4 Ways to Sell More Using 'Customer Journey Optimization' Strategy An efficient customer journey will improve your conversion rate.

One of the greatest customer acquisition strategies that entrepreneurs use to increase revenue is conversion rate optimization (CRO). Rather unfortunately, majority of them do it the wrong way. According to Unbounce, despite 98 percent of paid marketing campaigns fail, many marketers still blindly invest in online advertisements to get more traffic to their business.

It's inevitable that advertising on search engines and social platforms helps you to reach out to broader audience and experience a traffic hype. However, you'd be wasting your money if you don't convert the traffic to happy buyers.

In past few years, many entrepreneurs have started implementing conversion rate optimization strategies to achieve optimum results. Rather surprisingly, less than 23 percent of those businesses are happy with their CRO initiative outcome.

Many startups keep redesigning their website or focus on additional activities to increase traffic, hoping to attract more customers. In fact, the secret behind successful customer acquisition strategies and achieving higher conversion rate has nothing to do with your traffic volume, and the look and feel of your website; it's all about customer journey optimization (CJO).

Related: 6 Ways to Cure Your CRO Woes

You can boost your conversion rate optimization by engineering your website to offer a valuable customer journey. In actual fact, it would be absolutely wrong to lead every user to your opt-in landing page or your sales letter. Don't be a pushy sales man because customer journey optimization strategy is about directing your visitors to the right page and engage with them to encourage them to jump into your sales funnel.

I've outlined four essential steps to an efficient customer journey optimization that you can implement right away and improve your conversion rate.

1. Understand your customer's persona.

Understanding your customer's persona plays a great role in optimizing your business for higher conversion. The first step is to define your customer segment precisely.

Begin with exploring your prospective customer's desires, pains, attitude, and understand their needs. If you've discovered a new customer segment, you may modify your business model to accommodate the new opportunity.

Using empathy map not only helps you to speed up the customer discovery process, it also provides you with actionable tools to explore different aspects of your customer's persona, and craft innovative business models.

Print a copy of the empathy map template and place it on a wall. You can use the template to categorize your questions and focus on what your customers say, do, think, feel, hear and see. Empathy map also enables you to discover more about your customer's pains and desires.

Gather your team together and answer the following questions but do not limit yourself to this set.

• What hinders her?
• What does she dream to achieve?
• How does she perceive success?
• What influences her to make a purchase?
• How much social media and communities influence her decisions?
• What worries her?
• How does she behave in public, and among friends?

Even if you target the same customer group as your competitors, it's vital not to copy and implement their conversion optimization strategies. For instance, offering free trials or unlimited access to the basic version of your product might sound very intriguing to a group of customers, however, it might not be the right strategy for your business to adopt.

2. Leverage on historical data.

You must be able to back up your CRO strategies with historical data before thinking about which growth hacking strategy to implement. For example, extracting data about your existing customers who have subscribed to your monthly plan can be a great guide to learn more about your customer lifetime value (LTV).

Related: Why Smart Companies Are Making Customer Experience a C-Suite Job

Knowing how long a customer stays with you before they quit and use a competitor's product enables you to craft engagement strategies that result in higher retention rate. The same scenario applies to businesses who offer one-off deals and generate revenue from selling tangible products.

You can use retargeting strategies and enhance your conversion rate optimization initiative based on your customer's purchasing behavior. Simply, highlight the group that has made follow up purchases or have referred new customers to your business and engage them with new deals or ask them to join your loyalty program.

Besides, discovering whether these customer segments are referred to you through social networks or backlinks from a partner allows you to adjust your landing page optimization strategies accordingly.

3. Educate your customers.

Instead of driving all traffics to your signup page hoping that they will love your product and make a payment, you should concentrate on setting up an automated process to help your visitors to have a pleasant and educational tour in your website. Take to account that each customer segment has a set of unique needs that must be addressed accordingly.

Whether you are using paid marketing strategies or leveraging on white hat SEO techniques to attract customers to your business, it's essential to engineer your campaigns to lead your visitors to the right landing page.

For instance, you may publish a beginner's guide about how to get the best out of your product on your blog and drive unexperienced visitors and new users to your blog before pushing them to your conversion funnel.

Related: 3 Ways to Strengthen Your Email Marketing Impact

On the other hand, you can set up a separate ad for expert users and get them to visit your limited-offer product page. This way, you are addressing your customer segments the right way, as well as improving your conversion rate that consequently results in higher ROI.

Truthfully, focusing on numbers and prompting visitors with "signup now' popups before they even know what values your product can offer will impact your conversion rate, negatively.

4. Engage with your customers.

One of the common mistakes that online marketers make about conversion rate optimization strategy is to call it a day the moment the customer make a purchase. According to Econsultancy, 82 percent of companies admitted that customer retention is significantly cheaper than customer acquisition. It was also reported by Ipsos that customer acquisition costs 500 percent more than retaining customers.

Setting up a blog, and putting together a solid email marketing strategy to keep your customers engaged with useful tips will invigorate your customer retention strategy. Simply leverage on strategies such as content marketing to craft a piece of content, preferably a step by step guide and share it with your customers.

You must take your business relationship more serious than whatever is defined in your terms and conditions. Engaging with customers after they buy your product can result in stronger customer loyalty. You could even make them love your business by finding the most challenging issues that your customer face when they use your product and help them to address it for free.