Scott Meves has spent the last seven years as CTO and co-founder of Quikly, a technology platform that uses psychological motivators — like scarcity, anticipation and fear of missing out — to help consumer-facing marketers achieve their goals faster and more cost-effectively. During this time, he’s used conversion rate optimization (CRO) to help drive hundreds of millions of dollars in sales for Fortune 500 companies.
To help those of you just getting started with CRO, we called on Meves’ expertise.
What is conversion rate optimization (CRO)?
“Conversion rate optimization is the process of making incremental tweaks to your website to drive better results around specific goals. And so a conversion is when you get one of your site visitors to take a specific action. So it might be provide an email address or watch a video or make a purchase. And the conversion rate is how many of those site visitors are actually completing that action. And so when you try to optimize that conversion rate what you’re doing is you’re actually maximizing the value of all of those upstream marketing efforts.”
Is CRO limited to websites?
“Marketers can use conversion rate optimization in all sorts of advertising and marketing activities. So even if you’re a brick and mortar store and you’re interested in increasing foot traffic — if you’re running a sale, you can experiment with putting a ‘sale’ sign in your window or maybe out in the front of your store. And then you can measure which drives more foot traffic. And so with digital marketing, it’s particularly useful because it’s easier to make quick, incremental changes to your site and get immediate measurements. And then, with some sophistication, you can even automate that process.”
Why should I implement a CRO strategy?
“Conversion rate optimization makes every site visitor more valuable. And it also increases the return on investment of all of your upstream marketing efforts. If you can improve your CRO, you’re actually driving down the cost of acquisition and maximizing the benefit of all of your existing marketing efforts.”
If I’m interested in using CRO, how should I get started?
“I think if you’re interested in getting started with CRO, the best move is to pick one goal. Just one — and make a single change. And see how that change affects that goal. If you try to do too much or focus on too many goals or make too many changes, it gets a little bit confusing, and you’re not sure what’s affecting what. So I’d say start simple. Pick one goal. Make one change and see what happens.”
How can consumer psychology increase conversions?
“You can create some perceived scarcity. You can drive a lot of anticipation around the campaign. And then you can also emphasize how a lot of other people are going to take advantage of this and if you don’t, you might miss out.”
How can I leverage scarcity?
“You can tap into these psychological motivators using technology — so you may have a limited-time offer, and you could show a countdown timer for when that offer is no longer available. You could have some new product launch and show a timer that emphasizes when that’s going to become available. Oftentimes, you’ll see a quantity left of some sort of product to really drive home the scarcity of that item. And so there’s a lot of really interesting ways, and simple ways to tap into those psychological motivators to increase your conversion rate.”
What else should I think about with CRO campaigns?
”When you think about what drives people to act, you can think about the motivations of the consumer, the clarity of the value proposition, and the perceived friction of taking advantage of that offer. And so if you focus in on those three points, you can make some really clear incremental improvements to the process and drive up your results.”
