What Is CRO? Conversion Rate Optimization Explained
Any modern marketer knows that driving traffic to their website is essential to success. There's no doubt we'll get praise from our teams for all those visits but unless we translate all those new visitors to conversions it's worthless.
Imagine if you implemented an effective conversion rate optimization (CRO) process that ensured all the hard work done to acquire these visitors resulted in users that continued to take action all the way through sign up and purchase to drive higher revenues.
Throughout this article, we'll explain CRO, provide useful methods to improve conversion rates, and share how you can implement CRO and align teams within your organization to grow your business.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is the ongoing effort to increase the percentage of visitors that take a desired action on your website. Anything can be an action! For example, a user creates an account, registers for a trial, or purchases the latest product you've just announced; these are all considered actions. We'll use the word actions and events interchangeably as we continue to go into depth.
CRO focuses on understanding how users interact with your site and identifying the reasons behind their actions so you can leverage them effectively as an owner. Most simply, it's a process of experimentation and who doesn't love to experiment? Implement and measure the impact of one small change after another on your site's conversion rate.
Understanding Conversions
The phrase 'conversion' is something you'll hear a lot in the digital marketing space; marketers use it to describe when a website visitor spends some time on their pages and eventually carries out the site's objective.
When we talk about conversions, these can be big (macro conversions) or small (micro conversions). Of course, most companies' main aim is to sell products, which would be considered a macro conversion.
However, your business could have smaller conversion goals, like a number of visitors registering accounts on your website or signing up for a demo. These are known as micro conversions.
Common Conversion Events
If you want to find out whether you've got a conversion or not, you'll base it on conversion events, which are actions that describe a visitor's interaction with your website.
Whether it's getting their email address or encouraging them to create an account, these are all examples of conversion events. If you monitor the results, they can be used to optimize your conversion rate in the future.
Convert to a Lead
If a website visitor openly shares their email address with you through an opt-in form or a newsletter, that's called an email lead. When you get your hands on this kind of information, you'll be able to design campaigns to target them in whatever way you want and turn them into customers in the future.
Marketers will use all kinds of tactics to get users to provide their contact details so they can target them, but in our experience, the best way to do so is by offering them something valuable they won't be able to resist.
When you understand your target audience and what they like and know their pain points, you can offer them some sort of freebie that addresses their issue. We call these lead magnets. For example, you could write an E-book with a solution to their problem and offer it to everyone who signs up for your newsletter for free.
Building Heatmap, we get to see how various companies build and optimize their websites but ultimately they all are variations on trying to capture three types of leads:
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) - Sign ups for a coupon code, a newsletter, or an upcoming webinar.
- Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) - More common with companies that sell a SaaS or software service these are essentially account creations that have not yet turned into users or paying customers.
- Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) - Sign ups for a 1:1 call or demo of your product or service with a rep.
At the end of the day all leads point back to one thing - email. So, whenever you think of CRO for leads think increasing the number of emails captured.
Convert to a User
Getting a visitor's email is one thing, but when they register an account with your website, you have access to another level of information from them. You can see how they search through the products on your website, learn about their interests, and tailor the experience to them.
It's also a great method of measuring the success of your campaigns and will help you improve conversions based on the results you've got. Not only that, it shows you what works and what doesn't so you can refine your strategies to achieve better outcomes.
Convert to a Customer
Sales are the main type of conversion every business wants; it's the final stage of a customer's journey. You've started with their email, then enticed them to set up an account, and now they've bought something from you.
The more sales your company makes, the more revenue you can expect to generate over time. It will eventually lead to sustained growth and give you a nice advantage in the market. That's why, when someone is determining a company's success, sales end up being the main factor.
Depending on who you talk to, different companies will have different definitions of what a sale means for them. E-commerce websites measure sales with physical products, whereas if you're in the service industry, a sale to you would be forming a relationship with a new client.
What Are Average Conversion Rates?
Your website's average conversion rate is not just a KPI; it mirrors the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. This conversion metric reflects the number of visitors who successfully complete a conversion on your website, making it a key element in your marketing strategy's success.
Finding your website's conversion rate is easy; you just have to count the conversions and divide them by the traffic to get the average.
