Five lessons for maximizing your online and offline conversions

'The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Online and Offline', ClickZ's recent webinar in partnership with DialogTech, was an insightful deep dive into how marketers can improve or fine-tune their marketing activities to drive online and phone call conversions.

The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Online and Offline‘, ClickZ’s recent webinar in partnership with DialogTech, was an insightful deep dive into how marketers can improve or fine-tune their marketing activities to drive online and phone call conversions.

The hour-long webcast is now available for on-demand viewing.

To whet your appetite, we have drawn out five key takeaways from the webinar that featured presentations from oil and gas giant Shell, smart home services provider Vivint, and call attribution and analytics specialist DialogTech.

#1 Consumers are using multiple devices on their path to purchase

Blair Symes, Director of Content Marketing at DialogTech, highlighted Google research that shows that 90% of people use multiple screens for everyday activities, such as booking a hotel or shopping for electronics.

Marketers need to be mindful of ensuring that consumers engaging with digital advertising at the start of the journey can later convert as easily as possible across a range of online and offline channels.

The transition to a mobile world is illustrated by comScore data that shows that more than half of global web traffic comes from smartphones, and also recent Facebook earnings figures that revealed that 84% of the social platform’s advertising revenues come from mobile ads.

#2 Click-to-call is a great way to convert mobile consumers

When consumers connect with brands, they choose whatever is most convenient, whether that means browsing a website, stopping by a store, scrolling through an app, or calling to talk to a real person, the webinar audience heard.

According to research firm BIA/Kelsey, paid search advertising alone drove more than 40 billion call conversions in the U.S. last year, as companies cashed in on their ability to give consumers a less cumbersome way to purchase than asking them to fill out a form on a smartphone.

#3 Think local

Marketers were advised to ‘think local’, especially when it comes to click-to-call. Marketers enjoy greater success when they use local numbers when targeting people on their smartphones.

Consumers feel more trust towards a brand if they feel they are operating locally in their city or locale. DialogTech’s experience with clients suggests that clients drive higher volumes of calls when they use local numbers.

Despite the myriad opportunities to target customers based on their locations, ClickZ research published last year found that just 22% of marketers agreed that they were exploiting hyperlocal advertising to its full potential.

#4 Keep things simple … and human

Shell’s Global Social Media Manager, Matt Owen, stressed the importance of keeping form fields as limited as possible to avoid putting off consumers. Take stock before you ask prospects to hand over information such as phone numbers that may not be crucial to the business.

“Keeping things short is the general watchword,” he said, pointing out that while click-to-call can be ‘enabling’, asking for phone numbers in a form field can be ‘interruptive’.

Owen talked about a great case study involving online retail community Fab. The company was able to increase ‘add to carts’ from collection pages by 49%, simply by having a more explicit call to action.

He also urged marketers to ensure that they employed internal or external professional copywriters to ensure that website text was as appealing and clear as possible, while also using ‘subtle psychology’ to maximize the chances of conversion.

While the technical aspects of CRO are important, he said that brands were most likely to succeed when they were coming across as ‘more human’.

#5 Attribute, integrate and optimize

An important bedfellow of CRO is attribution, to help understand how different channels are contributing to sales. In the case of click-to-call it is important to give credit to every ad that influences a call conversion, not just the last one.

James Valentine, Conversion Rate Optimization Specialist at Vivint talked about how providing unique phone numbers for consumers can help with the attribution and optimization process, as can analysis of which calls actually lead to sales.

If you know what is working based on call and conversion data, you can then target people with similar profiles.

Valentine also described how the company synchronized its analytics and CRM data to give more visibility on what was working and not working.

The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Online and Offline – is now available for on-demand viewing.

 

This webinar was produced in association with DialogTech. Click here to read our collaborative content guidelines. Views and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ClickZ.

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