What's the difference between a successful and failed online business? Lead conversions. You're doomed to fail when the traffic on your website doesn't convert into paying customers. Incorporating CRO marketing (Conversion Rate Optimization) into your digital marketing strategy is one way to turn the tide.
A foolproof CRO strategy can turbocharge your website's performance and drive results. It's like the nitrous oxide of digital marketing, helping you to break out of the pack and turn your website into a high-performance machine.
In this post, we'll explore what CRO marketing is, the metrics that influence it, and the approaches to develop and improve it. So, let's get ready to rev up your marketing efforts!
CRO and CRO marketing: why are they important?
CRO marketing is a way that improves your conversions. It's a process of making an actionable strategy that increases conversions.
You analyze the current situation of your website traffic and several other related elements to see where and how things should be changed to convince the visitors to take action. Increasing traffic conversion into customers is the way to increase the sales of your products or services.
For example, content writing is a powerful tool for driving traffic to your website. But to get the most out of your content, you must look beyond basic SEO and conversion rate optimization.
The focal point of CRO marketing is to increase the number of visitors who take the actions you want them to take. It could be subscribing to your newsletter, signing up for a trial, or purchasing something. In other words, it's about turning more website visitors into leads and customers.
CRO marketing involves testing and optimizing your website's content, design, and other elements that can impact conversions. For example, you might test different headlines and calls to action to see which ones get more people to sign up for a trial.
For content writers, CRO marketing offers an opportunity to showcase their skills. They can use it to create compelling pieces that drive conversions. It means writing content that compels people to take the desired action and testing different versions of the content to see which one performs best.
You can create a business plan that drives results by leveraging the power of CRO marketing and ace content writing strategies.
What are the benefits of CRO marketing?
CRO is a data-driven approach that uses analytics and user feedback insights to improve user experience and drive more conversions.
It can bring many benefits to your business, including:
Generates more revenue
Investing in CRO will help you generate more leads and boost your ROI. By using data-driven insights to identify areas of improvement, you can optimize your website and drive more conversions.
Improves user experience
By understanding user behavior and testing different design elements, you can create an optimized user experience. When there are more happy customers, they'll spend money on your products, and you'll get a higher conversion rate. It's like a win-win situation for both parties.
The marketing approach helps you identify the best channels and strategies for your target audience. It allows you to focus your efforts on the areas with the most significant impact.
Improves brand affinity
Creating a positive user experience will increase brand recognition and loyalty among your target audience. And brand loyalty always brings new customers since the existing customers do the promotion for free.
Gives more value to current customers
The conversion rate optimization strategy improves the user experience by redesigning the layouts or new approaches to marketing efforts. It offers more value to the current customers and the current conversion process.
The critical elements of CRO marketing
Complex CRO marketing has several elements that need to be readjusted with each other to make the best results.
In this section, we've discussed all these 6 elements and how they affect your conversion rate. These are essential items for improving conversions on your website.
Landing page design
The element that impacts your website's success is the design of the landing page or the first page. This page leads visitors to take action, including the way to the CRO campaign.
To optimize landing pages, the best possible strategy you can take is to limit the number of user actions while providing the value of the service in a clear and enchanting way.
A quality landing page should have some elements, including:
- Headlines (Main title and subtitles)
- Unique business proposition
- End-user benefits
- Social proof
- High-quality media
- Persuading statements
- Call to cction (CTA)
Website copy
The website design is one of many elements that can give you the best results. Content is the lifeblood of any business, so you'll need good website copy to communicate and persuade visitors.
For any website copy, there are mainly two elements: the headline and the main body.
A headline should be catchy to captivate the audience, and the main body should give the readers insights about the topic.
You can hire professional content writers to write mesmerizing content that keeps the customers engaged for hours.
Forms
Forms are an essential part of an effective CRO process. They bridge website visitors and desired outcomes, such as lead generation or e-commerce sales.
Through forms, you can collect information from website visitors, such as their names, email addresses, or other personal information. Use the data to create targeted campaigns, measure the effectiveness of existing campaigns, and ultimately improve the overall experience for the users.
You can better understand your target audience and tailor the campaigns accordingly using forms.
CTA (call to action)
CTA or Call to Action is a plea to the visitors to perform a specific action, which can be anything depending on the service you are offering. For instance, you can ask your audience to answer a few questions, register for a webinar, purchase any service, or download a free planner.
A good CTA should be concise and visible and incentivize your visitors to take the desired action. When used correctly, CTA can be a powerful tool to help increase conversions, as it serves as a direct, clear prompt for visitors to take the next step.
Site structure
Site structure controls how visitors interact with the web pages. Poorly structured websites often frustrate users and drive them to leave your site quickly.
