Table of Contents

• 1. Analyze the performance of your current forms 
• 2. Beware of what you’re asking for
• 3. Mandatory fields and form validation
• 4. Clear and attention-grabbing CTAs
• 5. Testimonials and social proof 
• 6. Form placement 
• 7. Concise and convincing copy
• 8. Personalize your messaging
• Keep leads coming in with simple form fills! 

In the world of B2B SaaS, free trials and demo request forms are more than shooting just a list of questions to prospects. In your pursuit to humanize B2B marketing, you should focus on building connections with your audiences, generating trust among them, and convincing them to try what we offer. And the starting point for all of this is having them sign up for a trial or request for demos. 

It may seem like a lot of work, but it’s worth the effort.

Of course, your forms need the right ingredients to achieve their objectives. But to tap into their true potential, turn your focus on A/B testing. This strategy not only allows you to test one experience against another but also to understand what works and what doesn’t at that point for your website.

So, let’s begin discussing how to approach revamping forms and utilizing A/B testing to increase lead generation in this blog post.

1. Analyze the performance of your current forms

Before you give your web forms a makeover, make sure to diagnose the pain points.

By examining user behavior and identifying where they’re getting stuck or abandoning your form, you can make targeted improvements that will increase your conversion rates and drive more leads.

And that’s where VWO Form Analytics tool comes in. It can track and analyze user behavior to give you all the juicy deets on what’s working and what’s not. From drop-off points to time spent filling out each field, our form analytics tool helps you delve into macro-level as well as field-level statistics. Once you’ve gotten your hands on these data, you can work towards building high-converting forms by testing and incorporating the right elements.

2. Beware of what you’re asking for

Less is often more, and in the world of forms, this couldn’t be truer! Ever found yourself abandoning a form because it was long and you did not have the time to fill it out? But your audiences don’t have to go through the same. Make this process easy for visitors by reducing the number of questions you ask them to answer. This way, they can focus on the most important ones and save a lot of time. They’ll appreciate that you’re not too curious to collect too much personal information and therefore trust you enough to try your offering. 

Suppose you’ve asked users to enter both personal and official email addresses in a free trial form. But for this purpose, entering just one email address could work. Some forms ask a ton of questions like,  “How many employees do you have?”, “What industry is your company in?” and “How long have you been in business?” which are often not important to be answered at the outset. Let’s stop overwhelming users with so many questions from the get-go. If your product is solid, they’ll stick around. 

Having said that, we also believe that asking questions can sometimes help a brand evaluate the potential fit between the product and the customer.  At VWO, filling out our free trial and request demo forms is a breeze. However, to ensure we connect with prospects who are truly invested, we’re ramping things up by scheduling one-on-one meetings with our team immediately after they submit their basic information on the request demo form. The winning experience saw an increase in clicks on the request demo CTA button by 35.32% and demo page visits by 3.01%. 

3. Mandatory fields and form validation

Imagine you spend time filling out a form but all your efforts go in vain as you see an error message telling you that you entered the wrong information after you’ve filled out most of the fields. This is where form validation comes in. Form validation helps users ensure that they are filling out all the fields correctly on the go, which reduces the chances of making errors and speeds up the submission process. 

Highlighting mandatory fields is also crucial in helping users save time. Imagine your prospects are to fill out your request demo form which is quite lengthy because you need to ensure the product-customer fit. But the form doesn’t clearly indicate which fields are required. When mandatory fields are highlighted, users can identify which fields should be filled in and focus on them, resulting in a faster form submission rate. 

4. Clear and attention-grabbing CTAs

CTA buttons can make a big impact on your leads and bookings. They are the ones that seal the deal and get those leads coming in. But if they are not attention-grabbing, they are highly likely to be overlooked by users. 

Suppose your free trial form features a “Try now” CTA button, but it’s barely getting any clicks. A CTA like this one might fail to motivate visitors to take action. What you can do now is run a test by creating a variation featuring a far more interesting CTA copy – “Start your 30-day free trial now” This specific CTA gives visitors a clear picture of what they’ll get by clicking it. With years of experience helping brands, we’re confident that this variation will be a winner. But we still suggest you study visitor behavior on your website and then decide if you’d like to run this test or not. 

5. Testimonials and social proof

Testimonials and social proof are like stamps of approval from your existing customers. They show that these customers have already taken the plunge and had a great experience using your product. As a result, prospective clients can also take the leap following their footsteps. 

If your form ticks most of the boxes of best practices yet doesn’t bring in any leads, try adding testimonials and see how that performs. Below is how Chargebee encourages users to sign up for a free trial by displaying a testimonial on the left side of the form. 

Using VWO Visual Editor, you can add any type of form modal or widget to pop up on your website. You can also edit and customize them to suit your brand guidelines and improve request demo/free trial conversion rates. It’s also possible to preview the changes on both desktop and mobile before the test starts. Sounds fascinating? Try it out to fully understand its capability.

6. Form placement

If your forms are not easily noticeable, visitors are less likely to take the pain to find them all by themselves. So, keep them in a prominent position, making it easier for visitors to engage with it and use it to submit their information. 

To determine the right placement of your form, you can A/B test different form placements. At VWO, we ourselves champion the use of pop-up forms on our website. Our pop-ups are not at all intrusive in nature as they show up only when users click the CTA button. 

Why not give your website visitors a hassle-free experience by embedding your form above the fold? This smart placement eliminates the need for scrolling and allows them to fill out the form with ease. 

Human Interest, a US-based SaaS company, opted for VWO FullStack to integrate with Contentful and improve lead generation on its landing page. By showing the contact form above the fold, the number of form submissions increased by 3.77% and the number of calls scheduled with prospective customers increased by 75.84%. To know the details of this case study, read here. 

Alternatively, you can also place the CTA of the form in a sticky header that remains at the top of the page as visitors scroll down. Clicking the CTA button can open either a separate landing page or display a web pop-up. 

The age-old question, pop-ups or landing pages, which is the better form submission tool? We say, test them and see which one of them brings the maximum conversions for you.

Pop-ups ask for minimal information, such as an email address, to sign up for a free trial. Landing pages, on the other hand, show detailed information about your product or service and may ask for more information to be submitted, such as name, company, or phone number. 

If you go for landing pages, make a statement with head-turning information and take advantage of all that extra space. Give your landing page the attention it deserves by including SEO keywords, showcasing your success with testimonials, and adding reviews or security badges. Plus, you can add a compelling video that showcases what your product can do for your prospects. 

Does VWO help you test landing pages? Oh sure, it does! You can use VWO to test either individual elements of your landing page or conduct split-URL tests to validate complete overhauls. Request a demo and have our experts explain this in detail. 

7. Concise and convincing copy

One of my favorite sayings on LinkedIn these days is ‘Sell benefits, not features”. And that’s what I’m suggesting you do in your free trial or request demo forms. Users want to know how your product helps them solve their problems. If you’re not getting that part right, they can switch to brands that do that better. 

Tell your users what they can expect by signing up. Apart from a catchy headline, you must also list the benefits awaiting them after they are up for request demos. Think your current copy is not performing well? Our Visual Editor can come to your rescue. Its AI-powered copy generator can suggest great copies that resonate with your prospective customers. A/B test and see if the improved copy helps drive more conversions or not. The results will impress you, we’re sure. 

8. Personalize your messaging

Personalizing your forms can increase the likelihood of conversions. Here’s an example to help you understand how.

Let’s say yours is a customer relationship management platform. You’ve observed that most new visitors are starting to fill up the free trial form but not completing the signing process, based on the insights uncovered from segmented visitor groups on VWO Form Analytics. To push them down the lead conversion funnel, you can personalize your form and test it against the non-personalized generic form for this audience group. 

Suppose the control has something like “Unlock a 15-day free trial to start building better business relationships.” To appeal to this segment of the audience specifically, you can now tweak your offer to “Unlock a 30-day free trial to start building better business relationships”. The duration of the free trial can make a big difference in driving responses from visitors. 

Similarly, for a request demo form, you can offer 3 days of free inbound marketing consultation with one of your in-house experts who can customize a plan in the areas of marketing and sales for a prospect’s business. Run this test against the regular request demo form without a consultation offer. Roll out the experience that drives maximum demo bookings to all new customers. 

Keep leads coming in with simple form fills!

Free trial forms and request demo forms are the gateways to your SaaS products that spark user interest and guide them towards exploring what you have to offer. Whatever we discussed in this blog are the basic components of a good free trial form. But remember, with user experience being unique to each website, A/B testing is key to finding your perfect fit.

Whether you’re analyzing current form performance or testing out new optimization ideas, VWO has got your back. From form analysis to a range of testing options, it’s the ultimate tool for boosting your leads and taking your business to the next level. So, don’t settle for mediocre results. Let your free trial and demo forms soar with VWO!

