Driving traffic is only half of the marketing work done by your side. In addition to that, you need to adhere them to your website. After one purchase from a new customer, you need to make him your regular customer.
Conversion rate optimization provides a substantial opportunity to do so, 60% of online marketers try to improve the conversion rate in their game plan.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization is simply a process of increasing the website visitors to do an action such as filling out a survey, making a purchase and etc.
Examples of Conversions
This broad category is divided into two subcategories:
Macro-Conversions
It includes:
- Making a purchase from the website.
- Subscribing to an online service available on the website.
- Requesting an answer or quote.
Micro-Conversions
It includes:
- Creating a user account.
- Adding items in the check-out cart.
- Subscribing to an email newsletter.
How to Calculate Conversion Rate?
Calculating the conversion rate is rather simple.
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Converting Each Time, A Person Visits the Website
Suppose you own a website and notice a user making a purchase. Your goal is to optimize so that conversion rates could increase. For instance, if the user we talked about visiting the website 3 times, there are 3 wholesome opportunities for conversion.
For instance, if the user only visits the website for the first time but makes purchases on 2nd and 3rd session, that’s two conversions. All you have to do is find out the ratio of orders and the sessions.
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Converting Once Only
I will explain this by giving an example. For instance, a visitor visited the website multiple times but subscribed to the membership once only. That’s a one-time conversion and cannot be repeated with the same user.
In this category, it is better to measure the conversion success rather than its rate. For instance, you would get a 100% conversion success if there’s one order on one unique visitor.
Also Read: 6 Conversion Optimization Tools Marketers Shouldn’t Overlook
For Whom Is Conversion Rate Optimization Useful?
Conversion rate optimization is substantial for:
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FOR BUSINESS TO BUSINESS/ SaaS COMPANIES
As a B2B company owner, it is your responsibility to engage with them, gather their information and help them out in their buying decisions.
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E-Commerce Firms
Running conversion rate optimization campaigns would allow the e-commerce companies to detect the bottleneck issues of high shopping cart abandonment.
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Publication and Media Houses
Conversion rate optimization can help the media houses to keep the visitors engaged in email newsletters, email sign-ups and reading blogs.
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Travel and Tour Agencies
Tour agencies have the lowest conversion rate because people take more time to call decisions. They spend a lot of time comparing, searching for other deals and etc. Running a CRO campaign could help them to analyze their drawbacks and potential side.
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Agencies
Agencies such as digital marketing companies could benefit a lot from CRO campaigns as uplifting conversion rates can generate more revenue and help them to gain or retain new clients.
Importance of Conversion Rate Optimization
Here are some reasons why CRO campaigns are important to agencies and companies:
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The Higher the Conversion Rate, Better the Return on Investment
By CRO campaigns, you would learn to have more of the resources you currently have. In this way, you can gain more potential customers with fewer efforts.
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It Is Cost-Effective
While traditional ways of getting regular customers are too expensive, CRO campaigns give you a clear-cut chance to improve your conversions. This would ultimately to higher revenue. Hence, balancing out the capital that you had invested in conversion rate campaigns.
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It Is A Tool Against Limited Patience of Visitors
When users feel that your website is user-friendly, they tend to stick around longer. People would be empowered by good user experience if all your CRO studies would work out just fine.
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Improved Visitors’ Insights
CRO campaigns can help you to gather useful insights about the targeted market or audience. It is all about finding the right people for your business.
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CRO Increases Revenue
A high conversion rate means high regular customers. This also creates a chance for you to gain new prospects. Hence, increasing revenue and maximizing profits. In short, you would have better scalability and your audience circle would grow, leading to more and more profit.
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It Is Free
CRO campaigns won’t cost you a dime if done tactically. All you need to do is be professional and courteous towards your visitors.
Primary and Essential Elements of CRO
CRO is a comprehensive process crawling over a multitude of stages. The 6 elements of CRO that can be optimized are:
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Landing Page Design
The more accessible and usable the landing page is, the more traction your website will get. Understanding the landing page’s design or a website that’s aesthetically built can help to drive conversions. In short, it can make or break deal for giant e-commerce websites.