A proper one logically organizes your content and makes it easier for users to find the information they need in fewer steps. It encourages people to stay on the site and move down the sales funnel.
This is especially important for e-commerce sites, as it can guide people to the products and checkout page.
Site speed
We aren't living in the 90s, so it's annoying when any site takes more than a few seconds to load. If your website does not load quickly, potential customers may leave and visit a competitor's site.
For speed optimization, use appropriately sized images, minify code, and use a content delivery network. Additionally, set up caching and avoid unnecessary plugins.
Investing in speed optimization is a great way to maximize revenue potential and improve the overall user experience.
Is CRO and SEO marketing the same?
Many people think that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and CRO are opposite marketing policies, but others believe they are the same. They're not the same, but they're two sides of a coin.
CRO is focused on making changes to a website to increase the rate at which visitors convert into customers. The process involves:
- Testing different versions of a website.
- Split testing.
- Making changes to the website based on the data collected.
On the other hand, SEO is focused on optimizing a website for search engine algorithms to increase the website's ranking on the search engine results page. It uses strategies like keyword research, content optimization, and link building.
Ultimately, they are two distinct processes with different goals; however, they can complement each other to improve a website's overall performance.
Fundamental knowledge for booming CRO marketing
You need to keep some critical factors in mind to make your CRO marketing strategies flourish.
Fulfill requirements of website visitors
Your website visitors are like your potential customers. The more they visit the site, the higher the chance of conversions.
You must know why those people are visiting the website, their requirements, and from which platform they are coming. If you understand the reason, fulfilling their needs will be as easy as ABC.
For example, visitors from paid ads and Instagram reels are in different categories and won't look for the same things.
Do surveys
A survey is a simple method to solve most misunderstandings or confusion about the customer experience. However, most customers will skip long questionnaires.
Setting two to five simple direct questions on high-traffic pages is the best practice. For instance, you can ask why they're leaving the web pages or not choosing a particular option.
Also, you can ask your customers and any website visitor questions via email a few days after their visit or purchase. Quantitative data can help you learn about customers' needs, behaviors, and purchasing preferences.
Customer surveys can also help you identify your website's areas of improvement, such as design, usability, or navigation. Ultimately, they are a great way to gain valuable insights into your customers that you can use to optimize conversion rates.
Discern website visiting factors
You may see a sudden increase in website traffic, and most are taking action, spurring the conversion rate. Now it's your turn to find out what factors kept the visitors hooked on the site.
The shortest way to find out those factors is to ask them questions about their experience and what they liked or hated most.
It's best to ask these questions after they complete an action because it indicates their interest in your service.
Discern website leaving reasons
Nothing is more frustrating than seeing your visitors leave the website without taking action. You must identify why they exit to find the areas to improve your marketing efforts. You can do this through the conversion or goal funnel in Google Analytics.
First, you need to collect all the data from every page of the visitor's journey and put them in Google Analytics to make the conversion funnel. After the analysis, you can see which web pages had the most traffic exits.
Identifying the highest drop-off pages will help you to find out the last things your site visitors interacted with before leaving. Usually, heat maps are used to determine the most drop-off sections.
The heat maps show different colors for a different number of site visitors; the redder the section, the more traffic it receives. And the drop-off sections are where there is a noticeable change of color shades.
With the funnel analysis, you can also track visitors' interactions with different parts of your web pages. Study the results in detail and check if there are any issues or bugs on the site, like broken click buttons, that can force the visitors to leave.
The most important CRO marketing metrics
CRO marketing metrics are also essential items that show how the strategy makes a big difference and how that impacts your business. Let's find out how those matrices work.
Conversion rate
Since CRO marketing is all about the conversion of rates, it is the most critical metric. You can calculate the conversion rate with a simple formula where you'll need to divide the Number of Conversions by the Number of Visitors and then multiply by 100.
You can use that for calculating the conversion rate of any page. However, while analyzing converting, always keep an eye on selecting the different time ranges.
It's because the conversion rate varies from time to time. For any particular season, the conversion can be higher than the rest of the year, like the holiday months.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate defines the same thing as the name suggests. It shows the duration of your web page visitors before bouncing off or leaving. The bounce rate will be higher if there is less info on any page or little to read or spend time on.
Lead goal
Calculating the lead goal is easy. Divide the Number of New Customers by the Lead to Customer Close Rate Percentage. Here the Lead to Customer Close Rate Percentage is the ratio of the Total Number of Leads to the Total Number of Customers.
Net new customers
You can find the net new customer numbers by dividing the Net Revenue Goal by the Average Sales Price. Knowing the number of visitors at the current time can help get insights into the current conversion process and success factors.
Average session duration
The average session duration or time-on-site metric has little effect on conversion rates. However, it may indicate browsing problems and the necessity for the site's improvement.