You must have started with lots of questions (related to the use case, budget, impact, etc.). Then, there is a very high probability that at each stage of the buying process, you must have come across some content that answered a doubt and let you move forward. In the end, you must have chosen the tool that resolved all your doubts.

Content is like a signpost that leads you to the destination while moving on an unknown path. On that unknown path, you followed the signpost that made things clear for you. Similarly, your potential client is also moving on that unknown path. So, do you want to build signposts that will appeal to them? 

If you’re interested in building content that will brighten your potential client’s path to the destination, we have six B2B content ideas for you. Each idea includes examples that have leveraged these formats to increase engagement and conversions. 

1. Pillar pages

In any successful content marketing plan, pillar pages play an integral role. Essentially, a pillar page refers to an extensive and detailed content piece that delves into a broad topic within your industry or business. It functions as a central hub that connects all the relevant subtopics and content on your website, providing links to and from other pages and content.

Pillar pages should give a comprehensive and captivating perspective on a subject matter. Additionally, they should be visually appealing, user-friendly and incorporate a variety of multimedia elements, including images and text. 

Pillar pages work best in improving conversion at the top of the funnel (ToFu). A pillar page can attract more traffic to your site as it showcases expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, which makes content rank higher in SERPs. 

Take the example of the pillar page created by VWO on A/B testing. 

It touches on the broad topic of A/B testing and explains all the related subtopics to make it exhaustive and compelling simultaneously. The guide page showcases a table of contents that makes visitors aware of the content and jumps to a section of interest. 

The guide has images and actionable tips, making it visually appealing and easy to digest. Also, a call-to-action to email the guide allows for achieving the objective of generating a lead. 

The landing page has achieved a top-five ranking in the SERPS for keywords such as A/B testing, with a monthly search volume of over 10,000 in countries like the USA. This has resulted in a substantial influx of traffic to the page. Additionally, it projects VWO as a thought leader in online experimentation. 

That’s the power of pillar pages. Though it takes significant time and effort to create these, the rewards are worthy of all the input. 

2. Visual-based storytelling

In the age of information overload, the human attention span is fleeting, and your content strategy must include modern content delivery mediums based on visual storytelling. Content formats like Google Web Stories, short videos, and video series are becoming popular as they are visually appealing and quick to consume. 

Visual-based storytelling does not aim to replace long-form content formats such as pillar pages, guides, landing pages, and blog posts. Instead, it offers a distinct approach to engaging with audiences by conveying content concisely and narratively. This unique mode of storytelling can be highly effective in enhancing brand awareness and expanding the reach to a broader audience, which in turn increases the conversion at the ToFu.

Mailchimp is one of the leading players in the email marketing and marketing automation space that incorporated visual base storytelling with its Mailchimp Presents initiative.

Mailchimp Presents shares content related to entrepreneurial spirit via video and audio-based content. The video series and films engage the audience with stories and motivate them to be entrepreneurial. The subtle CTAs to Mailchimp offerings promote the brand and how it can help businesses scale up.

Such initiatives bring a fresh perspective to the brand’s outreach initiatives rather than just promoting links to new blog posts. Though such initiatives require significant capital and human resources investment, a small business can start with other visual-based mediums like Google Web Stories, YouTube Shorts, etc.  

3. Webinars

A webinar is an incredibly engaging and powerful way to communicate ideas, share knowledge, and build connections with your audience. A survey in 2021 that included 115 marketing practitioners concluded webinars as the most effective ToFu demand generation tactic.

Additionally, webinars are one of the few strategies where there is two-way communication between you and your audience. Many companies conduct ask-me-anything (AMA) webinars to resolve doubts and questions related to the product, which helps increase the conversion rate at the middle of the funnel (MoFu).

By bringing in guest speakers and thought leaders from your domain, you can capture your listeners’ attention and draw them in, helping them to connect with your content on a deeper level. Also, by incorporating personal anecdotes, case studies, and examples from your own or other brands’ experiences, you can bring your content to life and inspire your listeners to take action.

For example, CNBC organized a @work Spotlight Series event in 2020 for CXOs on changing business scenarios and leveraging technologies at work. 

The virtual event series featured esteemed guest speakers from Fortune 500 companies, offering invaluable insights to participants. With an intuitive and engaging experience, including targeted breakout rooms, the event fostered dynamic two-way conversations between attendees and guests. 

The results were remarkable, with over 20,000 average views on weekly live streams and a staggering 1 million unique visitors to CNBC’s Digital Events Hub, showcasing the event’s widespread success.

4. Case studies

In the B2B realm, case studies serve as a powerful medium to highlight the positive impact your product has brought to your clients. They also serve as compelling evidence for potential clients to evaluate your product based on the tangible results achieved by competitors or players within the same industry. 

Case studies are a collaborative effort between your company and your clients, and the data presented in them must be accurate and genuine. Exaggeration or understatement can lead to legal implications, which is why case studies are considered a highly reliable source of information for companies to assess the effectiveness of a product.

Take the example of VWO’s Success Stories. 

The success story landing page indicates the brand name, industry, utilized VWO product, and improvement in the conversion metric. 

It allows a potential customer to easily skim through the numerous success stories, identify their industry, and report uplift before delving deep to get more information. Additionally, it enables the sales team to share relevant case studies while they are conversing with a potential client to finalize a deal. 

Thus, case studies aid in giving a final nudge to a client to buy the product, as they showcase the product’s potential and answer doubts related to the product’s performance. Which helps in converting leads from the bottom of the funnel (BoFu) into clients.

5. Online courses

Online courses have become increasingly popular over the years and for good reasons. Many companies offer paid and free courses to increase brand affinity, revenue, customer retention rate, and project domain expertise.  

A good online course targets a specific topic catering to a specific user segment. It enables learners to delve deep into the topic and equips them with valuable knowledge. An online course should clearly outline its duration, prerequisites, a comprehensive table of contents, and expected learning outcomes. 

Online courses are efficient in converting leads at the ToFu by providing domain-specific courses and at the BoFu by providing product-related courses. 

Take the example of HubSpot to understand the power of utilizing online courses as part of the content strategy.

HubSpot offers a wide range of online courses that include certification programs related to marketing/sales and training programs on the HubSpot Product stack. Here is how it has helped Hubspot:

• Established HubSpot as a thought leader in the marketing and sales space. Which in turn, enhanced brand reputation and credibility.
• Lead to higher customer satisfaction and retention rates because training courses offered on HubSpot Academy have helped customers achieve their marketing and sales goals using HubSpot’s products. 
• Enabled a partner ecosystem, which includes agencies, resellers, and integrators, by offering partner-specific training and certifications. It has helped partners gain expertise in using HubSpot’s software and services, enabling them to deliver better results to their clients and drive business growth. 

The utilization of online courses has been instrumental in creating an ecosystem where HubSpot clients and partners receive comprehensive training to maximize their return on investment (ROI). 

As a potent medium for delivering valuable content, online courses have played a pivotal role in building a loyal customer base, fostering customer success, and enabling partners to deliver exceptional results using HubSpot’s offerings.

6. Whitepapers

A whitepaper is a detailed and comprehensive report that focuses on a particular topic. It aims to present a problem and its solution in an unbiased and convincing manner. Unlike promotional materials, a whitepaper does not endorse or criticize any company. Its main purpose is to educate rather than sell products or services. Normally, whitepapers are around 10 to 15 pages long and offer an authoritative perspective on the subject.

The structure of a whitepaper comprises several sections, including a title, an extensive summary, a table of contents, an introduction, an overview of challenges, proposed solutions, recommendations, a concluding statement, a brief company background, and a call-to-action (CTA).

A whitepaper by The OpenGroup on cloud computing can serve as a great guide to understanding how a whitepaper is written and structured. This whitepaper focuses on building Return on Investment (ROI) in cloud computing. It begins with an executive summary and an introduction that outlines the context and existing challenges. The subsequent sections delve into specifics, including financial value and ROI models. These insights are designed to assist you in maximizing ROI from cloud computing. The whitepaper concludes with a summary, references, and acknowledgments. 

Notably, it incorporates factual information and statistical data to establish credibility and underscore the expertise of The OpenGroup. The entire whitepaper educates you and elevates your knowledge about the topic without being promotional, which is the purpose of this content format.

Whitepapers are created to establish expertise and cultivate trust within the industry. Positioned at the initial stages of customer engagement, they provide valuable insights and help generate potential leads. Importantly, whitepapers offer informative solutions without directly promoting a product or service. 

Boost content performance with VWO

It’s not enough to just create content and never look back. In order to truly optimize your content and improve engagement, you need to take a data-driven approach. 

It means understanding how visitors interact with your content, identifying areas for improvement, and A/B testing to ensure that your content is not only high-quality but also effective in achieving your goals.

VWO enables you to enhance conversion rates by monitoring and optimizing your content. One common use case is to utilize VWO Insights to analyze the scroll depth at which the majority of users exit high-traffic content formats such as pillar pages and blog posts.

