When developing a product or content marketing strategy, it’s important to outperform your competition. I’ve always recommended to my clients to know and understand your competition because this is truly your roadblock in any business. In the end, when you are outperforming your competition, you’re able to increase conversions and engagement. However, many bloggers still make a vital mistake when introducing content or a new product to their readers. They forget the importance of testing and what factors matter. I believe competition ONLY effects your conversions where it matters most, like the sales page or opt-in form. For example, if you and your competition are selling the same product, the only thing that’s going to differentiate both of you is the sales process. Your competition might have a better sales funnel that is more engaging or they’ll have an effective opt-in process. In the end, this will affect the numbers down the road and it’s important you know what factors matter to avoid losing leverage.
Today, I’ll be discussing “3” important factors and how they relate to the testing process. If you can master these elements, then you’ll have an easier time outshining your competition. Let’s get started…
Opt-In Process
Many people don’t know how important it is to have an effective opt-in process. Gathering email subscribers is very important in making sure you get return visitors and increasing the chances of conversions later on. However, not every opt-in process is perfect so you have to test what works in producing the highest ROI. For example, these factors all play an important role in the process:
- Form
- Colors
- Thank you page
- Text on page
- Call-to-action
As a blogger, you should be vigorously testing these elements until you find one that has the highest ROI. From my research, your competition is going to be all over the place with different experience so they’ll already be tweaking their opt-in process way before you. Once you’re getting a high opt-in rate, it’s time to test your follow-up sequence to make sure subscribers are opening your messages and they are producing a click-through. The good news is many ESP’s include analytical data and make it available to you in the backend. It’s important to analyze this data and make adjustments where you can.
The Purchase Process
The opt-in process is completely different than the purchase process because many people will opt-in, but NOT purchase right away. If your end goal is to convert this subscriber into a customer, then you have to test your opt-in process, making sure it’s easy for people to complete the process. Certain factors like the following are important:
Here is the element to pay close attention to.
Product delivery – how effective is the delivery once product has been purchased? Is it easy to download? Are there any quality problems?
Other factors matter as well as discussed above like:
- Follow-up
- Thank you message
- Call-to-action on purchase page
Testing all of these factors will allow you to ensure product purchasing is streamlined and there are NO problems along the way.
Contact Forms
It doesn’t matter if you’re running an online business or an actual physical business because customer service is very important. This is why I recommend continually testing your contact us form, making sure customers can get a hold of you when they have questions. If they can’t, they won’t continue to visit your site or might even cancel their subscription. The contact form must be simple so they can send it right away and you want to make sure it goes to the right department. You don’t want their emails going into your spam folder because this will cause a major roadblock.
- Make sure drop-downs are working
- Messages go to right inbox
- Easy to fill out and find
Once you’ve tested all of these factors, you’ll be able to streamline the customer engagement and retention process. This will improve brand awareness and build customer loyalty.