Pages per visit
Pages per visit depend on the bounce rate and the average session duration. Page visits are low when there is more bounce rage. And if the time on-site is high, it's more likely to have higher pages per visit.
Goal funnel
Goal funnels from the Conversion section of Google Analytics can help you find where the most dropping off happened and thus needs the most optimization efforts.
Path length
The Path Length tool of Multi-Channel Funnels determines how visitors interact with the website and how much time they require to convert.
Also, this metric makes the experience of old or returned visitors more pleasing by creating a new landing page for them. This tool can also help you to re-directing the CRO marketing strategy.
Behavior flow
The visitors' behavior flow can help you understand them better and where you should make more optimization efforts to get more conversions.
Exit percentage
The exit percentage and bounce rate are pretty similar. While the bounce rate represents the leaving of visitors from that specific website, the exit percentage represents the percentage of people leaving a page to visit another page of that same website.
This metric is usually used to analyze the customer journey better.
Old vs. new visitors
An old or returning website visitor is less likely to leave the website since they are familiar with the brand and site structure. You need more new customers and ways to attract or make them stay on the site for more conversions.
In-page analytics
In-page analytics is a Google Analytics tool that can show you the sections on your site that have the maximum activity. It can also make your website's user experience smoother and help optimize further improvement.
Acquisition
The acquisition Overview section is also a part of the Analytics; it shows the website's traffic sources. With this tool, we can quickly evaluate the traffic metrics for each channel and create a separate user experience for them.
Devices
Since people can visit your site from different versions and types of devices, it's an important metric that can help improve your business. Because if you know what devices the customers are using, it'll be easier to design graphics and prioritize optimization.
How to develop a CRO marketing strategy
The marketing strategy for conversion rate optimization varies from business to business. One approach may send your company to the top, but it may not work for another company. For this reason, customized strategic planning is crucial for success.
Although the strategies may differ, they have some common steps they all need to follow. We'll discuss how to use those steps to develop the best methods.
Analyze conversion paths
The most significant step is to analyze the conversion process from your conversion funnel by identifying the potential sticking points.
There can be many reasons why the target audience doesn't convert. Some of them are slow-loading pages, small fonts, highly contrasting colors, irrelevant images, poor structure design, unattractive CTA buttons, etc. Proper analysis will help you determine which one of the elements is causing the problems in getting more conversions.
To analyze, skim every part of the funnel before modifying one specific element. Dig more into the analytics details, and search for where the conversion rate is minimal and which pages get the highest and lowest traffic.
The website's improvement process will be more straightforward if you understand these numbers in the conversion funnel better. Also, it'll take less time to convert your lowest leads to the highest ones.
Define conversion
Defining or setting conversion and conversion goals is crucial for your business's future because conversion impacts each business differently.
At first, you need to get a clear idea of what conversion means to you and your business, and then you can set goals to achieve what you need.
You can make different conversion goals like getting more net new customers and better lead goals.
Map customer journey
Tracking the customer's journey is vital since you may lead them to take specific actions. See the map and identify the areas where the conversion is the lowest. Improve those areas first, and then focus on the following underperforming sections.
You can also break all the problems into different segments according to your conversion. If you do these, it will be easy to put effort into the customers who are more prone to convert.
Create a strategy or CRO workflow
When you already find out the factors affecting the conversion rate, customer behavior, and journey, it's time to create a strategic workflow for a greater conversion rate.
Since conversion rate optimization is a process that never ends, you may need to make new strategies every other month. You can use digital tools to make CRO workflow easy.
The standard tools for this are Airtable or Asana. No matter which one you use, always keep a list or backlog of testing ideas, so you can remember all crucial steps and track the active tests.
How to improve your digital marketing with a CRO team
Most often, companies use CRO marketing strategy to boost traffic, forgetting to focus on the conversion rate. But when they want to raise the rate of conversion, they quickly add CTA to several web pages.
These few and simple changes in some places dramatically impact page improvements and conversion rates. You can easily guess how vast the effect will be if a CRO team works devotedly to increase the conversion rate.
There are mainly 2 ways to integrate a CRO marketing team.
CRO agency
When your business is expanding, you need a dedicated CRO agency. Only a professional team knows every know-how of conversion rate optimization marketing.
A CRO agency can help you identify areas that need improvement and then develop strategies to help you increase conversions. With the right expertise, they can help you optimize landing pages, design split tests, and create content tailored to your audience.
In addition, they can also help you track metrics, analyze results, and implement changes to ensure that your digital marketing campaigns are constantly improving. All these measures can help your business reach a higher level of success.
Internal team
An in-house CRO team is often the preferred option for many organizations, as it allows for much faster development and implementation of strategies. It can also lead to better communication between teams and departments, which helps with resolving issues quickly.