A scrollmap looks like this:

Once you know the scroll depth where most users are leaving, you can utilize VWO Testing to test how adding an image or interactive element can improve the conversion. Additionally, you can move important elements like newsletter sign-up above the point. 

Furthermore, VWO Insights provides access to useful data like heatmaps, session recordings, and survey responses, which can aid in understanding visitor engagement with your content, enabling you to generate data-driven hypotheses. You can then optimize your content by conducting experiments with VWO Testing.

Grab a free trial of VWO and learn how to improve important media conversions like social media shares, email-ups, user duration, etc.

Tying it all together

To conclude, these six content ideas can play a significant role in improving conversion rates at different stages of the sales funnel.

The pillar pages provide comprehensive information on broad topics and bring traffic from organic sources, while visual-based storytelling engages audiences and increases brand awareness. 

Webinars build connections and offer a two-way communication platform, case studies highlight a product’s positive impact, and online courses foster an ecosystem of thought leadership along with a loyal consumer base. While whitepapers help you build trust, showcase authority, and generate leads at the top of the funnel.  

Although it requires significant resources and effort, the results are undoubtedly worth it in the long run.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

For marketers with digital properties, this implies that even a minor negative deviation from visitors’ expectations will lower the conversion rate along with a loss of time and money spent attracting the target audience to the digital asset. 

So, how to deal with the fleeting attention span? Let’s go through some strategies that marketers can use to capture visitor attention and improve engagement on their websites. 

Identify the fold where most visitors leave

As a marketing professional, you work hard to design a landing page and create stellar copy. But what if most visitors leave at point A on the website, and all the crucial information about the product with an important call-to-action button comes at a succeeding point B? This means that numerous visitors are moving on without knowing the product. That’s why it is necessary to know the point on the page where most visitors lose interest and drop off.

A marketer can identify the fold where most visitors are leaving with the help of a scrollmap. For instance, here is a scrollmap of the homepage of an online watch store.

Half of the website’s visitors are dropping before reaching the product section located below the fold. To capture their attention, the website administrator can employ several tactics. For instance, at the 50% viewpoint, the website administrator can insert captivating text to highlight the watch’s features, pricing, or special offers, such as “The most affordable smartwatch on the market.”. It can entice visitors to continue scrolling for more information. 

Additionally, incorporating multimedia elements, such as images or videos, can pique visitors’ interest and encourage them to explore further. Another approach to address this attention threshold is to move key elements and information about the product above the 50% viewpoint.

It’s like either you increase the attention span with attractive elements or show everything important before the visitor loses attention.

Use quick and consumable content

This is the age of information overload, and everybody is looking to get answers that are crisp, visually appealing, and consumed in a minute. Thus, a marketer must resort to content formats like web stories and infographics that suffice all the mentioned requirements. 

For example, Refinery 29, an entertainment website, wanted to generate leads for their email digest. They explored the topic of currency manufacturing through a visually appealing medium like Google Web stories.

They could have gone through the traditional route of creating a long blog post with a request to join the newsletter at the end. Though web stories are not a replacement for blog posts, if you can explain a topic in a few words with visuals, then a web story can catch the attention and, at the same time, help achieve the marketing goal. 

Personalize the visitor experience

Personalization is a sophisticated technique that can enhance visitor satisfaction. Generic headlines and a copy may not effectively communicate your message to individuals with diverse interests, demographics, or ages. Personalization captures visitors’ attention by providing highly relevant content that makes them feel valued and unique.

Personalization must address visitors’ demands simply and transparently. For instance, here is how Amazon Prime uses personalization to communicate with subscribers.

The subscriber knows what’s in it for them without any ambiguity. Thus, after opening the app or watching a video, the content recommendation section entices visitors to explore similar content. Likewise, you can communicate with visitors and add personalized sections with clear headings like “You might also like” on the webpage based on past activity.

Additionally, the emergence of customer data platforms (CDPs) makes it easier to have a customer information hub collecting data from various sources. CDP allows tailoring a cross-channel hyper-personalized experience. For example, a regular customer of an eCommerce store with the habit of buying in discounts can get a tailored email, paid ads on social media, and a section on the website with top deals of the month or season. It will make the customer engage with the brand for a longer time, as all digital touchpoints have been customized to serve the intent of the customer.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

Reduce page loading speed

Imagine a visitor waiting 4-5 seconds for a webpage to load; with each passing second, the visitor is most likely losing interest and trust in the brand.? There is a substantial negative impact on the conversion rate due to an increase in page load time. Here is an excellent infographic showcasing the relationship between conversion rate and page load speed.

A marketer with the help of the website manager must regularly audit the website speed with tools like GT Metrix, and Google Pagespeed Insights to find possible opportunities to improve the speed. Also, a good content delivery network (CDN) and a dedicated hosting server can ensure the speedy delivery of content across geographical domains.  

Engage with interactive elements

What leaves an impression on visitors’ minds is experiences, not just plain information. Static content on landing pages limits the experience, and visitors are left to their imagination about the product or concept included in the content copy.  Interactive elements fill that gap and allow the visitors to experience the content they just read. 

For example, on the VWO Deploy landing page, the visitors get to play with all the features of the editor described in the page copy. 

This increases the dwell time of visitors and helps them understand the product they intend to buy. Marketers must include interactive elements that align with the topic of the landing page and spark interest. Here are some of the common interactive elements that you can embed on your landing pages:

• Tools and calculators
• Quizzes, polls, assessments, and tests
• Maps, interactive timelines, and graphics
• 360-degree video
• Drag-drop media editors  

Moving forward

Once you’ve successfully grabbed the visitor’s attention, make it count. Avoid ambiguity and provide clear messages that are comprehensible. Communicate what the next steps entail and ensure that they are easily accessible.

As attention spans may continue to decrease, the best way to deal with it is by continuously optimizing the user journey while keeping the three Es in mind: Experience, Expectation, and Ease of use. 

Lastly, let the customer enjoy each interaction and see you as a beacon of positivity in the saturating market.

The anticipation of an economic slowdown has caught businesses off guard while they gear up to face the brunt of it. 

But what remains surprising is the general tendency of companies to slash marketing budgets when economic downturns result in lower sales and revenue losses for them.

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

Cutting down on the marketing budget and restructuring the marketing budget judiciously to adjust to the evolving economic uncertainties are two different approaches – with different outcomes. When you go ahead with the latter, it ensures the long-term sustainability of your business. 

Then why do businesses decide to compromise on marketing? How should they strategize instead? We discuss all that and more in the next section. 

During a recession, other expenses take priority, pushing marketing investments to the backseat. Paying employees’ salaries, running operations, adopting new tech stacks, and maintaining important contracts are considered more crucial for business survival. 

Also, companies fear that promotions and advertisements around this time can displease customers who are now more likely to control their spending and are watchful of how brands position themselves during economic turbulence. 

On the contrary, McGraw-Hill research showed that B2B organizations that maintained or increased their marketing budget during the 1981-1982 recession had significantly higher sales during and for the next three years following the recession. 

So, how can marketers prioritize and adopt strategies that help businesses flourish during and after a recession? Here are 5 strategies you must take advantage of:

5 ways you can market your business during a recession

Customer marketing

Do you know even a 5% increase in customer retention can shoot up company revenue by 25-95%? This tells us that customer marketing – marketing to your existing customers – is the best bet during an ongoing recession when the focus is on achieving more by cutting down on spending. 

Starbucks aced customer marketing during the 2008 recession. The world’s largest coffeehouse chain put customers at the heart of its recession-combat strategy by allowing customers to share their expectations to improve the ‘Starbucks’ experience. In fact, the brand launched the Gold Card reward program to indulge its ‘super users’ with freebies and other in-store benefits at the peak of the 2008 recession crisis. 

It is this strategic customer marketing that cemented customer loyalty and helped Starbucks not only survive the recession but also come out of it stronger than ever. Here are a few tips for you to get customer marketing right in the face of an impending recession:

1. Send personalized emails to maintain a personal rapport with existing customers by sharing relevant information and offers.
2. Provide extra value through improved customer service, free add-ons to existing features, or offer detailed analyses of your customers’ problems and highlight how your product or service can solve them, and so on.
3. Offer discounts or incentivize your users to encourage them to refer your brands to others (get decision-makers on board with these objectives). 

Existing customers are the real driver of your future revenue growth, as they have the power to influence the purchase decisions of your potential customers. Don’t mind going the extra mile to please them and maintain a healthy retention rate if you want to build business resilience during a recession.

Content

Changes in customer behavior, choices, and buying preferences demand a new way of explaining your marketing message. With that said, we don’t mean changing your vision and mission; it is about finding a different and more relevant way of saying things. And how can you do it? By producing impactful content that resonates with audiences.

With 70% of customers wanting to learn about a brand through content rather than advertisements, content can be the medium through which you can reach your target customers without spending a lot on paid advertisements. 

