How To Set Your Website Up For CRO Success
Table of Contents
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Conversion rate optimization strategies increase the percentage of visitors who take the desired action on an eCommerce website or landing page, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or filling out a contact form.
Businesses spend a lot of time and resources on email marketing, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and paid search to bring a high number of visitors to their websites. But what’s the use of all that traffic if it’s not getting the intended results?
Getting new site visitors and more website traffic is a critical part of any business success, but if it isn’t converting into leads or sales, all of your marketing efforts are essentially for naught.
Instead, you must set up your site in a way that makes visitors more likely to take the actions you want them to take when they arrive.
This is where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in.
CRO uses various techniques to get visitors to take the desired action on your website. By increasing your number of conversions, you can gain a great ROI for your marketing efforts, build a more sustainable business, and effectively scale your growth. If you want to maximize traffic, generate more sales, and lower your costs, your conversion goals should be an integral part of your digital marketing strategy.
In this guide, I’ll show you why CRO is important, what the benefits are, and what steps you can take to increase sales and leads.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
While the ultimate goal of any website is to generate conversions, the path to conversion success is not always clear.
CRO identifies the drivers that influence conversion rates and tests website elements to see which ones have the most significant impact on your online marketing. These elements may include the design of the website, the copy on the page, or the call to action, which can be barriers to conversion success when poorly done.
The beauty of CRO is that it is based on data and scientific testing. There’s always a basis for the changes, and even the small tweaks are aimed at improving conversion rates.
CRO can have a big impact on the bottom line: A website that converts more visitors into customers or leads will generate more revenue for its owner.
What Is A Good Conversion Rate?
Optimal conversion rate metrics depend on several factors, such as industry, niche, product, price, and level of competition.
A good conversion rate is anything above the average for your industry or your competition or one that meets or exceeds your goals.
A 1% conversion rate may be considered good for some businesses, while for others the threshold would be 10%. It all depends on what you expect and what you hope to achieve with your website.
There are some general benchmarks for gauging your website’s success:
A conversion rate of 2-3% is considered average
A conversion rate of 4-7% is above average
Of course, your specific goals and expectations should always take precedence. The important thing is to set realistic goals for your website, basing your expectations on your past performance and the averages in your industry. Once you set your goals, you can work on optimizing your website to try and reach them.
What Are The Benefits Of Conversion Rate Optimization?
Some of the biggest CRO benefits include:
1. Increased Revenue
By increasing your conversion rate, you will be able to generate more leads and sales, which will bring more revenue into your business.
2. Understand your customers better
Through CRO testing and analysis, you’ll be better able to understand your customers and their needs. This invaluable information can help you improve your products or services and make them more appealing to your target audience and potential customers.
3. Improved Marketing ROI
By understanding what does and doesn’t work on your website or in your content marketing, you can fine-tune your campaigns to focus on the elements most likely to lead to conversions. This can increase campaign ROI for your campaigns and improve your marketing efforts.
4. Greater insight into customer behavior
CRO testing can provide greater insight into customer behavior. This information can be used to improve your website’s design and user experience, making it more user-friendly and intuitive.
5. Increased customer lifetime value (CLV)
If you can manage to keep your customers around longer, you will be able to generate more revenue from them over time. CRO uses tactics like personalized product recommendations, “welcome back” popups, and replenishment emails to ensure your website is designed to keep customers engaged and coming back for more.
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What Is The CRO Process?
The CRO process can be broken down into four main steps:
1. Research
The first step in any CRO project is to conduct research aimed at understanding your target audience, your competition, and your industry. Understanding these factors puts you in a better position to create a CRO strategy specific to your needs.
2. Planning
After conducting your research, you can start planning your CRO project. During this phase, decide on the goals you want to achieve with your CRO efforts and how much you’re willing to spend. You will also need to create a timeline for your project and determine which CRO methods to use.
3. Implementation
The implementation phase is where you start putting your CRO strategy into action. During this phase, you will need to create or update your website, run tests, and collect data.
4. Analysis
During the analysis phase of the CRO process, you will analyze the data you collected and use it to improve your CRO strategy. This data helps you understand where to make changes to your website and CRO strategy to improve conversion rates.
What Are Some Common CRO Tests?
