What is a conversion? A straightforward question but one that requires careful thought to provide a useful answer for your marketing strategy.
Conversions are often thought of as the last step. Usually, it’s when a transaction occurs, when money changes hands, like a loan disbursement or first deposit. From a customer acquisition and retention standpoint, it may be when a lead is qualified, or an application is submitted. These major events are often the last steps in a long series of small steps your customers make. It takes many smaller actions and micro conversions to nudge your customer forward and eventually reach the macro goal.
Thinking in terms of macro and micro can help point you in the right direction for improving your own tactics and act as a powerful approach to listening and responding to your customers. Designing your customer experience at the smallest possible granular steps can help identify the friction or hurdles your customers must overcome to do business with you.
Using BJ Fogg’s ability model, people typically face five different types of hurdles when trying to complete any action or associated micro/macro conversion:
- Time - from the milliseconds of site load to the hours collecting docs for a loan application
- Cognitive Load - how much thought is required to do what you’re asking your customer to do
- Money - how much does it cost, particularly up front, for what’s on offer
- Non-Routine - how odd or unusual is the step, how much out of their comfort zone is the action
- Physical Effort - having to actually move, including things like coming in person to a branch
- Social Deviance - is what you’re asking of your customer to do going against any social or cultural norms? Would they be embarrassed or criticized by friends and family for it?
Create a view of all the steps along the path to a macro conversion, with an assessment of what hurdles or ability is required for your customers to move forward. Think it through from as early in their experience or impression with you as you can. A whiteboard session with your front-line team closest to your customers at each step can help immensely. Survey and interview customers to make this view more vivid and real as you progress.
Next, measure, as best you can, the number of customers and their micro/macro conversion rates. Establishing baselines for each gives you a starting point to see trends and where efforts are resulting in improvements. Understanding where you have visibility and where you don’t can help uncover blind spots. This effort will provide you with a clear and actionable path for where to focus.
Incrementally improving your existing customer experiences/funnels, and building new ones with this end in mind, is a solid competitive advantage. Saving time and money is one of the main benefits of an agile approach to making your customer experience all it can be. Enter this process to learn as much as you can about your customers. Use that insight to make informed changes that produce improved results.
A continuous improvement approach, coupled with actionable data on your customers’ experience, is the path to success. If you’re interested in learning more or talking about where you should start, no matter where you are, reach out. We’re equipped with the frameworks and technology to give you a boost and get you to the next level of performance.