There has been a tidal wave of new marketing trends that talk about just one thing - businesses need to inculcate a customer-centric approach. The whole technological advancement is around designing marketing strategies for customers as it works mostly as pulling the buyers and not pushing the products anymore.
So in this exercise, giving your customers the best online experience can actually turn out to be very huge as that’s where they have to be more engaged to make the buying decision in your favor. Now comes into picture conversion optimization.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), is a process for increasing the percentage of website visitors to take a desired action like subscribing to a newsletter, or filling out a form or buying a product.
It is about improving some aspects of your website that is important for its performance and acquiring new customers. It can be different actions based on your key performance indicators, sometimes it can be making your call to action more apparent or placing it on a page with heavy-traffic.
What is the conversion rate:
The conversion rate can be defined as the number of times a user completes a desired action divided by the total number of sessions (number of unique times a user visits your website) on the website. The actions can be anything from signing up for email lists, creating an account, purchasing a product or subscribing for a service.
How to calculate CRO:
If you are an e-commerce site, if the customer visits thrice that would be three sessions. And he can make a purchase every time.
First visit = session1 = no purchase
2nd visit = session2 = bought 1 item - one conversion
3rd visit = session 3 = bought 2 items - even though he purchased 2 items, its only one order - one conversion
So conversion rate will be 2 orders / 3 sessions = 66.67%
Now assume that you are a publication and sell a monthly subscription. Now here the user can come several times but once he has bought the subscription he cannot convert again.
So here you will not calculate the conversion on session basis but user basis.
We divide the number of unique subscriptions by the number of unique users.
100 users - 10 bought subscription = 10/100 = 10% conversion.
Why is CRO important?
- CRO allows you to lower your cost of acquiring new customers by getting more conversions from the existing users and visitors. With more conversion rate the revenue per visitor increases and you can grow faster.
- Its cost effective to convert the visitors than attracting new visitors. The audience size may not increase with the business so focussing on existing visitors will give you more prospective customers.
- CRO is about studying what is working on your website, so by taking that into account improving the user experience you are making your audiences stick around for long.
- Optimization also means to give your visitors what they want in their limited attention span before they decide to move out. You can use this to get customer insights and find the right customers for your business.
Importance of Analytics
There is always room for improvement, iterating and correcting for a better experience for their users. But before any optimization you need to be familiar with the website analytics, how is it already performing, which are the pages that are doing great, which content is not doing good with the visitors, because if you are not gathering the important data you will be making decisions based on random assumptions and not solid insights. Analytics help you identify what to improve, where to improve and who to improve for.
Google analytics is a great platform to collect all the quantitative data from your website that you need to understand the behavior of people before taking any CRO initiatives.
The analysis of the data gives you information like
- Which page people land first on your website
- What pages and features they engage with
- What devices they use
- What is there demographics
- Where do they exit your website
Knowing the flow
Its also important to know your website flow, how visitors travel to become your paying customers. Comprehending the way visitors browse through your pages tells you the importance of each page and what improvements can be made by optimizing these pages.
You need to know the conversion metrics for your business
You can only optimize your conversion rate if you know your goals for your website. The success metrics will depend on the kind of business you are in.
For example, if you sell products online, a conversion for you is a purchase, if you sell products and services for businesses then probably you are tracking the leads, also newsletter subscriptions, social shares, booking appointments etc can be counted as conversions.
Once you know what you are tracking it will not be difficult to find out the pages where optimization is required. It can be pages which receive high traffic but not conversions and pages which are underperforming in comparison to other pages.
CRO Strategies-
Embed CTA’s within a blog post
It is always good and advisable to include a call to action in your blog post but sometimes they fail to entice the audiences to take the required action. People generally ignore such CTA’s at the bottom of the blog as they have become used to the fact and so sometimes they don’t even read it till the end.
You need a new approach to insert your CTA’s in the form of text content within your blogs in little bigger font and with anchor text leading to the desired landing page.
Work on marketing qualified lead
Sometimes people visiting your websites have the motives to come straight down to business rather than getting hit by various marketing offers. You can make this easy for them with smart and clear CTA’s. It's evident that people signing up for demos or sales meetings have higher conversion rates than people signing up for newsletters and free trails.
So, create a lead capture form on your website that helps you remove the friction between the visitor and sales team making it easy for them to book meetings or ask for a call back by leaving their details. You get time to tailor your conversations as per the requirements mentioned by the visitor.
Optimize high performing blog posts
If you are a blogger you know that some blogs outperform the others. So identify such blogs which are receiving high traffic but low conversion rates. It might be a possibility that the content of the blog is not aligned with your content offer or the call to action is not very clear.
You should also look at the blogs that have very high conversion rates as you would want to leverage them to drive more relevant traffic to the website. You can do that by optimizing the content to ensure it relevant and fresh.
Retargeting
It's a hard truth that most people do not take the actions you want them to when they are on your website. With retargeting, you can recapture the attention of those visitors who left your website without any action.
Retargeting is tracking those visitors and serving them online ads on other websites they visit after leaving your platform especially high conversion websites. The basics of content marketing will work as you need a good ad campaign with high-quality image, engaging message and enticing offer.
Reducing bounce and exit rates
The reasons behind your bounce and exit rates need special attention and analysis as they show the lack of engagement of users towards your content.
You should investigate if the reason is difficult navigation or longer loading time of the web pages or incompatibility with the mobile devices. The other reasons could be your users not able to find the content matching their expectations or they are not sure if they should buy your product.
You should remove the technical issues and also explain your products or services better to match the expectations of the buyers and making them feel strong about your product.
Conversion rate optimization is the process of making the online experience on your website consistent and structured and better over time with ongoing optimization.
Contact us to know more about CRO and how can you optimize your website to drive the qualified traffic.
And don't forget to subscribe to this blog and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn
