Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is at the heart of any successful digital marketing strategy. It is used to increase the number of website visitors who do what you want them to do (convert). It will, in the end, make more of your website’s visitors want to follow you and buy from you.
Starting a conversion rate optimization strategy can be hard, but the benefits can help you:
- Learn more about your clients.
- Make the experience of customers on-site better
- Maximize your PPC spend Maximize sales
- Get a better return on your money.
Let’s look at what a conversion is before we get into how CRO works (and give you 8 great tips to help you).
What does “conversion” mean in the world of digital marketing?
Many marketers think of a sale as a conversion. But a conversion is actually any action you want a website visitor to take. This action is usually a sale, but it could also be something smaller that moves a person further down the sales funnel toward making a purchase.
A customer could take one of the following actions to convert:
- When you click on a banner or text ad,
- Going to a website by clicking on it
- Getting a report or whitepaper as a download
- Signing up for a newsletter Filling out a web form
- Getting a spot on a webinar
No matter what you want people to do, it’s good for your business and can be measured.
Also Read: Comparing the Top 5 eCommerce Platforms for Small Businesses
What is a conversion rate?
The conversion rate is just the number of people who visit your website who do something you want them to do. So, the conversion rate is 100% if all visitors do what you want them to do. The conversion rate is 25% if only 25% of visitors buy something.
What’s a good rate of conversion?
Larry Kim, the founder of WordStream, says that the average conversion rate for a landing page across all industries is about 2.35 percent. But the top 25% of businesses have a conversion rate of at least 5.31 percent. And the top 10% convert at a rate of 11.45% or higher.
You should try to do better than the average student and get into the top 10%. To do this, you need an exchange rate of 11.45%. A good CRO strategy or programme can help you quickly double or even triple the number of people who buy from you.
To get the conversion rate you want, you’ll need to keep an eye on and improve the overall performance of your website. Use Google Analytics or other tools for reporting to keep an eye on these important things:
- Sources of traffic.
- Type of device, like tablets, laptops, and phones.
- Location. You might want to localise your content for people in other places.
- Exit pages. The last page a visitor looked at. If you know this, you can figure out why people leave your site, like when they leave their shopping carts.
- Rate of new visitors who stay.
- Rate of people who come back.
- Interactions during each visit.
- Value per visit. Divide your total revenue by the number of people who visit your site to get the value per visit.
- Cost for each new customer. This is a key indicator of how well a CRO is doing. It can also be called “cost per lead” or “cost per referral.” It shows how much you have to spend to make a sale.
- Rate of failure. The number of people who visit your site but don’t do anything after they get there.
Understanding conversion rate optimization (CRO) To get the conversion rate you want, you’ll have to keep an eye on your website’s overall performance and make changes to make it better. This means keeping track of your conversion rates and looking for ways to make them better.
Also Read: Building a Strong Online Presence through Social Selling
There are 8 good CRO strategies.
You can improve your website’s performance and get more people to buy from it by doing these eight things:
- Make the user experience better (UX)
- Optimize your messaging
- Buyer personas can help you learn about your customers.
- Use data to make changes.
- CRO goals should be SMART.
- Try out your CRO plans.
- Do research on your competitors. Do research on your users.
According to research from AWS, 88% of online shoppers said that if they had a bad user experience on a website, they wouldn’t go back. This means that optimising UX is key to CRO.
Consider using these ideas to improve UX:
- Optimize the layout of your webpages so that the most compelling and interesting content is visible in key areas
- Keep in mind which device a user prefers to use for visits and conversions, and adjust the page experience as needed for mobile and desktop devices.
- Add a site search, and think about adding a live chat feature. Use pop-ups only sometimes.
- Add more (or better) social proof like customer reviews and user-generated content to boost your credibility and consumers’ trust in you.
- Make online forms easier to use and improve CTAs.
- Make sure all webforms are easy to fill out, clear, and simple.
- You can get more people to click on your CTAs by making them more personal.
- Make sure CTAs are easy to understand.
- Use tools like PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom to check your site’s speed and fix common problems.
- Make it easy for people to buy from you on your e-commerce pages. Make sure they don’t have to sign in to shop. Use optional login and registration fields to make “guest purchases” easier.
- Send follow-up emails to people who have left items in their shopping carts.
Give incentives like free shipping for a certain amount of time.
2. Make sure your message is clear
When you want to improve your message, the first thing you should do is look at your buyer personas (see below). Make sure you know and understand your customers and that you know what they need, what they want, and what they plan to do.
Then, you can use these methods to tailor your messages to your ideal customers:
- Optimize the landing pages on your website. Make sure that your landing pages match your message and the copy or ad that brought people to your pages.
- Use and make the most of lead magnets. These are free things you give away in exchange for information from users, like their email addresses (while being aware of data privacy standards).
- At different points in the buyer’s journey, different lead magnets should be used. For example, customers in the awareness stage are often given checklists and online quizzes to use.
- Customers are better served by case studies and coupons in the conversion and retention stages.
