There are a few ways we can help. First is through a process traditionally called CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimisation. This is a process by which increase the percentage of the visitors to your website who then go onto become customers. We analyse your site against best practice across a number of established, tried and tested criteria; our own 20+ years of experience building sites and see how existing customers are using your site.
Based on this information, we suggest a number of changes and experiments to try, each one evidence-based. We then conduct A/B tests on the site to prove the value of our recommendations, and iterate the site until there are no further large gains to be made. (The development side of things can instead be done by your existing agency, or a freelancer should you require.)
We also offer a downloadable guide to understanding how to do some of this work yourself, and you can read more about this here; and there’s an online course in development which complements and builds on the information in the book, which will be live in Q2 2022.
Finally, we can also develop a whole new website for you based on the principles of high conversion rather than optimise your existing one.
Quite simply, it’s not our specialism. We believe in focusing our efforts on the things we’re good at, and not in spreading ourselves thinly across a range of different disciplines whilst claiming to be experts in them all.
We work specifically with the customers once they have arrived on your site, and making the site work harder for you.
CFO stands for Customer Focused Optimisation, and is a discipline we have created internally to combine a number of existing processes and applications to increasing the conversion rate of a website.
It combines lessons and from Direct Marketing, Advertising, Branding, Behavioural Science, CRO, UX and design to optimise a site around the customer. Rather than CRO, which is aimed at purely optimising conversion rates, it instead focuses on the behaviour of the customer on the website and how that can be optimised to best meet the overall business objectives of the company.
The workbook is aimed at people who are getting fewer than 5k visitors a month to their site, or thereabouts, and have a conversion rate of less than 3%. You’ve probably set up the site yourself and you’re doing all the work yourself. You want to know how to make your site better, but you don’t have the money to pay for an agency to do it.
Platforms like Shopify make it easy to set up a shop online and take payments without using a specialist agency, but this can cause an issue; without specialist knowledge, how do you know that the site you’ve built is going to sell as well as it can do? Even if you’ve used a freelancer from Upwork, how can you check that what they’ve done is best practice? Founders like you have enough to do worry about, but if a site is under-performing it’s costing you money especially if you’re spending money driving traffic from social ads to the site.
The good news—if you’ve never done any work on your site it’s reasonably safe to expect an uplift of around 25-30% on your online sales when you do. Could you manage an extra 30% turnover this year?
Northern Comfort is run by Rob Dobson. He’s been building websites for over 20 years, and set up Northern Comfort ten years ago. In that time we’ve worked for huge companies like Anglo American, Barclays, Astra Zeneca. A large part of our work now is focusing on D2C companies in the food and drink sector, which is why we’ve sponsored the Bread and Jam conference a few times.
This year we’ve increased conversion rates for food and drink D2C clients, like you, from 53-100%. One client we worked with for a year was turning over 35X what they were are the start of that year.
Absolutely. We can work with your existing agency to brief them with any work we recommend, or alternatively work alongside them.
