Conversion rate optimisation, or CRO, is the most important marketing strategy you've never heard of. It can make a huge difference in your profits and your customer base.
Read on to learn the details of what conversion rate optimisation is and how to use it to boost your business.
CRO 101
Conversion rate optimisation simply refers to the rate of views or clicks to sales or leads. In layman's terms, it tracks how well you are turning visitors to your website into customers- "converting" them from people who are just interested into full-fledged buyers. It's a critical metric for showing you how well you are selling your idea. Having a high CRO means that your website is designed well and it convinces viewers to buy from you, subscribe to you, or otherwise support you. Boosting your CRO is one of the best investments you can make, because it will increase the amount of customers you get per visitor. That means you get more for your money in terms of website advertising and marketing.
How It Works
Generally, CRO is a complicated process that needs expert knowledge. There are consultant agencies online that offer conversion rate optimisation service. They will start with an audit. The CRO team needs to learn about the business, the industry, and the market, as well as specific reasons your CRO is not as high as you want it to be. Website design is usually the biggest culprit. It's never easy to know what kind of design will be best at converting browsers into buyers. Furthermore, busy entrepreneurs don't have time to mess around with the design of their websites too much- they are using all of their time on the day to day management of their business. That's why website design changes can make a big difference to conversion rates.
Specifics and Tests
Once the initial audit has been completed; the primary way that CRO teams make changes is fairly standardised. They come up with a few different changes to the website design that they believe will lead to more conversions. For example, one version of the front page of the website might have a big picture of your product and lots of graphics, while another might have more text and detailed information. Nobody can be quite sure which one will work better before testing them out. To test them, the team will set up what is called an A/B split test. The CRO team designates one design "A" and the other one "B". Then they rewrite your website so that half all of of your visitors will see page A and the other half will see page B. The test runs for a predetermined length of time or for a predetermined amount of total visitors. At the end, the team analyses the results. If one version converted a lot more visitors than the other, than using that version is likely to boost your conversion rates. The team needs to ensure that the results are statistically robust- that they were not just the result of luck. The analysis for that can be a little complicated, but the general results can boil down to whether or not one version was significantly better than the other at converting visitors.
Tweaks
Of course, it's not as simple as just testing two versions of a front page. There are many different aspects of a website's design that can change, like whether or not there is a call to action, the presence of customer testimonials, implementing offers and promotions, and other elements of marketing. Part of the process of conversion rate optimisation is making and testing many small changes. There is never one magic bullet that will instantly boost conversion rates, but often, small changes can have big results. Analysing and isolating the effects of such small changes is skilled work that might take time, but it usually does pay off. And by "taking time" we mean that it takes more than a few days. Often, we see that clients have experienced growth in conversion rates so high that they make back their money within a month of beginning to work with us. CRO is a critical aspect of sales and marketing- we have often seen changes that generated 200 percent increases in conversions.
Tools and Teams
There are loads of tools out there to help you do a little bit of CRO on your own, like Optimizely. However, you will get the best results by working with a team. At Quantum Web, we combine experience with ingenuity to deliver the best CRO experience. Our clients see drastic changes in sales after working with us. We can help with everything to the initial analysis and brainstorming to implementing and testing changes, offering expert guidance and recommendations throughout the process. Don't underestimate how many potential sales you are currently missing due to a website that has not been optimised properly for conversion rates. Beyond tweaking your website, we can also provide you with some useful statistics and analytics about your sales, like which channels are best for you. Conversion rate optimisation is the kind of thing that can give you an insurmountable edge over the competition if you learn about it first. Now that you know the basics and understand the power of CRO, there's no stopping you. Put your website through some conversion rate optimisation and watch your sales take off!
