What is Conversion Rate Optimization, and why it matters for your business?

Any business that wants to be successful using an Online Marketing strategy needs to pay attention to its website Conversion Rate Optimization

The actions of customers after you have generated and sent traffic to your website make a huge difference in lead generation and your business revenue.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is what can help your get more traffic conversions and sales.

Today, I want to talk about the meaning of CRO, its importance for businesses, and ways to achieve the best conversion rate possible.

Today’s post is about Conversion rate optimization. What CRO is, why it is important for your business and marketing best practices for achieving the best conversion rate possible.

Let’s get started;

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Conversion rate optimization increases the percentage of your business website visitors who perform the desired action.

It involves the understanding of how your website visitors engage with your content, navigate your website, and the actions they took that resulted in leads and profit for your business.

Examples of Website Conversions

Conversion can only occur when a customer performs the desired action on your website.

These actions can include:

The Core Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization has a lot of unique benefits it does to website Search Engine Optimization (SEO). These benefits are not new to SEO professionals as well as the businesses they work with.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) benefits include:

• Increased Customer Engagement

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) makes sure that your website is properly optimized and that you have a well-tailored campaign for better engagement.

An increase in customer engagement metrics can provide your business with valuable data insights into how your marketing campaigns are performing and how your customers interact with your content.

• Increased ROI

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) leads to a higher rate of traffic conversion, what this means is that you are getting value for every penny you spent on your marketing effort.

It is possible you get more customers without getting more website traffic or increasing your marketing budget.

• Valuable Customer Insights

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) requires you to understand your customers in a better way that will help you improve your marketing efforts and overall content.

It will prepare you to reach out to the right customers with the right marketing message and at the right time necessary.

• Increased Business Trust

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) helps your business to build customer trust.

 Many conversion actions will require your customers to provide their contact information in exchange for valuable content or special offers about your products and services.

By providing information, it means that customers need to trust your website. CRO can help you build that trust and leaves a positive impression on your customers.

• Scalability

Some businesses have a large number of prospects they can tap into but CRO is what can allow them to make the most of these prospects to attract new customers.

Improving your business conversion rate will let you scale up your business without having to run out of potential customers.

• Calculating Conversion Rate

To do conversion rate calculation you have to divide the number of conversions by the total number of your website visitors, after which you will multiply the figure by 100 to generate the conversion percentage.

For example, if your website generated 500 contact forms fill and 5000 visitors in a month, your conversion rate would be: 500/5000 = 0.1 x 100 = 10%

Conversion rate calculation will enable your business to set a benchmark on how your website or marketing campaign is performing.

Changes that you will make will let you measure your corresponding results against your original conversion rate.

How to know “Good” Conversion Rate

In the marketing world, there is no static figure that qualifies as a good conversion rate.

Average conversion rates vary across industries, specific conversion goals, marketing campaigns e.t.c.

If you ask marketers randomly, a lot of them will tell you that a good conversion rate is between 1% to 4%.

Meanwhile, the better way to measure a considered average conversion rate is to calculate your past conversion rates with current conversion rates and compare them to your business's future results.

Let’s Also Talk About The CRO Process?

Conversion rate optimization is the process of optimizing your business website, capture page, or advertisement campaign geared towards the improvement of potential customers taking the right and desired action.

Conversion Rate Optimization process can be informed by past customers’ behavior, customer insights, and the best CRO practices.

CRO basic process is as follows:

• Target Customer Research

You have to survey your customers and dig into your business's past behavior analytics to better understand what your customers are interested in, and how they engage with your business.

• Optimization

You will use the insights that you have gathered during your audience research to optimize your marketing campaign or website for conversions.

The insights might include the following,

• A/B Testing

Conversion Rate Optimization changes are not a one-off thing, you will have to measure your adjustments against different components to see which one is working and generating a result.

For example, you can test two different landing pages, to see which page has a higher conversion rate than the other.

• Data Measurement

Analytics software such as Google Analytics can be used to measure the success of your marketing campaigns.

Create goals so that you can track conversions and then calculate your conversion rate by comparing the goals to the total traffic of the website.

• Ongoing Campaign Adjustments

You will need to monitor your campaign analytics to track the success or failure of websites and make the necessary adjustment if needed to improve your conversion rate.

Elements of a Successful Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Campaign

The process of CRO optimization is comprehensive and it involves varieties of components, from landing page design to the use of your web contact form.

For CRO to be successful it requires an in-depth analysis of your target customers, different tests to measure performance success, and periodical optimization that will ensure you get the satisfied results.

Throughout the optimization process, you will address the core elements of your website that will be optimized for higher conversion rates.

• Website Design

Your website and landing pages look are crucial when it comes to CRO.

A lovely and easy-to-navigate website design will improve usability and will also make it easier to convert potential audiences into paying customers.

Your website should be designed by a well-seasoned web designer that understands CRO and also knows what customers want from a website.

