Conversion rate optimization or CRO is the best way to provide you with a more effective sales funnel to increase your sales. To elaborate, it is optimizing your website and turn more of your existing website traffic into paying customers.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
The conversion rate optimization process involves using various tools and techniques to figure out how to tweak the elements on your website. Ultimately, the aim is to grow the highest possible conversion rate for your business.
For example, if you have a 10% conversion rate on your website, this would mean that 10% of your website traffic actually performs the main goal that you wanted them to do such as purchasing a product or signing up for your email list.
Conversion rate optimization is really focused on 2 factors:
- Enhancing your product/service offer
- Reduce friction in your sales
Your conversion rate can be calculated with this equation:
Total transactions / Total site visits x 100
So, let’s assume that your website received 10,000 website visits in the past month and 1000 people bought a product. Your conversion rate would be 10% (1000/10,000*100).
Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization
The absolute best part about conversion rate optimization is that you can increase your conversion rate even though your website traffic remains the same. This is important because bringing in website traffic costs quite a bit.
In short, you can get more customers with the same amount of investment.
Your customer acquisition cost will decrease and you will gain more profit that you can then spend on growing other aspects of your business. Therefore, investing a few weeks or months into conversion rate optimization can bring your business up to the next level.
Different Components of Conversion Rate Optimization
- Call-To-Action (CTA): A sentence or phrase that tells visitors exactly what to do.
- Conversion funnel: Your buyer’s journey
- A/B testing: A practice of testing different aspects of a site where two or more versions of your site are shown to your website visitors. The conversion rates of these can be measured and its effectiveness can be compared.
- User experience: Best practices to making your website more user-friendly and removing friction to increase conversions.
- Customer development: Using tools that can help you better understand your customers
- Analytics: Any tools that measure your website’s visitors to help you track your conversion rates.
- Heatmap analysis: A report that shows the areas your visitors click on most by showing “cold” or “hot” colors which can help you come up with ideas on how to improve conversions.
- User recordings: Records where users visit when they are on your website. This gives feedback on where your traffic is stuck on and where they actually want to go.
How To Build a Conversion Rate Optimization Strategy
1. Identify potential customers
Know who your target market is. Once again, you will need to create a buyer persona to know who your ideal customers are. You will be able to then craft a marketing message towards your ideal customers.
2. Survey users
By asking users to answer surveys, you will be able to learn about insights on your target customers’ wants and needs. Above all, keep in mind that your questions should be brief and easy to answer.
3. Data collection and analysis
Important metrics should be collected and measured to help you achieve your KPI goals. Some great tools for this are Google Analytics and Crazy Egg, for example.
4. A/B split tests
Test every aspect of your offers. This can be done through paid advertisements where you can link one version of your website on one ad and another version to a different ad. By doing A/B split tests, you can ensure that you are not leaving any money on the table.
5. Map out your buyer’s journey
Mapping out your customer journey will help you learn of the different touchpoints in your business. Some of which can give you ideas on where and how to improve your conversion rates.
6. Focus on important web pages with heatmap analysis
Some webpages you should really focus on is your landing page and product pages. Running a heatmap analysis on those pages will help you earn where visitors click and how they use the page which will help you maximize conversions.
7. Create the most optimized page with A/B testing
Every little detail of your website can be tested. From your website headline to your CTA’s button color.
8. Guide customers by being strategic
You can direct where your customers will go on the website with CTAs and other indicators. However, the placements of these should be strategic.
9. Reduce friction in the buyer’s journey
Reducing friction involves removing all elements that may lead to buyer’s objections or cause users to pause. For example, a paragraph of copy may be unnecessary for your sales page, or if it is necessary, the information can be easier to read with bullet points.
Tools for Conversion Rate Optimization
Here are some great tools to help with your conversion rate optimization:
- HubSpot: gain insights to user behaviors and supports overall marketing efforts
- Unbounce: Build landing pages without coding knowledge and test them
- CrazyEgg: heatmap analysis and other tools or tracking user behavior. The tool also supports A/B testing and segmenting your audiences.
- (Free) Google Analytics: A classic. Learn user behavior, demographic, traffic sources and more.
- (Free) Google PageSpeed: Tests your website speed and gives suggestions on how to improve.
Conclusion
With conversion rate optimization, your business can move up to the next level. Not only will you be able to increase conversion rates, but you will also learn more about your customers. The data you will have acquired over the course of your conversion rate optimization period can be applied to future marketing efforts as well.
If you are looking to take your business to the next level, let Marketing Guru help you! We have professional experts who can handle all your digital marketing needs. Contact us today to receive a free consultation on your digital marketing strategy!