Ever wished you could get more out of your website visitors?
Sure, you can.
Having people visit your website is great. But, when you get those people to do what you want?
That’s sexy! And definitely something every entrepreneur wants to do.
But, how do you do that? How do you get people to do what you want?
The answer:
Conversion Rate Optimization
Through conversion rate optimization, you can get the best out of your website and increase any metric you want.
And the good thing?
It’s not as hard as you think.
But hey. . .
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What’s Conversion Rate Optimization?
According to Qualaroo, Conversion Rate Optimization is the method of using analytics and user feedback to improve the performance of your website.
Here’s a simple drawing by conversion rate experts to help you understand CRO even better:
Now, to take full advantage of Conversion Rate Optimization, you’d first have to know and understand certain things about it; and that’s the purpose of this article.
Ready? Here we go:
1. CRO can be your secret weapon
Imagine this:
Your business competitors are busy paying for more traffic and looking to explore some (probably ineffective) ways to increase sales.
But you?
You’re just cool, optimizing conversion. And certainly making more sales.
That’s what CRO does for you. . .
. . .and to your competition.
This is particularly true for internet-based businesses such as eCommerce companies.
So, if you want to be twice as profitable as your competitors, you don’t have to drive twice as much traffic as them. . .
. . .just optimize your conversion.
That’s how CRO and your website can be your secret weapon!
2. CRO can turn your business around
Why all the talk about CRO?
Well, it’s simply because CRO can help you achieve your business goals.
Whether it’s to make more sales, increase your sign-ups, or get more people to download your app, with the right CRO strategy in place, it’ll be a breeze.
That’s because. . .
. . .CRO is an effective and organized way to enhance the performance of your website, and ultimately boost your leads, sales and profit.
Here’s how VWO expresses that:
So, how does conversion rate optimization make your business more successful?
Here:
When your conversion rate increases, you begin to see significant increase in your metrics as well, especially if you implement your CRO rightly.
3. CRO helps you Improve
No matter how ingenious your website is, and no matter how high your conversion rate is, there’s always a room for improvement. CRO helps you make that marketing improvement.
What’s more, the conversion process can be streamlined and improved for users, which leads to improved results for you.
Moreover, conversion rate optimization helps show where your website needs fixes—things like conversion leakages.
Conversion rate optimization also helps you improve your marketing skills as you get to know what works and what doesn’t.
4. With CRO, be ready for change
The Internet has evolved over the years and will keep on evolving. And so are Internet-related techniques, including Internet marketing and conversion rate optimization.
New technologies are being developed, old strategies done away with, and new design trends are popping up.
To create an effective CRO approach…
…you must be ready to adapt to these changes.
When implementing CRO, you must be willing to change something on your marketing, anytime. This is a component of the CRO practice, and can mean giving up past work.
You may have to make changes to your website, or even your business approach.
However, you have to understand that making those changes is for the good of your business.
Admittedly, the end result is profit.
Someone might be afraid to take risks, but the ability to adapt to changes can only lead to better things.
So:
If you’re used to your design, be prepared for change because you may find that your conversion goes up with a different design.
For example, BaseKit wanted to optimize conversion out of their pricing page. So, they changed their design. This is what the old design looked like:
And here’s the new design:
At the end, the new design got a 25% higher conversion rate than the old design.
While you’re ready to change something, also be ready to grow; be ready to handle the new businesses that’ll be flowing in…
…because yeah, if you do your CRO effectively, new businesses will come.
5. CRO helps you understand what your customers need
To effectively drive conversion, you must understand what your customers need.
Conversion rate optimization allows you to understand, not just those needs, but even the customers themselves.
This is especially easy if you monitor your CRO activities.
6. CRO is important for profits
Don’t want to optimize your conversion?
Here’s the trouble:
Your profit is shockingly and directly connected to your conversion rate.
Optimized conversion means increased profits and rebuffing CRO means you’re willing to keep profits down.
7. Conversion rate optimization is all-round
Conversion optimization isn’t just about changing one element of your web page. . .
. . .it involves every aspect of your design and messaging.
All elements must be designed to work together in helping you achieve your goals.
