Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) – Guide, Importance And Best Tips

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
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Conversion rate optimization or CRO is not a new term to digital marketing and you need to learn it today. Today, most marketing teams are basically structured to drive traffic towards websites, which then converts into leads for the sales team to close.

However, a lot of effort is not put into converting a higher percentage of the traffic they receive into leads and sales.

Contrary to popular belief, what determines increased revenue is not the amount of traffic a website receives, but rather the efficiency of the website to turn a higher percentage of the existing traffic into revenue.

This is one of the reasons companies lose money and let go of their digital marketers. The good news is that our digital marketing course covers this area and more. (Click here to join our course)

Are you done? Now let’s go on with helping you understand what conversion rate optimisation is.

In this blog post, you’ll learn the fundamentals of CRO; what it is, why it would do tremendous benefits to your business, as well as why companies would want to hire you for the skill, and then some of the best strategies to be used in achieving optimum website goal.

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?

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Put simply, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of improving the rate at which your website turns visitors into leads or sales.

Now, let’s break it down piece by piece.

When it comes to internet marketing, websites are created to achieve a set of goals – to sell a product, provide a service, obtain database, etc. To get potential clients to perform the bottom line action that achieves the goal of your website, you first need to employ strategies to attract these prospects to your website and then convert them from visitors into qualified sales or leads.

The latter strategies best describe the term “conversion”. Put clearly, conversion occurs when a visitor completes your site’s goal. These goals can be macro-conversion goals such as buying a product or requesting a service or micro-conversion goals like signing up for email newsletters or filling out a form or survey.

Conversion rate, on the other hand, is the percentage or rate at which your website convinces these visitors to perform your intended action and become leads or sales.

For instance, if your website receives a monthly traffic of 1000 unique visitors but only 100 of those visitors actually fill out your form or purchase a product on your site, this means that your site has a 10% rate at which it converts visitors into sales.

You should not continue doing this because it harms your business or that of your employee, however, we have prepared enough actionable steps and tips on how to prevent these pitfalls in our digital marketing training. Want to learn them? Click here to learn from the experts as you continue with this post.

[bctt tweet=”The skill, art, science and marketing methodology of constantly increasing your monthly conversion rate by 10% or more is what optimization refers to when it comes to CRO.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTuners and author of the book, Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions gave what is perhaps the aptest definition of CRO. He defined CRO as “the art and science of getting people to act once they arrive on your website. It typically involves elements of visual design, copywriting, user experience, psychology, testing out different versions of your website content, and the neuro-marketing to influence people to act.”

What this means for a digitalmarketing newbie like yourself is that the process of optimizing your website’s conversion rate is not only an artful digital marketing skill, but is one that also involves some technical and science-styled experimentation, hypothesizing and testing.

[bctt tweet=”When it comes to internet marketing, website traffic can be drawn in order to increase sales, or you can improve the capacity of your site to convert this traffic into revenue. Conversion rate optimization focuses on the latter.” username=”dmsinstitute“]

With conversion rate optimization, you evaluate your website’s sales funnel to identify ways you can improve your site in order to get a higher percentage of people to sign up for your product or service.

Next, you come up with a hypothesis to test, and then you create a new version of a web page or landing page to test against your current version to see which one is more effective at getting visitors to sign up or buy.

In the end, you implement the variation that convinces the highest percentage of people to buy what you’re selling.

Basically, this can be achieved by auditing current site conversion rate, developing new strategies to meet current conversion rate shortcomings, employing those strategies accordingly and constantly testing the performance of each strategy against the intended goal.

This can include making changes to website copy, font, layout, design or even changing the text on your call to action (CTA).

Switch Video, for example, found that changing a single word in a call-to-action button copy increased qualified leads generated from their homepage by 221%.

Results like this help make it obvious that CRO is so extremely important to companies. However, testing is the key factor when it comes to CRO.

Without testing, you’re left relying on your guesswork to determine what will be more effective, but once you test, you understand better whether a change leads to an improved conversion rate or not. The number of tests you can eventually run are endless.

You can test different headlines, new value propositions, varying button colors, different CTA copy, and much more. Even small changes made by you or your conversion rate optimization agency can have a significant impact on your website’s bottom line.

Why Conversion Rate Optimization Is Important For You

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The basic importance of conversion rate optimization is not far-fetched. As you probably already know, CRO helps serious and strategic businesses generate more sales with the same amount of traffic visiting websites.

Let’s say you [eafl id=”8985″ name=”Bluehost Hosting” text=”own a website”] that allows visitors request for your ₦10,000 monthly home physiotherapy services, and before optimization, you had only 10 clients from your monthly 100 site visitors, which amounted to ₦100,000.

If you optimize your website for better conversion performance and it resulted in 10 additional monthly clients from the same amount of 100 visitors, this would mean increased revenue for you at the same cost.

However, as you’ll soon see in this post, there are probably tons of more reasons why you need to register for a unique digital marketing course like ours so that you can make these optimizations to your traffic conversion rate. Make this beneficial decision by clicking here to register today.

Spend Less and Gain More

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It’s possible that your website is currently generating more than enough traffic that you need to meet your financial target for the month. If this is so, why sink in extra money into rising paid ads (mainly Google Adwords), when you can learn how to get the most out of the current traffic your website is receiving by optimising how effectively your website converts the traffic it gets.

That’s where conversion rate optimization helps make the most clicks that you do get, so that clicks actually pay for themselves.