An internal team understands your company's vision and mission better than any outside agency. They are more likely to make decisions that align with your company's brand.
Having an in-house team allows for one-on-one training, ensuring everyone on the team is on the same page.
How to improve digital marketing with tools
Don't have the budget to hire an agency or resource to form an internal team? You can do it alone using a digital marketing tool.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics tool allows you to get raw analytic data for your website, like the bounce rate, main drop-off points, the number of visitors and sessions, and many more. This tool also allows you to
Heat map and mouse tracking tools
Heat maps show the segments where the most drop-off happened and where to take action first. And the Mouse Tracking tools allow you to examine exactly how, when, and where website visitors go on any page on your site, in short, you can analyze the customer's behaviors.
User testing tools
These tools allow you to watch over the customers through the conversion funnel. You can learn about their behavior and thoughts about your website.
Survey tools
Using the survey tools, you can ask the website visitors about their experience and feedback. Do this by using automated pop-ups that open when visitors browse any particular portion of the page.
A/B testing tools
These tools help you compare different strategies to determine which is performing the best. We've discussed this tool and how this method will impact your business in the next segment.
How to improve your CRO marketing with A/B testing
For any CRO marketing strategy, A/B testing is a must. This testing method lets you make important decisions and strategies based on actual data rather than assumptions.
Although this testing process is vital for successful CRO marketing, many companies still haven't embraced this method. Half of those marketers need to gain knowledge or skills in this testing method, while the other half need more resources or time to do this test.
But what exactly is A/B testing? As the name implies, A or B, your website visitors will face two versions of the same element, just like two competitor items.
Suppose one group is given the A type of that element and the other group simultaneously faces the type B element. Then you can evaluate which version performs best and choose the winner.
When you find the better option for your site, you can optimize the website and get higher conversion rates. However, some elements of your website need A/B testing for better CRO marketing strategies. They are:
Copy
Your website copy can be A/B tested in 4 different ways.
- The first thing your audiences see when visiting your site is the headline, so make different clear and relevant headings and test how each of them attracts the customers.
- Write the same copy twice, one in the first person and the other in the second person.
- Create a copy with two different content lengths and present them to your visitors simultaneously to evaluate their performance.
- Statistics, tables, and numbers can make your content look more credible and grab the audience's attention more. You can analyze how they are affecting conversions.
CTA
Call to Action or CTA can impact the overall conversions on your website. Make the background color, placement, text options, shapes, and sizes of the CTA lines different in each A/B test. Observe their impacts to analyze and find which makes the best conversion.
Email subject line
Subject lines of your email significantly impact email marketing efforts as they act as the attention grabber. You can send emails with different subject lines to see which one gets the highest responses.
Font
The font is as important as the content for your site. Tiny fonts are challenging to read, and most visitors will skip them. But bigger fonts catch attention more and are easier to read.
Test how each font type influences the customer experience and conversion for future reference.
Digital media
Digital media, such as images and videos, greatly impact page improvements and conversion rates. You can test how no image or a few static images and videos affect conversions.
Landing pages
Try different versions of landing or home pages to see how they perform and which attracts the audience more. It'll give you insights for future planning.
Customer testimonials
Adding customer testimonials in one campaign and skipping it in another can be an excellent way to compare how they affect conversion rate performance.
Customer contact number
You may need the contact numbers of your customers depending on your business type. In that case, create two offers but ask for the phone number in only one. See which one converts better and plan your next strategy accordingly.
Product description
You can put different product and service descriptions for different versions and examine which converts better. For example, you can write short or broad descriptions or use paragraphs in one campaign and bullet points in another.
Countdown timer
You can add a countdown timer for any campaign to persuade your customers to act more with a sense of urgency. Put a countdown timer in a discount offer to see how the visitors react.
Discounts
You can offer discounts in two ways to test the customers. You may say "20% off for the purchase within 2 days" and "40% off only for today" to track their behavior.
Lead magnets
Lead magnets will let your visitors subscribe to your email list. You can change the lead magnet types by offering an ebook, checklists, or other products. See which offer convinces the visitors more to leave their emails or additional information.
eCommerce website scarcity
Do you often make offers that may run out soon, such as low stock or promotional sales? Let your customer know by writing the eCommerce content copy differently.
For example, you may say, "Only 2 days left for 10% off" in one version and "Hurry up before prices go up" in another version. Note down the customer behaviors and make strategies based on that result.
Conclusion
CRO marketing helps bloom your digital marketing with simple steps. Since there are many ways to improve your site's performance, think clearly and discuss with the experts what your next steps should be.
Are you looking for a way to boost your website conversions? Our experienced content writing team will help you analyze your website and develop an effective conversion optimization strategy to ensure your visitors take the desired action. Start optimizing your website today and unlock its full potential.
