Conversation Rate Optimization or simply CRO has been gaining in popularity in the online marketing and business world.
Here is the growth in interest in the last decade:
Why are so many more people interested in conversion rate optimization?
What are the facts about CRO that make it easier to understand and implement.
Let’s get into some of those facts so you can better use the practice of CRO to improve your online sales process and land more (and better) customers.
1. Why Conversion Rate Optimization Matters: Money
Here’s a quote from online marketer and entrepreneur Neil Patel about CRO:
By merely conducting a few simple tests and a few subtle change, a conversion optimizer can improve a website’s conversions by 15%, 70%, or even 2,000%!
There are tons of conversion rate optimization case studies like this. Search for that keyword and you’ll see some. You’ll probably see this one from Moz and how they added an additional $1 million in revenue with CRO.
Conversion Rate can mean a few different things to different websites and businesses.
And each website may have different kinds of conversions. One may be a direct sale. Another may be a phone call from a prospect. Another may be a visitor signing up for a webinar or downloading an ebook.
But the goal with all of these is getting a potential customer moving closer to a sale, closer to giving the business money in exchange for a product or service.
The simply math is enticing.
Let’s say your site gets 1,000 visitors per month. 5 of those, or 0.5%, convert to clients.
You could work on getting another 1,000 visitors per month to double your new clients.
Or you could work to double the conversion rate.
Obviously both would be nice, but conversion rate optimization is often overlooked. Apparently, businesses spend $92 trying to acquire new customers for every $1 spent on improving conversion.
Before you work on that new traffic initiative, it’s worth making sure your conversion rates are setup pretty well so you can convert all that new traffic you plan on acquiring.
2. Conversion Issues: There Are Many Causes
The exciting and also frustrating aspect of conversion rate optimization is that there are many causes of poor performance.
That’s frustrating because it can be a struggle to find the right things to test and improve.
But that also means there are lots of opportunities. And you’re never really “done” testing. You can always improve your conversion. And even over time your industry will likely change. Your customers will likely change in certain ways.
Conversion issues could include everything from the words you use to describe your business to the photos you use to show your team. It could be something as simple as the color of a call to action button or something more challenging like how you write and present your case studies.
3. Measurement: What Leads To Sales?
Earlier I mentioned that conversion can be different things for different websites and businesses.
The key to this whole conversion thing is really understanding your sales cycle.
If you’re in charge of selling and converting customers go through and map your entire sales process.
How customers find out about you. When they find out about you. What questions they ask. How long it takes. And when they send you the money.
Throughout that process there are different conversions.
Getting people to read blog posts is a form of conversion. You’re introducing new people to your brand. You’re earning their trust. They might not be ready to buy, but they now know a little about who you are.
After mapping out your sales process you can then begin to test all the various aspects of how your website converts people throughout the sales cycle.
4. How To Improve: Constant Testing
And the different elements you can test are endless as we looked at earlier.
The key to a successful conversion rate optimization effort is to setup a constant testing program. One month you test one or a couple things against what you’re doing now. You pick the winner and move on to testing the next item.
And so on.
And all the while you’re looking at how your changes affect your sales cycle. You want to make sure you’re getting more conversions and that those conversions are leading to more sales.
But you also want to make sure that things are getting more efficient.
5. Who: You, Agency, Tools
There are a number of great A/B testing tools. I’m not affiliated with any specific one.
Neil Patel had a good note about A/B testing in one of his articles. I can’t find it right now. But he said that it’s good to do an A/A test.
A/B testing is creating two versions of something on your site and using the tool or software to test them against each other.
So you might change the color of a button on your homepage. Using the tool, visitors to your site will see one version of the other. And after awhile you’ll see what version performs better.
With an A/A test you test the same version against itself and make sure the tool or software is working.
So you can get away with doing this DIY-style.
But there are also a number of great CRO agencies. I’ve followed Conversion Rate Experts for awhile and they seem to do great work. They’re in that link about Moz earlier.
That will cost you anywhere from about $2,000/mo for a low end effort all the way into the tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a partnership.
But depending on your website…those numbers can be well worth it. The great thing about CRO is that the results tie directly to more sales.
Final Thought
Conversion Rate Optimization is one of the best investments you can make in business. And odds are pretty good that your competition is ignoring the facts about conversion rate optimization. We saw the stat about how much businesses spend on getting traffic vs. converting that traffic.
Use the tips above to dive into this topic and to get started. It’s definitely an opportunity worth exploring and experimenting with.