Feeling good about the 10,000-per-month visits to your online store, but how many visits lead to sales?
Many businesses focus on driving tons of traffic to their websites, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you can increase your online sales. If you believe that the traffic will eventually lead to conversions and sales without any strategies on your part, you need to re-evaluate what you’re doing. This is where conversion rate optimization comes in.
A CRO marketing strategy enables you to use your current resources, including the web traffic, to drive more conversions. This article is a comprehensive guide to building the best CRO strategy for your business.
Let’s begin!
CRO Marketing Definition
CRO stands for conversion rate optimization. CRO marketing definition is a process of optimizing the percentage of the website traffic who ‘convert,’ i.e., performing the desired goal, such as signing up for a service, downloading a video, or purchasing a service/product.
The desired goals can vastly vary from primary business conversion goals – such as a visitor purchasing a product from your online business – to micro conversions. An example of micro conversion is signing up for a newsletter or adding products to the cart.
CRO is crucial to your business as it allows you to pave a pathway for a seamless buyer’s journey. Interestingly, if you implement CRO marketing and observe a one percent increase in the conversion rate, your company’s revenue can make a huge difference. Additionally, focusing on CRO marketing gives you an edge over businesses that do not practice this type of marketing.
Importance of CRO Marketing
Do you know that companies spend $2000 a month on CRO tools?
That’s a huge amount!
If you are an owner of an online business, you should increase your website’s traffic. But there is no point in increasing visits if the visitors are not doing something meaningful other than mindlessly browsing your store.
Let’s imagine you receive 10,000 visits per month. If your conversion rate is 0.3%, then that means that only 30 people out of 10000 visitors are taking action on your website. Out of 30, only a few of them are making a purchase. Ultimately, it only adds a little to your business’s revenue and will not cover your expenses.
This is where CRO comes to the rescue.
| Get more customers | The main goal of the CRO process is to help visitors navigate your website and convince them to make a purchase. CRO is about understanding the customer persona to enhance the user experience. This way, you can cater to the specific needs of the users and motivate them to make a purchase. |
| CRO and SEO | CRO and SEO are connected to one another. This is because user experience UX is an important factor in SEO ranking. Google often ranks the pages with the best user experience higher than the ones with the lack thereof. |
| The short attention span of visitors | For small business owners, the shortening of the attention span of consumers puts them at risk of low sales. This is because users will leave a website immediately if they don’t find what they are looking for. However, the CRO strategy is all about improving your website, so the visitors feel the urge to make a purchase (or convert). |
How to Calculate Conversion Rate
Before you kickstart your CRO journey, you should know what you are currently dealing with. Measuring your CRO is an easy task. You have to divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors and multiply the number by a hundred to get an accurate percentage of conversions.
To calculate conversion rate:
Conversion rate = (conversions / total number of visitors) * 100
The date includes:
- The number of conversions – includes the number of times visitors have performed a particular action on your website.
- The total number of visitors – the total number of users who have visited your website.
Let’s imagine a scenario – 1000 people visit your website, and 5 leads convert. You need to divide 5 by 1000 and multiply it by 100%. The answer (0.5%) is your conversion rate. Calculating your conversion rates is an efficient way to determine if your business’s current marketing strategy is working.
CRO Marketing For Beginners
What Is Your Preferred Conversion Type?
When creating an effective CRO marketing strategy, you need to identify the type of conversion you are specifically aiming for for your business. This is because every campaign should be tailored to produce the desired results. There are several types of conversion, such as
- Likes and follows on social media
- Subscribing to a newsletter
- Making an online purchase
- Completing an online form,
- Downloading an ebook or an application.
- Clicking on a link
Know Your Customers
It’s important to identify your customer’s journey from the beginning, where they discover your brand, to the point where they decide to convert. This step generates the customer’s in-depth data so you can customize the marketing strategy accordingly.
The first step to this task is collecting buyer’s data to create a marketing persona. This often includes:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Occupation
- Interests
- Income
Information is easily accessible to you via current market data. You can also use other methods like surveys, net promoter scores, sales team feedback, and other methods of collecting data. Once you have built a marketing persona, you can use this information to create a specifically designed CRO strategy for your business rather than sticking to the general method.
What Are the Current Shortcomings?
Why are there 10,000 visitors per month but only 50 converts?
It’s crucial to analyze the reason why your current strategy needs to be fixed. You need to specify the points where your customers decide to drop off your business. There might be several reasons, such as the site’s speed, headlines and banners feeling intrusive, color palette, font size being difficult to examine, and messy organizational structure. That’s why aesthetically pleasing fonts are important to a design.
