Anatomy of an Effective CRO Strategy

What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

Conversion Rate Optimization, also known as CRO, is one of the quickest and most efficient ways to convert existing website traffic into paying clients. Either by filling out a form online or by making a purchase. As part of the CRO process, you need to know how your visitors use your site, what they do, and why they don't fulfill your goals.

What is a conversion?

The act of a visitor fulfilling the goal of a website is known as a conversion. There are numerous sizes and shapes of goals. Let's say your website is selling products; the main goal (also known as the macro-conversion) is for the customer to purchase. There can be smaller conversions before a customer completes a macro-conversion, like signing up to get emails. We call these micro-conversions.

Examples of micro-conversions: 

• Adding a product to your cart 
• Signing up for email lists 
• A user creating an account 
• Browsing the site 

Examples of macro-conversions:

• Purchasing a product
• Subscribing to a service 
• Free-trial 
• Contact us

How to Calculate Conversion Rate? 

Calculating the conversion rate is very simple. To calculate your conversion rate, multiply the total number of visitors to your website or landing page by the number of conversions you generate over a specified period.

For example, let's say you have a clothing website, and 200,000 people visited your website last month. From those, 10,000 bought products.

The conversion rate would be 5 percent (10,000/200,000*100).

If 20,000 people have converted, your conversion rate will increase by 10 percent. 

Conversion Rate Optimization's most important benefits

Now that you understand what CRO is and how to determine your website's conversion rate, let's examine why it's significant and how focusing on CRO may benefit your business.

Start understanding your customers better

An essential first step in the conversion optimization process is thoroughly understanding who you're trying to reach with your website. It is necessary to study how clients interact with your store and determine what prevents them from converting.

Data should be the foundation of your CRO strategy, and it will help you establish conversion-friendly segmentations based on your current and potential consumers' activities, lifecycle stage, and purchases.

Expand your customer base while reducing your cost per acquisition

The goal of conversion rate optimization (CRO) is to make it easier for customers to identify what they're looking for and complete their purchases faster. Understanding your customers will enable you to customize their shopping experience and persuade them to make those important purchases.

If you work hard to acquire website visitors in order to convert more of that traffic into customers, CRO should be your top concern.

Enhance your SEO efforts

It's not a one-or-the-other situation. In some cases, CRO and SEO are intertwined. Google has acknowledged that user behavior is now a component of page rankings, and this means that websites with the best customer experience will rank higher. The time and effort you devote to improving the client experience will not only increase conversions, it could also boost your online store's search engine rankings and bring in more visitors.

Increase the value of your customer base

Everything we have discussed thus far will assist you in creating an exceptional customer experience for all the new visitors to your website, who will subsequently become devoted customers. Creating 'welcome back' pop-ups or customized product recommendations in their purchased product categories would be an excellent way to show appreciation to all of your loyal customers. By recognizing their needs and making them feel unique, optimizing your customer journey will transform one-time buyers into repeat customers.

Understanding the Different Parts of Conversion Optimization

There are many parts to conversion rate optimization. Here's what each of them means:

Call to action (CTA): Tells your visitors to do something specific on your website.  

Conversion funnel: This is a list of the steps a user must complete to reach your site's primary objective.

A/B testing: A common way to check if conversion improvements are working. To determine which version of your website is most effective, visitors are shown two or more versions, and the conversion rates of each version are compared. 

Multivariate testing (MVT): A type of A/B testing that looks at more than two variables at once.

Usability: A collection of best practices and procedures for enhancing the usability of a website. Typically, this improves conversions by reducing site friction.

Customer development: Tools and techniques for gaining a deeper understanding of your customers. Creating websites that convert a higher percentage of your visitors is much simpler when you have a thorough understanding of your customers.

User recordings: A program that monitors how website visitors navigate. It provides a lot of information on where people are stopped and where they wish to go. It is an excellent source of suggestions for boosting conversion rates.

Analytics: tools for counting the number of visitors and users. Measuring is one of the most important parts of increasing conversion rates.

Heatmaps: A report that uses "hot" and "cold" colors to show where people click on a page. It's a great way to get ideas for how to improve conversions. 

How to Double Your Conversion Rate, Step-by-Step

You need to know your target audience and who they are not before you can market to them. Your goal is to ensure that every marketing message reaches its audience, and it must be so specific and engaging that your target consumer will not be able to resist.

Discovering how your consumers navigate your website will save you time and provide you with all the necessary data. 

