Why Conversion Rate Optimization is an Essential Part of an Effective Growth Marketing Mix
On average, 98% of website visitors don't convert. This may surprise many because of how prevalent it is to make a purchase or request a demo, or fill out a contact form of any kind. This means that only 2% of the people who land on a website take the desired action. This can be frustrating for businesses, especially those who are trying to grow and expand their customer base.
Enter conversion rate optimization or CRO. CRO is a process of improving the percentage of website visitors who take the desired action. It's a vital part of growth marketing, which is focused on using data and experimentation to drive business growth.
In this article, we'll take a deep dive into conversion rate optimization and explore how it is an underrated part of any effective growth marketing mix. We'll cover the basics of CRO, including the key metrics you need to know and the different types of tests one needs to consider running. We will also look at some of the best practices for implementing a successful CRO strategy as well as effective tactics that when implemented consistently, allow your business to start seeing real results and drive growth for your business.
What is conversion rate optimization (CRO) and why it ought to be part of your business’ growth marketing fundamentals
Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is a process that aims to improve the percentage of website visitors who take a specific desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. The basic idea is to create a more user-friendly website experience that encourages visitors to convert at a higher rate.
To effectively use CRO for growth marketing, it's important to understand the basics of how it works. This includes knowing which metrics to measure to gauge your success, how to identify conversion roadblocks on your website, and which types of tests to run to optimize your conversion rates.
In essence, CRO is all about optimizing in order to make data-driven decisions that create a better user experience and ultimately drive more growth for your business. By improving the conversion rate of your website, you can increase the number of leads, sales, and revenue for your business without having to spend more on advertising or traffic acquisition
Why CRO’s data-driven focus is a key part of creating an effective growth marketing strategy for your business
Creating a data-driven CRO (conversion rate optimization) strategy means using website data and analytics to make informed decisions about what changes to make to your website. Taking a data-driven approach ensures that you can ensure that your optimization efforts are focused on the areas that will have the biggest impact on your website's performance.
To create a data-driven CRO strategy, there are a few key steps to follow:
Analyzing website data: Use web analytics tools like Google Analytics to track visitor behavior on your site. Look at metrics like bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rate to identify areas that need improvement.
Establish your baseline: The first step is to identify your current key metrics, such as conversion rate, bounce rate, cost per conversion or lead, etc. This gives you a base from which you can start to identify areas for improvement,
Identify your conversion goals: Next, you need to identify what actions you want visitors to take on your website. This might include filling out a form, online sales, reaching checkout, or signing up for a newsletter.
Develop hypotheses: Based on your data analysis, develop hypotheses about what changes to your website could improve your conversion rate. For example, if you notice that visitors are abandoning your checkout or contact form with a high degree of regularity, you might hypothesize that making adding a better call to action or simplifying the page might generate more leads or sales..
Prioritize key goals: Once you have a list of hypotheses, prioritize them based on potential impact and ease of implementation. Focus on tests that are impactful but are also fairly easy to implement, so you can start seeing results quickly.
Test and analyze: Use A/B testing or multivariate tests to determine the impact of what you are looking to assess. Analyze the results to determine which changes were most effective and iterate on your strategy as needed.
By following a data-driven CRO strategy, you can make more informed decisions about what changes to make to your website and improve your conversion rate (and ultimately improve your efficiency in generating sales or leads. Optimization is perpetually ongoing, so it's important to continually analyze your data, not just to assess the impact of the tests that you have conducted, but also to find new ideas to test in order to keep improving your website's performance.
The importance of continuous conversion rate optimization (CRO) for sustained revenue or lead growth
In today's competitive digital landscape, it's not enough to simply optimize your website once and never look at it again. To achieve sustained growth, it's imperative that continuous optimization be a priority. This means regularly testing and refining your website to improve its performance and working to better meet the constantly evolving needs of your users.
There are several reasons why continuous optimization is so important for sustained growth:
The ever-evolving digital landscape: With new technologies and platforms emerging all the time, it's important to stay up to date and adapt to the latest trends and best practices.
Changing user needs: This goes partly to the previous point, but just as well to just the natural growth and evolution of your business. As your business grows and your user base expands, it's important to continually re-evaluate your website to ensure that it meets the evolving needs of your users. By regularly testing and optimizing your website, you can make sure that your user experience stays fresh and relevant.
