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Conversion is the term generally used for a website visitor to complete his goal on your site. Conversion goals could be for the visitor to purchase on your website. It could also be something much smaller, like signing up on your website to receive emails.
Conversion rate optimization or CRO is a process of systematically increasing the percentage of visitors that visit a website and take the desired action. The action to perform on the site could be to fill out a form or to become a customer and make a purchase. The CRO process understands how the user navigates through your website and what actions they take. Conversion rate optimization strategies let you figure out what stops the users from completing the goal on your website. Usually, as Conversionrate.store‘s experts assure, the CRO process could be done in several steps, and results could be received in 3-6 months.
Conversion types
Conversions on a website are broadly categorized into two types – micro conversions and macro conversions.
- Micro conversion – Micro conversion is when a prospective client has become engaged with your website brand. This is accomplished when he may have signed up on your website, watched the introductory video, or just have started following you on social media.
- Macro conversion – Macro conversion is when a visitor on your website gets converted and takes the primary offer that you have on your site. It could be buying a product, filling out a form for lead capture, or subscribing to your services.
Both kinds of conversions are crucial for your brand. The micro-conversions will lead to macro conversions; This is because, through the micro-conversions, the visitor will have your brand in his mind and is more likely to get involved with your brand.
Why is conversion rate optimization important?
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- CRO leads to more sales for the same traffic on your website that you receive recently.
- Instead of investing money in digital marketing or PPC ads to attract more traffic to your website, you could opt for CRO to turn your visitors into customers.
- If you choose to drive in more traffic to your site, then CRO automatically converts to more sales because of your marketing efforts.
- All that CRO does is to make your conversions funnel effective.
- You do not change anything else in the way you were already carrying out your business. CRO translates to an increase in sales for the same pricing and the same amount of traffic on your website.
- When your sale increases, it, in turn, increases the revenue of your business.
- CRO lowers the cost of acquiring new customers by letting you value the visitors that you already have.
- CRO lets you increase the revenue from each visitor, and also grows your business by acquiring new customers.
- In a nutshell, CRO helps to increase sales, which boosts your bottom line.
Which are the areas of your site that need optimization?
The benefit of CRO is well understood, but which are the areas on your site that you should look to optimize.
The ideal way to do this is to first lookout for those areas on the website that gets the maximum amount of traffic. It could also be that area where the most significant number of conversions is generated. When you focus on these crucial parts of your website, then this will let you see the change results quicker, and it will also reflect in your business performance.
Next, you should look out for places on your website that underperform as compared to the rest of your site. Optimizing these areas shows on your goals of conversions. Like for example, you may be operating a clothing website and notice that the page on caps gets a lot of traffic but has a low conversion rate. In this case, you should look to improve the conversion rate using conversion rate optimization tools such as Personalization, A/B Testing, Heatmap, etc.
Elements of your website that will benefit from CRO
CRO lets your content not to work hard but to work smart. Implementing CRO will offer better results with the actual amount of traffic. The websites are designed in such a way to convert visitors to customers. The conversion keeps on all over, be it the homepage, a blog, the pricing page, or the landing page on the website. Conversion rate optimization best practices can be applied to each of these pages to increase conversion.
Look further to understand how each of your websites pages benefits with CRO.
- Homepage: CRO is crucial for your website homepage. The homepage is what lets the visitor make an impression of your brand. It is also the page that will decide whether or not the visitor will go further. CRO on the homage can be achieved by having links on product information or through a signup option for free.
- Pricing Page: The pricing page is another vital part of your website because it is a make or a breakpoint for the user. Modifying the interval of price, describing what features of the product are associated with the price, and including a contact number to get the price quote are ways in which CRO can be incorporated on the pricing page.
- Blog: A blog on your website also gives you an excellent opportunity for conversion. The blog features a lot of valuable content about your brand, but it can also be used to convert your readers to customers. And this can be achieved with CRO. Call to action through the article or offering a free eBook for sharing email addresses on the site are ways to implement CRO on your blogs.
- Landing Pages: A landing page has been designed to let the visitors take action on your site. The landing page could be optimized using ab testing to create and test two variations of your landing page to check which version of the landing page performs better in terms of conversion. If there are free resources that you are offering, then CRO on a landing page could be to give the viewers a preview of what they should be expecting from the resource.
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When should you apply CRO to your business?
