As a PR and marketing agency, one of the main reasons agribusinesses come to us is to help to them to generate more leads and ultimately, sell more stuff.
Some already have established marketing plans in place and need our help to optimise their channel activity to take performance to the next level, whereas others need us to come up with a whole new marketing strategy for their business.
Either way, we nearly always find opportunities to improve the conversion rate of their website which is something that gets consistently overlooked by marketers. By focusing on delivering a great user experience, you will convert more casual visitors into prospective customers. Not only that but it will help the performance of your advertising campaigns and give you a competitive advantage, and who doesn’t want a competitive advantage?
Let’s run some numbers using paid search as an example. Let’s assume you’re selling a DNA genomic testing service for cattle at a retail price of £495 which has a 30% profit margin. Your aim is to generate £2 of profit from every £1 spent on clicks via Google Ads.
Website A’s conversion rate is 1.5%. This simply means that for every 100 visitors to the site, 1.5 of them will convert on average. The conversion in this case is an online purchase.
Without going too heavy on the math, we need to take a few steps to work out the maximum we can pay for a click if we want to achieve our profit target.
By setting a maximum click price of £1.11, we know that as long as we pay that or less, we will achieve our desired ROI – we spend £74.25 to get a £495 sale from which we make £148.50 profit on, effectively doubling our money.
In reality, it’s not quite that simple because of keyword level performance variability – some keywords will convert at a higher rate than others but for the sake of the comparing websites with different conversion rates, we’ll keep it simple.
Now let’s run the numbers again for website B (which might be your competitor!) that converts at 2%: as opposed to website A’s 1.5%:
As you can see, the maximum amount per click to achieve the same amount of profit per sale increases. Because Google Ads is auction based, this affords the paid search manager of website B to bid more aggressively whilst maintaining the same level of profit per sale. This means more traffic to the site vs its lower bidding competitors and therefore more sales and profit.
I’m sure you can see how this becomes very powerful and scalable over time. But how can you increase the conversion rate of your website to give you this type of competitive advantage? Read on!
Conversion Rate Optimisation, or ‘CRO’, is the process of optimising a website to improve the rate at which is converts visitors to leads or sales.
In agriculture, that might be an online purchase (for example a farmer ordering a new gate or a few tubs of mineral lick) or for non-ecommerce website, a form fill or phone call to enquire about products or services. Other types of conversions include booking a demo or test drive (in the case of machinery and vehicles) or brochure downloads. In reality, most website have more than one conversion types.
At a basic level, CRO as a concept is very easy to understand. There are however a number of different elements which need to be combined in order for a website to achieve its potential from a conversion perspective. These include:
There is a common misconception that simply changing things like the colour of buttons is all that’s needed to increase conversion on a site when that’s rarely the case. It’s true that typically red buttons can convert less well than some other colours due to psychological ‘danger signals’ but in isolation, making your main CTA button a ‘safe’ green isn’t likely to solve all of your conversion issues.
To make the biggest difference to website conversion rates, more wholesale changes are usually required and tend to include elements from the list above which we’ll break down and expand on shortly.
There is no substitute for testing and using data to inform decisions. That said, a website does need a reasonable amount of traffic if you want to achieve statistical significance with your conversion testing programme.
To use some conversion rates used as examples earlier, if we ran a simple A/B test and the control page converted at 1.5% and the variant converted at 2%, to reach statistical significance at a confidence level of 95%, each page would need over 10,000 visitors which, on a lot of websites in the agricultural sector, would take a while to reach.
In cases where you’re trying to improve conversion rates on a low traffic website, taking a more heuristic approach might make more sense – implementing improvements based on well-established best practices. Another approach in this scenario is a user-centric one which uses qualitative methods such as user interviews and surveys to inform decision making.
The next section should provide you with some of the information needed to take a heuristic approach to CRO for your website.
“If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”
I love this quote by Ralf Speth, the former CEO of Jaguar Land Rover. It amazes me when I walk around some of the ag shows and see some of the design and branding on display – for what it costs to exhibit, it makes sense to present your brand in the best possible way and design is a fundamental part of that.
Everybody appreciates good design – if they didn’t, we’d all be walking around in the same clothes and driving the same cars. It is subjective of course, but there’s a reason why luxury cars are admired by many, not just for what’s under the bonnet.
