If you’re a beginner, this guide will describe Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), how it will help you with the given list of benefits, and what steps you need to take to begin your CRO journey and get more out of the traffic you’re already getting.

First, it is necessary to explain what many people are concerned about – conversions.

What is a Conversion in Marketing?

In marketing, a conversion rate is the visitor’s action regarding the website’s Call To Action (CTA).

The set of converts can be very broad and encompass different types of change. For instance, if people subscribe to the emails or newsletters you send regularly, that is known as conversion. If they take an offer and sign up for a trial, they also make another conversion. It is a conversion if they buy the product at the store, in the supermarket, or online after seeing the Call to Action.

However, there are three more types of conversions known as micro-conversions, which are, in fact, other stages of the consumer buying process but not the last one.

For instance, a micro-conversion may involve a call to action, including adding a product to the cart or requesting more information about a specific product—even if the visitor does not purchase.

How Do You Work Out Your Conversion Rate?

To work out your conversion rate, you need to know:

• The number of people who pay attention to CTA
• How many people act in the way that occurs at the desired time-frequency?

It also requires some computation—this is true if you opt for the other recipe versions. You should be able to establish a percentage by dividing the number of people who take the action called for by your CTA by the total visitors. Next, they multiply by 100 to convert the number into a degree of percentage.

For instance, suppose you placed your newsletter subscription CTA before 400 people; only 100 of the audience followed the CTA, whereby your conversion rate is 1/4 x 100 = 25%.

Conversion rate? It depends. This is important to remember as it relates to many circumstances in eCommerce, such as conversion rates per device industry or sector.

And it is no different from the more traditional form of marketing, such as email marketing.

Everybody can learn a thing or two about conversion rate, so don’t let it happen even if your results are slightly higher than your competitors.

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?

It means optimizing your website to increase conversion rate, converting visitors into customers. When you understand the specific actions you want the visitors to perform and the current conversion rates achieved, you can focus on convincing more visitors to take the desired conversion actions.

What CRO Is Not

Before proceeding any further, it’s perhaps useful to specify what exact science is not. CRO is not:

• SEM (search engine marketing) is a method more directly linked to marketing that aims to gain better positions on search engine results pages to attract organic traffic. But CRO is all about figuring out what works and doesn’t with the visitor you have already acquired.
• CRO, which, as will shortly become clear, is the only part of conversion optimization, is known as A/B testing.

Here’s one more important fact about CRO.: Conversion rate optimization is not the key objective of your marketing strategies.

CRO someone perceives as having revenue as its primary purpose – however, your main objective is to increase leads, sales, and revenue – so remember that CRO is one of the most effective ways to achieve that.

Benefits of CRO

Some important factors justify why CRO is crucial to any business’s marketing plan.

Here is the thing, and let me explain this to you: SEO may help you get more people to visit your website, but more people do not necessarily mean more profits. CRO can help you get more revenues from the existing traffic, so people tend to find CRO the most profitable solution.

It also means that the CRO does not depend on the website’s traffic, meaning that even sites with low traffic can benefit. Small changes to the conversion optimization approach can realize a considerable increase in ROI, even for sites that do not receive much traffic.

Thus, CRO, for a longer time and to a greater extent, can help you delve deeper into the actions and preferences of your customers. A good conversion optimization strategy will help you:

• Develop more accurate MarTech buyer personas
• Map the customer journey
• Record user traffic and evaluate the ease of navigating through your website.

All of this goes a long way toward enhancing your customers’ probability of success. They trust their favorite brands more and are inclined to spend the money they’ve spent on advertising the product. Perhaps the best part is that they are all derived from data, meaning things get done better over time and not through mere speculation.

3 Steps to Implement Your Conversion Optimization Strategy

There are three main steps:

• measurement
• analysis and hypothesis
• changes and testing

As we mentioned, let us look at these in more detail.

1. Measure Where You Are

Yes, you can’t optimize if you don’t know how bad your current problem is. That’s why you’ll often see analytics software listed among conversion optimization tools. It can be a powerful weapon when placed in the right hands.

For instance, you will use a statistical tool to determine how many people visit your website or particular pages in your funnel. You can track particular conversion activities by setting goals in Google Analytics.

For instance, if you’re employing OptinAble, the inherent Geejam Conversion Analytics lets you know how your marketing campaigns are faring. As it is fully compatible with Google Analytics and all the key email marketing software, you may also track these transformations in the OptinAble interface.

2. Form a Hypothesis

Then, it is time to inquire about what you would have to adjust on your site to increase that conversion rate.

That’s called forming a hypothesis: a specification outlining what is to be changed, why this has to be done, and what you expect to gain. When you get to the test, it will assist you in determining which point of the funnel you’ll be converting and the outcome of the conversion optimization test.

To create a conversion optimization hypothesis, use this template from Digital Marketer:

Since [A] made [B], we believe that if we change [C] for the visitors [D], we shall achieve [E]. We will know this is true when we get to [F] and are given [G].

For example, you could say:

We made this change because, while using e-commerce metrics tools, we noticed that too few people buy our electric shavers, and visitors commented that they couldn’t find information on our shipping. Adding a very noticeable header with our free shipping offer will increase purchases. We’ll know this when we sell more electric shavers within a two-week testing period than the previous time, and customers will mention that they were aware of the information concerning free shipping.

