Feeling underwhelmed by the number of leads you’re generating? Frustrated that you keep spending more and the results are still lackluster? You might have a conversion issue, instead of a traffic issue.
With the complexity of marketing and the importance of your website, fixing and improving your foundations is key to growth and remaining profitable. Conversion rate optimization is all about the foundations: it helps ensure you have the best user experience and are driving the highest amount of conversions. In other words, CRO helps maximize your marketing dollars and efforts.
Below, we explore what makes CRO effective and how you can reap the benefits.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing your website or landing page to increase the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action. It is not about increasing your traffic, rather, it is about maximizing the traffic you already have.
CRO involves analyzing your website or landing page to identify areas where improvements can be made. This could involve changing the layout, design, or content of the page, as well as adjusting the call-to-action or other elements that can impact the user experience. By making these changes, you can increase the likelihood that your visitors will take the desired action, ultimately increasing the conversion rate and driving more revenue.
What is Considered a Conversion?
From filling out a contact form to subscribing to a newsletter, a conversion occurs when a visitor takes a desired action on your website. There are different conversions for different areas of the buyer funnel, but ultimately, a valuable website conversion is when a visitor gives you their contact information in exchange for something else.
Why is CRO Important?
Conversion rate optimization has a significant impact on your bottom line by generating more revenue without having to increase your advertising spend. This means that CRO can be a cost-effective way to boost sales in a quick-fix manner.
CRO improves the user experience of a website or landing page. When your site is more appealing to visitors, they are encouraged to engage, ultimately leading to increased customer acquisition, repeat users, and word-of-mouth referrals. Even if you are a marketer for an architecture or design firm that is not actively looking to grow, CRO allows you to improve your visitors’ online experience, and harmoniously reflects the offline experience you present to customers.
Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization for Your Business
Who doesn’t love a marketing service that directly impacts bottom-line revenue? While CRO is not a traffic driver, it has a substantial impact on the ultimate end goal: higher profitability and growth.
- Increased Revenue: The primary benefit of CRO is that it can notably increase revenue for your business. By improving the conversion rate, businesses typically generate more sales without having to increase their advertising spend. This means that CRO can be a cost-effective way to boost ROI.
- Improved User Experience (UX): CRO also improves the user experience of your website or landing page. By making changes to the design, layout, and content of the page, you create a more appealing and engaging user experience, which can encourage visitors to spend more time on your site.
- Better Insights into Customer Behavior: By analyzing CRO data, marketers gain valuable insights into customer behavior. This helps you better understand what motivates your customers/clients to make a purchase or take a specific action, which informs future marketing and sales strategies.
- Competitive Advantage: CRO can give you a competitive advantage as it creates a better user experience by getting your visitors the right information, in the right place, at the right time. If your website has an ease of use over your competitors, customers/clients are more likely to choose you over them.
- Increased Customer Loyalty: By improving the user experience on your website, you in turn increase customer loyalty because they find it easy to work with you and find the information they want. This can lead to repeat business and positive word-of-mouth referrals, furthering a boost in sales and revenue.
Steps Involved in Conversion Rate Optimization
The process of CRO involves a thorough analysis of your website and customer journey mapping. At Unframed Digital, we also might survey your team members to help us articulate nuances across your market sectors and audience verticals, in addition to finding patterns. Once the data is gathered, we use this to create a hypothesis, test, and implement changes on your website. It’s important to understand that the CRO process is a true cycle, rather than something that can be achieved in a one-time project. Our process typically involves the following steps:
Step 1: Define Goals
The first step in CRO is to define the goals of the optimization effort. This could be anything from increasing sales to improving engagement or reducing bounce rate. By defining the goals upfront, we can create a clear roadmap for the optimization process and measure progress along the way.
Step 2: Analyze Data
Our next step is to analyze the data from your website or landing page to identify areas that may be causing low conversion rates. We use a variety of software to come up with quantitative and qualitative analyses of your user behavior. Analyzing user and team member feedback can also provide valuable insights into areas that need improvement. And yes, eye tracking in CRO is actually a thing!
Step 3: Develop Hypotheses
Once areas for improvement have been identified, our next step is to develop hypotheses for how to improve your site or landing page. This could involve making changes to the design, layout, or content of the page, as well as adjusting the call-to-action or other elements that can impact the user experience. Typically, in Phase 1, we are focused on site-wide changes that are low effort but result in big wins.
Step 4: Implement Changes
After creating our initial hypothesis, we might go directly into implementation, rather than A/B testing. Most of our clients are on website retainers with us which allows our implementation to be seamless. If we are working with a client’s own website team, we then work with their website designer and developer to implement our recommendations.
Step 5: Conduct A/B Tests
Sometimes a client’s goals and budget allows for us to engage in A/B testing. A/B testing involves creating two versions of a page and randomly showing them to visitors to see which performs better. This can help us determine which changes are most effective in improving the conversion rate. A/B testing should be conducted in a controlled environment, with a large enough sample size to ensure statistical significance.
Step 5: Analyze Results
After the A/B test has been conducted, it’s important to analyze the results again to determine which version of the page performed better. This can help businesses to identify which changes were most effective and inform future optimization efforts.
Step 6: Implement Changes
Finally, we continue to implement changes based on our data. The beautiful thing about CRO is that it empowers us to know that the decisions we make on your site have a data-backed reason. Gone are the days of using subjective opinions to drive your website strategy, which in turn wastes time and resources without impacting your bottom line.
Tips for Successful Conversion Rate Optimization
While the process of CRO is complex, there are several tips that you can follow to get started:
Start with the Basics. Before making more advanced changes, it’s important to ensure that the basics are in place. This includes things like clear navigation that is always visible no matter how a user scrolls, easy-to-use forms, and fast page load times. These foundational elements can have a significant impact on the user experience and conversion rate.
Focus on the User Experience. User experience is the perfect partner to CRO. Your website should be easy to navigate, engaging, and visually appealing. Additionally, make sure your call-to-actions are clear and prominently displayed.
Test Small Changes First. Rather than making sweeping changes all at once, it’s often more effective to test small changes first. This allows you to identify which changes are most effective in improving the conversion rate and can prevent unintended consequences from larger changes.
Use Data to Drive Decisions. Data should be at the center of all optimization efforts. By analyzing user behavior and testing different versions of a page, you are able to make data-driven decisions that are more likely to result in increased conversion rates. We use data from Google Analytics, Hot Jar and our A/B tests to determine our hypothesis.
Keep Testing: CRO is an ongoing process that requires continuous testing and optimization. Even after a successful A/B test, you should continue to make small changes and test different versions of the page to identify new areas for improvement.
Final Thoughts
Conversion rate optimization is a powerful tool for businesses looking to increase revenue, improve customer engagement, and gain a competitive advantage. By focusing on the user experience and using data to drive decisions, you can make incremental improvements to your website or landing page that can have a significant impact on the conversion rate. Without foundational optimizations like CRO, much of your advertising and marketing dollars are going to waste.
Learn more about how Unframed Digital can help improve CRO here.