If you think the aesthetics of your brand and website are potential barriers to conversion, have a conversion with a graphic designer or a marketing agency like us to get a professional opinion on it. In a lot of cases, the fundamentals are there and with a bit of work, the appearance of a brand and/or website can be transformed.
To some this might sound a bit complicated, but it really doesn’t have to be – it’s just about laying out your website navigation and content in a way that makes it easy for users to use and understand.
There can be a temptation to try and be a bit different, to stand out and flex your creative muscles, especially if you’re combining this stage with the stage above. However, I’d recommend keeping it simple – users on the internet have got used to using websites and finding the information they need in a specific way so there’s really no need to stray too far from this. It frustrates me as a user when I land on a website of say, a creative agency, where the primary goal is to show off their talents, and the website looks cool but I’m left scratching my head trying to figure out exactly what they do and who they do it for.
This can make a big difference to conversion rates on a website – the language you use and the context in which you use it can make the difference between it resonating with a user who goes on to be a customer and putting off the user and them ending up as customers of one of your competitors.
Learning how to write conversion focused copy which is both articulate and persuasive is a massively valuable thing in CRO and in a lot of cases is quite formulaic which can make the learning curve a little less steep.
To bring this to life, let’s look at a heading which is typical of what we see – we’ll use the fictitious cattle DNA testing business we mentioned earlier.
‘Optimise Your Livestock Operations with Our Advanced Testing Solutions’
The wording is vague and lacks specificity – if it’s aimed at cattle, say cattle and not livestock. What are advanced testing solutions? Milk testing? Health screening? What is it optimising and what issue does it solve? Who knows.
We would recommend something more in line with this:
“Enhance Herd Quality and Profits with Precise Cattle DNA Genomic Testing”
This is more specific in the problems it solves/the benefits it delivers as well as what the solution is and how it’s applied. In the words of Steve Krug (author and website usability expert) ‘don’t make me think.’
Social proof is massively important in most industries but especially in agriculture where there’s a cultural norm of ‘looking over the farm gate’ to see what other farmers are doing – this translates to the online world too.
The opinion of another farmer will resonate much more strongly with farmers than carefully crafted messaging from a brand will so use case studies and testimonials to your advantage. Video is the perfect medium for this but if that feels too ambitious as a starting point, simple text-based testimonial boxes will do the job. The important thing is that you have genuine quotes from the genuine farmers saying how good your products and/or services are.
Other trust factors include:
As mentioned earlier, people will no longer accept a site which they can’t view on their phone and/or is slow to load.
Free tools that Google provides such as PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console can give you a lot of information on where your site might be falling short with guidance on how to improve it. Alternatively, ask your SEO person or web developer to look into it and report back on where things are at and what needs to be done.
Although there are some best practices that you can follow, a lot can be achieved in this area by employing a critical eye and using your common sense.
Put yourself in the mind of a user landing on the page you’re assessing and ask the following questions:
To keep it simple, I’ll provide 3 pieces of advice here:
The example used earlier when describing this was short and simple forms to fill in. I realise that you want to collect the best quality data when people are making enquiries or downloading your resources, but we’ve seen it time and time again – long forms kill conversion rates. The best conversion rate is likely to be just an email address box but that’s rarely sufficient from a data quality perspective.
A good balance between data quality and conversion is to collect name, email address and one or two more key pieces of information for your business. That might be farm type for example, or region. If you really need to ask for a phone number then do so but it is likely to put some people off. Another contentious one is herd size or amount of land – some farmers don’t like to be asked those things.
Working on your website from a conversion perspective is essential if you want to get the maximum value out of your digital campaigns.
It’s activity which can deliver more leads and/or sales without needing to drive more traffic to your website so it’s surprising that more people don’t put more focus, energy, and budget into it.
Not only can it enhance the perceived value of your brand but it can deliver better ROI and allow you to be more competitive at channel level.
We’ve only scratched the surface here but hopefully it gives you the appetite to explore the topic in more depth. If you want to learn more about CRO from us which is specific to businesses selling to farmers, I’ll be doing a talk about website conversion at our Agribusiness Growth Summit in October. You can register here.