3. Make Changes and Test

The last operation is to implement the change you estimate would be effective and then check to determine whether the estimations are accurate. At the end of this process, you will either:

• Feel confident in your hypothesis and make the change an expected permanent action.
• Realize that hypothesizing that the therapy was not helping the PTSD sufferers was the wrong thing to do, and think again.
• If not, enter a new logical concept that has not been defined, either positive or negative, and begin the experiment again.

A Conversion Optimization Example

Here’s one example of this three-step process in action:

1. A writer discovered that one of her reviews had become one of the most viewed pages on her website. However, she could not garner the responses she wanted by simply having a general sign-up form.
2. Lastly, she came up with a hypothesis postulating that redesigning the form to look like the content on the page would increase Email signups.
3. She made the change and observed that her conversion rate was better.

What Can/Should You Test?

Perhaps the clearest and most important aspect of conversion optimization strategy is what one has to test. Of course, you can test anything you want; however, the best idea is to target web pages that are instrumental in your goal of generating traffic for revenue, leads, or any other purpose and test aspects of your website or marketing that are keeping people from converting.

Here’s a quick conversion rate optimization checklist of items to look at:

• The size and the visibility of your headline, as well as the actual headline. And how you proceed to write your headline (check out the guide to improving your headline that we’ve written here)
• The copy which we explain the advantages of short and long-type copying in one of our guides to the sales page.
• Some of the elements of the web page that can assist in your online presentation are;
• While both elements seem to be indicated on the page,
• CTA placement and its format relate to the button color, position on a web page, and the words used.

It is also possible to compare the ratio of mobile and non-mobile visitors on the spot and adjust something to increase the ratio of mobiles.

Introduction to CRO Testing Techniques

When you’re doing conversion rate optimization, there are three main techniques you’re likely to use:

• A/B testing
• Multivariate testing
• User/usability testing

Before we get into what those are, here are a couple of terms you need to be familiar with:

• Control, which is your original web page or the modified control web page
• The changed version you are trying to use is the variation or trial version.

This method is commonly used in split testing. In this case, you have a control and a variant. You change one element and use it with half of your traffic to check for any conversion rate increase.

For instance, the actual buy means can be “Buy Now,” while another CTA button may mean “Access the Deal.”

Another testing method is A/B/n testing, where you have a few versions of the element that you are changing and split the traffic between all the versions 50/50. With our example above, you could have a third variant: Rather than the literal translation of the nickname, one is left with the memorable slogan – “I’m In.”

For multivariate testing, you still split the traffic, but you’ll change more than one factor. In a similar example that we came up with, some changes could be made to CTA buttons and their content. Here, with multivariate tests, page versions can each look radically different from one another.

Much of the above is easily understood, but one more practice belongs to the Usability testing category. Usability testing implies asking some real users (audience) to perform some tasks concerning site use (such as using a single page of a site to make a purchase) and asking for their reaction to performing those tasks.

They are used to analyze how users engage with or navigate your site. However, they will also help you determine whether something is performing well and what should be tried at the next level.

Conversion Optimization Best Practices

Here are the best practices you need to consider to optimize conversion from your strategy to ensure it gets better results.

First, be sure you are testing apples against apples, for instance, scanning against scanning, assessment against assessment, and so on. It means the testing first- and second-conditions and groups must be equivalent. For instance, don’t post the don’t marketing that is being developed for 18-25s against that meant to be employed by those over 40.

You wouldn’t equate tests conducted during peak shopper traffic season, like the Black Friday shopping period, with those done in the post-Christmas period.

Therefore, one should ensure they are testing long enough to eliminate these initial fluctuations. As illustrated in the following chart showcasing the Digital Marketer, the test period will often take at least a week. However, it may take even more based on the traffic needed and the number of variants.

It is also required that the data you obtain be as accurate as possible. That means making sure the facts calculated in the result have statistical relevance (which is a fancy way of saying the same thing) and that you are confident that they are accurate, which, for most industries, the results should at least have a 95% confidence rating.

Also, test the right items. As we mentioned before, you’ll focus on those that have an impact on revenue, like:

• Your most visited pages
• The key informational pages critical for lead generation
• Landing pages for important pre-sales resources.

4 CRO Tools You Can’t Do Without

Here are four tools that you should ensure that you use when creating your conversion optimization plan.

1. Google Analytics

As discussed earlier, using Google Analytics may help determine or discover what occurs on the website and where people can find problems. Please find out more about Google Analytics in the following: a guide on how to get started and our guide for creating an analytics dashboard for your business.

2. VWO

Some of the tools that VWO has created include conversion optimization tools such as multivariate testing, both mobile and desktop.

3. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg tools are in the Heatmap tool that helps you identify the site’s most active and less active areas. Many people who visit such websites read and click many areas, so they’ll look warm, whereas areas that people do not pay much attention to as they skim through will look cold. That’ll help you position your marketing campaigns and particular activities within those campaigns – for instance, the call to action template.

4. User Testing

We have mentioned before that usability testing, also called user testing, enables you to determine how visitors engage with your website to eliminate any conversion killer easily. Some of the most commonly used software for usability testing are Qualaroo & 5 Second Test.

That’s it! Having learned all about conversion rate optimization, discover how to get even more conversions thanks to the FOMO concept in marketing. You can also get a conversion rate audit to find certain areas of leakage that can be corrected to increase the conversion rate.