Getting your message across to target audiences has to be done thoughtfully during a downturn. Ensure the content your produce or revamp reflects the recent market trends and resonates with customers to help them figure out how your brand is helping them stay agile in times of crisis. 

Need inspiration? One of the biggest cloud-based software companies Salesforce built its ‘Leading Through Change’ resource center, featuring blogs, webinars, videos, and ebooks to help businesses fight through the pandemic-induced economic crisis in 2020-21. HubSpot also walked the same route by launching Adapt 2020 to help businesses adapt to the changing environment through educational content.

How to level up your content game during a recession? Below are some tips you can follow for great results.

1. Create content for every stage of your customer funnel to engage your audiences and encourage them to become your customers.
2. Use positive language and maintain an empathetic tone in your content, considering the sensitive mood of your customers during a downturn. 
3. Repurpose your old best-performing content to increase traffic flow to your website and double the chances of generating more leads. 

As content marketing costs less and generates more leads than traditional marketing, it makes a strong marketing investment against a recession backdrop. Even if you don’t see results right away, be assured that your content strategy will eventually bring more conversions. Till then keep creating content to educate your audiences and feature on their top-of-the-mind recall.  

Conversion optimization

As recession grips the economy and businesses struggle to stay afloat, it’s never safe to put all your eggs in one basket. For example, paid advertisements may help get tons of traction to your website, but you wouldn’t want to keep all your eggs in it because throwing money at ‘low-traffic’ problems can be difficult for you in an already cash-crunch situation.

The above organic marketing methods can drive significant website traffic, but how do you convert that traffic to leads? This is where Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) comes to your help. With CRO, businesses make the most of the existing traffic without pumping more cash into running ads to drive website traction. 

Let’s say, you believe adding guest checkout will prevent drop-offs and encourage purchases on your website. So, you pit two experiences against one another (the control without guest checkout and the variation with guest checkout) to check which one performs better in driving more revenue conversions. You’ll obviously go ahead with the experience that shows a higher conversion probability. That’s a no-brainer. Thanks to A/B testing that helps marketers improve key metrics impacting important business decisions in critical times. 

Now, remember, while A/B testing is one of the CRO techniques, CRO is an overall process of helping businesses deliver great user experiences. At a time when conversion rates are going down and users’ buying habits changing, CRO can indeed empower businesses by enabling them to identify optimization opportunities and improve conversions. 

If you’re wondering where to start, you can try a holistic tool like VWO that facilitates hypothesis generation, user segmentation, a 360-degree view of customer data, and of course, different types of testing (not just A/B) to improve user experiences and contribute to business ROIs. Take an all-inclusive free trial with VWO to kickstart your CRO journey the right way. 

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SEO

Over 70% of B2B customers start their product research on Google search engines. How does this affect your SEO strategy during a recession? The answer is pretty simple. When customer needs and behavior change during a downturn, you can perform keyword research and follow search trends to understand what search terms customers use to find products, services, or answers to their problems on search engines. This way you can tailor content as per customers’ needs, driving more engagement and eventually convincing them to spend more on your brand. 

You may also audit your content pieces and optimize some of them with SEO keywords to make them relevant to the current market scenario and stay real with your audiences. These combined efforts will help improve the online ranking of your content and bring them to the fingertips of readers who want the most relevant answers to their search queries. 

Further, all those SEO strategies that were previously overlooked because of other priorities can now be addressed. So, when your competitors are busy pondering whether to do it or not, you can get an edge with SEO by improving site speed, crawlability, link building, indexation, and so on. 

Much like content marketing, SEO takes time to show results, and you can’t immediately tie its metrics to your business revenue. On the better side, both these organic marketing activities cost less than paid advertisements while helping build brand awareness in the long run. In other words, make sure your SEO game doesn’t lose momentum right now because its results will outlast the recession when the economy recovers in full swing. 

Co-marketing

Today, businesses can’t survive or function in siloes. They need to reach out to other like-minded people, build relationships, and establish authority in the industry. And co-marketing is key to this objective. We understand running a co-marketing campaign is not a cakewalk as it takes a lot of effort in finding the right partner, setting common goals, fitting into each other’s schedules, and so on. But when it’s done right, co-marketing campaigns can create a lasting impact on audiences. 

If you wonder if co-marketing is worth giving a shot during a recession, we say look at how Netflix and Xbox nailed it back in 2008. Based on this deal, Xbox Live Gold subscribers could stream TV shows and films from Netflix on demand. It was a win-win for both parties as Netflix got access to some million Xbox members, whereas Microsoft saw this as an opportunity to pitch its gaming product to the potential customer base. 

Considering the woes of the recession, co-marketing can also be cost-effective because both brands can pool resources together instead of only one party bearing the marketing costs. From creating shared content like eBooks, webinars, and blogs, to co-hosting product launches whether offline or online – co-marketing allows your brand to attract eyeballs, which in turn,  contributes to revenue growth in the long run.

Before we sign off…

Adjusting marketing priorities is not just a recession-friendly strategy. It speaks volumes about how businesses form, value, and maintain relationships with customers when time is not in their favor. From a business perspective, such a mindset allows companies to be proactive rather than reactive to surrounding changes and turn challenges into opportunities at every step. 

As one can figure out from our above discussion, marketing teams can do a lot more than they think to help companies sail through a recession. But before you dive into all strategies, start with A/B testing first to take the uncertainty out of decision-making and practice data-driven marketing during critical times. With a holistic and user-friendly tool like VWO, you are sure to maximize marketing wins and help achieve business goals. So, wait no more and make a head start today. Good luck! 

Truly personalized marketing has become a necessity rather than a nice-to-have. This is because customers have already come to expect a certain amount of customization, such as their name appearing at the top of a marketing email. Now, they’re looking for the next level, such as web pages that automatically display content based on their preferences or location-based ads for special offers at nearby stores.

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

Luckily, technology is on our side, with automation and machine learning making it easier to provide truly personalized marketing content. Let’s explore what that means for your business.

What is personalized marketing?

Personalized marketing is the practice of targeting content to specific customers based on data you’ve collected. This includes their interests, preferences, and behaviors. Companies use this data to create highly customized content, which is delivered to customers via email, ads, or other platforms. For example, VWO Personalize enables you to deliver thousands of unique journeys tailor-made for a specific audience and triggered at the right time. You can take a free trial if you’d like to explore it.

Customer data is collected using automated tools and smart algorithms, which is where machine learning comes in. Typically, a code is added to the website, enabling the machine to capture valuable data such as clicks, time spent on site, and purchase history. With the right technology, you can also collect data from customer interactions across multiple channels.

Data collection also includes gathering information on customer demographics, such as age, gender, location, and financial status. Once you’ve collected all the relevant data, the algorithms will analyze it and identify which customers should receive which content.

The aim is to create a great experience that feels unique to each customer. This means reaching the right person at the right time with the right message. Think: 

• Custom emails (and we don’t just mean inserting their name instead of “Dear customer”)
• Targeted discounts 
• Product recommendations 
• Birthday offers 
• Rewards for loyal customers

Benefits of personalized marketing

Personalization lends an important human touch to your marketing strategy (even if everyone knows it’s carried out by a machine). It makes your prospect feel valued, as the brand has made an effort to find out what they want.

Customer happiness leads to increased loyalty. This has a positive impact on your acquisition costs (it’s typically cheaper to keep the customers you’ve got). Loyal patrons will also recommend you to others. This, in turn, enhances your reputation and attracts more business.

Plus, personalized marketing can improve your ROI, as tailored recommendations encourage customers to spend more than they would with traditional advertising. According to one survey, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that remember them and provide relevant offers and recommendations.

Meanwhile, 63% of US marketers see increased conversion rates as the main benefit of personalization. So, if you’re worrying about conversions and revenue and asking, “How long does it take to see SEO results?”, it’s worth devoting your marketing efforts to personalization.

Challenges of personalized marketing

Personalized marketing isn’t a walk in the park. For one thing, you have to make sure your customers aren’t put off by having their preferences and behaviors tracked and analyzed. There are also data privacy laws to navigate.

Another challenge is that you need to collect a lot of data to accurately predict what customers want. This is in addition to segmenting customers based on things like age, gender, and location. And you’ll want to carry out experimentation to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s time-consuming to do any of this at scale.

Even if you use a tool such as Apache Hadoop to process and store large volumes of big data (Read this Databricks article about Hadoop software), it’s not possible to manually create personalized emails or ads for every customer. That’s where machine learning comes in.

What is machine learning?

Machine learning (ML) is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables machines to learn continually from data. Algorithms analyze large datasets to identify trends and relationships between data, using their findings to predict which actions or experiences are most likely to give a certain result.

The machines get smarter the more data they absorb. After a while, they become capable of making their own decisions and adjusting their actions without human input.

