The detail of digital success.

It’s very easy for businesses to understand the immediate impact of a new digital sales or conversion process. They can (if it is implemented relatively accurately), see an immediate increase in the conversion rate of their sales, quote, booking journey alongside the inevitable improvement in revenue etc.

Quite rightly everyone gets a pat on the back when this is achieved, and the new process is held aloft as the ‘way things should be’. Likewise smart businesses understand the need to constantly measure and improve the process — but this constant improvement requires a both tremendous amount of work and consideration of multiple other influences….

Not least the wonderful human……

Who are;

Lazy and hardworking.

Smart and stupid.

Ignorant and aware.

Anxious and confident.

All at the same time and in equal measure.

So, how really can any conversion process be implemented and then constantly improved with such a contradictory and unwieldy bunch of humans following the journey?

Despite our best intentions of segmenting customers and creating personalised experiences — at any time and in any context the customer may do something silly — like not following our incredibly well-designed and hitherto incredibly successful process — and conversion rates drop…..

So, many businesses take a look at the analytics, the funnel, the bounce rate, the time on page and move call to action buttons, change the colour of a heading, make the heading bigger, create a new form, delete an old form, move an image, add an image — you get the idea.

Nothing fundamentally wrong with this you may think and indeed many businesses that do this see a short-term improvement in conversions.

But taking a look at the entire journey is we believe, a much better approach — after all changing the text on a call to action may improve the conversion rate of a human who has followed one journey but not of another who has come through a different route.

The problem with looking at the entire journey is that it takes time and sometimes it can challenge and undermine the initial conversion successes — but remember that humans are contradictory — maybe they’ve changed — and the initial conversion process that worked for them just doesn’t excite them now.

Working on the entire journey and conversion process means you need to break it down into component parts and rebuild new versions. At Human we have in the past taken one process and created and tested eight different versions — in real time with real humans using each route. We then refine down to six or four, then two and then the final most successful process is implemented — ahhh and then we start again — because remember (again) humans are contradictory…

And these journeys are not so different to each other, a text change here, a drop down selector placed there — small but smart changes inevitably produce the biggest improvements. We have seen two of our most successful increases in conversion processes by including a minimum order number (1) in a drop down — increase of 15% on conversions and [insert unbiased example and stats in here]

The biggest growth in conversion improvements comes from having a ‘starting again’ mindset, working through a fresh design and test process and then identifying the (often) smallest changes that make all the difference.

So, once you’ve created a successful and engaging conversion process, look at it, break it and start again. Then refine it, refine it again and make small but evidence based changes — you’ll get more improvements.

And then start again.