Iterative optimization leads to long-term success: Making small, incremental improvements to your website over time can add up to significant gains in the long run.
By regularly testing and refining your website, you can improve its performance, meet the evolving needs of your users, and stay ahead of the competition.
How to Identify Potential Conversion Roadblocks in Your Growth Marketing Funnel
Conversion roadblocks are obstacles on your website that prevent visitors from taking the desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. Identifying and removing these roadblocks is essential for achieving better conversion rates for your website.
When it comes to identifying CRO roadblocks, it's important to track and measure the right metrics to determine whether your optimization efforts are successful or not. Here are some key metrics to consider when measuring your CRO success:
Conversion rate: This is the most important metric to track. It measures the percentage of visitors who take the desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. This measure allows you to know the true impact of your efforts on your bottom line.
Bounce rate: This metric measures the percentage of visitors who navigate away from your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can be an indication that visitors are not finding what they're looking for on your website.
Time on site: This metric measures how long visitors are spending on your website. The longer they stay, the more engaged they are with your the more engaged they are with your content, and the more likely they are to convert, .
Exit rate: This metric measures the percentage of visitors who leave your website from a specific page. By tracking your exit rate, you can identify which pages may be causing visitors to leave your site without converting.
Click-through rate: This metric measures the percentage of visitors who click on a specific call-to-action (CTA) or link. A high click-through rate can indicate that your CTA is effective, that what you are offering is resonating with visitors, and that ultimately they are taking the desired action (ex; ordering your products, requesting a meeting, etc.).
It is also imperative to put yourself in your customers/prospects/visitors’ shoes in order to understand just what they might be experiencing when they visit your site and go about deciding if your business serves their interests. Are there any confusing or unclear calls to action? Are there any steps in the conversion process that are causing friction? Or any technical issues that may be preventing visitors from converting?
Another effective way to identify conversion roadblocks is to ask for feedback from your visitors. Consider using surveys, on-site polls, or user testing to get feedback on their website experience. This can help you pinpoint specific issues and make the necessary changes to improve your conversion rates.
Once you've identified your conversion roadblocks, the next step is to address them. This may involve making changes to your website design, reworking your calls-to-action, or simplifying your conversion process. By removing these obstacles, you can create a more user-friendly website that is more inviting and naturally encourages visitors to convert at a higher rate.
Types of CRO tests to run (A/B testing, multivariate testing, etc.)
When it comes to conversion rate optimization (CRO), there are different types of tests you can run to determine which changes to your website will lead to higher conversion rates.
A/B testing: This is the most basic and widely-used type of CRO test. It involves creating two versions of a webpage - an original version (A) and a variation (B) - and splitting traffic between the two versions to see which performs better. A/B testing is an especially efficient way to test small changes like headlines, button text, or images.
Multivariate testing: This allows you to test multiple variables at the same time. Instead of creating two separate pages like in A/B testing, you create multiple variations of different page elements (such as headlines, images, and buttons) and test all possible combinations. Multivariate testing is best used for larger, more complex changes that may have multiple factors contributing to their effectiveness.
Split URL testing: This type of CRO test involves testing entirely different versions of a webpage on different URLs. Split URL testing is useful when testing large-scale changes, such as a complete redesign of a page or a new landing page.
User testing: This involves recruiting real users to test your website and provide feedback on their experience. User testing can be done in-person or remotely, and is a good way to get more qualitative data on how users are interacting with your site.
Heat mapping: Heat mapping is a way to track how users interact with different areas of your website. It can help you identify which elements on your page are getting the most attention, and which may be causing confusion or frustration for visitors.
By running different types of CRO tests, you can get a better understanding of what changes are most effective in improving your website's conversion rate. It's important to remember that no single test can provide all the answers, so it's important to run multiple tests and analyze the data to determine what changes will have the biggest impact on your website's performance.
8 Reasons Why Conversion Rate Optimization Needs to Be An Important Part of A Growth Marketing-Based Framework
There are many reasons why you need to understand CRO, but the main thing you need to know is how many people accept your offer vis-à-vis those who visit your site.
Many business owners or marketers tend to relegate CRO to the periphery, but it’s nearly essential that CRO not only not be neglected, but that it is applied early and often in their day-to-day business operations.
