So increasing conversions is absolutely the primary goal of any small business owner or any marketer. You have to focus on getting these conversions in order to get your sales in order to increase your revenues and stay in business, especially if you’re an ecommerce business, focusing on Aliexpress dropshipping. So how do you do that? How can you increase conversions and use your marketing to its best effectiveness?
Flint McGlaughlin, the CEO of MECLABS Institute, created what he called the conversion heuristic. Now this is just a toolkit. It’s a mental framework to guide you through your marketing practices so you can understand how to make these adjustments, how to make changes, and what is going to increase and effectively influence your conversions the most.
Follow along on this one. The conversion sequence, this heuristic, is C = 4M + 3V 2(I-F) – 2A. It sounds complex, but this is just a toolkit to get you from point A to point B. Don’t worry about solving it. We’re going to break this down and show you how you can use this to influence your marketing.
First thing we’re going to talk about is C. C is the conversion.
This is the end goal that you’re trying to get to. And obviously as a business owner or a marketer, you understand that conversions are the life blood of your company. So this is what the rest of this heuristic is going to guide us to. You can’t ever guarantee a conversion, but you can increase its probability.
And M stands for motivation.
It’s also given the highest numeric value, because at the end of the day, a consumer’s motivation is the primary driving force behind the decisions that they make. You could have a terribly designed website. You could have a subpar product. But if you’re the only name in town, the only place that they can get what they’re looking for, they’re still going to work with you based on the value of their motivation.
Now you can work with consumers to meet their motivations by reaching them exactly when their motivation is highest by using strategic marketing and reaching them right at that moment. Motivation is the highest value, and this will influence just about everything else. But if you focus on a consumer’s motivation, that’s where you really start to increase your opportunities for conversion.
Next is 3V. 3V is value proposition, and it’s given a numeric value of 3
Slightly less than motivation, but still incredibly important. Now if a consumer isn’t motivated to buy your product, even though you’re a great company, they love what you stand for, they love what you do and they love the service that you provide, if there’s no motivation, they’re still not going to buy that.
But if it comes down to comparing you versus your competitor that’s where the value proposition really starts to become important. You have to differentiate yourself and showcase why it is important to work with you versus somebody else. It’s given a value of 3 because it’s still highly important.
Next is 2(I-F). (I-F) is incentive minus friction.
The incentive is what the consumer is getting for working with you. Maybe they are going to get a free ebook, or they get free shipping if they spend a certain amount. Maybe the incentive is just the product that they’re going to get, or they’re going to get it faster. The service that you provide could be a free consultation or a free estimate, something like that. That’s your incentive. That is, the value of that is subtracted by the friction, the difficulty that you have created or built into your sales funnel for them to get that.
Now there is a tipping point, and you do need to have some sort of friction. If it’s too easy to provide information to you, then everybody will do it, you’ll have low quality leads. Maybe high volume, but low quality, and just it wears out your sales team. If friction is too high, then the people that have filled out the form or bought from you or reached out to you, they may be extremely motivated, they may be very high quality, but you have very low volume.
So, you want to find a balance here between the incentive and the friction. Too much friction means that you’re going to have a much, you need to have a higher valued incentive for someone to want to work with you. If the incentive is low and the friction is high, you’re going to see a loss of sales and a loss of conversions.
And finally, the last one is 2A, and A stands for anxiety.
Now there’s nothing that you can do to completely remove the anxiety of working with you, especially if we’re talking about an online business, maybe a new company. You don’t have an established name. Maybe there’s bad reviews out there or something like that. All these things will build on a consumer’s anxiety.
Are you going to provide the product? Are you providing the service that they’re looking for? Is it going to be the value for what they’re paying? Are you going to steal their credit card information? Is this a secure website? Are you a legitimate company or just fly by night? All of these different things feed a consumer’s anxiety. You can never get rid of it entirely, but you can work to mitigate those different issues.
You can provide your contact information very easy to find, they can easily reach you on phone, email, chat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, things like that. You can immediately respond to reviews, both good and bad. You can ensure that you have a padlock on your forms and you say that we will never share or sell your information. All these little things will go to mitigate a consumer’s anxiety.
Another thing you could do is actually look at your website. Is there something about your website, maybe it’s old or maybe the design is out of date, it’s no longer modern, it’s not mobile responsive. All of these different things will feed a consumer’s anxiety, so look at every single little piece and find what you can do to influence it. Turning the knob just a little bit on each one of these different pieces will increase your conversions.