It might sound wildly futuristic, but we all experience machine learning in our everyday lives. If you browse an item on a retail website, expect to see it advertised on your social media feeds. When you type a message on WhatsApp, suggested words pop up based on your previous message content. And when you log in to Amazon or Netflix, you’ll see recommendations tailored to your preferences.

How is it used in marketing?

In personalized marketing, ML is used to analyze the type of content, keywords, and phrases that grab the attention of your target consumers. Once you’ve discovered what matters to them, you can create relevant content or infographics. And, over time, the machine will learn which content is most effective for meeting particular goals.

Here are some of the techniques commonly used in machine learning:

Regression analysis

This is a statistical method that allows you to examine the relationship between two or more variables. You can use linear regression to figure out which pages are most likely to lead to conversions, as a regression equation can reveal a definite relationship between the number of clicks on a certain page and the number of conversions. Logistical regression is used to analyze historical shopping behavior data, which helps you determine personalized follow-up actions to deal with cart abandonment.

Clustering algorithms

These algorithms help you, group customers, into segments by analyzing unlabeled data, separating it into groups based on shared characteristics and qualities, and assigning it into clusters. 

They can be applied for recommendation engine development and social media analysis. The idea is that if a connection exists between people, they often have a common set of preferences, so you could be confident that followers of a particular Facebook page would react positively to an ad for something similar. 

Association rules

Association rules reveal interesting relationships between different variables in huge databases and can also be used to build recommendation engines. For example, if you buy a new phone on Amazon, you might see a recommendation for a suitable phone case. This is based on the fact that other customers bought both items together, and the computer has learned that it’s a popular action.

Markov chains

This method is used to model probabilities, such as analyzing a user’s real-time website behavior and making navigation predictions based on it. A machine might spot that most visitors click on CTA buttons when they’re positioned in the middle of the page, so the web designer knows to set all pages up that way in the future.

Download Free: Website Personalization Guide

Why is machine learning so effective for personalized marketing?

Personalization at scale

Machine learning tools learn about customer preferences much faster than humans can. They’re able to process huge amounts of data almost instantly and make smart decisions based on it. 

For example, the machine knows when someone has abandoned their shopping cart and automatically generates a personalized follow-up email. Take a look at the following example, where the message includes the shopper’s name and gives them an incentive to return:

Deeper insights

ML is useful for gaining a deeper understanding of your audience. Machines can learn from filters that allow website visitors to sort items by category and deep behavioral tracking that monitors mouse movement, scrolling, and time spent per page. Google’s deep learning technology enables it to come up with suggested searches for individual users.

They can also analyze interactions using Natural Language Processing (NLP), where computers learn to understand spoken words and text in a human-like way, and sentiment analysis, where the machine can tell if the participants’ attitudes are positive or negative. Both techniques help marketers to realize when a customer is unhappy, or find the ideal opportunity to upsell.

Adjustable actions

Because machine learning enables computers to develop knowledge and analyze data constantly, it means that evolving customer characteristics and behaviors can be taken into account. 

If a customer has been with you for a long time, their tastes and circumstances may change. Machine learning helps you be prepared for that, as the tools can adjust and refine content for the most up-to-date preferences.

For example, Salesforce has an AI called Einstein, which is capable of adjusting its modeling with every customer interaction and additional piece of data it receives.

Best practices for using machine learning in personalized marketing

A massive 93% of global B2B professionals believe that personalization efforts on their websites have paid off in revenue growth. But how can you ensure that machine learning augments those efforts most effectively? Here are some tips on how to get it right.

Put the customer first

Sounds obvious, but you should always keep the customer experience at the top of your mind. Don’t get so carried away with new technology that you forget why you’re using it. If there’s a situation where a live phone call would work better than a personalized email (such as compensating a customer for a problem or mistake), go for it. 

You can also use ML to strengthen the customer support experience with options like chatbots and voice-activated search.

Timing is key

Personalized marketing isn’t just about tailoring the content of your messages. The right timing is crucial if you want the recipient to engage fully. Every customer is unique, and they don’t all check their emails or browse social media at the same time of day. Machine learning lets you customize send/display times based on previous behaviors, which is called “intelligent delivery.”

Use A/B testing

A/B testing compares the original version of your digital property with one or more variations and measures the difference against defined goals. It uniformly splits your traffic between versions to determine which version fares better. This means that a significant proportion of your traffic is sent to an underperforming variation.

To maximize conversions in the experimentation time window, VWO offers multi-armed bandit (MAB) testing. The MAB algorithm allocates traffic dynamically – which means it continuously identifies the outperforming variation based on the data obtained during the test and routes the majority of the traffic dynamically and in real-time to this winning variant. 

So if you have a short window for optimization and not enough time to wait for statistical significance, you can opt for this machine-learning-based testing to maximize your conversions. To know more about this, take a free trial with VWO or request a demo with our MAB experts. 

Personalize your website

As well as personalizing pop-up ads or emails, you can tailor web pages and apps to suit specific customers. When someone browses the site or app, the content they see can be personalized based on things like gender, location, and whether they’re a new customer. Again, Amazon and Netflix are particularly good at this. Take a free trial to see how VWO Personalize can help you with this. 

Take an omnichannel approach

Customers like to use whichever channel is most convenient to them at the time, so make sure personalization extends across all of them. You can use functional testing tools to check your websites and apps are working as intended, with the right messages reaching the right users.

The more channels you have, the more data there will be! You might also use pandas DataFrames to load data from different databases and data formats to get a complete view and segment records within a data frame. (Read this Databricks article about pandas DataFrame structure).

Takeaway

As people are bombarded with marketing messages from a growing range of channels, you need to cut through the noise with truly relevant content. Machine learning allows you to:

• Personalize your marketing messages at scale 
• Make the data-gathering process more efficient 
• Experiment with your messaging to drive conversions

However, marketing teams need not fear for their jobs. Machines are not yet capable of displaying creative intelligence or consciousness. So smart marketers can combine AI with human input to deliver a personalized customer experience.

Hopefully, this guide has provided a clear answer to the question, “What is personalized marketing?” and you now feel confident to use personalized marketing to supercharge your business.

When you optimize your landing pages consistently to improve user experience by engaging visitors on your website, it signals to Google that your website fulfils the user intent. As a result, Google incentivizes you with a high ranking in the search.  

SEO has evolved from being a traditional keyword-oriented model to a full-blown strategy as Google keeps changing its algorithm. User intent has become one of the top factors for ranking, but at the same time, it has become challenging for marketers to predict visitor behavior while making any changes in their SEO strategy. 

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

The logical resolution to the problem of figuring out what Google and visitors want from your website is rigorous testing of your SEO efforts.

This is good news because a) it is possible to run A/B tests without impacting SEO negatively and b) Google encourages A/B testing as long as it is done bearing in mind recommended best practices. 

In this blog post, we have covered the basics of SEO testing and how A/B testing can help you optimize your SEO efforts. 

What is SEO testing?

SEO testing enables businesses to optimize their website performance on the search engine result pages (SERPs). If you have ideas to optimize SEO for your website, you can do so by testing your ideas before you execute them at scale, which otherwise might pose a negative impact on your business if you ship the changes untested. Well-informed decisions also facilitate planning a smooth CRO roadmap in terms of both—strategy and budget. 

The big advantage here is that Google encourages you to A/B test your SEO changes. You may test pages such as product pages, category pages, and elements like meta tags, copy format and relevancy, headline, call-to-action buttons, and other SERP features. These modifications are crawled by Googlebot and help Google learn new information and assess the implications of changes on your website for ranking. 

SEO testing is different from A/B testing, as explained in the following sections.

What is Googlebot?

Google defines Googlebot as the crawler that visits web pages to include them within the Google Search index. In simple words, it is computer software or a bot that keeps learning new information on your web page and indexes the changes in Google’s database. It supports the latest JavaScript features that help them render the web pages to make ranking decisions. 

Google declared the bot as the new evergreen Googlebot. And yes, there is just one Googlebot and it doesn’t like crawling duplicate pages as duplication confuses it. Let’s understand its function in bot-based testing.

Bot-based testing

With SEO bot-based testing, you run the split URL test and assess the control and variation response in a given period. It is done either to accept and deploy the changes to similar pages on your website or reject the changes before moving on with your next experiment. 

For example, if you want to test your call-to-action (CTA) buttons to rope your visitors in organically, you can compare the copy and positioning of your CTA on your website by running a split test. The bot in such a test will be presented with unique web pages with unique CTAs that you want to test. It will crawl down the web pages to index the new information which you have presented through the test, thereby mitigating the chances of confusion for the bot. You will get the winner once the test signals a significant influx of visitors into the sales funnel, which eventually will be reflected in SERPs. 

On the contrary, if you want to run an A/B test for CTA copy and positioning, you present a control version to a set of visitors and a variation to another set of visitors. Here, the bot may not be able to distinguish between the two pages (until you use link attributes to your original page, as discussed in best practices below), and it may confuse your testing situation with cloaking—a practice lethal for your SEO.