8. CRO is a low hanging fruit compared to paid marketing options
In some cases, a business may be on budget and so may not be in a good position to move forward with highly paid marketing options such as paid advertising.
But, with the right conversion rate optimization program, they can compete favorably with competitors who’ve got money to spend.
This makes CRO, not just a low hanging fruit, but a preferable option for companies that are on budget but still want to grow their business.
9. CRO is defined by Key Performance Indicators
A key performance indicator (KPI) is any metric used by a business to manage, monitor and measure marketing performance.
KPI could be anything from unique website visitors to CTR.
For better CRO returns, you need to figure out your KPIs.
What are your objectives and what are those metrics that will indicate your level of performance based on your objectives?
These metrics will help you measure, monitor, and manage the performance of your conversion rate optimization.
They’ll also provide important insights for improvements.
10. You can calculate and measure your site’s CRO
Knowing your site’s Conversion Rate is both important and necessary.
It’s easy too. . .
. . .you need just 2 numbers:
- The total number of visitors
- The total number of conversions.
Next, divide the total number of conversions by the number of your site’s visitors. For instance, a site with 200 conversions out of 10,000 visitors has a conversion rate of 2%.
11. SEO is important
Even though CRO is not all about 1000s of visits (more on that later), you’ll only be able to improve your conversion rate if your traffic rate is good.
Let’s say you have just 50 people visiting your site out of which 50% have converted. You’d only have 25 customers in total.
But:
If you have up to 5,000 unique visitors out of which you’re only able to convert 5%, you’d have 250 customers.
If there’s a traffic issue with your website, your CRO may suffer because of low visitor rate.
SEO Expert Page did a great job in outlining the SEO/CRO relationship.
Here it is:
See?
For effective CRO, be sure to have a solid search engine optimization (SEO) in place.
12. Testing is vital
When it comes to CRO, lots of testing is required and you just must do it; you must test every change you make and analyze the results for better conversion.
Testing helps you know which tool performs better, what needs changing, and most importantly, what elements work best with your website visitors.
Actually, effective CRO depends on improvement, but improvement without testing is virtually impossible to achieve, hence the importance of testing.
It could be A/B split testing, multivariate testing, or just any CRO testing.
So, if you want to up your conversion rate, what you have to do is test, test, and test again. And again.
13. Your CMS counts
The content management system (CMS) which you operate your website on matters a lot with your CRO.
Here’s why:
If the CMS is not up to standard, your site will be unfriendly for users—unresponsive, mobile-unfriendly, slow to load etc.
Study found that a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
That’s a bummer!
Another CRO-CMS tie is that you must be able to change and test things easily via your CMS. A poor CMS that does not support the kind of changes you want to effect will certainly hinder your conversion optimization. . .
. . .and ultimately affect your conversion rates.
14. Conversion rate optimization needs monitoring
To better your CRO, you’d need to monitor the process after implementing your strategy.
Monitoring will help you see how your conversion campaign is going, learn about user behavior, and what needs to be changed in your marketing.
Without monitoring, you may be missing out on some very important data about your business.
That said, monitoring lets you resolve problems as they crop up, change course and tactics when necessary, and rework your CRO strategy if it appears futile in helping you reach your set goals.
15. CRO can pay for itself
CRO is great:
Not only is it one of the most effective ways to earn more, it can also pay for itself in a matter of days or weeks.
Return on investment is usually high with CRO. After making the initial financial investment, you can be sure that you’d have your money back, plus more.
This makes investing in CRO tools, such as TruConversion, a great business move.
16. You can’t do it all alone
For effectiveness and efficiency, you’d need to select the right tools when planning your CRO.
The kind of tools you pick can determine your CRO results.
17. CRO just got better—and easier too
There’s an old way of optimizing conversion. . .
. . .and there’s a new way.
No more do you have to depend on multiple [expensive] tools to optimize your conversion, you can actually do everything with just ONE powerful application.
And the outcome?
Hours upon hours saved, no more CRO hassles, improved CRO for less price, and yay!, better results.
There you have them. . .
. . .17 key things to know about CRO.
