CRO: what is the Conversion Rate Optimization and why it is useful to the business
To just make traffic is not enough: in order to achieve goals and not only financial ones, it is necessary for users to interact with the content and turn into customers, buying the product or service we offer. This is one of the cornerstones of online marketing, which is spread across many useful channels to direct people to our site or social channels, which all channel into the content that “must” generate leads and revenue for the company. Help in this regard comes from CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization, the conversion rate optimization strategies that can help us to get more conversions and grow the business.
What is the CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization
CRO is the work of optimization of the conversion rate, a systematic process that serves to increase the percentage of visitors who take a specific action or goal on site pages, social channels, mobile apps or other online marketing campaigns.
These desired actions may include purchasing a product, clicking on “add to cart”, subscribing to a service, filling out a form or clicking on a link.
The CRO is therefore an organic set of techniques, diagnostic and experimental, which involve as a crucial element the understanding of the way users interact with the content, browse within the site and, ultimately, take actions that translate into leads and revenues for our business.
CRO and focus on the user experience
In recent years, in fact, the standard definition of CRO has been surpassed, focused on a “numerical” approach based on conversion rates, averages and benchmarks, and has expanded the work to the understanding of the people behind these data.
In this sense, then, the CRO has been reinterpreted as the process that focuses on understanding what drives, stops and persuades users, so they can offer them the best possible user experience, which represents the reason they convert and that, ultimately improves the conversion rate of a website.
This second meaning seems to work better because it focuses not only on the final action – the conversion, which remains obviously relevant – but also on everything that occurs before (and leads to) that point, such as drivers (which bring people to the site), any barriers (which force them to leave) and hooks (which convince them to convert).
Examples of conversion
Conversions are, as mentioned, the result that we get when users take action from us specially designed on the website or marketing campaign.
Ultimately, a conversion can be “any action we want a user to take that results in the collection of their information, the sale or the acquisition of insights on how they interact with your campaigns” as Jessica Foster suggests on Search Engine Journal.
These actions may include:
- Purchase of a product.
- Registration for a free trial.
- Adding a product to the cart.
- Filling out a contact form.
- Click on a link.
- Download a content resource (like an ebook).
- Registration for a service.
- Subscription to the newsletter.
History of CRO
The optimization of the conversion rate arises from the need to improve the performance of the site by e-commerce marketing professionals, in particular following the so-called “dot-com bubble”, when technology companies began to be more aware of their expenses, investing more in website analysis.
In the wake of the spread of the Internet and the possibility of creating websites easily, in fact, at the end of the 1990s there were tons of pages with a negative user experience; already in the early 2000s, however, increased competition and the availability of website analysis tools led to increased awareness of the value of website usability, pushing online marketers to measure their tactics and improve the user experience provided by the site.
Subsequent tools have allowed you to start experimenting on site design and content variations to determine which layout, text copy, offers and images work best, and today optimization and conversion are key aspects of many digital marketing campaigns: a research study conducted among Internet marketers in 2017, for example, highlighted that 50% of respondents believed that the CRO was “crucial to your global digital marketing strategy”.
Benefits of the CRO
To summarize, then, the CRO aims to maximize the conversions of our visitors, using as much as possible the traffic entering the pages of the site to achieve concrete results.
This activity therefore offers unique benefits when it comes to SEO, experienced by both professionals and companies with which they work. Among these are:
- More engagement from users
The optimization of the conversion rate also serves to optimize the website and campaigns for better engagement and, ultimately, conversions.
An increase in engagement metrics can provide valuable information about campaign performance and what drives users to interact with content.
- Better ROI
CRO leads to higher conversion rates, which means that we can earn more from marketing: that is, we can acquire more customers without necessarily generating more traffic or increasing the marketing budget.
- Valuable insights on users
The CRO process requires a better understanding of the public, which will improve marketing efforts and content in general.
We’ll be better equipped to reach the right customers with the right messages at the right time.
- Increased trust from users
Many actions require users to provide their contact information (email address, name, phone number, etc.) in exchange for content or information about the services.
This means that users must necessarily trust our site before releasing their information: CRO helps us build customer trust and leaves a positive impression on potential customers.
- Scalability
Although we have a limited pool of potential customers to tap into, the CRO allows you to get the most out of the existing audience to attract new customers.
By improving the conversion rate we can be able to expand our business and always find new potential customers.
How to calculate the conversion rate
The conversion rate represents the percentage of visitors who complete a target, as set by the site owner.