- Make sure that your content, title tags, and meta-descriptions are all aligned with the best keywords.
- Make sure to use your keyword several times in your content, but don’t overuse it.
- Focus on users who are likely to buy and find out what works for them. These users are very valuable because they are almost ready to buy. You can reach users with high-intent by putting high-intent keywords on your landing pages and making content that addresses customer pain points.
3. Use buyer personas to learn about your clients.
For your customers to have a better experience on your website and be more likely to buy, you need to know who they are, what drives them, and what they want your product to do. You can use buyer personas to find out this information and use it to improve your content, site layout, and calls to action (CTAs).
A buyer persona is a profile of the kind of customer you want to get. To create a buyer persona, you must:
- Read what customers say.
- Ask customers questions via polls or surveys.
- Check your data on your customers.
- Talk to your customers and potential customers.
4. Make changes based on real data
Optimize your website using good data, not your gut, feelings, or instincts. You can use an analytics tool like Google Analytics to get hard data on your bounce rate, exit pages, cost per conversion, and other key metrics, which you can then use to improve these areas.
Rate of failure. Most people agree that a high bounce rate is anything above 56%. If your bounce rate is this high, you need to fix it right away.
Pay attention to your main pages and try to make them better.
Exit pages. Use an analytics tool to find out where people are leaving your site. Then, try to figure out why they are leaving on those pages and fix the problems.
You can do this by looking at the content on your exit pages and making it better so that visitors find it more useful.
Cost for each new customer. If you set up conversion tracking in your analytics tool, you can see how much each conversion on your website costs. This metric can help you decide if the money you spend on marketing is worth it.
5. Set CRO goals that are SMART
Set SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) to help you improve CRO performance.
For instance:
Don’t say, “My goal is to get more people to buy from me.”
Do say: “My goal is to increase conversions by 10% in the next three months by running a targeted email campaign.”
6. Put your CRO plans to the test
You can test your CRO strategies in both A/B and multivariate ways. You can use both kinds of tests together for the best results.
A split test is another name for an A/B test. It lets you look at different parts of two web pages side by side. This test is especially good for testing headlines, calls to action, images, or copy.
A multivariate test looks at many different versions of different parts of a webpage. The goal of this test is to find out which set of changes works best.
Remember that CRO testing, like everything else in digital marketing, is not a one-time thing. It’s a process with many steps that takes time to show results.
There are many tools you can use to help you run your tests. There are three popular ways to test changes to your site:
Google is testing Optimize VWO on Instapage.
Here are some of the best ways to test CRO:
Do an A/B test: You can test your changes with an A/B or split test. This lets us see how changing one variable changes the outcome of the test. For example, does changing the CTA button from blue to green lead to more conversions?
With Tampermonkey, you can save time: This free browser extension lets you run user scripts on websites. User scripts are small computer programmes that change how a page looks and add or take away new features and content.
Preserve query parameters: When people come to your site, the parameters in their URLs tell you useful things, like where they came from. Try to keep your query parameters when running tests and experiments.
Test on multiple devices: Use different devices, operating systems, and browsers to test your site. Make sure they work right on all of them.
Ensure statistical significance: When a result is significant, you can be sure that it is real and not just because your sample was lucky or unlucky. Make sure your sample is big enough to give you results that mean something.
7. Find out about your competitors
Always look at what your competitors are doing and find out what works for them. Your goal isn’t to copy their successful strategies and methods, but to get ideas from them and give your own activities a new twist.
You can do three types of audits to figure out how your competitors stack up:
- Content audit: A content audit helps you find out what kinds of content your competitors are sharing with their audiences. Then you can compare your content plan to theirs.
- SEO audit: In an SEO audit, you look into the keywords your competitors are using and look at their SEO strategy as a whole. You can do an SEO audit with many tools, such as Ubersuggest.
- Social media audit: To do a social media audit of your competitors, just follow them on their social sites and keep an eye on the posts, content, and social activities that seem to do well and connect with their audiences. You can start following your competitors on social media as soon as you download our Competitor Analysis Tracker.
8. Find out what users want
With this kind of research, you want to find out exactly how people use your website. You also want to know what brought them to your website. Also, it’s important to find out if they run into any problems while using your website, especially ones that stop them from making a purchase, and which parts of their visit go well.
During your user research, you will also look at:
- Problems with the way your website works, like broken links
- Problems with the user interface (UI) that affect how the user feels, such as bad navigation,
- How people think about your website in general
Conclusion
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is an important part of online marketing and e-commerce because it has a direct effect on a business’s bottom line.
The main goal of CRO is to get more of a website’s visitors to do what the site owner wants, like buy something, fill out a form, or sign up for a newsletter.
By increasing the conversion rate, businesses can boost their revenue and return on investment (ROI) while also giving their customers a better experience.
CRO is the process of analyzing and testing different parts of a website, such as its design, content, messaging, and user experience, to find any barriers to conversion and fix them.
Businesses can stay ahead of the competition and make sure their online presence works at its best by constantly optimizing and improving their websites.