How do A/B testing and split URL testing impact SEO?

Simply put, they don’t. SEO is not negatively impacted by testing activities as long as you’re not deliberately trying to confuse Googlebot. 

Also, A/B testing and split URL testing are not the same. Your visitor will land on a variation or control purely by chance in an A/B test, whereas in split URL testing, they will land on statistically similar groups of pages as tests are hosted on different URLs. So, in A/B testing, you split users to test experiences, and in the latter, you split pages with distinct experiences. 

For example, if you want to test your title tags which are key to SERPs, you can compare your title tags with SEO split testing, which will allow you to create groups of pages, say product pages, where you want to ship your changes to. These pages are categorized into unique testing groups and hence appear alike to visitors and Googlebot. This type of testing is straightforward and effective for SEO. Whereas, it gets a bit tricky in A/B testing if you don’t follow the best practices. 

Split URL testing is preferred for SEO when you need to test major changes like content format, navigation, design, etc. However, you can A/B test your SEO efforts as well keeping in mind a few factors that we will discuss in the following sections.

Best practices for A/B testing SEO activities

Google advises stringent guidelines on SEO A/B testing if you don’t want to hurt your SEO:

• Avoid cloaking

According to Google Webmaster guidelines, cloaking is showing one version to humans and others to bots. It’s deceptive to the search engines, bringing more harm to your website. Try always to serve the original content, otherwise, Google can demote your website.

• Use 302 redirects

Always use a temporary 302 URL rather than 301. You may need to redirect some of your URLs to consolidate similar content pages into one or move your site to a new address.

• Use rel=“canonical” to avoid duplication 

While running an A/B test for minor changes on your web page, always add a link attribute to your alternative URLs for your testing pages. This linking enables Google to distinguish between the original and the variation. For example, Google can index your homepage as a test variation if you want them to understand that you are running a test on your homepage. You can do so by identifying the page by using rel=”canonical”. It also signals to Google that other variations are close copies and should not be confused with the original URL.

• Experiment runtime

Figure out what you want from the changes on the website. Since Google changes its algorithm all the time, be mindful of your test’s duration as your SEO might get affected if Google updates its algorithm while your test is running. This may, in turn,  impact the metric you are testing. Such situations certainly get you skewed test results. It is advisable not to run SEO tests for long periods, unmonitored. If you want to see the positive impact of the variation, then you may want to conclude the test and make the changes live. However, if you want to gauge the scale of impact, then wait until your test reaches statistical significance. 

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

How does VWO help in running A/B tests and split URL tests without impacting SEO?

According to Google webmaster, website speed is one of the key factors impacting website ranking. The VWO Asynchronous SmartCode loads in parallel with your website, thereby having zero impact on your website load time. You can customize time-out parameters for the VWO SmartCode to execute and make sure that your visitors do not experience any inconsistent behavior while using the website. If the VWO SmartCode fails to execute within a specified time, it stops and then loads the original content of the page.

VWO Testing ensures that there is no negative impact on your website ranking while A/B testing your SEO elements. For example, if you want to A/B test some minor changes in the website, such as the copy, image, or color of a button, it usually has no impact on the page’s search result snippet or ranking. However, if you want to make changes like copy length and redesign your website, it is recommended that you follow best practices such as using query parameter rel= “canonical”.

For instance, if you have two different URLs ending with A.php and B.php, you can use the below code on B.php to avoid content duplication: 

<head>

    <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://vwo.com/A.php” />

</head>

Although Google will index both the pages, you are enhancing Google’s knowledge to consider the original A.php for SEO by adding the above code. 

Conclusion

SEO is a black box. Nobody knows the future of Google’s algorithms and how the search engine perceives your unique web pages. 

The closest you could get to understanding it is by acknowledging that Google is getting smarter every minute as you read this blog piece. The only way to keep your SEO game up and running in this competitive age is through consistent experimentation. 

Just like the COVID vaccines. There are so many other factors at play you can only say with some reasonable amount of confidence that you can expect the results to come out a certain way.

Kevin Indig, Head of SEO, Shopify

The only solution to crack your SEO efforts for revenue generation is to keep testing, keep optimizing!

Parents do it. 

Teachers do it. 

Spouses do it. 

And so do companies. 

Of the 100 users who land on, let’s say, your landing page, most won’t buy. That doesn’t mean they’d never buy. And you could bridge the gap between today’s abandonment and tomorrow’s BUY NOW, by remarketing. 

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

What’s more, you could validate your remarketing ideas and strategies by A/B testing them and taking decisions based on data as opposed to guesswork. 

What is remarketing in digital marketing?

Have you ever clicked on an online ad (say one showing a camera or laptop) but not actually gone through the act of purchase?

Remarketing is the repeated use of prompts to get a customer to follow through on something they showed interest in.

The visitor would find the same ad popping up now and again on various websites, including social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook. 

What we just described was retargeting (using cookies to chase the customer across the net). Remarketing would use email as well as cookies. They both have the same goal but use slightly different routes.

However, the two terms are used interchangeably and mean suggesting to the customer time and again to complete the purchase. 

The importance of remarketing in digital marketing lies in the fact that someone has already shown an interest in the product. It is much easier to convert their interest to sale rather than try the same with a completely random person. 

That is enough reason to convince 56% of companies to depend on remarketing for customer acquisition. 

Five essential remarketing strategies to adopt in 2021

1. User segmentation

Analysis of your marketing campaign would reveal three types of visitors who respond to the initial advertisement.

• Bounce: They hit the landing page and make a U-turn. The time spent is minimum, often less than 20 seconds, and they do not visit any other page.
• Browse: These users stay on your site for several minutes and view different pages. Often they focus on a variation of the product they saw in the advertisement: a different model or something else that your site’s search algorithm shows them. They might purchase in the future and are researching.
• Abandon: These users begin the buying process and add the product to the shopping cart but midway through checkout quit the platform. They could be distracted or have second thoughts about spending at the last minute. 

The remarketing strategy created by Google Adwords experts has to be carefully differentiated for these groups.

The first group is the least interesting. They have little or no value and perhaps landed on your page by mistake. 

The second group is more plausible. Perhaps they found cheaper prices elsewhere or maybe need a slightly varied product. Informing them about more choices is the best approach.

The last set is vital. They liked the product and the price. 

With a little nudge, they can be converted into sales. Pursue them aggressively since with a small amount of persuasion they would complete the purchase. Maybe a discount is all that is necessary. With an average 70% abandoned carts rate, it is essential to resort to remarketing to increase sales. 

2. Email remarketing

A crucial part of the remarketing process is the use of email for outreach. 

If a regular customer, whose email address is in the database, bounced off the website, he can be reached through email. Email applications such as MailChimp are invaluable in this regard. They have inbuilt tools that can track such activity and respond automatically.

What can you do through emails that are so unique? You have at your disposal at least a hundred words, often more, to convince the customer to visit you and complete the purchase.

An email is also a perfect way to throw in a customized offer. Someone who has purchased repeatedly in the past can be provided a hefty discount to entice them to spend more. Since they already know your quality of service, they are likely to accept if they feel they are getting a good deal.

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

3. Pixel remarketing

Cookies have for long been the accepted way for websites to track users. Comprising a line of code embedded inside the browser which reports back user activity to the server, it sends back information about the device and browsing session. 

A pixel is a special type of cookie. It is a tiny image. Google Adwords and Facebook are by far the most prolific users of tracking pixels.

Since usually a person is logged into these services 24×7 (at least on a smartphone) the pixel summons up the cookies as needed. 

Both Google and Facebook have a decent idea of the user profile (gender, location, type of content preferred, browsing habits, buying history), and the use of a cookie alongside that makes for an unbeatable combination for highly effective remarketing campaigns.

One crucial benefit of pixel remarketing is that the strategy uses behaviour-based algorithms that learn from past activities. The service already knows if the user accepts remarketing prompts or ignores them.

4. Google Display Network

GDN is a group of over 2 million sites where Google displays advertisements. These ads are either banner ads or short video clips, much like those that interrupt playback on YouTube.

GDN ads are persuasive and able to create a good impression. The most necessary element of online advertising is adequate space to convey a message and a banner advertisement serves that purpose admirably. 

To enable it, add the Google remarketing code to your website product pages and enable Adwords to show banners.

The use of well-placed tags tied to the Google Display Network is a sure-fire way to create conversions.

5. Target mobile users

Make it a point to reach out to those on mobile. 

Not only do mobile devices provide the bulk of internet searches but they are also used by younger consumers who can be persuaded more easily to make the purchase.

If you have a mobile app it is easier to target cart abandonment and other issues through push messages. Also, offers of exclusive discounts can be communicated without being intrusive.

Make app-specific purchases more lucrative than website-based purchases (Amazon does it regularly) and see your remarketing efforts hit a new high. 

Let the pros manage to remarket

The key to all the above is the successful management of Google Adwords and Facebook Business Manager.