It is calculated as the total number of conversions divided by the total number of people who have visited the website, multiplying this figure by 100 to generate a percentage.
For instance, if our website receives 100 visitors in one day and 15 of them subscribe to the newsletter by e-mail (the conversion chosen to be measured), our conversion rate for that day is 15%, or 15/100 = 0.15 x 100 = 15%.
Calculating the conversion rate allows us to set a benchmark for the performance of the web page or campaign: in this way, all the changes made and the corresponding results generated can be measured against the original conversion rate.
Average conversion rate and ideal values
There is no single universal figure that qualifies as a “good” conversion rate and, in reality, even what is considered as an “average” conversion rate varies depending on the sectors, niches, campaigns, specific conversion targets and beyond.
Usually, however, we read that average conversion rate is between 1% and 4%, but this figure is somewhat meaningless, since the conversion rate varies greatly depending on the conversion target and, in addition, each website, page and audience are different.
Therefore, the best measure of what is considered “average” is to calculate past and current conversion rates and compare them with future results for our specific activity: instead of focusing on achieving a value that we consider optimal, It is more useful to investigate what motivates our target audience and then provide the value they are looking for, so that then the conversions will naturally follow.
What is the CRO intervention process
The optimization of the conversion rate is achieved through a process of site optimization, landing page or marketing campaign to increase the probability that a user takes the desired action.
This optimization work collects insights about past user behaviours, customer information and CRO best practices, and generally the basic process of CRO is as follows.
- Audience research
Examining the audience and deepening the analysis of past customers’ behavior serves to understand what users are interested in, what they have difficulties with and how they interact with our brand.
- Optimization
Use of the insights collected during audience research to optimize campaigns or pages for conversions.
This work could include writing more compelling texts, adding attractive call to action, redesigning the site for a better user experience (UX) or otherwise removing bottlenecks from the sales funnel.
- A/B Tests
Most CRO changes do not complete on a single occasion: it is necessary to measure the adjustment interventions with respect to different components to see which ones really move the bar.
In this sense, the classic A/B test is useful to verify the effects of corrections: for example, we can experiment with two types of call to action to see which has a better return, that is, has a higher conversion rate, or check if a change to button colors produces different effects and so on.
- Measuring
Data collection is also crucial, so we recommend using analytics software (such as Google Analytics) to measure the success of campaigns.
In particular, experts suggest to create goals to monitor conversions and then calculate the conversion rate by comparing it with total traffic numbers.
- Corrections in progress
The optimization work goes on over time and we must use analytics to monitor the success (or failure) of campaigns or pages, making the necessary changes to improve the conversion rate in progress.
The best practices of CRO
We described the best working process to intervene on conversion rate optimization, but in the world of digital marketing there are some widespread beliefs about CRO best practices – and, in particular, that performing particular actions can ensure an improvement in the rate, such as:
- Using a strong color for all CTA buttons.
- Placing the call to action above the fold.
- Using urgency (like time-limited offers) to boost sales.
- Always show customer testimonials.
- Use as few fields as possible in the forms.
The use of CRO best practices would be useful to improve every conversion rate, a belief at least questionable for a number of factors; first of all, by definition, these practices are old, or something that worked for someone else in the past and is not guaranteed to work today. Besides, and more importantly, just because one technique has borne fruit to someone else doesn’t mean it will work for us.
And so, the real best practice is to invest time to understand our users and customers, building a customer-centric culture, because they are the people who matter to our business and have the answers we need to improve the results.
The components of a successful CRO
CRO is therefore a complete process, involving a variety of components, from the landing page design to the contact forms we use; a successful CRO campaign requires an in-depth analysis of the target audience, more tests to measure performance and continuous optimization to ensure maximum results.
During this process, you will likely find some key elements that can be optimized to bring higher conversion rates:
- Design
The appearance of the website and target pages plays an important role for the CRO: it is likely that an aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate design improves usability and facilitates conversion by users.
During the design of a landing page it can be useful to work with a web designer who understands CRO and how users generally browse a website.
Basically, the site should be accessible on mobile devices, include readable fonts and interactive menus and allow visitors to easily find what they are looking for.
- Site speed
The fast loading speed of the website is an essential part of any website optimized for search engines and is also a component of the CRO. The longer it takes to load a page, the more likely it will be that users will leave the page and visit a competitor’s site.
Ideally, a website should load in less than 3 seconds on both desktop and mobile devices; To achieve this standard and ensure fast loading times we can reduce the size of the image file and remove slow-loading site items, for example: only this can increase site conversions.
