A Brief Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization Strategy
- Moz increased sales revenue by $1 million.
- The Guardian gained a 46% boost in subscriptions.
- CrazyEgg increased revenue by 363%.
All these companies generated these results by employing the same online marketing strategy – conversion rate optimization.
Before learning about conversion rate optimization, you should know what a conversion is.
What Is a Conversion?
A conversion is when your leads complete a specified goal. For example, suppose your company has an upcoming webinar. To attract participants, you send out email invitations to the relevant audience. In this scenario, every time your subscriber registers for the session, it will be recorded as a conversion.
Conversion is divided into two types: micro conversions and macro conversions.
- A micro conversion is one where a potential client has interacted with your business. For instance, they may have added a product to the shopping cart or followed you on social media.
- A macro conversion is one where a visitor interacts with the primary offer on your site. It is associated with the chief goal of your business. For instance, making a reservation or requesting a quote.
What Is Conversion Rate?
Conversion rate involves tracking the number of times the desired goal is met, after which it is divided by the number of users making up the website traffic. For example, if your conversion goal is to promote and sell a product, conversion rate is the number of sold goods in each visit divided by the number of varying instances when a user visited your site.
The important thing is to keep in mind that one unique customer equals one conversion in every visit, regardless of whether the visitor bought four things or exited the site without converting. For instance, if a customer purchases three shoes online, it will count as a single conversion.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) refers to a process where you increase the percentage of visitors who carry out desired actions on your site. To put it briefly, CRO helps boost the number of visitors – ones who buy from you. Examples include:
- Buying a product from your e-commerce website
- Downloading a whitepaper from your website
- Signing up on your landing page
How to Calculate Conversion Rate?
In order to calculate your conversion rate, you should know the number of unique website visitors and the number of conversions you have gained over a specified time.
To determine your conversion rate, divide your conversions by your visitors. This way, you can discover the number of conversions expected from each visitor. Turn this number into a percentage – demonstrating the number of expected conversions from 100 visitors – and multiply it by 100.
Conversion rate = number of conversions / number of unique visitors
For instance, if you had 25 sales from 2,000 interactions in one month, your conversion rate would be 1.25 for that month. However, it is up to you to decide what you consider a valuable interaction as calculating all potential actions can produce skewed rates.
There is a broad array of tools used to track these interactions. For instance, Google has conversion tracking in Google Ads. This helps you create conversion actions that are unique to your brand.
Main Elements of CRO
CRO consists of four elements – A/B testing & personalization, website persuasion, user experience (UX), and conversion research. Prioritizing these elements will increase the likelihood of boosting your conversion rate, which in turn will multiply leads and sales.
- A/B Testing & Personalization: A/B tests& personalization tactics identify and demonstrate the biggest converting experiences for your site. However, this strategy only works for companies that have significant conversions or traffic.
- User experience (UX): User experience is used to improve the user experience of your site. This way, visitors can browse and convert seamlessly, utilizing leading practices for enhancing your site navigation, user flow, and forms.
- Website persuasion: You cannot expect your site to convert your visitors. To interact and convert most of them, you will have to leverage best practice techniques, including the use of urgency and reciprocity, scarcity, and social proof.
- Conversion Research: Collect improvement ideas and insights from conversion research. This is gathered from surveys, visitor recordings, heat maps, web analytics, and user testing.
How Can Websites Benefit from CRO?
There are many areas where your website can benefit from CRO. Here are four of them:
Homepage
Homepages are essential for CRO. They are the first impression for your visitors. It is an opportunity for you to retain those visitors and let them visit other sections of your site. To do this, you can emphasize links to product information – add a free signup option or go with a chatbot implementation to collect questions from visitors in the midst of the browsing experience.
Pricing Page
A pricing page can make or break businesses. With CRO, you can modify the pricing points, helping a pricing page turn visitors to customers, e.g., the price per month or price per year. Describe the strong points of a product linked to each price and include a contact number for visitors, so they can call and request a price quote.
Blog
A blog is a major conversion opportunity for website owners. Other than being used to publish helpful and thoughtful content of your niche, you can use CRO with a blog to convert readers into leads. This process involves placing call-to-action (CTA) across an article or welcoming readers to read more on a topic by providing their contact information for an industry report or ebook.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are created for visitors to take an action. For instance, you can optimize an event landing page by incorporating a video with last year’s event to tempt visitors into registering this year. If a landing page is used to share free resources with visitors, you can optimize it with preview content to motivate visitors to download it.