Here are 12 reasons why conversion rate optimization is important for growth-focused businesses (hopefully like yours).
Establishes Credibility and Trust: If you don’t have trust, you won’t be able to make the profits you hope to make
CRO helps build this trust as you get to know when and how to target your customers with the right offers thanks to already existing data from CRO efforts.
On top of that, CRO helps you optimize your website’s design to make it easier for users to find what they need, or at least quickly figure out how to find it.
2) Generates a Stream of Easy Customers
CRO helps increase the conversions from your current web traffic without you having to increase your advertising budget just to increase conversion rates.
CRO allows you to essentially grab the free money on the table that you can generate from the same web traffic you get every month on your site. Consequently, CRO decreases the cost of customer acquisition and increases sales and revenue.
3) Increase Revenues and Profits
A higher your conversion rate doesn’t translate to increased costs. In fact, your fixed costs and advertising will remain the same as you start optimizing the different elements on your website.
CRO saves you the money you’d otherwise have spent on PPC ads and/or digital marketing efforts just to get your website optimized. You’ll find that you’re spending less money per customer while making more money.
4) Lower Customer Acquisition Costs
On a related note, they say it’s less expensive to retain an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. In fact, Harvard Business Review reports that acquiring new customers is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than it is to retain an existing customer.
This shows how important customer lifetime value is, so you want to spend as little as you can to get more customers, which CRO helps you achieve.
CRO ensures that you can give your customers what they want, and position your brand on the market using more effective copy and sharp brand design. You also get to reach the right prospects and enjoy sustainable, repeatable and consistent growth
5) It gives you insights into your customers
As you apply more and newer CRO strategies to your e-commerce store, you get to learn even more about your customers and visitors.
You find out things like what they need, what they want, why they come to your site, and other audience behaviors, which form the basis for CRO.
6) Data-driven decision making
When it comes to business and making profits, you don’t want to leave anything to chance or guesswork.
You want to know for sure that what you’re doing is backed by evidence and that it will work. CRO ensures that you get the hard data about your audience and use it to make better decisions.
By optimizing different elements of your site, you get to increase your conversion rate and improve lead generation results. This allows you to capture more information about your audience and visitors and market to them.
For instance, if you find that visitors who sign up for free trials convert lower than those who sign up for product demos, you can optimize your site and conversion paths for those booking meetings or demos with a sales rep.
7) Allows you to take calculated risks
As we’ve already seen, CRO helps you understand your customers and your business better. With the relevant data in hand and the right strategies, you’re able to take calculated risks because you’re more secure about what you can experiment on thanks to the increased revenue or leads.
8) Create more targeted and profitable advertising campaigns
CRO comes with business growth, improved traffic and profitability, which more often than not would encourage you to advertise more so you can gain more.
What’s more, even though it gets your business lots of highly targeted traffic, pay-per-click (PPC) is getting costlier all the time.
CRO is the most affordable and effective way to increase the number of page visitors and conversions while combating the rising cost of SEM, paid social ads and other forms of digital marketing.
6 advanced conversion optimization tactics that need to be part of your business’ growth marketing playbook
Now that we have established the many benefits of using conversion optimization as part of your business growth mix,let us look at six customer-centric conversion optimization techniques to help you ease the customer journey and accelerate business growth. You will walk away with actionable steps you can take today to improve your website and increase conversions.
Ultimately, conversion optimization is about the overall user experience of discovering, learning, and, ultimately, purchasing a product.
Let’s look at six things to add to your growth marketing strategy that your business can use to improve the user experience (UX) and guide shoppers toward a purchase:
1. Identify bottlenecks
With so many elements on a standard site, it’s all too easy for a visitor to get tripped up by a single misplaced CTA, confusing pricing table, or incomplete product description.
The goal, then, is to look for website bottlenecks that may cause users to drop off too early.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) agency The Good found that identifying bottlenecks for their client Swiss Gear increased conversions by 132%.
After using Google Analytics to access data like where and when users exited the site, The Good used Hotjar’s behavior analytics tools—like Heatmaps and Recordings—to paint a fuller picture of what was happening on Swiss Gear’s e-commerce website.
2. Conduct A/B testing to improve navigation
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is essential for reducing friction in site navigation—and increasing conversions.
