Conversion Rates Optimization: What It Is and How to Do It

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• What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
• How Does Conversion Rate Optimization Benefit Your Business?
• What Are the Different Ways of Defining Conversion Rate Optimization?
• What Are Some Ways to Carry Out Conversion Rate Optimization?

Properly optimizing your website to convert casual website browsers into customers can lead to some impressive outcomes. With effective conversion rate optimization, you’ll see improved profits and better SEO, among other benefits. Get started with CRO to improve your website’s functionality and to see more customer conversions.

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is the active process of increasing the desired actions of the visitors to your website. Desired actions might include low-level engagements such as liking a post or clicking a link, or they could include higher-level actions like purchasing a product.

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How Does Conversion Rate Optimization Benefit Your Business?

Conversion rate optimization provides a number of advantages to your company. Consider these top CRO benefits:

Improves Customer Understanding

The heart of CRO is understanding what’s keeping customers from performing desired actions and clearing any roadblocks to those actions. When you investigate how customers interact with your page, you’ll learn a lot about what they’re looking for, what they need, and how you can better serve them. Improved customer understanding can always positively benefit your bottom line.

Grows Customer Numbers

With effective CRO, you make purchasing your product as easy as possible for your customers. When properly optimized, those customers who used to come to your site and leave before they made a purchase are more likely to buy, turning them from a browser into a customer.

Increases Profits From Your Website

While there is some upfront work involved in optimizing your website, once it’s done, it doesn’t cost additional money to maintain. This means when you increase sales on your website, that money goes directly into your company’s pocket with no additional expenses.

Defeats Your Competition

Your competitors can assess your website for things like SEO and social media tie-ins, but they can’t truly understand your CRO strategy from the outside. Since CRO involves a multitude of testing and tweaks that all work in unison to improve customer experience and action, it’s a challenge for your competitors to replicate, which gives you a competitive edge.

Leverages Your Current Traffic

The beauty of CRO is that it works with the website visitors you already have to turn them from browsers into customers. You don’t have to spend additional money on increased advertising to see an increase in profits — the CRO-driven changes you make to your page will increase conversions without the need for any extra expense.

Lowers Some Costs

For every customer conversion you get on your website, you lower your overall customer acquisition cost. CRO can help you save money and increase profits, leaving you more capital to improve marketing campaigns or put into product development.

Provides Competitive Edge

The competitive edge you get from effective CRO can help your business grow while your competition flounders. When competing for a customer, you need to be the top choice — it’s unlikely the customer will make a purchase from you and your competitor. CRO gives you that advantage.

Enhance Website Branding

Part of the CRO strategy is ensuring your website looks and feels legitimate. When customers trust your brand, they’re more likely to make a purchase.

Raise Your SEO

Google likes to rank websites that have excellent conversion ratings. The better your customer conversion rates, the higher your website will rank when people search for your products, and the more customers you’ll get.

Establish Lifetime Customers

If a customer has a positive purchasing experience and likes the product they bought, they’re much more likely to return and make additional purchases. Not only can CRO help you convert new customers, but it can also help you establish long-term relationships with returning customers.

What Are the Different Ways of Defining Conversion Rate Optimization?

When calculating CRO, you should use four different metrics to help you establish an understanding of your customers’ actions and the subsequent profits and expenses those actions initiate:

1. Conversion Rate

To find your conversion rate, divide the number of conversions, or the number of leads you generated, by the total number of website visitors. Take that total and multiply it by 100 to get a percentage.

Leads / website visitors x 100 = conversion rate %

2. Number of Net New Customers

To find out how many total new customers you earned, divide your net revenue goal figure by the average price per sale.

Net revenue goal / average price per sale = number of new customers

3. Lead-to-Customer Close Rate

To calculate your lead-to-customer close rate, divide your total number of leads by the total number of customers.

Total number of leads / total number of customers = lead-to-customer close rate

4. Lead Goal

To find your lead goal, divide your number of new customers by your lead-to-customer close rate.

Number of new customers / lead-to-customer close rate = lead goal 

What Are Some Ways to Carry Out Conversion Rate Optimization?

You can apply CRO to just about any aspect of your website. Use these strategies to start implementing CRO:

• Execute effective headlines – The headline is the first thing customers see when they arrive on your page. Make it eye-catching.
• Use CTAs strategically – Calls-to-action, or CTAs, can effectively guide potential customers into the sales funnel when placed strategically on your page.
• Keep the navigation simple – Customers are more likely to make a purchase if they can easily navigate the website and find the products they want.
• Offer small commitments – Rather than asking customers to sign up for a lengthy membership, provide a free trial to demonstrate your product’s appeal.
• Consider autofill fields – Keep your customers moving through the checkout process with autofill fields that help them quickly enter information and make their purchase.

Conversion rate optimization can have long-lasting effects on your business. Assess your current conversion data to see where you can improve and implement some CRO strategies for more conversions and higher profits.

Knowledge Base: Intro to Marketing