Conversion optimization is about doing better marketing. It’s about understanding your customers better, and providing them with a better experience, helping them complete their tasks faster, simplifying everything.
We can do this by KNOWING, not guessing. The difference between knowing (or forming an educated hypothesis) and having an opinion, is data. Critical part of the conversion optimization part is collecting good data, and interpreting the data. If you have bad data or you don’t draw the right conclusions out of it, everything else becomes meaningless. No point forming a hypothesis from bad data. No point testing this stuff.
So the most important skill of a conversion optimizer is knowing how to get good data and how to draw conclusions out of it. But even so, this is just the beginning. You need to know a lot about people, design, copywriting, statistics, usability and – frameworks.
In this course I will teach you processes, methods, and also heuristics. Conversion heuristics are experience-based techniques for analyzing web pages – but they’re not guaranteed to be optimal. Sometimes where the exhaustive research is impractical or little data is available, heuristic methods are used to speed up or complement the process of analysis.
It’s about boosting profits
We call it “conversion optimization”, but the goal should never be to boost conversions. Just lower your prices by 99%, and conversions will go instantly up – but you will lose money. And – conversions can go down while revenue goes up at the same time – when you get 100,000 unexpected visits from StumbleUpon, and one of them actually buys something (and many other scenarios).
So in the end the question we’re asking is ‘how can we increase revenue, and do so at profit?’ It’s not just about the copy or the layout of the site, you need to look at the big picture. Is incoming traffic targeted? Are proper landing pages used? What’s the sales funnel like? Are content marketing and relationship building efforts made? Are shopping cart abandonment recovery emails being sent out? Is the customer support great?
Conversion optimization is about doing better marketing. And we need to approach it that way.