What is the CRO?
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a systematic process of increasing the percentage of visitors to a website who take a desired action , whether it’s filling out a form, requesting make a purchase, or any other action desired by the owner or manager of this site. This CRO process involves understanding how users move around your site, what actions they take, and what is preventing them from achieving your goals.
What is a conversion?
A conversion is a general term for the action of a website visitor who achieves a given goal. These goals can be of any kind. If you use your website to sell products, the primary focus (called macro-conversion) will of course be the act of user buying. But there are more modest conversions that can happen before a user completes a macro conversion, like signing up for a newsletter. This is called micro-conversions.
Here are some examples of conversions
– Macro-conversions: purchase of a product on the site, request for a quote, subscription to a service, etc.
– Micro-conversions: subscribing to a mailing list, creating an account, adding a product to the cart, etc.
What is the conversion rate?
Your site’s conversion rate is the number of times a user reaches a specific goal divided by your site traffic. If a user can convert on every visit, such as purchasing a product, divide the number of conversions by the number of sessions (the number of unique times a user has visited your site). If you’re selling a subscription, divide the number of conversions by the number of users.
How to calculate the conversion rate?
The conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions (desired actions taken by visitors) by the total number of visitors and multiplying the result by 100 to get a percentage.
For example, if your web page had 50 sales and 1,000 visitors last month, your conversion rate is 50 divided by 1,000 (0.05), multiplied by 100 = 5%.
The average conversion rate is considered to be between 1% and 4%, but this range is actually meaningless, for the following reasons:
- Every website, page or audience is different
- Conversion rates vary enormously depending on the conversion objective (clicks on Ads, finalizing an order, subscribing to a newsletter, etc.)
- Most businesses and e-merchants do not share their conversion data publicly anyway.
The benefits of a CRO strategy
Once you’ve implemented a CRO strategy, the benefits go beyond just getting more people to take a specific action on your website.
Here are the top three benefits your business can gain from effective CRO action:
1-? Increase your profits
As conversion rate optimization is strictly focused on maximizing the performance of your current website or application, there are no additional fixed costs to your business or increased marketing budget required.
So while your variable costs, such as the cost of producing and shipping products, increase because you sell more, your fixed costs such as salaries, office rent, and marketing budget remain the same.
2-? Maximize your marketing expenses
When measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, whether it’s traditional offline media or online media like Google Ads, social media, or sending emails, the ultimate goal is usually conversion. . There are other metrics of a campaign’s performance, such as engagement rate, click-through rate (CTR), etc., but ultimately the goal of most campaigns is to incentivize the customer to buy.
If your marketing action is performing well in engagement and CTR metrics but is not producing as many conversions as expected, it can ultimately result in a negative outcome for your marketing strategy. With a successful CRO job, you’ll get the most out of the traffic your marketing sends to your website or app and turn a higher percentage of visitors into paying customers.
3-? Boost your brand value
Conversion rate optimization work generally means that customers will be able to enjoy a more enjoyable and transparent experience with your brand. When they visit your website, they are able to do what they want to do quickly and easily.
Some strategies to work your CRO
Take a look at the following methods and techniques to improve your CRO and increase your ROI.
1-? Use the data
Collecting data is crucial to help you set up a cohesive CRO project. This requires having clear and precise data on your current conversions, on the behavior of Internet users through the pages of your website and on your audience. You can collect both qualitative and quantitative data when working on improving your conversion rate optimization. Tools like Google Analytics and your CRM software can help you collect quantitative data, both in the area of click-through rates and in terms of conversion rates. If you want to collect qualitative data, you can conduct surveys and polls to enable your visitors, leads,
In addition to collecting your own data, always try to find and use existing data related to your audience and business goals. There are many statistics, surveys, and case studies that you might find helpful. Applying real-world data to your concrete actions as you work on optimizing your conversion rate will allow you to define and apply reasoned choices.
2-? Create effective CTAs
A call-to-action button (CTA) remains one of the most important elements in ensuring conversions of any kind. It encourages the user to take the next step and take a desirable action that will help you achieve your goals. The effective use of call-to-action buttons is essential if you want to achieve the best possible results and ensure a decent return on your investment. There are many ways to create a CTA, so you need to think about where it will be placed, what text it will feature, and also what its design will be.
You might already be using CTAs in your emails, PPC ads, landing pages, etc. You can therefore analyze the reaction of your audience to these CTAs, whether it is the positioning, the wording of your CTA or even the different colors used for your buttons. Either way, an effective CTA can dramatically improve the conversion rate.
3-? Publish high quality content
The content you publish can definitely increase your conversion rates and boost your ROI. High-quality content gives your audience useful tips and information that are part of the buying journey. It plays a key role and guides your leads through the different parts of your marketing and sales funnel, helping them answer their questions and position your brand as an authority in your industry.
You probably already publish content, but do you have a clear content strategy? Are you creating high quality content focused on driving conversions? Informative and authoritative content drives traffic to your site and helps convince leads to make the right decisions once they land on your website. Unique content prompts people to take desired actions and can convert them into customers, while being both informative and entertaining. SEO-optimized blog posts are a great example of content that can help increase your traffic, conversions, and return on investment.
4-? A / B testing
Your CRO strategy should involve a lot of testing. The best way to know if your marketing and sales strategy is really working is to test several different options to see what produces the best results. And that’s where A / B testing, or A / B testing comes in. A / B testing, also known as split testing, is a process of showing two versions or variations of the same web page to different segments of visitors to the site in question, in order to find the variation that generates the the more conversions, the more clicks, which is which one works the best. Using this testing technique, you will be able to resolve visitors’ pain points and optimize the return on investment of your existing traffic.
Conclusion
There are a lot of other things you can do to optimize your conversion rates, like improving your landing pages, giving customers more choice about the payment methods offered on your site, using the technique of social proof, etc. .
To carry out your CRO projects and go further in terms of optimization, you will have to use suitable tools, such as Google Analytics, Inspeclet (to record visitor sessions on your site), Optimizely ( A / B testing), or Qualaroo (for surveys).