don’t let that distract you from things that can really make a difference to you — and in the end, unless you’re a glorified billboard on the Internet, the real difference-maker is more money. While being #1 on the search engine listings is nice, and important, it’s not the difference-maker that CRO is.

Merchandise is Ready to Go - Are You Optimized for the Holidays?

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Everyone knows the words to the song. Pretty soon, any retail outlet you approach will be booming out holiday-cheer tunes ad nauseam. But, for the moment, let’s try to keep the urge to vomit down and think about what really matters for eCommerce — and that’s making your website the BEST POSSIBLE store window you can have. Store window, eh, you say? Yes, you’re probably right. That metaphor doesn’t really work too well any more. Frankly, people arrive at your online checkout page through a variety of sources, and the important thing for you is to INCREASE REVENUE.

Increase revenue = conversion goal. It’s that simple. So how can CRO help that number to rise? and can it really rise in time to make the holiday season more profitable for a site like yours?

I know what you’re thinking, it’s always risky to try something new when the number of visitors is highest and at the time of the year when revenues are most critical to the company “making the numbers.” Right?

So let me tell you why – or rather, three ways how CRO is going to make you more money during this holiday season.

Three Ways CRO Makes You More Money

• CRO takes variations of your page and, through the technology, rearranges them through how your visitors react to them. After a very small number of visitors, CRO converges on the best combination of those variations, making subsequent visitors MUCH MORE LIKELY to buy. That leads to an increased conversion rate while you test.
• The right CRO product is architected in a way to burn through very few visitors to begin converging, and requires no technical staff or technical intervention to work.
• You don’t need a new website, or more visitors — the technology lets these assets “sweat” more for you.

Three Things You Don’t Need in Order to Do CRO

• Glorified heat maps. Yes, it’s nice to analyze where potential customer eyes go, and very intuitive. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as testing everything. Get a tool that will let you.
• Someone else “best practices” imported into your eCommerce site. Why’s that? Because someone else’s best practice applied to you is the surest way to create yourself an average company. Invasive species are usually unwelcome in a new ecosystem.
• Expensive consultants. A good design person isn’t expensive, can plug the variations into the right tool, and then the test runs itself. You don’t need reports about statements of work, areas to target, etc.