In this article, we will learn about Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), its major benefits for businesses and the important tips on how to improve CRO. This is going to be a long, detailed post, and I’m sure it will answer a lot of questions about CRO that are yet to be answered properly.
Conversion rate optimization, as the name suggests, is an online marketing strategy that is used to optimize the conversion rate of any business. In simpler terms, CRO helps convert more users to clients or customers.
CRO is a vital part of any business’s growth and success these days. There are different ways to attract users or visitors to your website and social media accounts, but converting those visitors to leads and then converting the leads to buyers or customers is what matters. Creating captivating content and doing proper promotion has been its core.
Let’s learn more about CRO, its benefits for businesses and how to achieve the best conversion rate through legitimate techniques and practices.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
CRO, as explained above, is the process of converting more users to customers. It is the systematic strategy of increasing the number or percentage of visitors who take an action on your website or social media accounts. CRO in practical cases involves deep research about the behavior and activities of your site visitors and the performance of your website content.
Conversion rate optimization focuses on optimizing the percentage of visitors that take a specific action on your website. Conversions don’t necessarily always mean direct purchases. There can be a few different types of conversions businesses target these days, such as:
Direct purchase of a product or adding a product to the cart
Signing up for a service
Signing up for a free trial
Downloading content (such as ebooks or pdf files)
Filling out the contact form on the site
And even clicking a link
You want your users and site visitors to take any of the above actions while on your site. If they do, you count that as a successful conversion. Even if there’s no direct purchase, you still can get important insight into how they are interacting with your content, products and/or services. You can also collect some information about them that can help you do better with your campaign.
The conversion rate is a percentage value, which can be calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of site visitors, and then multiplying the result by 100. For example, if 500 people have visited your site in the last 7 days and you have managed to make 10 sales, then the conversion rate in the last week is 10 / 500 = 0.02 x 100 = 2%.
Do you know what a good conversion rate actually is? All businesses set different conversion rates, but the average figure anywhere between 1% and 4% can be safely considered a good conversion rate. But it varies from business to business.
There is a lot of importance of conversion rate for businesses. Conversion rate gives the business owners an indication of how their site or a particular web page is performing, and what needs to be done in order to perform better.
How CRO is done
CRO focuses on optimizing a website or a particular web page, increase conversions and improve the conversion rate. CRO is done by constantly monitoring the customer insights, user behavior, CRO best practices.
Let’s learn about the CRO best practices and understand how the process of CRO is done.
Here are the 5 main steps involved in the CRO process:
Audience research
In this step you would want to know about your audience, understand their interests, behavior and how they interact or interacted with your products or service. Knowledge about your audience helps you make your products or service better and maximize the conversion rate.
A/B testing
Through a proper A/B testing you will understand what works and what doesn’t. You cannot deny the fact that your visitors’ interests keep changing, so your CRO techniques have to change from time to time. So, A/B testing is important to know the options that are working out.
Measurement
Measurement is a number game. You need to set goals based on some specific numerical values, try and achieve them, and then set some other goals. Google analytics tool can be a handy tool here that enables you to create realistic goals, track conversions and then calculate the conversion rate.
Adjustments
Through proper measurement and A/B testing you get an idea of what works and what doesn’t. Based on that understanding you can make your adjustments. Making adjustments should be an on-going process.
Optimization
During the audience research, measurement of goals and results, A/B testing and making adjustments, you get enough knowledge and gather important insights that are going to help you optimize your campaign and/or website’s user experience. You may discover that your existing content needs editing or that dull call-to-action needs some improvement, or the current landing pages can be redesigned for better user experience and engagement.
They all add to the optimization of your conversion rate.
Here is a list of the important factors that determine if the CRO process is successful.
Design
Design of your website and the sales pages must be attractive and user-friendly. This ensures that the user enjoys staying the page and doing some activities. Design and structuring of the pages is an important part of the CRO process.
Navigation
Your site must be easy to navigate. No user would ever want to go to an important page for some info after so many clicks. They would want to get to the matter as quickly as possible, so easy navigation is key to a successful CRO.
Content
Your website content (including the text, images and visuals) matters the most. Your content should answer your audience’s questions really well, and address their pain points like nobody else would do. That should be your goal when creating content for your website.
Site speed
Nobody likes slow sites. For the best user experience, your site should load within 3 seconds. Try to use a light-weight theme with correct advanced coding (if additional coding is necessary). Don’t install extra plugins (your site can do well even without those plugins). Use a great hosting service to experience minimal downtime.
Call-to-action
This is where you are requesting your users to take an action. When creating call-to-action buttons and phrases, focus on creating captivating buttons (button colors and designs matter), creative phrases (something other than just ‘contact us’, ‘view more’ etc.), and eye-catching anchor text etc.
Forms
Yes, I agree that contact forms nowadays are used more by spammers, freelancers and other firms that are considering you as their potential client and less by your target users. Yet, you can get some information about your users and their interests from your contact form data, so don’t ignore the power of contact forms completely. An attractive form with less number of fields that takes care of your users’ privacy well is considered to be a CRO-friendly contact form.
How to measure CRO
This is a simple measurement process.
You just set a goal for the conversion rate initially – Achieve that – Measure the success.
Set another bigger goal – Try and achieve that – And then measure the success.
Keep working on the CRO and increase the conversion rate number. That is all you want to focus on for your business growth.
You can make use of useful tools like Google Analytics to collect data related to your website visitors, contact form analytics tools and sales funnel tools. These tools will help you collect the website traffic data, user behavior and activities, monitor the conversions and goal completion, and then calculate the conversion rate.
With all those data you can measure the success of your conversion rate optimization process.
Benefits of CRO
Conversion rate optimization has a number of benefits for your business. It helps you understand your audience better. With that understanding you can easily create your content, website or web pages, and work on your marketing campaigns to reach out to a larger audience over time. You can get some important insights about what is going wrong and where you need betterment. You can gain more customer trust with the process of CRO.
However, all of those benefits more or less focus on one thing – and that is increased conversions / sales / ROI. So, needless to say, CRO helps generate more qualified leads and more revenue for your business, so that you can achieve growth at a faster rate.
How to improve CRO
There is no one thing you can do to improve your CRO results. It’s actually a combination of many things that you have to try and implement on a regular basis in order to improve on your CRO efforts over time.
What works now might not work 3 months later, but if you do the basics right and keep satisfying your users by providing them with some value and a great experience while they are on your site, it should do the trick for you.
Remember to use the Google Analytics tool to track the number of traffic from different sources, their behavior on your site, goal completions and other metrics that help you understand your audience better. More traffic should not be the only goal. It’s how much of that traffic actually takes an action on your site that matters.
Do implement the CRO best practices, A/B testing and continual adjustments to create better content and fine-tune the techniques to satisfy your users, earn their trust and accomplish more conversions.
Some modern-day CRO tactics
Some popular brands go a step further and implement some uncommon tactics to improve their CRO results. It’s not that they ignore the fundamental steps, but they keep doing experiments to understand their audience’s emotions and expectations better.
Some of the uncommon modern-day tactics include:
Using AI-driven CRO tools
Gaining valuable insights from Search suggestions
Personalized product suggestions
On-site customer surveys etc.
Popular brands today are taking all the cutting-edge tools and apps to their advantage to maximize their conversion rate and client retention.