CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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What is CRO?
Benefits of CRO
Top CRO Tools
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Advanced CRO techniques
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WHAT IS CRO? Conversion rate optimization (CRO) offers one of the fastest, most effective methodologies for turning your existing web traffic into paying customers. Conversion rate optimization can involve numerous tools and strategies, but they’re all geared toward the same thing: Converting visitors into leads and leads into customers. In its simplest form, conversion rate optimization is the process by which a business increases the percentage of website visitors who convert on available offers.
Two types of conversions exist: macro and micro. A micro conversion means that a prospective customer has somehow engaged with your brand. He or she might have signed up for your newsletter, watched your service’s explainer video, or followed you on social media. Macro conversions are the biggies. That’s when someone converts on a primary offer on your website. They might buy a product, subscribe to a service, or fill out a lead-capture form. Both micro and macro conversions matter. Micro conversions often lead to macro
CALCULATING CRO Conversion rate is a ratio. It tells you what percentage of visitors to your website actually convert. The equation is pretty simple: (Total Transactions divided by Total Site Visits) x 100 Let’s say 100,000 people visited your website last month. Of those visitors, 3,000 bought a product. Your conversion rate would be 3 percent (3,000/100,000*100). If 10,000 people converted, your conversion rate would jump to 10 percent.
IMPORTANCE OF CRO It’s all about the numbers, right? More sales equal more revenue, which means a more profitable business. Let’s look at the calculations we performed on the PREVIOUS slide. For our fictional business, we’ll say that the company is selling just one product worth $300. In our first calculation, we came up with a conversion rate of just 3 percent. Three thousand people bought the product, which produced gross revenue of $900,000. That sounds great. But what if we boosted that conversion rate to our second equation, which quantified conversions at 10 percent? In this case, revenue jumps to $3 million (10,000 people bought a product worth $300). Big difference, right?
BENEFITS OF CRO
There are several reasons to spend more money and time on CRO: Take advantage of existing traffic without spending cash on ads Build more trust among your audience Encourage repeat business and, by extension, customer retention Generate more revenue that you can inject back into the business Steal more customers from your competitors Better understand your customers’ wants and needs Reduce customer acquisition costs Improve brand perception
Understanding CRO in Marketing CROÂ can take many forms, but it consists of a few essential moving parts. If you want to do conversion optimization right, you need the following features in place: CALL TO ACTION FORMS CONVERSION FUNNEL MULTIVARIATE TESTING A/B TESTING SEO WEBSITE USABILITY
CRO METRICS TO ANALYZE
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ROI
Bounce Rate
Average time on page
Pageviews
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Unique visitors
User Experience
Number of Customers
Page Load Time
HOW TO USE CRO BEST PRACTICES Conversion rate optimization best practices can help you improve your results from the very beginning. In other words, you won’t have to start from scratch. Following are some of the tried-and-true best practices I’ve used to accelerate my websites’ growth. You’ll learn how to do conversion rate optimization:
Identify your potential customer
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Discover the exact journey visitors take through your site
Collect & analyze data
2 Survey users
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4 Run A/B tests
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HOW TO USE CRO BEST PRACTICES Create the perfect page with A/B testing
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Focus on the content that matters using heatmap analysis
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Guide your customer
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Don’t “guess”
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1 0 Reduce friction
CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION MISTAKES Unfortunately, even with lots of information circulating the Internet, business owners still make mistakes when it comes to conversion rate optimization. I’d like to help you avoid the three most common pitfalls:
CRO MISTAKES Not adding positive emotional response
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In your copywriting, include positive storytelling to help convey benefits. Help your reader envision himself benefiting from your product or service.
Not adopting a mobile-first strategy More than half of consumers use their mobile devices to surf the Internet. If your store isn’t mobile-ready, you’ll turn off prospects.
2 Not caring about the site speed
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Your pages need to load fast. Consumers expect a page to fully load in fewer than 2 seconds.
Multivariate or A/B testing? They’re both highly useful conversion rate optimization tools. A/B testing (also called split testing) is useful when you want to take a granular approach. You want to know how a CTA button’s color impacts conversions, but you don’t want anything else to contribute to the test. Multivariate testing, on the other hand, works great when you have two very different versions of the same page or asset. Which one appeals most to your target audience?
Choosing a testing platform You can run A/B and multivariate testing manually, but I don’t recommend it. Use a tool to automate the process and get your results faster.
Analyze A/B test results Once you have your results, record and analyze them. Why did your target audience prefer Version B, for instance? What aspect of the color red or the font Georgia or the wording of the CTA appealed to them? You can use this information for later without running an identical A/B test.
ADVANCED CRO TECHNIQUES Once you’ve nailed the basics, you can drill down on more specific aspects of your website’s design, format, and copy to take conversion rate optimization to the next level. I recommend testing all of these facets of your website.
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CREATE MORE CONCISE COPYWRITING
TEST YOUR WEB FORM’S FORMAT
Condense your copy so visitors have to read less.
Different versions of a web form will perform differently.
4 3 ADJUST YOUR CTA Test different CTA copy, backgrounds, and positioning.
CREATE AN EDUCATED HYPOTHESIS Predict what your tests will show before you run them.
SEO and conversion rate optimization might seem like two sides of a coin. One is designed to attract more traffic (SEO), while the other optimizes content for existing traffic (conversion rate optimization). So which matters more? In my opinion, they’re equally important. Without SEO, you can’t get traffic in the first place. Without CRO, your traffic will produce fewer sales.
CONCLUSION Through conversion rate optimization, one can vastly improve their businesses’ conversion rates, and can also help their clients do the same. Sure, it takes work. But once you have the data, you can generate more sales and dominate your industry. Start by understanding the definition of CRO and how it works. Focus on following the CRO best practices and avoiding the most common mistakes.
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