But, there’s more:
Many people have a slight misunderstanding of what CRO really is. So, they think it is what it is not.
That said, we would like to clear the air by letting you know what conversion rate optimization is NOT.
Correcting these mix-ups will help you in running an effective CRO campaign.
What Conversion Rate Optimization is NOT
1. CRO is not A/B testing
Over the years, A/B testing has grown in popularity and practice. Recent statistics show that A/B testing is the most used CRO method.
With this high number, most people have mixed up A/B testing with CRO.
But as an entrepreneur who wants to see real results, you have to get this right:
CRO is not A/B testing. . .
. . .but A/B testing is a part of CRO.
Specifically, CRO is about utilizing tools and techniques to dig up the most conversions from your website. Testing on the other hand is about evaluating and validating these tools and techniques.
For instance, CloudSponge which had an outdated design. . .
. . .updated and optimized their website with a new design.
With the new design, they saw about 33% increase in conversion. That can be described as Conversion Rate Optimization because the new design came with certain features and elements which have helped to improve customer engagement and conversion.
A/B testing could be anything from testing two versions of a website to testing two different headlines, to see the one that’ll perform better.
It could be about testing different button text…
…or testing different button colors.
A good example of this is what Performable did with their homepage before they were acquired by HubSpot.
They A/B tested the button color, green (original) versus red (variation):
Turned out, the red button won with 21% more clicks.
Think of A/B testing as one of the several tools for conversion rate optimization.
2. CRO is not Landing Page Optimization
Another common jumble is thinking of CRO as landing page optimization (LPO). While these two are both for increasing conversion, they are different.
Just as A/B testing, landing page optimization is only a part of conversion rate optimization.
Conversion rate optimization is a broader internet marketing method and should never be confused with LPO.
3. Conversion Rate Optimization is not the end goal
When optimizing conversion, you should have in mind that CRO isn’t the end result…
…it’s just a mean to an end.
That said, I’d like to think of CRO as a tool for growing your business, increasing conversion, and making more money. . . ultimately.
So, what then is the end goal?
Revenue. That’s it!
The reason why you optimize conversion is to increase your revenue.
The process goes from CRO to conversion…
…and ultimately to sales which means more revenue for you.
Put differently, optimization is a journey not the destination.
4. CRO is not a one-off thing
Conversion rate optimization is not like one of those marketing strategies in which you make some initial investments and sit back while they keep bringing in businesses on autopilot. . .
. . .CRO is an on-going process.
It’s continuous basically because you have to keep improving on it.
It’s important you know this from the onset.
5. CRO is not founded on guesswork
Conversion rate optimization must be done with insights, specifically, analytics and user feedback.
Knowing your site’s analytics and user feedback doesn’t have to be difficult. . .
. . .at least, not with TruConversion.
Running a CRO campaign that’s based on guesses may get you the wrong results. Effective CRO must be data-driven; it must be informed and not anchored on hunches.
Also, if you must get results, you shouldn’t be doing what everybody is doing, but find out who your website users are and what works best with them.
6. CRO is not about getting more site visitors
If you run a business online, you can generate more revenue through one of the following ways:
- Driving extra traffic to your site to up your sales
- Improving your website to increase sales, but with the same number of traffic
Conversion rate optimization is about the latter.
Sure, more visitors can lead to more sales but that’s not how CRO works.
CRO focuses on squeezing the most out of your current traffic in order to get you more sales, better engagement and even increased revenue.
It’s about taking the traffic your site is already receiving and making the most of it, not about getting thousands of more visits. It’s about converting the present users. It’s about quality engagement.
What’s more, CRO is more cost-effective than finding new visitors.
Wrapping Up
Truth is, if you’re not optimizing conversion, you are leaving money on the table already. . .
. . .because you can get more out your website without increasing your traffic.
Plus:
If you’re not doing it, your competition might be doing it already.
So, here’s the kicker:
Determine your goal, create your strategy, pick your CRO tool, and get to work using the tips we’ve provided above.
What else would you like to know about Conversion Rate Optimization for businesses? Drop your opinions and questions below in the comment section and we will do our best to get back to you!