Your website should be accessible on mobile devices with readable fonts and interactive content that will make it easier for your website visitors to find what they are searching for.

• Site Speed

Your website load time should be fast because fast loading website is an essential part of the search engine optimized website and it’s also a core element of CRO.

The longer your website takes to load up, the more potential audience will drop off to visit your competitor’s website.

A well-optimized website will load in no more than 3 seconds on both desktop and mobile devices.

You will need to work on your website files, images, and videos and also remove other elements that are making your website slow to ensure you have a faster loading time.

Increasing your website loading time will increase your conversions.

• Website Copy

The words your customers read on your website and landing pages is called web copy. You will need to get highly experienced and skilled copywriters that will be able to craft copy that speaks to the emotions of your target audience.

Writing a web copy does not mean you simply have to write “off the cuff” and hope for the best.

You will need to do some audience research to be able to know what your potential audience is struggling with and how they are looking for their problem to be solved.

With your web copy, you will be able to communicate the value you have for them and how it can help them solve their problems.

What you are trying to do is to convince your potential audience that the product or service that you offer them is the solution to their problems.

• Call-to-Action

A call-to-action button is a short button with a concise copy that targets users to take some conversion action on your site.

Some of the most commonly used call-to-action phrases are “Buy Now”, “Contact Us”, “Order Now” E.t.c.

You can add creativity to your call-to-action copy to give your customers the best experience.

For example, if you know that your customers are interested in a particular offer, you can come up with a call-to-action button that can be obvious; like, “Download X Now” or “Buy Y Now”

The best practice is to make what your customers are getting obvious so that they will know what they get once they click on your link or submit their contact information.

• Website Navigation

You should build your business website structure with the primary goal of making it easy to navigate by your customers.

The structure will consist of a layout of where your web pages exist on your website and how the pages are connected with each other.

Most websites embrace the use of a hierarchical site structure, with the most important pages on the website showing in the main menu and subpages in the dropdown menu.

But your web pages should not be more than a few clicks apart from your home page.

You will need to consider how a typical web user will find it easy to navigate your website, and you should also look at the content report of your website to see how your website visitors move from one page to another.

It might look like this:

Or, for an eCommerce site:

Creating an easy-to-navigate website is crucial to increasing your website conversions, customer trust, and improving customer loyalty.

• Capture Forms

Most business owners with websites make use of contact forms as a tool to collect customer information, particularly for service business and agency websites.

On the other hand, eCommerce websites will have individual product pages and a typical shopping cart.

Your website contact form should be functional and not be complicated to fill.

Your customers should be able to submit their contact information easily and this form fills should be collected within your website to ensure you do a quick follow-up.

Conversion Rate Optimization best practices when using a website contact form.

• The fewer the form fields, the better it will convert. It is necessary you collect the contact information of your customers so that you can follow up with the leads you have generated in a timely manner. If you want to have better and quality leads, you can add additional fields to your contact form.
• Design matters:- A good-looking and appealing contact form equate to a better user experience. Your website text should be easy to read, the use of consistent styling should be involved, and you have to make sure that the submission button on your website is clickable.
• Consider customer privacy:- Because of the introduction of GDPR and other consumer privacy laws, it is now more important than ever to let your website visitors know how you collect their information and how you will use it. A disclaimer should be added to let your customers know why they are giving you their contact information, how you will reach out to them, and if they have the option to unsubscribe at any time they like.

How to Measure Conversion Rate

There are various available tools that can be used to collect data and track conversions on your website.

These tools include tools like, Google Analytics, website heat map tools like Hotjar or Microsoft clarity, sales funnel tools like clickfunnels, leadpages, contact forms analytics tools like leadformly, monster insights and so much more.

Any tools that will allow you to track your website conversion/goal or that will enable you to gain insights into your website traffic data can be used to calculate your conversion rates.

By measuring your website conversion rate you will gain an insight into how your site has performed in the past and how it is presently performing.

Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices – Do They Work?

CRO best practices are practices that have worked for various businesses in the past. What this means is that the quick CRO hacks used by most businesses might not work for your business.

Having known this, you should be wary of adopting any CRO best practices without you doing a proper measurement and an in-depth understanding of your target audience.

For most businesses, it takes a few simple tweaks to their campaign to improve their conversion.

These tweaks often include:

Just because a CRO practice worked for one business does not mean it will work for your own.

You should focus more on what’s working with your target audience and then use your creativity to make the necessary adjustments that will improve your conversion rates.

How to Improve Your Conversion Rate

You have to keep a close eye on your customer behavior data and how they interact with your website to give you the key to improving your conversion rate.

Google Analytics is a free analytics tool by google that can be used to measure your website traffic numbers, user engagement, goal completions, and many more.

A great CRO does not have a one size fits all strategy.

The method that works best for your business will depend heavily on your target audience's interest and behaviors, the offers you are giving out to your audience, the layout of your website, and many more options.