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Website Copy
While an aesthetic design can drive traffic to your website, words on your website can hook potential customers and visitors. Writing relevant content can persuade visitors to take the desired actions. Consequently, increasing the conversion rate. Two main subsections of website copy are:
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Headline
Headlines are the foremost things that you see when first visiting a website. In short, they make a business’s first impression. To ensure you are on the right track,
- Focus on the font size, type, and color.
- Keep the writing style in mind. Ask questions, split your content body into two parts, focus on figures and address the visitors directly for retaining them as customers.
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Body Content
Body content should be well-written, concise, convincing and portray your brand in the most efficient manner. To ensure that your body content is worth hooking visitors, here some factors that you need to consider:
- Format the content properly. Use concise headings, cut down paragraphs for more readability, explain points in bullet form and match the font size, color, and style with your website’s overall design.
- Your writing style should be of current tone and must include adjectives, phrases, and metaphors. Moreover, you should address directly to the visitors.
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Call-To-Action
Call-to-action is nothing but a request for the visitors to take action on your website. The action could be anything. From purchasing to subscribing to your newsletter. The stronger and visible call-to-action requests on your website, the better will be lead generation.
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Site Structure and Navigation Within the Website
Your website should be good enough to navigate through the webpages easily. A visitor usually navigates first through the homepage and then explores subcategories.
If your site structure is not right, the visitor will have a problem navigating through your website. For good site structure, one must highlight the important categories within your website such as about us page, the home page, services page, contact us page and etc.
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Forms
Even If they are part of sales funnel pages, they are an asset to a website. Optimizing the forms can lead to higher conversion rates. However, different strategies work out for everyone. For some people, shorter forms work out while others get more leads through long forms.
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Page Speed
One thing that has a huge impact on overall website visitors is page speed. The more the loading speed, the higher the revenue your website would generate. But if your page speed is slower than other websites, you would lose 11% of potential customers.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization Process?
CRO is a high-level process. Some of the crucial steps involved are:
- Conducting a high-quality heuristic evaluation for the website.
- To conduct analysis on user behavior along with high qualitative research.
- Conducting data-driven quantitative research.
- Conducting competitive analysis.
- Creating a conversion roadmap and prioritizing problematic areas of conversions first.
- To create and test the hypothesis.
- Creating aesthetic designed based on the hypothesis.
- Conducting multivariate testing.
- Finalizing and analyzing data-driven results.
Conversion Rate Optimization Metrics to Analyze
Some of the important metrics to analyze in CRO are:
- Return on investment or otherwise known as ROI.
- Bounce rate.
- Average time on page.
- Views per page.
- Unique or first-time visitors.
- User experience.
- A number of converted visitors.
- Page’s loading time.
Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization
Some benefits of CRO campaigns are:
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To Understand the Audience Along with Their Issues
Stating a hypothesis and testing the same hypothesis with all aspects can help you to understand the audience and can help you to get a better panorama of your customers’ behavior and actions on webpages of your business website.
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Improving the Website Rank on Search Engines for High Conversion Rate
By A/B testing, I am sure you would gather a large amount of data that would help you to update your website and design it aesthetically with high loading time so that it can be ranked as one of the top websites on search engines for high conversion rate.
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Improving Brand’s Reputation and Perception
Strengthen your brand’s reputation and perception in front of the target market with strong website design, higher conversion rates, effective copy and great writing styles.
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Creating Bond with Your Audience with Trust
You can create an unbreakable bond with your audience by recognizing the most common activities on your website. Moreover, you can also develop useful insights that would help to address their needs properly. Hence, creating a truthful relationship between buyer and vendor.
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Boom Up the Website Revenue and Maximize Profit
If there’s one thing you can do to maximize the profits coming from website purchases, it is increasing the conversion rate.
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Taking Advantages of Existing Customers Without Spending A Dime on Ads
To achieve more, you need to spend less on existing customers and more on the CRO campaigns as these drives help you to target and get new prospects and leads.
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Lowering Down Your Strategy’s Cost Per Lead
There’s no full chance that you would get qualified leads by spending more cost per lead. The real target is to reach the right prospects through CRO campaigns, not random or ghost browsers.
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Increase in Business Returns
The right and sustainable CRO approach can bring you incremented profits day by day.
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Stealing Customers from Competitors
If you have high conversion rates, a beautifully designed website, and great body content, you can attract your competitors’ customers and offer them better services, products and solutions to their problems.
