Conversion Rate Optimisation
There are currently over 1.1 billion websites online, spread across over 271 million domains. It is an incredible number of pages vying for a limited pool of readers and viewers. But if you're trying to make money off your website, it takes more than that to succeed. Instead, once people find your site, you need to convince them to take the action your business deems as a conversion. Increased levels of this action more often than not comes from sites that have been well-equipped and optimised for the customer to do it quickly and efficiently.
A conversion rate optimisation (CRO) strategy is a great tool for increasing the number of people who convert to buyers on your website. Here, we'll explain conversion rate optimisation (CRO) in greater detail, and an understanding of its importance, and share tips for improving your site's conversion rate.
Definition Of "Conversion Rate optimisation"
The goal of conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is to increase the percentage of website visitors who take the desired action (such as submitting a form or making a purchase). During the CRO phase, you'll learn about your users' journeys as they navigate your site, their actions, and the barriers that prevent them from achieving your objectives.
The three main methods of CRO are content optimisation, A/B testing, and process optimisation. Optimal conversion rates bring about better-qualified leads, more sales, and lower acquisition costs.
Why Consider CRO for Your Business Website?
The likelihood of a visitor returning to complete your desired action after unsuccessfully persuading them on their first visit to enter your conversion funnel is low.
For your company, this represents a missed opportunity. Conversion rate optimisation campaigns are the best way to increase your success rate and the number of customers who choose to do business with you.
You can save a lot of time, money, and effort with a well-executed conversion rate optimisation campaign and discover novel approaches to expansion. In other words, CRO aids in gaining a deeper comprehension of user behaviour on your website and guides how to enhance the user experience (UX) to achieve your objectives.
Conversion rate optimisation, or CRO, is an ever-evolving strategic practice. Unfortunately, the "continuous" aspect is often overlooked when discussing conversion rate optimisation elements.
What Does Conversion Rate & CRO Strategy Mean?
The conversion rate is the percentage of site visitors who take the desired action, such as registering for a service or making a purchase. If your website has a high conversion rate, it is because it has a desirable offer and is well-organised, user-friendly, and interesting to the people you want to convert.
However, several website performances or design factors could contribute to a low conversion rate. Common causes of low conversion rates include long page loading times, broken forms or poorly designed shopping carts, and copy that fails to describe the offer's benefits adequately.
A CRO Strategy is a plan to assess areas that are impacting your conversion rate. By understanding the functionality and customer journeys on a website, and making counter measures to improve the areas where you see your potential customers drop off.
How to Determine the Conversion Rate of a Landing Page?
The first step in optimising your landing pages are determining your current conversion rate. The conversion rate can be expressed as a percentage by taking the number of conversions and dividing it by the total number of users or visitors to the website, then multiplying the result by 100.
Conversion rates can be used as a yardstick to measure the success of a website or advertising campaign. You can see what works and what doesn't by comparing the conversion rate before and after implementing any changes.
What Is A "Good" Conversion Rate by Digital Marketing Standards?
There is no one "good" conversion rate that can be applied universally. What constitutes an "average" conversion rate varies widely across industries and conversion objectives. The actual worldwide average, however, is debated between estimates of 1% and 4%.
This may or may not apply to your situation. If you want to know how you stack up against the norm, it's best to do some math and compare your historical and current conversion rates to what you can expect in the future. Finding out what motivates your specific audience is more important than worrying about whether or not your conversion rate is "good."
One thing to keep in mind is that you are always comparing apples with apples, if your conversion rate is much lower than previous periods it may be that you are spending a higher amount of advertising budget on a channel with lower conversion. If you have a spike in conversion it could be because of an influx of highly qualified customers from an email or a special offer.
A conversion rate is a living breathing thing and there are some practical ways you can influence it very easily.
What Does CRO Process & Conversion Rate Optimisation Services Entail?
The goal of conversion rate optimisation is to increase the percentage of visitors who take the desired action through the website, landing page, or advertising campaign.
Information gleaned from past user actions, customer feedback, and conversion rate optimisation best practices all factor into this process. The CRO process involves the following:
Analysis of the Target Market
Understanding your target market's pain points, interests, and brand interactions can be gained through surveys and analytical research. By assessing feedback from customers for trends that can heavily influence their buying decisions could be crucial to improving your conversion rate.
Optimisation
Optimise your marketing efforts or web pages with recommendations pulled from proper market research. Some examples include improving your website's user experience (UX) by redesigning the layout, adding more compelling calls to action, or expanding your target audience by eliminating obstacles. optimisation is essential for turning warm leads into paying customers.
A/B Testing
In most cases, a change in CRO is not a set and forget occurrence. You should evaluate your changes against a variety of criteria. You could compare the effectiveness of various calls-to-action to determine which ones work best (i.e., has a higher conversion rate). The temptation to skip this step is understandable but can result in false positives. A/B testing reveals the gains made through the optimisation of the user experience on your site.
