Most businesses have upgraded their techniques for driving traffic to their websites. However, the real challenge for businesses remains to be increasing conversion rates.

When you have a website for your business, it’s important to understand that it is much like a constantly evolving creature, and best practices from last year may not work next year. You’ve got to stay ahead of the curve and keep optimizing or you risk falling behind the competition. This is where Conversion Rate Optimization, frequently termed CRO, comes in. 

Whether your conversion is for visitors to sign up for a newsletter, buy a product, or enroll in a subscription service, you must constantly be thinking of how to improve your conversion rates. In this guide, we will go over all the terminology in addition to providing a list of things you can do to increase your conversion rates in different business cycles.

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)? 

Conversion Rate Optimization can be defined as the regular practice of enhancing your website to increase the percentage of users who perform a designated action. These actions may include product purchases, form fills, video views, or clicking a link on your website.  

CRO focuses on understanding what is persuading your users to convert, what is hindering them and what would make your conversion process much more user-focused. Understanding these factors can help improve your website’s user experience and ultimately encourage users to convert. 

What are the Benefits of Performing CRO on Your Website? 

As the term indicates, the overall benefit of CRO is achieving the purpose that your website was created for, whether it be brand awareness, sales, or getting leads. Let’s break down what CRO does for your business. 

Customer Insights – Conversion rate optimization focuses on understanding what your key audience responds well to and making optimizations that enhance their user experience. This focus on user experience is rewarded by Google Search Bots which decides how well your website can rank on search engines;

Increased ROI – Increasing your conversion rate reduces the number of resources you need to allocate on increasing new customer acquisition efforts. This means you are getting the most out of your current marketing efforts; 

Scale Your Resources – CRO allows you to get the most out of your internal resources and your current audience. Audiences are limited, so it is important to turn your current audience into loyal consumers for better future growth; 

Better User Experience –  CRO identifies what hinders or encourages conversions, and leads companies to make appropriate changes for a better user experience; 

Increased Trust – Through improving your website’s conversion process, you will increase trust that your business is a safe organization for end-users to share their credit card and personal information with. 

What Are The Main Elements of CRO? 

CRO focuses on conversion research, user experience, website effectiveness, and personalization. Focusing on all four of these elements will help improve conversion rates and sales.  

Conversion Research – It is beneficial to gather information to guide your creation of improvement ideas. This research may come from analytics, heat maps, or surveys. Conversion research is the most important factor of CRO because it provides real insight into how your users interact with your site; 

Website Effectiveness – Implement persuasive and relatable copywriting to encourage end-users they need to engage with your product or services. Using social proof, scarcity and urgency can strongly encourage users to purchase or convert; 

User Experience – Improving user experience will allow your consumers to browse and find more information easily. Improved navigation, forms, and information flow can lead to an increase in conversions; 

Personalization – Implementing personalization techniques will help you discover the highest converting experience on your website for end-users. Personalized landing pages for different audience groups can help with this. 

How to Set Conversion Goals? 

Before you can begin setting conversion rate goals, you need to identify all of the microconversions that need to take place before your macroconversion is complete. 

The macroconversion is the main conversion you would like to visitors to do on your website. This conversion should guide your website copy, layout, design, and call to action buttons.  

Microconversions are the small steps that must be taken before the macroconversion can take place. These microconversions may help educate and build trust with your consumers.  

Below is a list of macroconversions that you may set: 

• Make a purchase; 
• Leave reviews; 
• Make a subscription; 
• Download user guides; 

• Share to social media; 
• Form fills; 
• Join a community. 

5 Ways to Improve Your Website’s Conversion Rates 

Optimize Your Site Structure 

Make navigation for your customers as easy as possible. Customers who get lost in the maze of internal links won’t find what they’re looking for—so they won’t take action. Improving store navigation through the layout and site architecture is an easy way to increase your CRO (and your SEO at the same time). Avoid unnecessary content that clutters the page and makes browsing confusing; for example, if you have an eCommerce website, make it easy to find products, make it easy to find variants, and make it easy to check out. 

Build an attention-grabbing homepage 

With all the work you put into SEO and social media marketing and paid ads, you want to make sure your customers land somewhere appealing. Think back again to those brick-and-mortar days: when you landed in a department store decked out with holiday cheer, it effectively got you into the spirit of buying. No matter the time of year, your store’s homepage is the place to make a great first impression. Make sure your call-to-action (CTA) is prominently displayed and well-placed as well, whether you want visitors to buy from you or to sign up for a newsletter. 

Target and Retarget, Constantly 

Once you have a list of leads, develop a targeted marketing strategy. Many businesses send daily or weekly emails with content such as recipes, advice, and gift ideas. With the range of email marketing suites we have today, you can also personalize emails for anniversaries, birthdays, and other client milestones. Retargeting is a long-term strategy, and it’s even more relevant today when consumers need as many as seven points of contact before making a move. Make sure you have some sort of system set up to send an email to customers who have abandoned the conversion process.

Feature Social Proof or User-Generated content

In today’s era of social media, shopping choices are often influenced by what friends and connections are doing. This has created a strong sentiment of customer trust in user-generated content. UGC on your site can include videos, pictures, and reviews from past customers. You can integrate your site with Instagram images using a service like Instafeed. Written reviews are also still important, but their power to instill a sense of trust goes even further when they’re accompanied by pictures of the reviewers and their social media handles.

Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly 

There’s no question about it: you’ve got to make your site responsive on mobile devices. Mobile visits have already been outpacing desktop traffic since 2017. But the need for CRO is even more pressing with mobile because research shows that mobile visits have a higher bounce rate and that visitors spend less time on the site. That said, it’s important that the mobile version of your site looks amazing and presents a seamless user experience in order to get users browsing to come back later when they have more time to look around your site.

Over to You 

Your conversion rate can tell a lot about the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Attracting traffic to your site is good, but getting those visitors to convert is the most significant element of inbound marketing. Conversion rate optimization has a direct effect to other important metrics, especially the ones that your business are interested in.

If you're ready to get started on your CRO, you can reach us at +61 2 9089 8875 or use our contact form.

We're excited to be a part of your company's future success!