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Boosting Sales
The better your market position, the more sales will boom.
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Getting A SEO Boost
A large part of the CRO campaign consists of the body content. Curating good content would boost your SEO. Consequently, giving your high rankings on search engines.
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Life-Time Value for Customers
Advanced hypothesis testing can provide you relevant data about your audience. You can then, use the data to increase customer’s life-time value.
Challenges in Conversion Rate Optimization
Some challenges faced in CRO campaigns are:
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No Defined Structure for CRO Support
CRO gets a lot of resistance and criticism because it does not have a defined structure for support. What’s working for one organization might not make sense for another one. Make CRO work by case studies, test ideas and etc.
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Incorrect and Inadequate Budget Allocation
It’s a serious challenge that’s very hard to overcome. Sometimes, you have insufficient budget for CRO campaigns such as the cost to rebuild your website and other times, the budget is not allocated properly.
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Right Tools to Make a CRO Campaign Work Out
Sometimes, organizations do not have the right tool, such as the correct budget allocation tools to meet business goals and to make a CRO campaign work out.
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Inefficient Methodology for Implementing CRO
Sometimes, the results obtained by inefficient methods are incorrect and not data driven. This leads to the wrong implementation of CRO strategies for increasing conversion rates.
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Ending A/B Testing Too Early
The main issue that arises here is that people do not know how to run A/B tests. Secondly, they end the A/B tests too early. Nobody conducts tests for one day and get amazing results the next day.
Testing takes time and for the facts and results to be figured out, you need patience and time. however, another challenge is that some campaign organizers end the test too late.
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Giving Up After Failed Tests
If there’s no CRO experience, you would likely get frustrated. Hence, you would give up after one or two failed attempts. You must know that results take time and its analysis in CRO takes time.
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Not Tracking Macro Conversions
Most of the campaign organizers do not focus on keeping track of macro conversions. As a result, they lose count of the actions performed by regular, unique and new customers.
What Mistakes Should You Avoid While Running a CRO Campaign?
Here are some mistakes that you must avoid for running a successful CRO campaign:
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Not Making Decisions Based on Statistical Data but Rather Personal Opinions
even if your content on the website is cleaned and polished, it does not mean it will drive customers to your website. Theirs is no one-size-fits-all CRO strategy for businesses. You must trust the statistical data. What works for them might not work for you.
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Writing Unmatched Copy
Carefully curated content can do wonders and drive traffic. However, adding irrelevant content to your website, not using simple and crisp words and using a scanning writing style can leave a bad impact on the visitors.
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Conducting Small Tests First
In a world of CRO, we always conduct big tests first that might have a major impact on the conversion rate.
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Running Several Pop-Ups and Tests on One Page
Running several pop-ups and tests can decrease the accuracy of result analysis. every new element discovered will influence the other elements.
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Ignoring Basic Design Elements
Some designers think that sliders have a great impact on visitors. However, CRO experts say that it can actually reduce the conversion rate. Moreover, many campaign runners do not post quality pictures and do not post videos much. This could also reduce the conversion rate.
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Not Knowing the Importance of Call-To-Action Buttons
How can you persuade the visitors to take certain actions if you don’t put call-to-action buttons right in front of them? When you do not give weightage to call-to-action features, you miss out on potential customers.
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Not Creating an Urgency or Hype
Many marketers do not know that creating urgency or hype about an offer or product could actually increase the conversion rate twice fold.
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Not Building Trustworthy Relationships with Customers
No matter how persuasive your tone is or how good the website design is, if you would not ensure the customers of your product quality, it won’t create a trustworthy impression of you. Hence, the shopping cart abandonment percentage would shoot up.
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Making Complex Conversion Funnels
Funnel pages are webpages that lead to new prospects by some kind of process such as signing up a form or etc. You would be shocked to know that most people abandon the funnel pages on Step 2 because of the complexities.
Final Thoughts
From ways to improve website performance and A/B testing to understand the importance of CRO campaigns, conversion rate optimization efforts have become mandatory and mainstream in every industry.
CRO is not just an ordinary tool to enhance your website performance but a powerful tool that could make you stand out. All you have to do is map a great CRO strategy.