Google controls your preferences through the Audience Manager. Google Ads offers filters that are complex and allow granular choices to be made. 

For E.g. visitors of a page are classified into visitors of a page who also visited other pages, visitors of a page who did not visit other pages, visitors of a page during specific dates, visitors of a page with specific tags, etc. 

Similar changes can be made to Membership Duration (how long a customer would be retargeted), and platforms (include or exclude YouTube or GDN). Every aspect of remarketing can be tailored to suit the specific business segment, size, and budget.

Facebook Business Manager is similar in its complexity. 

Besides, Facebook lets you target a specific age and gender (unlike Facebook, Google does not have access to age and gender).

A generic remarketing strategy without insight would not work at all. 

Because of this complexity, it is worthwhile to use a reputed digital marketing agency such as Uplers to manage your remarketing efforts.

They are affordable and take the burden off your shoulders. 

Having a professional team manage the remarketing and augment conversions while you focus on growing your product line and improving the after-sales service is the best way to grow your topline. 

Using VWO Engage for remarketing

With VWO Engage you can send out push notifications for both desktop and mobile. You can craft effective messaging that is influenced by the behaviour of your website visitors. For instance, you can develop onboarding campaigns for new users. You can also choose your target audience – whether it’s your entire subscriber base or a custom audience with specific behavioural properties and set up entry-exit triggers for the notifications. VWO Engage also offers in-depth reporting for each push notification campaign that you build. Take a 30day free trial to test it out yourself! 

Research shows 62% of Gen Z, and millennial consumers want visual search functionality, while nearly 23% of Google search queries yield images. At the same time, only about 8% of eCommerce brands have added visual search to their site experience.

Download Free: E-Commerce Best Practices Guide

Clearly, this is a huge untapped opportunity that you would do well to capitalize on before your competitors catch up.

What is visual search?

Essentially, visual search refers to search made about or with images. The most common way for users to do this is through Google Image search, either by entering keywords and looking for matching images or searching through image files for the original source.

One significant step forward in this direction is Google Lens, which allows users to add calendar events, find recipes, take photos of products they like, and learn where to find them online.

Social media platforms like Pinterest also have functionalities that allow users to shop with the help of pictures they take. Similarly, individual brands like Neiman Marcus have their versions of visual search tools.

The luxury retailer, for instance, has embraced experimentation by launching a feature in their mobile app called “Snap. Find. Shop.”

Their customers can take pictures of any shoe, handbag, or clothing through their phone camera. The app would then scan the Neiman Marcus inventory to see if they carried an item similar to the item in the photo.

The innovative app makes product recommendations that the customer can purchase from the app itself. Due to this functionality, Neiman Marcus has been able to increase its overall app usage and customer engagement significantly, thereby reducing customer churn.

Why visual SEO matters

At present, there are over 1.8 billion websites on the Internet, and that number is going up every day. To stand out among all that competition, you need a good reason for customers to look at your website rather than anyone else’s, and strong visuals are a big part of that. Here is why visual content is your new best friend when it comes to site SEO:

1. Conveys more information

Today’s customers are comfortable when it comes to Internet searches. It is not surprising since 50% of site visitors decide whether to keep browsing a site or abandon it within eight seconds.

You thus have only a small window of time in which to make an impact — and visuals, with their high retention rate, allow visitors to learn much more about your site within that small window than a block of text would.

Therefore, invest in creating high-quality infographics, charts, and data visualizations that sum up important information in an eye-catching manner, and position them on your webpage in a way that site visitors cannot miss.

2. Attracts more links

Backlinks are critical to establishing your website as domain authority, in addition to being one of the biggest search ranking factors.

While backlinking remains a challenge for SEO executives, having strong visual content such as a data-packed infographic can boost your backlinks in much less time than a blog post or other text-based content would.

Therefore, help the process along by promoting your infographic among your professional network, follower base, and content influence — the more popular it becomes, the more likely it is that sites will link to it.

3. Improves average site visit length

The longer visitors spend on your website, the higher your search rankings go, especially since Google launched the Rankbrain algorithm in 2015. Having an infographic, a video clip, or even an evocative image on your website’s landing page is an instant attention grabber. It creates a feel-good vibe that encourages the visitor to stay longer.

Moreover, 95% of purchases are driven by emotion. That makes visuals an essential and powerful sales tool. They can efficiently communicate valuable information about your business offering, which significantly increases the chances of getting more conversions.

To convert the people you are sending to your website, you must opt for proper conversion rate optimization to get more out of your existing website traffic. Strong visuals can help you achieve this goal comfortably.

4. Boosts social activity

There is a strong correlation between a website’s social presence and its SEO rankings. The more social activity you enjoy, the likelier it is to generate clicks.

Plus, new social media algorithms make it much likelier for image-based content to show up on people’s feeds than text-based content — which makes it all the more critical for you to invest in solid visuals for your Facebook and Instagram pages.

Tips to optimize visual search for your business

Image-based search technology will only evolve over the next few years, and eCommerce websites that do not come along for the ride are bound to suffer. Here are some easy tips on how to incorporate visual search into your site optimization and appeal to the new generation of visual-first buyers:

1. Add images to your sitemap

Build up an extensive library of high-quality original images and include them on your sitemap so that visual search engines can quickly scan them. Be sure to have a system of organizing them, such as by URL. With the help of an image sitemap, you will give Google crawlers more information about the photos — and make them more susceptible to show up in search.

2. Size your images correctly

When it comes to image sizing for your website, remember that less is more. Excessively large images will only slow down the load time and bring down the user experience on various browsers and devices. This would obviously hamper your search rankings in the long run.

Before uploading your images, use a compressor such as TinyPNG to bring them down to an optimal size without compromising quality or the proper proportions.

It would be best to choose an image file type that lends itself to adaption and compression — JPEG is usually the best. For videos, AVI works best.

Download Free: E-Commerce Best Practices Guide

3. Name your images properly

Search engine bots will be scanning your image file names besides the images themselves. Be sure to add a unique and relevant name and a short but descriptive alt text to each. This way, even if the bot cannot recognize what your image contains, it can refer to your file name and alt text for the right keywords and feature you in search results.

For instance, if you have a photo of Notre Dame on one of your landing pages, the file name should not be DSC1456.jpg. A proper file name would be “notre-dame-paris,” ensuring the main subject of your landing page is at the beginning of the file name.

4. Include alt tags

As mentioned above, alt tags are essential for search engine bots scanning your site. However, they are also helpful for consumers using screen readers to browse your website. Even if those consumers cannot see the image, alt text gives them an idea of its contents. When writing alt text, be sure to keep it clear and relevant for the reader — do not stuff keywords in for its sake.

A typical alt text: <img src=”escalator.jpg” alt=”man on escalator”>

A converting alt text: <img src=”escalator.jpg” alt=”man wearing backpack walking down an escalator”>

Alt text can help you rank in Google Images, which is responsible for 20.45% of all online searches worldwide.

5. Optimise your eCommerce site for text search

While visual search should undoubtedly be a focal area, you do not want to forget about ranking for traditional text-based search either. Optimize your eCommerce site’s text for SEO and be as careful about your keywords, headlines, alt tags, and metatags as you would be for your image file names and alt tags. Do not forget to A/B test them over time to see what works for your site and what does not.

6. Add captions

Captions provide context for your images and also weave it in with the rest of the text content on the webpage. You may use the same image more than once on your website, but add different captions to suit different contexts.

Captions with relevant keywords help boost your search engine results and boost the customer’s reading experience by providing details about the fabric and design theme for an image of a dress.

7. Upgrade your chatbot

Several chatbots now offer visual search functionalities as well. If you are serious about optimizing your website for visual search, adding a chatbot like this can streamline conversations with site visitors.

The chatbot provides links to relevant images as real-time answers to queries. For instance, if someone asks about summer clothing on an apparel website, the chatbot can respond with images from the latest summer collection.

American Eagle Outfitters, for instance, has a chatbot that asks questions to visitors and makes product recommendations based on the information collected.

8. Optimize your social media visuals

Particularly on channels like Instagram, having the right visual appeal is key to attracting and retaining customers.

Apart from using high-quality images, pay attention to how your feed looks — for instance, Instagram uses a grid layout, so you want each photo you upload to complement the other ones around it visually.

Moreover, to attract the attention of shoppers, your Instagram feed needs to reflect your brand aesthetics appealingly.

For instance, if your retail brand stands for earth-friendliness, create an Instagram feed representing just that. Your choice of images needs to reflect your brand aesthetics.

Infuse warm and earthy vibes through the artistic selection of your product photos. Plus, use the right hashtags so that your images are easily searchable, and be sure to post at the optimal times for maximum engagement.

Wrapping it up

As Google continues to push the boundaries of what search is and what it can be, eCommerce marketers need to plan for the future of search, which at the moment, is exceptionally visuals-focused.

