Best Practices for Conversion Optimization in the Digital Transformation Journey

We are consistently asked by retail executives about what the best practices are for deploying traffic and conversion analytics in the digital transformation journey, and which actions will deliver the best results.

The Big 5

We believe the following are the Big 5 in order of importance:

1. Executive-level sponsorship/ownership of conversion metrics
2. Empowerment of store-level users to act on insights and change behaviors;
3. Adopt Conversion and Traffic as a lens to understand the true performance of stores, managers, and marketing.  Set priorities for each accordingly.
4. Adopt conversion and traffic as essential KPI across the organization (it’s not just for Marketing or Store Operations);
5. Conversion Optimization is an ongoing process, not a one-time project. Allow time for this culture shift to take hold. (It is worth the effort!)

Why Bother with Conversion Optimization?

Every day hundreds or thousands of shoppers enter every store.  Without understanding these trends there is no way to improve your success rates. It is like management guru Peter Drucker said, “You can't manage what you can't measure. You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” 

In retail, it is particularly important to measure your sales opportunities.  Only a small percentage of customers who enter stores make a purchase. By simply improving the percentage of shoppers who make a purchase once they have entered the store by only  1% the average store can improve sales by 5-10%. People counting is not expensive and the ROI is very impressive.

Certainly, there are more sexy-sounding initiatives like customer experience, loyalty, social media, or mobile apps, and more.  However, it cannot be overemphasized how much traffic and customer conversion help you get the absolute most out of other in-store and marketing initiatives.  It really is essential to focus on traffic and conversion as a key component to improving store sales.

Traffic and conversion offer the most essential understanding of brand performance and are much faster in terms of measuring and driving results than many other initiatives. The overall ROI that they deliver both on traffic systems alone but also in improving returns from other digital initiatives suggests that it should be given high priority in the digital transformation journey.

Traffic and conversion analytics can help you with the digital transformation of your retail culture….and make you money from the get-go.