What is CRO? Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of optimising your website to increase the likelihood that visitors will complete a specific action. The higher your website’s conversion rate, the better. Your website could do brilliantly in all other areas, but if your conversion rate is poor, it will directly impact your bottom line, so it’s essential you make improvements.
There are many different steps you must take to create a website that persuades browsers to perform an action. That action could be enquiring about a service, making a purchase, creating an account, subscribing to a mailing list or getting in touch.
Firstly, the design of the site has to engender the browsers’ trust. It should be easy to navigate and simple to use. It must also attract traffic in some way, whether it’s through the organic search results or a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. The final step is perhaps the most difficult. All that traffic is worth nothing to your business if it is not compelled to act in some way, so your website must be able to ‘convert’, by turning a proportion of that traffic into leads, subscribers and customers.
How important is conversion rate optimisation?
There are a number of reasons why conversion rate optimisation is so important. Firstly, when you’re spending money on SEO or paying for traffic via a PPC campaign, a good conversion rate will provide you with a higher return on investment (ROI). It’s also more cost-effective to convert the visitors you already have rather than attracting more traffic.
The importance of CRO is not lost on digital marketing teams. In fact, 59 percent say CRO is crucial to their overall digital marketing strategy, which is why more and more businesses are choosing to invest in CRO training. CRO training can provide businesses with the skills they need to identify and break down the barriers that are reducing conversions to increase revenue and maximise ROI.
How can conversation rates be optimised?
Conversion rate optimisation can be an extremely simple and cost-effective way for digital marketing teams to have a dramatic impact on the success of their online campaigns. Many marketers who receive CRO training have been amazed by just how much difference a few subtle changes to a website can make.
Conversions can occur all over a website, from the homepage and service pages to pricing pages, blogs and landing pages designed for specific campaigns. Here are a few simple ways those pages can be optimised for conversions.
- Homepage
A homepage is not typically the page visitors will complete an action on, but it still has a critical role to play in conversions. It must make a positive first impression on visitors and guide them clearly through your website to the information they want to find. A homepage should display clear links to product and service information, include buttons that allow visitors to take quick action and even incorporate features like a chatbot that can provide answers to visitors’ questions.
- Landing pages
Landing pages are specifically designed for people to take action. They are often the main destination of paid online marketing campaigns and a lot of money is spent driving traffic to these pages, so it’s important you get them right. Limiting the number of potential actions visitors can take, clearly articulating the value the product or service can provide the visitor and establishing the credibility of the business are just a few of the elements you need to consider to optimise conversion rates.
- Pricing page
A website’s pricing page is primed and ready for conversion rate optimisation. A visitor who reaches a website’s pricing page could well have the intention to buy, so this is the page that could make or break that decision for them. Giving the visitor a range of pricing options (e.g. prices per week, per month and per year), offering promotions, including discount codes, providing plenty of information about the product features and having simple payment options can all help to increase the conversion rates.
- Blogs
Blogs are an excellent way to answer the questions visitors may have about your products or services and provide more information about the kind of benefits they can provide. That also makes them an effective way to potentially turn readers into leads. Publishing relevant, genuinely helpful content which includes a call-to-action (CTA), invites readers to find out more and asks them to submit their email address for more comprehensive information can help you convert.
How can CRO benefit your business?
There are numerous reasons why digital marketing teams are increasingly spending their time and money on professional CRO training. The benefits of conversion rate optimisation include:
- You can capitalise on your existing traffic without having to spend money on SEO, PPC and other traffic generating methods.
- A higher conversion rate leads to more repeat business and greater customer retention.
- Conversion rate optimisation allows you to win customers from your competitors.
- By analysing data such as user session recordings and website navigation behaviour, you’ll gain a better understanding of your leads, prospects and customers.
- You’ll be able to identify which parts of your website are underperforming and make the necessary improvements.
- Having a website that guides visitors seamlessly to their objectives will help to boost brand perception.