CRO Test: How to Calculate Conversion Rate
If you want to calculate the conversion rate of your website, follow these steps:
- Determine the amount of conversions your site has had in a certain period of time.
- Divide them by the full figure of website visitors you've had in that period.
- With the result, multiply it by 100, and that will give you the average website conversion rate.
How to implement CRO into my company?
Ah our favorite question! When done well, conversion rate optimization can drive some of the most rewarding and satisfying work for all those involved.
Here's three steps we've seen to implement the conversion rate optimization process effectively in any org:
- Assemble a CRO Squad. You'll need a marketer, designer, a front-end developer, and data analyst to execute but throw in someone from product and sales and you'll have a great cross functional team.
- Brainstorm & Prioritize. Create a spreadsheet where anyone can add an idea to and the team collectively scores each idea against the level of effort and level of impact they predict it might have. Sort by highest impact lowest effort and you now have your priorities.
- Implement, Observe, Decide. Make sure you have the resources to implement these new ideas as well as the tools to measure their impact. This way, at the end of 2-3 weeks the collective team can make a decision to keep or kill any experiment. No egos. Just pure data driven decision making.
CRO: Best Practices for Boosting Conversion Rates
Ready to increase conversions? Follow these successful (CRO) strategies to start improving your performance.
Carry out a Split Test
Conducting a split test (A/B testing) will show you what converts and what doesn't. To get started, you must make two web pages with one differing element to see which one performs better; it could be something as small as changing a header or reducing your image sizes.
When the pages are made, and the conversion optimization (CRO) test is completed, you can see which performed best and use the results for future amendments.
Another type of testing you could consider is multivariate testing, which changes multiple elements to see the best-performing formula that achieves the highest results rather than changing one element (split test)
Experiment With Calls to Action
Calls to action are a fantastic way of building a good conversion rate, but sometimes, you need to experiment with these optimization strategies to find out which ones resonate best with your audience.
The best thing you can do is strike a healthy balance. Why would you want to overwhelm your audience with constant sales pitches? Don't go overboard, but don't sell yourself short; you should always take advantage of potential opportunities.
If you want to find out what's giving the best results, why not place your CTA's in various parts of your pages and count up their conversions to see what they reveal?
Optimize Your Conversions With Content That Appeals to Your Visitors
One of the main things you need to do to increase the percentage of conversions is to make sure all of your site's content appeals to visitors. This goes for every page on your website, including landing pages and blog posts.
If someone clicks on a landing page on your site that has been marketed like you can answer their problem, you'll need to ensure that you've answered it, or else they'll close the session and get their answer elsewhere. Before you know it, you've lost a potential conversion.
Take a Look at Your Conversion Funnel
Your site's conversion funnel shows the user's path from becoming a visitor to becoming a paid customer. Sometimes, there's a noticeable place where users drop off in the funnel, which could cause a high bounce rate and lower your conversion rate.
Consider conducting a funnel analysis with our revenue-tracked screen recording analytics tool to find this. You should be able to see how users interact with your pages and the point where they drop off.
Heatmap CRO Tool: Boost Your Optimization Efforts and Conversion Rates
Sure, conversion rates are helpful, but only when you know the value being generated by the conversion.
Instead of playing a guessing game of what's generating revenue, solve your problems with a CRO tool like Heatmap that shows you what elements on your site are producing profits.
When you use conversion rate optimization tools like Heatmap, you see revenue on everything, including scroll maps, screen recordings, or any custom filter you'd like. Using this information, you can optimize any page on your website for the most value and accelerate your revenue growth.
Improve Your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Today
Now that you know what conversion rate optimization (CRO) is, you can start enhancing your website to improve user engagement, increase conversions, and drive more revenue in the future.
Sure, it takes time, but as long as you understand your audience and improve your CRO efforts with the appropriate tactics, you'll start to see results.
How You Can Do It:
1: Download heatmap
2: Wait for 5k sessions
3: Reorganize products based on the highest revenue per session from top left to bottom right.
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You made it all the way down here?
Might as well give us a shot, right? It'll change the way you approach CRO. We promise. In fact, our friend Nate over at Original Grain used element-level revenue data from heatmap to identify high-impact areas of his website to test, resulting in a 17% lift in Revenue per Session while scaling site traffic by 43%. Be like Nate. Try heatmap today.
