Not everyone who visits your website or landing page will become a customer. Usually, it is only a small percentage. Successful websites turn a larger percentage of their web visitors into customers.
One of the many acronyms you will hear digital marketing professionals talk about is CRO, an acronym for Conversion Rate Optimization. The discipline of CRO (and digital marketing in general) is constantly evolving and innovating better strategies for effectiveness.
CRO complements your customer acquisiton strategies. It is a strategy for improving your rate of conversion. Hubspot defines CRO as a process of creating a compelling user experience that transforms web visitors to customers.
But that is only one way to measure conversion. There are other ways to convert, depending on what you want your site visitors to do.
Conversion means to convince someone to do what you want them to do. You might want people to subscribe to your newsletter, click on a post, share, sign up for a webinar, book a call, or purchase a product.
By measuring the number of visitors who actually do what you want them to do compared to visitors who don’t do what you want them to do, you can come up with your conversion rate and strategize to improve it.
The Difference between SEO and CRO
SEO is all about optimizing to achieve a higher ranking on search engines and CRO is optimizing for better website conversions.
While SEO efforts are aimed at getting people to visit your website, CRO efforts are aimed at getting the web visitors to become customers.
What Techniques and Tools can be Used to Measure Conversion Rates
Analytics are the basis for every decision in digital marketing. Use analytics tools to find all the important information about your website users. Try to gain an understanding of your audience before trying to implement any ideas on your website. This will help you to apply your efforts in the most effective way.
Your analytics will tell you where your visitors are coming from, what they do on your website, and give you ideas to optimize around the best opportunities.
Analytics will help you to first of all know your audience. It will also help you to know how much time they spend on your website – the session time, as well as the bounce rate. How users get to your page matters a lot. Analytics tools will also help you to know where to concentrate your efforts, what marketing channels they come from, and what devices they use. Armed with these numbers, you can easily come up with a strategy.
You cannot measure CRO using only one tool. You have to rely on multiple sources of information before coming up with tactics to improve conversions.
Identify the possible weak points and improve them. Keep on analyzing the results as you make changes and improvements with time.
Start by taking note of the total number of conversions. This is the total number of people who have bought, called, signed up, or otherwise completed an action that you count as a conversion.
Calculate your conversion rate by dividing the total conversions by the total number of visitors. The total number of visitors will always be higher than the total number of conversions. No matter how good you are at marketing – it can never be 100%!
What Techniques and Tools can be Used to Test CRO Strategies?
People who visit your website are probably already interested in whatever you are selling. This makes them already warm prospects. You just need to give them a little nudge towards your good services.
Use A/B testing to find out the best way to funnel that interest. To get started with A/B testing simply create two versions of a page and direct one set of users to the first version and another set of users to the second. Make tweaks to the test page based on assumptions about what will improve your conversion rates. You can then compare how consumers behave on the two pages to understand what converts better.
Use A/B testing to test any of the elements that might affect a visitor’s decision to convert. These elements include price, the copy, different offers, as well as different colors and page designs.
What Techniques and Tools can be Used to Improve Conversion Rates?
To improve your conversion rate, try some of these tricks. There are many ways of improving your conversion rate. One simple way is to use surveys or heatmap tools to find out how people are using your site and ways in which you can improve it.
Content
Take a second look at your content to see what needs to be improved. Can you make your content more engaging? It is easy to read? Does it evoke emotions in the audience? Study the content on your page and compare the content that has more engagement to the content that has poor engagement. If you pay attention, you can easily identify what people respond to.
It could be certain kinds of words, visuals, colors, themes, topics, or the tone of the article. The same applies to multimedia content.
Visuals
How does your website look visually? Is it too cluttered, too complicated. Find ways to make the web page work visually. Try to identify the colors that draw people in versus turning them away. Doing a little research on the effect of color on page visitors goes a long way in informing any improvements to your page.
To ensure that you are investing your efforts where they will bring the most return, work on attracting the right people. You want to attract people who matter to you. People who are more likely to convert.
Simple is Better
Too many distractions on a web page like pop-ups, badly formatted articles, and flashing ads can distract users so that they don’t convert. Generally speaking, simple, bold, clean designs work better. Make sure to create enough white space, too.
Calls to Action
It is pretty hard to get people to do what you want them to do without coming out and asking them to do it. This is where your Call to Action comes in. A call to action is an ask. This is where you ask people to Buy, Call, Click, Sign up, or Share.
Design your Call to Action carefully, with the right words, colors, and page positioning.
Include Faces
Our eyes are naturally attracted to other people’s faces. This means that you can improve your CRO by incorporating images that include human faces on them. Make the faces more central to the image.
While any face is better than no face at all, it is better to use photos of real people than using stock photos or models. People like to feel like they are connecting with real people.
This is because people love to look at the faces of other people – even more than they like looking at beautiful scenery. This means that even if you have a photo of some lovely scenery, be sure to include a human face – or several human faces – on your landing page.
Marketers have found that it is possible to almost double your CRO by just by adding in photos of people close to the Call to Action button.
This means that your Call to Action can be made much more effective just by adding a human face to it. This is why selfies get so much engagement on Social Media, and entrepreneurs who are not afraid to engage with their followers do so well on social media.
Make it easy for website visitors to convert. Put your phone number on every page. Or if you want them to sign up, put a sign up form on every page. And don’t make them fill in too much information or they’ll give up and go away. Always remember that people are lazy and they won’t go to too much effort just to answer your CTA.
Ultimately, CRO is the sum total of everything you do to get people who visit your site to answer your call to action.