Shortening Customer Attention Span

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It is no news again that social media and growing internet media, while revolutionising the pace, ease and access to information and networking, has also reduced attention span and patience among users.

Another problem arising from this is that the internet space has become busier and noisier with everyone seeking to spend less time searching for what they want. There is now a survival of the fittest race in the online product and service offering markets.

[bctt tweet=”This is where CRO comes in. With CRO, you can understand what your potential clients want, their pain points and how to meet those needs so that they stay on your website long enough to buy your product or request your service.” username=”dmsinstitute“]

Having a product listed on your site isn’t enough anymore.  You need to differentiate yourself from the competition and noise which will require you to have your own unique story tied to your offerings.

Gain Industry Authority and Legitimacy

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Think about this. If you were looking to purchase a new pair of shoes online and you stumbled on a website that had very unclear fonts, background colours that put you off in the first instance, a copy filled with blunders, or a [eafl id=”7359″ name=”Header CTA for Course” text=”CTA”] that invisibly says “Purchase”, but then you later visit another website that did the opposite with a convincing and excitingly designed CTA that says “Buy Now”, your purchase decision would no doubt favour the latter store, right?

[bctt tweet=”This is what conversion rate optimisation does for you. It lends credence, customer confidence, authority and legitimacy to your business. In our digital marketing course, you’ll learn how to pull customers in, rather than drive them away.” username=”dmsinstitute“]

Best Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies 

Optimised [eafl id=”7359″ name=”Header CTA for Course” text=”CTA”] Position

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While it is advisable to include a CTA in your blog post or landing page, it is equally good that these CTAs are not entirely graphical or placed at the bottom of your page or blog post.

[bctt tweet=”As website visitors increasingly continue to ignore bottom page sections, a new approach of strategically placing CTAs at the top, side and even in the body of your blog post puts your website goal right before your site visitors.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

Landing Page Testing

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A [eafl id=”8991″ name=”Elementor” text=”landing page”] is where a website visitor becomes a lead, or an existing lead engages more deeply with your brand to request an offering. It is important that considering how tremendously important these pages are in capturing leads, it is a skillful conversion rate optimization strategy to run A/B tests on these pages so that you can get the best out of them.

Remove On-Site Frictions

The key takeaway is to look for ways to remove friction from the sales process and reduce bounce rate to the barest minimum. Use bolder fonts, friendlier colours, simpler sign up forms, provide Q&As, and optimize any other element of the on-site sales process.

Chances are that the easier and quicker it takes a visitor to find the information and service that they need on your site, the higher the likelihood of engaging your offerings.

Communicate on Your Sales Pages

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When a visitor eventually visits your sales page, it is left to you to work your sales magic on them. Using on-site communication strategies like live chatting would allow you to chat with website visitors in real-time.

For instance, if someone has spent more than a minute on your products or pricing page, you can send them an automated message offering to help to provide additional information that would help them make more informed decisions.  

Optimise Existing Site Content

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If you’ve been blogging for more than a year, it’s likely you’ll have some high conversion blog posts. To start with, identify the blog posts with high levels of web traffic, but low engagement and conversion rates.

Find out whether the content offer you’re promoting is matched by the blog post’s content, or whether your CTA is convincing enough. Afterwards, make informed and needed changes to get the best out of that content and then run tests afterwards.

Additionally, you can also look at blog posts with high conversion rates like ours or attend the content marketing classes in our digital marketing course so that you can learn how to drive more qualified website traffic to those posts. (Click here now to reserve one of our limited seats.)

User Surveyingconversion rate optimization cro      

Without understanding what your users and visitors really want, your marketing efforts can be as good as irrelevant.

Whether you intend to conduct surveys before the launch of your website to capture the needs of your potential clients or you discovered there are aspects of your website that if redesigned, would not only increase traffic, but also qualify those visitors into leads.

Register for our digital marketing course here to learn how to conduct surveys and gain more client insights.

Demography Based Marketing

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It may be obvious how demographics affect CRO. If you’re marketing to someone in Nigeria, you’ll need to use buyer personas, messages, language, value proposition strategies, pricing, maybe web font, different from when you’re marketing to someone in Singapore.

Web Psychology

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[bctt tweet=”Your CRO strategies should also pay adequate attention to the psychology of value proposition. That is, it must consider the impacts of the online behavior of your potential customers to their buyer decision.” username=”dmsinstitute“]

To achieve this neuro-marketing strategy, your site content must communicate personally to the audience that you’re targeting in the language they understand and their preferences.

User and Usability Testing

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Have you ever watched someone use your website? It can reveal a lot of insights. What you think is simple and intuitive may be confusing to your customers when put to test.

User and usability testing might sound similar, but they’re different things.

[bctt tweet=”Your CRO strategies should also pay adequate attention to the psychology of value proposition. That is, it must consider the impacts of the online behavior of your potential customers to their buyer decision.” username=”dmsinstitute“]

Final Words

The real importance of conversion rate optimization is in how it gets your online marketing efforts kicking with less cost and more insights. It really is the icing on the traffic acquisition cake, because, without it, your marketing efforts might seem less intentional, directional and goal-oriented.

Once CRO is in place, every other thing falls into line. You should get your website optimized for better conversion rates today! Trust me, you won’t find a better way to learn this except at our digital marketing course.

Take that necessary move today and join hundreds of newbie digital marketers who are now doing it right, earning more for their businesses and helping their clients better.  (Click here to register.)

9 Tested and Proven Ways to Make $500/Day with Digital Marketing Skills working from home or anywhere.

*By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of service.

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