Measurement
Consider utilising data and analytics programs to track the progress of your various marketing initiatives. You can figure out your conversion rate by setting up goals to monitor conversion progress and comparing the results to your overall traffic statistics. Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager work together to help you determine your game plan. There is other pieces of software that track visually where your visitors are engaging and dropping off in their journey like HotJar.
Results from CRO Carried Out on a Client's Site by Do Good Things
Doubled form submissions for free consultation from CRO on a marketing website.
Who can Benefit from Using Conversion Rate Optimisation Service?
Businesses of any size or industry can benefit from conversion rate optimisation. Even if you are mostly happy with your conversion rate now, there is always more that you do to start stoking the fire with new prospects. For specific industries here is what we propose.
CRO for B2B And SaaS Companies
Lead generation is the first step in converting website visitors into paying customers by attracting their attention, keeping them engaged, and collecting their contact information through various means, including Google Analytics and other tags used by CRO services. Invite them to download a lead magnet mailing list, giving them free trials to test the product and start their customer journey with you.
When running a business that caters to other businesses or provides a service to other businesses, it is your responsibility to aid your customers in finding what they need, pique their interest, and provide them with the information they need to purchase decisions.
A CRO service will be able to give you a third person perspective on your site, what your competitors are doing well and how your offers sit from a consumer perspective. They will have run tests for similar businesses and be able to use their own experience to better yours.
CRO For Online Retailers
One of the biggest problems facing e-commerce businesses is the loss of potential sales worth billions of dollars every year due to cart abandonment and a failed website's conversion rate optimisation. The Baymard Institute found that nearly 69 percent of online shoppers abandon their carts during the buying process for various reasons.
Therefore, it is essential to create a user-friendly eCommerce site with a user-friendly experience, great design, and affordable shipping costs. These are not the only cart abandonment problems to consider if you are having drop-off issues. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers every month or so and try out your entire journey. There might be issues such as a complicated payment process or a lack of basic information, and so on.
These are some of the most common reasons site visitors abandon a website is due to bad website conversion rate optimisation (CRO):
- Customers may become distracted if they encounter too many interruptions, such as pop-ups or forms to complete.
- Inconvenient checkout: First-time buyers might struggle with the site's checkout process if it isn't user-friendly.
- Costs that aren't immediately obvious to the customer include shipping fees, sales tax, and others.
Conversion rate optimisation (or CRO) campaigns help find and fix these types of roadblocks, which in turn boosts conversions. Using conversion rate optimisation services or a conversion rate optimisation agency to optimise your site will give you fresh, expert eyes over your site. CRO Agencies will analyse your conversion funnel, determine customer acquisition costs and calculate conversion rate for your industry.
CRO For Media Companies
Companies like media agencies and publishing houses rely heavily on attracting new customers and keeping them engaged on their sites. Here, CRO can aid them by testing out different website features like email subscription forms, social media sharing buttons, suggested articles, and other forms of advertising to see which ones attract the most visitors and lead them to convert.
CRO For Travel Agencies
The travel industry has a notoriously difficult time converting customers. Consumers in this segment take more time than average to make a buying decision, check prices and reviews, talk to their peers, and pick up the phone to make a call. Their difficult booking habits exacerbate the difficulty of the industry. Travel businesses implementing a CRO campaign can better assess strengths and weaknesses and boost conversions.
Digital Marketing Agency CRO Expertise.
When discussing the many industries that have benefited from CRO, it is impossible to leave out service providers like digital marketing agencies, web developers, and specialised CRO firms. Conversion rate optimisation campaigns, whether for their own or their client's websites, have been shown to increase conversions, revenue, return on investment, customer retention, and satisfaction with the business.
A good digital marketing agency who provides services like marketing websites, eCommerce websites and Landing Page design also have services such as CRO where they can recommend ways of maximising the value of their current visitors, without rebuilding the whole new site. They have access to a wider network of industries and experts which means they will have expertise in solving many different problems and understand how to influence digital traffic more than most.
Do Good Things is just that. We are a holistic Digital Marketing agency who design, build and promote businesses online.
Get in touch for a complimentary evaluation of your site and a game plan to improve your CRO
Where To Implement CRO Strategies
Here are four places on your site where conversion rate optimisation efforts could have a significant impact.
Homepage
Optimising a website's homepage is a great place to start with CRO. The homepage serves as a first impression and a chance to keep visitors on your site and direct them to other parts of the site.
You can do this in several ways, including highlighting links to product information, incorporating a chatbot that asks questions from visitors during their browsing experience, or even providing a free signup button.
Pricing Page
When deciding whether or not to continue seeking the services listed on a website, many customers will first look at the prices. Changes to the pricing intervals (such as price-per-year vs. price-per-month), descriptions of the product feature associated with each price, a cell number for visitors to call for a price quote, or a simple pop-up form can all help a pricing page convert visitors into customers through conversion rate optimisation.
