With over 1100 variables that can impact conversions, where to start your analysis and testing can quickly become overwhelming resulting in poor progress.
Where most people start is with Analytics, which is fine, and a great way to pick off the low hanging fruit, but what do you do after that, and is there a better place to start?
To help answer this question and help us with this challenge, Bryan Eisenberg created the Conversion Trinity, or what I like to call, the Trinity of CRO, which groups the variables into three buckets – Relevance, Value, and Calls to Action.
The Foundation of the Trinity of CRO
Three vital questions form the foundation of the Trinity which are:
- Are you relevant to my need or query?
- Do I know why you are the right solution for me?
- Is what I need to do obviously?
Using these three question allows you to focus in on obvious problems quickly, and then helps you go deeper into audience understandings to find more hidden problems.
Relevance & Scent
In today’s online world, with so much information available to wade through, to deal with it, people have developed short attention spans led by a demand for relevance. No relevance and people are out; and, they will give you about 5 seconds to provide it to them.
But the initial relevance with your audience is just the beginning of their journey with you, i.e., the point at which you got their attention. From there you need to keep your audience on a scent trail of relevance that continues to get stronger and stronger all the way to the conversion goal.
If at any point within your funnel people are falling off, they fell off because, for some reason, the scent was lost.
Put another way, the scent of relevance is the enlargement of what initially attracted people in the first place.
The quality of your relevance scent trail will significantly play into your conversion success. A strong scent trail leads to strong conversion rates. A weak scent trail leads to weaker conversion rates; and, the point at which people are falling off identifies where the loss of scent is occurring.
Value Amplifies Relevance
Value is what amplifies relevance. It’s what sets one company above another when both companies are equally relevant.
For example, say two companies in the same market both have done a great job on relevance, what will pull people in one direction over another? What will draw you in one direction over another?
Perceived value!
Conversions = Perceived Value – Cost (cost in emotional experience positive to negative)
Relevance and value work together to create conversion momentum.
If your persuasive system is relevant, but still struggling with conversions, then people aren’t clear on why your solution better than your competitor’s solution, and a sign that your value proposition needs improvement.
Create A Clear Call to Action
It’s important that people understand what they need to do next. If they don’t, conversion rates will suffer. That said, make sure people know what to do. Use a clear call to action that attracts people.
But what if you have a relevance that is being greatly amplified by value, and a clear call to action but still are not converting well?
In this case, you want to think about the mental load that you are putting on people, i.e., how much work does their brain need to do to convert with you.
In other words, you don’t want to ask people to overthink. You want to make the process of converting as intuitive and straightforward as you possibly can. You do this by removing distractions and anything else that might be causing anxiety.
Start with Relevance
Due to online attention deficit, the first thing that you want to focus on is relevance. For paid media relevance can be measured by click thru rate or CTR. With a landing page, you can measure relevance by bounce and conversion rate.
The bottom line with relevance is this, no matter what your persuasive system is, if relevance isn’t there, and a scent trail in place, people won’t spend much time engaging.
What’s Your Value
Next, you want to think about your value, do people know why you are the best deal on the market? Do they understand why they should do business with you over your competitor?
If CTR is good, and bounce rate is low, and people are spending time in your funnel, but still aren’t converting, work on your scent trail, and increasing your perceived value.
Remember, value amplifies relevance, so if you are relevant, what you need to do, is increase that with value. This is a critical part of overcoming lower conversion rates.
Your Call to Action and Mental Load
Finally, do people know what they need to do, and how taxing is it for them to figure that out?
You can test different calls to action to determine which works best. At the same time, if your system creates or does not eliminate anxiety, or has too many conversion distractions, you can test the CTA, but chances are, you won’t see significant improvements.
Summary
Make sure your system you are relevant and amplifying that relevance with value, and using scent all the way through to the call to action. Finally, if you want the highest conversion rates possible, make sure you remove distractions and reduce anxiety, i.e., don’t make people overthink.
Use the Trinity of CRO to improve all your processes.
Thanks for reading and good luck!
Comments are welcomed!