You can run many different CRO tests on your website. Some of the most common tests include:
A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing
A/B testing and Multivariate split testing allow you to test multiple versions of a web page simultaneously. Comparing two versions of a web page allows you to see which one performs better. It’s done by showing one version of the page to half of your visitors and the other version to the other half. Once the test is complete, you can analyze the data to see which page design led to more conversions.
Optimizely is a paid web analytics and testing tool that allows you to create and run A/B tests on your website.
Usability Testing
Usability testing shows how users interact with your website by having users complete tasks and provide feedback on the user experience. This feedback can be used to improve your website’s overall design and customer experience.
What Are Some Common CRO Testing Tools?
Conducting CRO tests can be a time-consuming and expensive process. However, there are many CRO tools that you can use to make the process easier and more affordable. Here are a few of the most common:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool that collects data about how users interact with your website. Use this data to improve your CRO strategy.
Adobe Analytics
This paid tool offers similar functionality to Google Analytics but includes additional features such as heat mapping and user session recording. Heat maps track where users click on your website, and user session recordings enable you to see how users interact with your website in real-time.
Heap Analytics
This qualitative data-gathering tool allows you to collect data about your website visitors. Heap Analytics includes features such as user session recordings and user surveys. This data can be used to improve your CRO strategy.
What Are Some Common CRO Strategies?
There are many different CRO strategies that you can use to improve your conversion rate. Some of the most common strategies include:
Create a compelling offer on your product pages
Your offer is one of the most important aspects of your website. This could be a discount, a free trial, or something else, but it needs to be enticing enough to compel visitors to take action.
Optimize load time
This is perhaps the most important thing you can do to improve your website’s conversion rate. Visitors are unlikely to convert if your website takes too long to load. To improve your website’s loading time, optimize the size of your images, use a content delivery network (CDN), and minimize complex code.
Use high-quality trust badges and testimonials
Visitors are more likely to convert if they trust your website and testimonials. Build trust with your visitors by adding trust badges showing your website shopping cart is secure, whether you have a money-back guarantee, or if you are an accredited business.
Optimize for mobile devices
More and more people are using mobile devices to browse the internet, so it’s important to make sure your website is optimized for phones and tablets. This means making sure your website can be easily viewed on a small screen, that your buttons and links are easy to click on, and pages load quickly.
Create landing pages or multiple homepages
Landing pages are pages on your website specifically designed for conversion. This means that they should have a clear and concise offer, a strong call-to-action (CTA), and zero distractions. Studies have shown that longer landing pages are more effective at converting visitors into leads.
If you have a navigation menu on your landing page, consider removing it to keep visitors focused on your offer, reduce the bounce rate, and increase the chances that they will take action.
Use fewer form fields
The fewer form fields you have on your website, the more likely visitors will fill them out. Stick to the essentials and only ask for information that you need.
Protect user privacy
Ensure you have a privacy policy in place that’s clear about how you use the information you collect from your visitors. Visitors appreciate this transparency and will be more comfortable using a website they know they can trust.
Engage with the user
Interact with users in the comments section of your blog, answer their questions on social media, and respond to their emails. Engaging with your users in these ways builds trust and rapport, which increases the likelihood of conversions.
Have clear call-to-actions (CTAs) on different pages
Every landing page should have a clear and concise call-to-action (CTA) that’s relevant to the page’s content and encourages visitors to take action. Make sure the CTA is prominently displayed and should be easy to find.
The Bottom Line?
Getting more out of existing traffic and leads is essential for any business. The good news is, that you can encourage more visitors to convert into customers by making a few simple changes to your website.
The idea is to understand what’s happening on your website, how customers are behaving, and what tactics are already working. Once you have that information, you can make quantitative changes to improve your conversion rate.
If you’re not sure where to start, consider hiring a web designer or expert to help you with the conversion funnel. These professionals have the knowledge and experience to help you convert more visitors into customers and boost sales and revenue for your business.
The investment in optimizing your website will likely pay for itself if the work generates just a few new customers.
So don’t wait. Take action today and set your website up for CRO success.
About the author
Eric Unger
Eric is the founder of North Designs, a collaborative web studio in Guelph, Canada. His team builds high-performance Webflow websites for small businesses and growing startups. The top-rated studio has worked with award-winning tech startups and the country’s largest online accounting firm.