Changes to the pricing intervals (such as price-per-year vs. price-per-month), descriptions of the product feature associated with each price, a cell number for visitors to call for a price quote, or a simple pop-up form can all help a pricing page convert visitors into customers through conversion rate optimisation.
Blog
Using CRO, a blog can do more than just publish informative and helpful content about the industry in which it operates. To accomplish this, it is common practice to insert CTAs (calls to action) at various points throughout an article or to request that readers provide their email addresses in exchange for a free ebook or industry report.
Landing Pages
With an average conversion rate of 23%, landing pages easily outperform other types of signup forms due to their focus on getting visitors to take action. Optimising a landing page for an event, for instance, with a video from the previous year, can increase the likelihood that a visitor will sign up for this year's event. Preview content from a free resource can increase the likelihood that a visitor will download the full resource.
Results from a Landing Page Redevelopment Carried Out by Do Good Things
100% Increase of the conversion rate for Free Consultation from our paid search campaign beginning in July 2022 from CRO and campaign optimisation
How CRO Benefits Your Website's SEO
While improving conversion rates isn't directly related to increasing a site's organic traffic or position in search engine results pages (SERPs), it does help SEO in other ways.
Enhanced Understanding of What the Customer Base Wants
Conversion rate optimisation can help you identify your target demographic and determine the most effective way to communicate with them. The goal of conversion rate optimisation is to increase revenue by attracting new and loyal customers.
Better Return on Investment (ROI)
Learning how to maximise your acquisition efforts will increase conversions without increasing your marketing spend on new leads. CRO allows you to expand without exhausting your available assets or losing potential customers, which is especially helpful because your audience size might not expand proportionally as your business does.
There is a finite size to any audience. You can expand your business indefinitely if you can convince more people to purchase from your site. Users are more likely to return if they have a positive experience and come away thinking highly of your website. CRO is the study of your site's successes. It's possible to improve the user experience by building on existing successes. If your site's visitors are given a sense of control, they will use it more frequently and may even become brand advocates.
Increased Trust Level
A user's level of trust in the site must increase before they are willing to provide sensitive information such as a credit card number, email address, or other identifying details. In terms of making sales, your website is invaluable. Your site should have the same professionalism, courtesy, and preparedness to answer questions as your internal sales team.
Do the Recommended Methods for Improving Conversion Rates Work?
Best practices in CRO are, by definition, methods that have proven successful for other businesses. The quick CRO "hacks" may not work for your company.
In light of this, companies should exercise caution before implementing any changes without first conducting thorough testing and gaining a deep familiarity with their target demographic. It's commonly held that, for instance, all it takes to boost conversions is a couple of minor adjustments.
Common examples of CRO "tips" are:
- A/B testing headlines.
- The incorporation of contact forms on every page.
- Subtly altering the hue of call-to-action buttons.
- Consistently adding customer reviews.
- Providing discounts.
The success of another company is no guarantee of your own. The best strategy is to zero in on what's already resonating with your target demographic and use that information to inform creative changes that will boost conversion rates.
Don’t Risk Getting Your CRO Wrong
Before you try and implement any CRO strategies, it is always wise to reach out to a professional CRO agency that can guide you. CRO strategies are specific to every business.
If you are looking to implement CRO for your business, reach out to Do Good Things today.
Innovative Approaches To CRO
Rather than simply following current ‘conversion hack’ fashions, there are many brands on the forefront of creating new ones. Adopting non-standard CRO strategies and gauging their efficacy is one way to stay ahead of the competition. This could be as wild as augmented reality for shoppers on a makeup site but it could also by refining all your micro-conversions goals - optimising your audience's journey all the way from reading an article on social media all the way down the funnel to signing up to your brand.
At the same time, you should monitor user behaviour closely and adjust your site accordingly.
There is a wide range of CRO-related tools and strategies to investigate, including:
- Optimising software powered by artificial intelligence.
- Keyword analysis tools.
- Mouse tracking and heat maps for web pages.
- On-site customer research.
- Customised product recommendations.
There are many CRO best practices to choose from, but in the end what it boils down to is, the need to learn what your customers value and how to best provide them with a unique solution that can turn them into loyal customers.
The Essence of CRO
Everyone in marketing and business has the same objective. Optimising your conversion rate and landing pages is essential to any successful marketing strategy. Conversion rate optimisation has gone mainstream, from heat mapping the importance of website optimisation to conducting A/B tests, strategising on how to improve site performance, and using the results to boost marketing efforts.
It not only gives businesses insight into how customers feel about and interact with their brand and products but also provides access to a wealth of additional information that can be used to inform strategic decisions.
To improve your brand's online performance, CRO is not "one of many" tools available; it is "the" tool that will set you apart.
Looking for a Conversion Rate Optimisation Services for your Business?
Do Good Things is a Full-Service Digital Marketing Agency based in Queenstown & Auckland, New Zealand.
Our CRO services will help you with a better knowledge of your customer, and your site which will lead to more conversions, more leads and greater online success.
If you are having conversion issues, or want some fresh ideas,
Let's start a conversation, get in touch!