The coronavirus is creating extraordinary times. For many Web sites, visitors, their behavior and needs have changed. Some Web sites have a 100% conversion increase, others a 100% decrease. What used to be the most normal thing in the world can now suddenly be a big conversion winner. For example, mentioning that your Web site still delivers may be an important question on visitors' minds.

It is also a time of opportunity. As a conversion specialist, this is the perfect opportunity to lend a helping hand. Both your visitors and colleagues will be left with many questions. Customer service will be inundated with questions for many organizations, product teams are mostly guessing about the best approach, marketing and innovation departments are facing a sudden change in needs, and many executives will undoubtedly be at a loss for words due to declining sales. 

In addition, in times of crisis, many people let go of their routines. Some routines are suddenly no longer possible because we are out of the office. Therefore, this is ideally the time to learn new routines. The routine of experimentation and validation, for example. By lending a helping hand with our expertise just now, colleagues will embrace our way of working more, which can pay off after this time of crisis. A win-win situation, in other words.

Do research and share your learnings

If all goes well, you are already doing research. Both qualitative and quantitative. In this day and age, it doesn't hurt to do just a little more research. Who are your current visitors? Are they different visitors than they were a month ago? What are they coming to your website to do today? Why do they decide to purchase something from you? And more importantly; why do they decide not to purchase something from you? What information are they looking for? Has the behavior in your funnels changed? Are other products being bought? Are other pages being visited compared to a month ago? And is the search function used differently?

For this research, engage with your colleagues.You could work with the SEO specialist to analyze changes in search terms in Google and through which keywords your visitors are now reaching your website. Together you can think of ways to respond to this.

Another information-packed department is customer service. Find the connection with your colleagues there. They often know exactly what is going on with the (potential) customer.

With all these insights, you can help both your visitors and your colleagues. Provide your colleagues with these insights and give them a better picture of what is happening on the website and how visitors and behavior compare to pre-crisis times. Also respond to these changing needs and if possible A/B test your solutions (see the last point).

A good example is the Dutch homepage of I amsterdam. Normally the website is full of great tips for cultural activities, restaurants, bars and events. Since none of this is possible, it now contains (original) tips for seeing Amsterdam while sitting at home.

Unburden customer service and align with visitor needs

With all the insights from your research, you and your colleagues already have a good idea of the current situation. As mentioned, an important source is your customer service. If you are already talking to them, ask about their needs in this situation.

Is customer service way too busy? Then there are several things you can do to help them. You can display certain information more prominently on the Web site (and test different elaborations), based on your research insights. You can put more emphasis on the ‘self service’ section or make chat more prominent, rather than a phone number or e-mail address.

You can also, together with the content team, set up or modify an FAQ page to the new needs of the visitor. You can also test the location and display of this page on the website to make it stand out as much as possible. In this situation, you can even choose to test with two variants, instead of one control and one variant. In this way, you will help your colleagues as quickly as possible.

Through this approach, you will help visitors get the information they need, and support your customer service colleagues.

Use your testing tool to help

Normally, you want to use your testing tool only for A/B testing and not let others abuse it to bypass the IT backlog. In this day and age, you might make an exception. Especially when there is undercapacity in the IT department.

For information your visitors need directly, you can choose to display it on your website using your testing tool. The same can be done for information that your organization wants to have directly on the website. Put the changes on the website using your testing tool and let 100% of the traffic see the variant. This way, you and your colleagues know for sure that the required information is directly online and you relieve the IT department.

The great thing is that VWO and Optimizely have already come up with initiatives to make this very easy to pick up. Without the help of a developer, you can display pop-ups on your website with the information you want to put in it. Both organizations offer this functionality for free (within your current subscription) while this crisis lasts.

Help come up with initiatives

VWO and Optimizely have already made a wonderful gesture by making the above functionality available at no cost to their subscribers. Fortunately, I see more and more such initiatives from our field.

For example, in Belgium, Els and Karl of AGconsult started the #action2020 initiative (https://actie2020.be/). This action connects companies and charities in the corona crisis. In doing so, they themselves put 20% of their time and 20% of their revenue into organizations that actively provide corona-related aid.

Online Dialogue is not sitting still either. We provide the training Conversion Specialist as an online course and at a discount due to the corona crisis.

This kind of initiative can be set up by anyone in our field. Every day, we are busy identifying problems on our website, which we then find a solution for. We have enough experience and creativity to help come up with such initiatives.

Which department within your organization is dealing with this? Connect with them and offer your help. If no one in your organization is working on this yet, create your own team with people willing to help and organize a (digital) brainstorming session.

Deviate from your test plan if necessary, but above all, keep testing!

Undoubtedly, many companies will run into financial difficulties and many boards of directors will face challenges. From research has shown that companies that invest in growth during times of crisis come out significantly better. You can help achieve that growth. So by all means, keep testing while you still have plenty of traffic and conversions!

You will have to deviate from your test plan, though. In your research, you probably saw that the customer's needs have changed. Perhaps your current USPs don't speak to this day and age, there is a different information need, or you just need to increase usability on your Web site because more older people are on your site.

For testing in this day and age, learning is probably not the most important thing and you want quick results. You can therefore, if your tool allows it, use algorithms that send traffic to the winner faster (multi-armed bandit, for example).

So take a good look at what has come out of your research and respond accordingly with your tests. But above all, keep testing and achieving growth if your traffic allows it.

Conclusion

As a conversion specialist, this is the perfect opportunity to help your visitors and colleagues with your expertise. By lending a helping hand just now, colleagues will embrace our methods more, which can pay off after this time of crisis.

In addition to the examples in this article, I'm sure you can think of more examples. What are you currently doing to help your colleagues and visitors? And how are you ensuring that your CRO program will soon be more in the spotlight? I'd love to hear about it!