Since online shoppers cannot touch or feel a product, they depend heavily on images to make purchase decisions. Therefore, it is essential to optimize eCommerce sites for visual search. What do you think?

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

This is where CRO marketing enters.

In this blog post, we will focus on what CRO marketing is, the best strategies to pick up and prioritize, and the tools that are available for you to leverage CRO’s true power.

Table of Contents

• What is CRO marketing?
• What are CRO marketing goals?
• CRO strategy to get started: focus on low-hanging fruits
• Prioritize your strategies
• CRO marketing tools
• Best practices
• CRO marketing: on a rescue mission for the complex journey of the modern customer

What is CRO marketing?

Conversion rate optimization marketing or CRO marketing is crucial because optimization enables your marketing efforts to edge over those who do not practice CRO marketing efficiently.  

CRO marketing is a process of increasing the percentage of your website visitors taking the desired action (such as subscribing to mailing lists, signing up for a free trial, filling out a form, or downloading an ebook).

These actions could vary from meeting your main business conversion goal to attaining micro conversions. For instance, visitors making an online purchase on an eCommerce store could be your primary goal, and clicking the ‘add to cart button, which would move them ahead in the sales funnel, could be a micro-conversion.

So, how can you get more visitors to convert? The first step is not looking at the visitors but looking within your company to identify your business goals.

What are CRO marketing goals?

First thing first. You must know what you want to achieve with your optimization exercise. You need to zero in on a set of goals, and for that, you need to sit with your stakeholders and identify the critical metrics (also known as KPIs) that define your business goals. Once you have identified the goals specific to marketing, you can use the A/B testing framework recommended below to test your optimization ideas.

1. Do your research: Utilize Google Analytics and behavioral analysis tools, such as heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys, to gather behavioral insights from your existing website traffic.

2. Identify the top key metrics that directly impact your business conversion goals—for example, free trial sign-ups, online purchases, etc. Don’t forget to make observations of these data as they will help you compare your conversion rates pre and post-experimentation.

3. Construct hypotheses based on each of the observations and combine them wherever required. You can fill the following to create and articulate a hypothesis: “I believe______, and if I am right then _______, because_________.” The latter part of the hypothesis is the qualification of the outcome that you expect and why you think so. For example, I believe that adding customer testimonials on key pages will address the low rate of audience purchasing because testimonials will establish the credibility of our product/service as social proof. You can prioritize your hypotheses using the ICE model for efficient execution. 

4. Run your experiment: You can utilize a testing system with analytics like VWO to measure the KPIs against the current baseline and desired goal. For example, to test the impact of social proof on your conversions, run an A/B test, wherein your control could be a landing page without testimonials and a variation of the same landing page with testimonials.

5. Analyze your test results: Study your test results for any uplifts in conversion rates (including micro-conversions). It’s imperative to run a test till it reaches 95% statistical significance, which yields relevant results. Also, you should run a test for a minimum duration that accounts for traffic variations for both weekends and weekdays. Do remember to document your result metrics for subsequent experimentation activities. 

In the below section, I’ve listed some common and easy-to-implement tests that can kick off your CRO journey smoothly and are likely to give you some quick wins.

CRO strategy to get started: focus on low-hanging fruits

Your high-traffic website has enormous potential to turn your visitors into customers. You only need a direction on how to go about the optimization process. Your CRO strategies could be both site-wide and visitor-level.

Here is a list of some strategies that you can implement:

1. Rule of congruence: Congruence in marketing can be explained as the alignment and uniformity of your brand voice across channels in the most intuitive way. For instance, your ads should match the image on your landing page, leaving no room for confusion in your prospects’ minds. The last thing you want is for your prospects to doubt your brand. You can determine and confirm what drives more traffic—the same image on the ad and the landing page, or two different images. 

2. Use CTAs anchored within the blog text: According to an experiment by HubSpot, they captured between 47% and 93% of leads on one of their posts, using the text-based CTA. You can highlight your text-anchored CTAs within your blog posts or guidebooks. Test whether they work in favor of your conversions. 

3. Create lead flows: A lead flow in CRO defines the flow in which a lead is captured in exchange for an offer. It is a pop-up or a slide-in box that appears while you interact with a web page. The idea of this pop-up is to offer something to add value to your experience. But it can be annoying, as it hinders your focus while you are reading on a screen to solve a problem at hand. Yet, in a few cases, it has worked well. For example, the below-shown lightbox drove a humongous 1,375% more sign-ups as compared to the sticky sidebar form on the landing page. 

Lightbox form:

Sidebar form:

4. Optimize your conversion path: Remove the friction from the sales process for your high-intent visitors. These are those visitors that land on your website either through paid advertisements or direct search with an intent to convert. You can remove the friction by optimizing your conversion paths for different visitors. Conversion path is a process wherein your website visitor becomes a marketing-qualified lead (MQL). For example, a few visitors might want to get down straight to work. In a B2B setup, your prospects might not want hand-holding across a typical, step-by-step buyer’s journey that you have crafted. Instead, they would need a call with a sales rep by jumping right on requesting a demo than a free trial.

Analyze visitor behavior, note these observations, and run experiments to find the best conversion path for high-intent visitors. A healthy conversion path for your website constitutes: 

• Digestible content with a clear context: Address a specific pain point with a solution in your content.

• Knowledge of buyers’ personas: You should know who is your ideal prospect/customer. For example, you should know their demographics, psychographics understanding, etc.

• Enticing CTAs: Action-oriented, congruent, and clear CTAs are the most enticing ones. But again, never overestimate your assumptions. You might end up shooting yourself in the foot without backing your hypotheses with data. Utilize the behavior analysis tools to embed CTAs in the right places on your website.

• Optimized thank you pages: The conversion path comes to a full circle with an optimized thank you page. It will fulfill the promise you made to your visitor on your landing page and allow you to push them further in their buyer’s journey.  

5. Optimizing your high-performing content: Leaving your high-performance content unattended is akin to killing your conversions slowly. For example, your high-traffic blog posts should trigger you to push these visitors into your marketing funnel. You can do so by adding CTAs pertaining to your business within the context of your content in the most logical and intuitive way. This approach is likely to yield better conversions. 

You can optimize your high-converting landing pages as well if they do not drive traffic. To do so, fix your SEO with semantic indexing and entities, which might result in an organic push from Google. Of course, this does not guarantee a high ranking on Google. However,  you can run an experiment to see if that works for your high-converting content pages. 

6. Retargeting to re-engage website visitors: Your visitors may jump off your website for many possible reasons. However, you can retarget these users by using push notifications and also by optimizing your landing page.      

1. Web push notifications (like VWO engage): These notifications are pretty easy to build and do not need much technical skill as well. You can utilize push notifications to encourage visitors to keep coming back to your website, thereby increasing conversions.

2. Optimizing your paid ads: You can optimize your ad content with a well-crafted copy, engaging images, videos, and a compelling offer to target the lost visitors. With behavioral insights in place, you can also utilize website personalization for retargeting. You can utilize retargeting tools such as Retargeter and Adroll.

These strategies lay the foundation of your CRO efforts. But lack of prioritization before implementation can leave you befuddled with the results. To gain efficiency, prioritize your strategies in a way that they can be implemented logically.

Download Free: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide

Prioritize your strategies

Assign a number on a scale of 1 to 10 to every strategy that you pick for your optimization exercise, using the impact, confidence, and ease (ICE) scoring model. A higher score would mean that the strategy should be picked and implemented early on in the pipeline. 

Now that you have a list of prioritized strategies with you, ready to be implemented, you must realize that strategies alone can’t help you succeed in your optimization journey. You will also need the right set of tools. 

CRO marketing tools

Evaluate your CRO tools well before putting them to use. Here is a recommended list of tools you can utilize for your CRO efforts. 

Best practices

Your customers’ response and, of course, trends in your business goals should drive your CRO efforts. However, there are a few best practices that any CRO team should follow:

• Always have your ideas, assumptions backed by data, and test them before making any changes to your website.

• Utilize the ICE model to prioritize and rank your CRO strategies as discussed in the above sections.

CRO marketing: on a rescue mission for the complex journey of the modern customer

An efficient CRO strategy takes care of the complicated journey of a modern, 21st-century customer on your website. For example, a visitor’s journey on a travel website is not as straightforward as one would assume.

As shown in the below image, the flow involves several nuances that need to be taken care of while creating a website’s CRO strategy. 

Identify the steps where your visitors get lost and break them down into small and easy steps to move things seamlessly. Never assume that your prospects or even customers know everything. Instead, always back your observations with data, empathize with your personas, and implement changes only after testing your experimentation hypotheses.

CRO marketing is not a one-time activity but a persevering quest to be better than what you were yesterday. The best part about CRO marketing is that it does not interfere with your other existing marketing strategies; instead, it facilitates them to convert better.

So go on, embark on this exciting journey! Happy optimizing!