The perfect stage of thinking about conversion rate optimization is when you notice that your marketing and sales engine can attract visitors. The traffic is being attracted in high amounts at this stage. It is an apt time when you should look at converting the traffic to leads.
Any business has a finite demand. The services and products that any business offers will not be lucrative for customers all their life. Thus every company has a life span. As a business owner, you should look to gain the maximum advantage of this period when you notice the maximum demand for your products or services. It is easy to understand your customer demands using online tools. Once you get this figure, it is time to nail it down to get the maximum from your website traffic.
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It may, however, not be a cakewalk to set a conversion goal. For this, you need to make use of conversion rate optimization. You do not want to have 100 more conversions on your webpage now. You want 100 more conversions to say X number of people who visited your website. You need to be looking at your website’s conversion rate, which is the percentage of people who get converted on your site based on the number of people who touch your site.
The key takeaway here is that you do not want to generate more traffic for your website. It is not the correct approach. Conversion rate optimization is about getting more from what you already have and making it work for you.
Why is converting your current traffic a better option than acquiring more traffic?
- You understand more about the behavior of your consumers. Testing and hypothesis give you a better idea about how consumers behave on your webpage.
- You also get to discover your customers more deeply. You do not just recognize how your customers behave on a single page. You also develop key insights on how you can address the needs of your customers at various touchpoints.
- You get to keep track of the behavior of the user. Every stage of the buying journey of your consumer lets you gather essential data.
- You get to offer the best to your users. No decluttered designs anymore since now you can provide a clear copy that is well designed to enhance the user’s experience.
- With all the essential information, you can now update your website easily.
- A sharp and effective copy and high conversion rate let you strengthen your brand, making use of bright designs.
- You get to reach out to more qualified leads and not just try to target any random browser.
- In order to increase your website traffic, you now do not need to invest a lot of money into your campaigns.
- More conversions translate to an increase in revenue for your business.
- With the correct approach to CRO, you can bring about a repeatable, sustainable, and consistent increase to your business.
What makes online companies shy away from incorporating conversion rates for their website?
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- It is easier to increase the traffic on the website than to increase the conversion rates of websites. It seems to be much easier to increase the pay per click campaigning budget and thus to improve the website traffic. It also takes very little effort to set up a paid campaign. To convert the new traffic is what is seen as challenging.
- Many companies have failed after having put CRO in place. They launched a conversion rate program with the hope of increasing their revenue. However, instead of following a methodology, they jumped to testing straightway. They selected the pages and tested it, randomly tested the elements, and failed to analyze the results of their program. Eventually, they decided that conversion rate optimization is not for them. Here the problem was not with optimization. It was the way in which optimization was approached by the company, which was the issue. The repeatable and consistent methodology does the trick. Random marketing fails to give results.
- It is complex to increase conversion rates. To increase revenue, you need to anticipate and understand your visitors. You need to know what information the visitors on your website would want to see and then need to brainstorm on how to provide them with the information. You thus need to focus on analyzing and incorporating human behavior, which is not an easy task.
- It takes lots of commitment in order to increase conversation rates for your website. CRO is a long term commitment, like any other marketing program.
- Many companies may even shy away from CRO because CRO leads to creating a website design that is about the visitors and not about the brand owner. Your website traffic gets a voice in the entire website design process. You may thus have to leave back the latest developments and instead incorporate a solution that voices your visitor’s ideas.
Conclusion
You now know what conversion rate is and why CRO is so crucial for your online business. Your revenue is the most critical indicator of the success of your business. Conversion stands just a step below it. You need to aim to increase the traffic percentage on your website, which does not only visit your site but ends up spending money on your website. This is what will determine your business growth by increasing revenue for your company. It is about optimizing those resources that you already have and doing just a little bit more to capture the customers who are low-hanging and waiting to purchase on your site.
It cannot be argued that CRO has a lot of potentials. Unfortunately, it still lies untapped by the marketing team. The impact that CRO can create for your brand is phenomenal, and thus, this opportunity should not be ignored. It is all about weighing the investment that you do in CRO and the benefits that you receive when you incorporate it into your system.
Shivani is a content writer at InviteReferals. She writes SEO articles, blogs, and guest posts for businesses who want to improve website ranking on SERP. She follows a balanced approach for the quality of content and its marketing. She loves to do creativity, although she had an English major in her graduation