Deciphering the CRO Process
CRO is a multi-faceted approach that does not merely prioritize a single element of a marketing campaign and website. There are many CRO frameworks that you can use for your process. These frameworks focus on the following five areas:
- Research
- Hypothesis
- Prioritization
- Testing
- Learning
Let’s discuss one of the most popular CRO frameworks: The LIFT Model.
The LIFT Model
The LIFT model is one of the CRO frameworks. Created by Chris Goward, the CEO and Founder of WiderFunnel, this CRO framework uses scientific testing.
The LIFT Model empowers you to analyze experiences from the perspective of your website visitor by going through the following factors:
- Anxiety
- Urgency
- Distraction
- Relevance
- Clarity
- Value Proposition
In the LIFT model, your value proposition identifies your potential conversion rate, making it the most important aspect of the framework. Other factors in the model inhibit or drive your value proposition and help create your hypothesis and testing strategy.
Why Is User Experience Important for CRO?
It makes no difference how persuasive or good your website is; if visitors struggle with navigating or using it, the conversion rate will remain low.Hence, you have to make sure that you can embrace the best practices of website usability to enhance your site user experience. User flow elements, forms, and navigation elements are essential elements of UX. A conversion rate optimization consultant will perform the following tasks:
- Create finger-friendly links and buttons on mobile devices
- Work on error handling of form fields to increase completion rate
- Use tool tips for content pieces and fields that need an explanation
CRO Tools
For A/B testing and conversion research, a conversion rate optimization consultant uses three forms of CRO tools:
- A/B Testing Tool: You have to test various forms of content, such as different page layouts and call-to-action buttons. It will determine the version of the content that can increase your conversion rate. This involves using affordable tools like VWO.
- Visitor Feedback Tool: Collecting positive feedback from your visitors is important for understanding their requirements and needs, shaping high-impact ideas. One of the most popular tools for this purpose is Hotjar.
- Web Analytics Tool: Such a tool is critical because it helps you track your existing web conversion rate and success metric performance. Besides, you can collect visitor insights and look for pages with low conversion rates. The most important tool to use for this is Google Analytics.
What Conversion Rate Should You Aim for?
This is a widely asked question and it has plenty of answers because good conversion rate varies from case to case. Conversion rates depend on your site type, marketing efforts, and unique value proposition.
For an approximate benchmark, 2% is average for an e-commerce website and anything more than 5% is taken as extremely good. On the other hand, paid search for landing pages has an average conversion rate of 50%.
Moreover, avoid comparing your conversion rates with a competitor or a report or blog. Doing this is risky and can lead you to set the wrong expectations.
Benefits of CRO
What is your current business goal? Is it one of these?
- You would like to increase website readability.
- You are looking to increase the number of backlinks to your website.
- You want more customers to register for your service.
Regardless of your goal, with assistance from a conversion rate optimization consultant, you can enjoy the following advantages:
- You can deliver better and faster service than your competition, making more users choose you.
- An increase in conversion rate can help attract more traffic to your site, get more desired actions, and increase your overall profit.
- Using CRO to increase conversion rate can decrease your customer acquisition cost (CAC).
- CRO lets you put a defense against impatient users as it tells you about user needs and expectations.
- CRO ensures that your customers benefit from a pleasant user experience. It reviews what works on your site and how to build on it. Satisfied customers will engage with your business.
- CRO aids growth without depleting your resources. By increasing your customer-base, you can turn browsers into potential customers.
- By determining how to improve the conversion rate, you can enhance the ROI of your acquisition efforts.
- CRO turns passive browsers into leads because it determines user behavior, such as what they are looking for and what prevents them from taking the desired action
- CRO saves money. Perhaps you pay for website traffic and with CRO, you can get a higher return on investment
- Quality carries more importance than quantity for customer acquisition. With CRO, you can find the relevant customer for your brand, meeting your goals, rather than receiving a barrage of inactive customers.
Final Thoughts
So, how to start with conversion rate optimization? At first, you have to determine your conversion metrics. After that, the next step is to determine which part of your conversion funnel you would like to optimize. Usually, this is portion of the funnel that receives the most traffic. Focusing on these sections will produce a positive impact on your brand.
With some basic elements in place, a well-thought-out CRO strategy is bound to yield positive outcomes. If you have calculated your conversion rates and track key metrics, then you are off to a good start.