As explained earlier, tests should be designed around hypotheses that you’re trying to prove or disprove. These hypotheses focus on what's changing, what user impact that makes, and an estimated impact to conversion.”
Once you have a solid hypothesis, you’ll need to make sure you have the right tools to test it.
Using tools like Optimizely, VWO, or Google Optimize can be very helpful for running small tests without the need for sometimes time-consuming deployment cycles.
Hotjar can be great for seeing heat maps of what people are paying attention to on your site and making improvements.
Carefully analyze how changes affect conversion rates, but try not to get discouraged if they don’t work. Whether your conversion rate stays the same or goes up, you’ll gain valuable data about your users you can use to improve their experience.
3. Highlight product reviews and testimonials
If customers need even a little nudge in converting, social proof—like product reviews and testimonials—provides just that.
In fact, Baymard found that 95% of shoppers on traditional ecommerce sites use reviews to evaluate a product.
When shoppers see that others have purchased (and had a good experience with) an item, they feel more confident buying it themselves.
Some online retailers leverage the power of reviews by making it easy to filter and sort them. J.Crew’s product pages, for instance, let users sort reviews by body type and height.
These features erase doubts about product fit that might prevent users from purchasing. Plus, the company handles fewer returns by helping customers get it right the first time.
4. Use high-quality photos and videos
Customers need to see a product from all angles to feel confident buying. A backpack might look appealing from the front, but a shopper might hesitate to click purchase without seeing a close-up of its straps.
In addition to helping customers convert with confidence, high-quality images inform customers’ perception of your company as trustworthy and professional.
Patagonia uses multiple models and offers large photos and videos from different angles.
More companies are also using videos on product pages to let customers visualize how an item functions. For example, you can see how a backpack shifts with each step the model takes.
While these videos are important in retail, they’re equally as vital for software-as-a-service (SaaS) products. By seeing a clip of the software in action, buyers can clearly see how the product works, and just might be the nudge that makes a buyer say, “Oh, I need that!”, and ask for a demo or a consultation.
5. Make the checkout process seamless—and unforgettable
We’ve all been there before: a daunting checkout page requiring credit card information makes us move a purchase to the ‘later’ list.
Eliminating obstacles at checkout makes for a calmer, happier experience for your customers—and more sales for you. Research by Baymard shows that websites can increase conversion rates by over 35% by improving the design of their checkout or lead form pages.
Web design agency NerdCow found and resolved cart abandonment issues on a client’s site by launching surveys to ask the customer why they didn’t buy. The most common reason? People simply got distracted or forgot.
To fix the issue, NerdCow created a cart reminder email sequence and an on-site cart reminder for returning shoppers.
The result? Conversions tripled in two weeks.
6. Personalize the customer experience
Personalizing the customer experience helps you improve conversion rates—and creates satisfied, loyal customers.
Consider a high-touch sales experience, like buying a home. Throughout the process, you work closely with the seller (or, in this case, the realtor). You frequently chat with them, gaining trust in their guidance, and your enthusiasm about the sale grows.
Companies that want to do this at scale without 1:1 interaction can bring in qualities of the concierge experience, This makes the user feel more understood and that the product is tailor-made for them and their needs. It’s extremely powerful.
CRO As an Important Part of Your Business Growth Marketing Strategy
Conversion Rate Optimization can be a powerful way to drive revenue growth and progress for your business, but it requires a continuous cycle of analysis, execution and reevaluation. What makes it particularly powerful is the fact that CRO is a particularly overlooked tactic when it comes to generating revenue growth. So the very fact that your business is using CRO can be a particularly strong advantage. To help you get the most out of your campaigns, this article examines the benefits, tactics, and roadblocks that may be pertinent to your specific business.
By following these tips and best practices, you can continuously optimize your conversion rate optimization efforts. Whether you're new to implementing A/B or multivariate testing, this article hopefully provides some guidelines for getting started, Alternatley if your business has already started implementing CRO as part of the list of growth-focused marketing tactics, perhaps this list would serve for some inspiration.
If you believe that conversion rate optimization might be a driver for your business, but are not sure about how to get started, or about your existing strategy, please feel to reach out today to our CRO consultants or for a general free, no-obligation growth marketing consultation. Our expert growth marketing consultants look forward to meeting with you, learning more about your business, and determining what key levers of your business need to be optimized in order to maximize your business growth potential.