It’s imperative to recognize the hurdles in the conversion process to ensure that the next strategy eliminates such problems.
Optimize the UX
Now you know the bumps and hurdles in the conversion process, you can easily build a strategy inclined towards optimizing the user experience (UX). To do this, you must ensure that you actively eliminate all hurdles so the user has a smooth buyer’s journey.
For instance, if a video featured on the homepage affects the webpage’s speed, you should immediately remove it and replace it with something that is more eye-catching.
Improve And Examine the Results
After analyzing the bumps in your conversion process and making the necessary changes, you might have formulated strategies to increase the conversion rate. To determine the effectiveness of the design model, measure KPIs repeatedly to identify the most appropriate design of work for the business.
Steps to Improve CRO Marketing Strategy
While every website has its own set of problems and solutions, here are a few tips that can work wonders for every website, regardless of niche.
Include Effective CTAs And Headlines
Headlines on the homepage are the first things users see when they visit your website. A headline is usually a catchy phrase that tends to summarize your business and sales pitch in only a few words.
The headline’s goal is to capture the potential customer’s attention immediately and persuade them to interact with the website, leading to conversions. To optimize your headline, you must ensure that it is:
- concise
- clear
- original
- witty, or catchy
If you’re unsure, you can use various headline analyzing tools to help you improve your headlines.
Similarly, call-to-actions (CTAs) address the buyers directly and motivate them to take a certain action. Long and dull sentences will undoubtedly bore your users to the point of drop-off. So replace them with concise instructions guiding your users towards the desired action. Interestingly, HubSpot found that CTA-based texts have acquired 47-93% of leads on one of their posts.
An example of using CTAs is embedding them on your blog post as anchor text. This way, visitors may come across them while reading a blog post, click on it, and are redirected to another article. Ultimately, this can help optimize your conversion rates.
Add Lead Flows
They are a type of popups on your website that have the potential to boost conversion rates.
Yes, popups can be annoying sometimes. However, the average conversion rate of popups is 11.09%. This is because recently creatively designed pop-ups can be used to inform customers. Incorporate popups to your website to display special offers, newsletters, sign-up, discounts, and more. Lead flow can be in various forms, such as drop-down banners, slide-in boxes, or pop-up notifications.
Add Customer Testimonials, Reviews, And Feedback
Customers want to know why they should buy your products and how the product/service can benefit them in the future.
Besides compelling product descriptions, customers heavily rely on reviews by other customers who have bought, tried, and tested your products. This is because online shopping is tricky, and people don’t want to spend their hard-earned money on low-quality products.
You can easily boost your business’s credibility, transparency, and conversion rates by including customer reviews on the product pages. In fact, only one review on your product page can impact your conversion and increase it by a whopping 354%. This is because 89% of people read reviews before purchasing a product.
Perform Various Tests On the Landing Pages
Landing pages are an integral part of CRO digital marketing that can optimize your conversion rates.
A landing page is a page on your website that is specifically designed for a marketing campaign to convert visitors into leads. The landing page doesn’t have any other distractions besides a form that allows you to collect a visitor’s information in exchange for an interesting offer.
You can improve a landing page by running various tests, such as A/B tests, to investigate the best design model for targeted visitors.
A/B test, also called split testing, is a process that involves experimenting with two different versions of the single variable that you are optimizing. But you only change one variant. For example, changing the color of the headline and calculating the visitor’s response to the change. This experiment is conducted to determine which version of the two performs better.
A/B testing is quite effective, as many businesses have observed a staggering surge in the conversion rate by implementing it. For instance, the conversion rate of China Expat Health advanced to 79% by A/B testing.
Optimize the Content of Your Blog
Do you know that a marketing strategy that includes blogging is 13 times more likely to produce desired goals?
In hindsight, spending such a significant amount of time on a blog section for an ecommerce store might seem unnecessary. But, there is a multitude of advantages that you can gain by revamping the content of your website.
For instance, it allows you to share your brand’s identity with potential customers. In some cases, blog posts can generate leads and converts better than advertising campaigns.
Plus, it’s cost-effective.
If you’re a small business, every penny counts for you. Compared to large businesses that can spend thousands of dollars on marketing campaigns, smaller businesses don’t have the privilege of doing so. It would help if you looked into content-driven marketing strategies to boost your sales and generate more leads and converts.
Key Takeaway
CRO marketing strategy effectively makes your website smarter and generates more leads and converts. The CRO process is the best option for you if you want to boost your business’s revenue. This article provides a comprehensive guide on kickstarting your CRO digital marketing journey.