- Copy
As copy we refer to the words that users read on the website and on the target pages: expert copywriters are able to create texts that meet the specific needs of the target audience, and it is not enough to simply write “on the arm” and hope for the best.
Comes into play – again and forcefully – the audience research: if we know what are the criticalities with which you compare our audience and the solutions you are looking for, we will be able to communicate the value of our offer, its features, advantages and more.
Ultimately, we can try to convince users that our service or product is the best solution for their needs.
- Call to action
As we know, the call to action is often a short and concise call for users to take action on the site. The most commonly seen phrases are “Contact Us”, “Buy Now” and “Work with Us”, but of course we can become much more creative.
For example, if we know that our audience is interested in a particular offer, the call for action can be more direct, such as “Buy X here” or “Download Y now”.
A good practice is to make clear what users will receive after clicking a link or submitting their information.
- Browsing
The structure of the site should be built with the main goal of making the entire site easy to navigate for users; generally, it consists of a layout of where the pages on the site exist and how they interact with each other.
Most sites adopt a hierarchical site structure, with the most important pages in the main menu and subpages in the drop-down menu. As a general advice, pages should not be “buried” more than 3 clicks away from the home page.
To optimize this aspect we can identify with the browsing path of a typical user, studying the contents to see how users pass from one page to another.
This path could look like:
- Home
- Page of services
- Individual service page
- Contact page
- Goal completion (to fill in a form)
Or, for an e-commerce site:
- Home page
- Page of products
- Product category page
- Page of the single product
- Add to cart
- Checkout
- Thank you page
Overall, creating an easy-to-navigate site is key to increasing conversions, building customer trust and improving customer loyalty over time.
- Forms
Contact forms are the most popular tool used by site owners to collect information about users, especially for service sites and agencies. E-commerce sites, on the other hand, may have individual product pages and a typical shopping cart function.
Contact forms should be easy to use and functional: that is, users should be easily able to send their information and these forms should be collected within the website to ensure a quick follow-up.
There are also some CRO best practices to the correct use of contact forms:
- The fewer the fields, the better (generally, as already mentioned): we should collect information that allows us to promptly follow the leads; if we want to better qualify these leads, we can provide additional fields, such as Sector or Budget.
- Aesthetically-pleasing forms typically equate to a better user experience. You have to make the text easy to read, use a consistent style and make sure that the send button is clickable.
- Take into account the privacy of customers. With the introduction of the GDPR and other consumer privacy laws, it has become more and more important than telling users how their information will be collected and used. We should always include a disclaimer that indicates what users are subscribing to, how we will be in contact with them and whether they can unsubscribe at any time.
How to measure the conversion rate
There are numerous quantitative tools that allow us to collect data to monitor conversions on the site: general analysis tools such as Google Analytics, site heatmaps, sales funnel analysis, contact form analysis and more.
Basically, we can use to calculate the conversion rates any tool that allows us to monitor conversions or completion of goals and see the data on site traffic. Once we get the conversion rate, we will have data on site performance in the past and current performance: at this point, we can use a variety of CRO tactics to generate even more leads, customers and revenues for our business.
How to improve your conversion rate
The key to improving the conversion rate over time is to keep an eye on customer behavior data and monitor how users interact with our site.
In this sense, we can start with a heuristic analysis of website or e-commerce performance with tools like Google Analytics, which we can use to measure goal completions, traffic numbers, user engagement and more, But – as said for the best practices – there is no valid strategy for everyone to have an excellent CRO.
What works for our business will depend to a large extent on the interests and behaviors of our target audience, the offers we are promoting, the site layout and much more.
Having this well in mind, we can nevertheless examine some suggestions for the optimization of the conversion rate to improve the site over time: for example, include the implementation of UX best practices, CRO adjustments with A/B testing, Better sales texts or CTA enhancements for higher conversions.
Free tools to understand the audience and improve conversions
Then there are some free tools that are fundamental to CRO: our brains, ears, eyes and mouth, which we need to use to understand our customers, empathize with their experience, draw conclusions based on data and, Finally, make the changes that improve our conversion rates.
In practical terms, we can (and we must, if we want to increase conversions) listen to what users have to say on the site, see how people use the site, dive into the market by studying competitors, work closely with those who design and build the site product or service (or who has done so in the past), talk to the staff who sells and supports the product/ service and, last but not least, trace connections between different sources of feedback.
Ultimately, therefore, the winning approach is based on investing in the understanding and learning of our users and in the use of insights to build an optimization strategy that improves conversions and, more generally, allow our business to continuously grow.
