How to Improve Conversion With Session Replays
With user experiences shifting to digital platforms more and more, it is becoming increasingly important that we tailor the user experience to the buyer in order to increase conversion rates. We can help improve the experience by using metrics from Google Analytics, but these metrics don’t convey the nuances of user behavior. And how we address these nuances as sellers will separate the big hitters from mid-tier strugglers.
One of the best ways to address those is through advanced web analytics tools, including session replays. It makes it easier for us to address bugs, understand and improve the UX, and learn exactly what parts of design play a certain role for your customers. Plus, it helps us convey better stories of products and brands since we understand completely what customers are thinking.
What are Session Replays?
Session replays, sometimes also known as session recordings, or session playbacks, are simply recordings of mouse movements that users make on our website. They allow us to press the playback button and see exactly where each and every user on our website pressed or moved their mouse. It looks almost like a recording of someone moving the mouse around the website.
However, this is not exactly a video replay, video presenter software, or video footage. Instead, session recordings are created from logged individual events that are then collected and put together into an entity. Session replays can be a very valuable tool for CRO specialists. They help us understand our customers better and see exactly where the focus of our customers is, and create an understanding of your website.
Session recordings are a valuable source of information about the visitors. What we don’t learn through numbers, we can learn through tools such as replays. And that’s because we get to see the actual mouse movement of each and every user that comes to our website.
One of the biggest ways that session replays enhance our CRO efforts is by giving us a more wholesome understanding of our visitors. We are able to see exactly how users behave on our site, and how and where we can make improvements in order to satisfy the visitors even further. In this article, we’ll take a look at the ways how session recordings make us understand customers better and enhance our CRO efforts.
How Session Replays Improve Your CRO Techniques
Session recordings offer us a number of ways that will help us understand the users better and potentially kick our CRO game to another level. Let’s take a look at how.
- Session Replays Help You Solve Bugs Faster
- Measure How Your Customers Adopt New Features
- Solve Customer Support Questions
- Improve Your Onboarding
- Identify Funnel Leaks and Fix Them
- See How Your Customers Engage with Your Marketing
- Improve the User Experience
1. Session Replays Help You Solve Bugs Faster
Yes, bugs are an inevitable part of almost any website. But it’s certainly not something we want to have too much of when we’re selling something on our website. If there is a but that’s “game-breaking”, then our conversions can take a big hit and potentially, our entire business, too.
The good news is that we can easily solve them better with session recordings. Many session replay tools offer us the ability to take a look at sessions with “error clicks”. These error clicks show us the sessions where users encountered a bug and allow us a way to improve our website by solving these bugs.
Sometimes, our conversions start to suffer, and we can’t exactly put a finger on why that is. If you are able to pair up session recordings with console logs, then you’re in for a winning bug-solving solution. It is perhaps the most effective way to get rid of bugs and increase conversions and the potential of your website.
Also, user experience on the website will go up, and customer satisfaction will also go up a notch. And session replays can provide us with valuable insight as to where exactly these bugs occur on the website, and how we can solve them easily.
2. Measure How Your Customers Adopt New Features
If you’re someone who’s constantly adding new features to your website, then session recording can be an effective way of measuring how your users interact and use them. Sure, you can do that with A/B testing, but session replays can be incredibly effective at uncovering exactly how users interact and how they move their mouse.
Perhaps it will make your life much easier when you’re trying out new things and implementing them in your campaign. And you will get much faster and secure results when you really understand where these new features help and how they can be effective for your customer.
3. Solve Customer Support Questions
Another area where session recordings help you improve your relationship with customers is through customer support. You see, session replays can take your customer support game to a completely new level.
Sometimes, it might be hard to understand exactly what the issue is when a customer complains about something on your website. With session recordings, you will get a much better understanding of what that is, and how you can solve that problem seamlessly and easily.
You can co-browse with your users (with a small delay of a few seconds), and learn exactly what is bothering them. At the same time, you will be able to guide them through your UI and enable them to enjoy the full capability of your website.
And solving customer support problems is one of the key areas that can help you elevate the user experience to another level. And this can, in turn, help you build better relationships with your clients, and in the end, you will do a lot of good with it.
4. Improve Your Onboarding
One of the key aspects of online websites and retailers is the onboarding process. With session replays, you can make your onboarding procedure much easier to follow, as you can see clearly where there are stumbling blocks, and where the onboarding needs improvement.
You can simply watch some failing onboarding flows from your users, and you will quickly start to understand where your onboarding is not working. Perhaps it’s just a small error or a small, quick fix that will take your onboarding to a whole new level.
And we know that the more people you can have on board, the more conversions you can make in the long run. That’s why you should always focus on improving your onboarding, even if it’s not that bad, to begin with. There is always room for improvement.
5. Identify Funnel Leaks and Fix Them
With session recordings, you can find out where there are leaks in your funnel procedure, and where you need to fix your conversion funnel. Sure, there will be leaks in almost every aspect of your funnel. But the key here is not to eliminate these leaks, which is almost impossible. The important thing is that you focus on minimizing the losses each step of the way.
And one of the best ways to do that is to watch session replays of users who leave a part of your funnel. That’s how you can build some knowledge about where your site is lacking in terms of the conversion funnel. You can get a good understanding of where and how you can make improvements to your site.
And to do that, you can watch some sessions and see what is stopping users. And you will need to watch several replays to get tangible and reliable results and consequently, make the needed improvements.
6. See How Your Customers Engage with Your Marketing
An important aspect of every online business is how they connect their marketing to their conversions. It’s an important bridge that many fail to connect.
Perhaps you are trying to see how your landing page will impact your visitors. Or, you have recently put out a paid ad on Facebook and Google. In that case, you will want to learn how new users coming from those paid ads are behaving on your site. Do you think they are leaving too early? Then one of the best ways to find out why is with the help of session recordings.
7. Improve the User Experience
Again, session replays can help you improve the user experience on your website, which can potentially result in more conversions. You don’t want any broken links or dead links on your website, and you also don’t want any bugs that are preventing your site from prospering.
And a great way to fix this is to learn exactly where those problem areas are, and fix them as quickly as possible. With session recordings, you’ll be able to get a good idea of where you can easily improve your site in terms of user experience.
Wrapping Up
Ultimately, session replays can be very useful for a number of means that can improve your conversion rates. But you will also want to combine the tool with other CRO tools and analytics tools, which will take your CRO game to a completely new level.