Ask yourself a couple of questions.

How far do they scroll down on each page? 

Do they read any of your blogs? 

Do they follow you anywhere on social media? 

Don't put your faith in an educated guess, because that's when things could go wrong. When you have the information, use it to decide what to do next.

Eliminate any elements that can cause the user to guess their decision or object second. One way to do this is to get rid of a paragraph on your website that isn't needed. Using bullet points is a great way to present your information in a way that is easy for your users to understand.

CTAs and directional indications can assist you in guiding clients to the desired destination. Place call-to-action buttons, arrows, navigation panels, and other elements strategically.

Mistakes in Conversion Rate Optimization

The vast majority of people and businesses who go into CRO without understanding what it involves waste time, money, and effort. It's important to know which ones to stay away from so you can avoid them.

In order to demonstrate the value of your product, it's essential to include success stories in your copywriting. Make it clear to the reader how your product or service can benefit them.

More than half of your consumers use their phones to browse the internet. If your store isn’t ready for mobile, you’ll lose customers. 

When a customer views your website, the website must load quickly, and customers will abandon a website that takes longer than two seconds to load. It would help if you made sure the speed of your website is loading fast and consistent. 

The key to optimization that works

To optimize for conversion rates, you must understand where to optimize, what to improve, and who to optimize for. CRO strategies that work are based on this data. If you don't collect data, you'll have to depend on your gut to make decisions. However, making decisions based solely on intuition rather than data might be a waste of time and money.

The Analytics Method

This technique, also known as quantitative data analysis, provides quantitative evidence of how users behave on your website. Start with a reliable online platform for analytics, like Google Analytics. Next, you should implement conversion tracking.

Using CRO based on analytics can answer crucial questions regarding how users interact with your website. Quantitative analysis yields data including:

• How people get to your website 
• What features do they use 
• How did they find out about your website?
• What devices and web browsers do they use 
• Where users leave your conversion funnel 
• What interests your users 

With this information, you'll know where to put your attention. To get the most out of your work, put it on pages that people like and find useful.

The People Method 

Performing your quantitative analysis first is especially beneficial if you have a massive website with a variety of material, as it reveals, from a quantitative standpoint, where to concentrate your efforts. Now that you have a greater understanding of how individuals interact with your website, you can investigate their reasons.

An individual's subjective perspective is taken into account using qualitative data analysis. Prioritize your efforts on those users who are most likely to buy from you.

The qualitative analysis aims to increase conversion rates by obtaining information about users, such as:

• What brought them to your website or a particular page?
• In what way did they find the page or product appealing?
• How strongly would they suggest it to others?
• How do they think you're different from everyone else?

Rough statistics can't tell you everything about why someone is visiting your site or how to improve their experience. With the help of your analytics data, you'll be able to identify the pages on your site that offer the most potential for optimizing and engaging the audience you'd like to target.

The Bad Method

It arrives in a variety of ways. The following are some ineffective CRO strategies:

• Gut feelings
• Guesses 
• Doing something just because that's what your competitors are doing
• Changes depending on the opinion of the highest-paid individual

These examples have one thing in common: they are not based on facts and could just as easily be random guesses. If you want meaningful testing, don't waste time running tests that don't work; gather data and analyze it until you get the answers you need.

Excellent CRO Approaches

To boost your website's conversion rate, you'll need to pay attention to more specific parts of its design, structure, and copy. Consider doing testing on each of these website features.

A/B testing is a must-do. 

Even though results often go against what we expect, they still surprise us. Only with complex data can you be sure that your idea works.

Take out fields from your sign-up form.

Adding more steps to your form will lower its conversion rate. Make sure you only add the most important ones, which will boost your conversion rate.

Clearly Defined Goals Are Essential.

Goals need to be clearly stated so that there is no doubt about what is being measured. Even if an experiment fails, the lessons and insights we gain from it can be used to guide future testing.

Don't do what your competitors are doing.

Our data should be used to identify the problem, generate prospective solutions, and then test our solutions rather than replicating those of others.

Conclusion 

The first step is to learn about CROs and how it works. Avoid the most common mistakes in CRO by following the excellent CRO approaches. As your business grows, you'll want to learn more about how visitors move around your website so you can improve your conversions. 

Continue to rely on facts rather than intuition if you don't want to make a mistake. The most crucial aspect of this is ensuring that users remain on your website and know what they want to purchase.