What is CRO?

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Conversion Rate Optimisation (or CRO) is not a new phenomenon in marketing. In fact, it has been around for a while, and guess what – It’s here to stay!

But what is CRO in marketing? Conversion Rate Optimisation refers to increasing the percentage of visitors that take the desired action on your website and become a customer. The ideal would be a macro-conversions, which is where users make a purchase, however, they might engage initially with micro-conversions, which includes an action such as subscribing to a blog or email list.

However, these actions are as valuable for your eCommerce website as purchases, because your business works around conversions. Your brand will then have the opportunity to obtain this data and engage with the user. This user might not be ready to make a purchase at the time of the subscription, but could be beneficial for lifetime value.

Your website could excel in other areas. You might have the smoothest checkout or the most capturing home page, but if you have a poor conversion rate, your business will be directly impacted unless you make vital improvements.

Benefits of CRO: Increase your sales conversion

Your CRO is vital to understand and improve the way in which a user interacts with your site. Every click in your eCommerce store is closer to a conversion. This is why taking the time to optimise your website towards a better user journey will improve your sales.

CRO rate will be directly linked to your SEO and PPC campaign budgets. The higher the conversion rate, the higher your return on investment will be, which equals more cash/profits for your business.

Optimising your CRO allows you to enjoy lower customer acquisition costs, by increasing the value of your existing visitors. This is far easier and more cost-effective than trying to attract new ones.

This frees up budget for other areas of the business that need focus (which could be new customer acquisition).

Optimising the section of your conversion funnel that gets the most traffic is a good place to start as you will have more chance of seeing results.

5 ways you can improve CRO?

Optimising your conversion rate optimisation is not an easy task but it will beneficial for your site. Improve your conversions by making sure that you are including these 5 steps in your marketing strategy.

1.Rich product pages

If a product page is omitting vital information such as colour, size, pricing, and delivery, there is a risk that visitors might hesitate, resulting in a missed conversion. You should always make sure your product pages are rich with detail and the relevant information.

2.Design

Having a site that’s aesthetically pleasing, with an attractive design and responsive functionality can also contribute to improving your customer retention.

The UX of your site is a really important factor here – an easy navigational structure and minimal clicks from homepage to basket gives users a streamlined, uncluttered experience, and reduces the hurdles between browsing and purchasing.

3.Optimising your blog content

Whilst blogs are not the main contributor to making sales, they do assist in improving your overall ROI. After all, readers of your blog have the capacity to become customers if they like what they see!

Incorporating links to other pages and clear CTAs to demonstrate action points can help reduce the bounce rate and keep readers interested.

This is an example of where leveraging existing web traffic can improve CRO. You could even consider incorporating a Lead Flow – which is essentially a pop-up that is designed to capture the attention of the reader, add value to their experience and increase the clickthrough rate. Don’t over-do it though! A subtle nudge rather than an obtrusive approach works best.

4.Testing

Performing A/B tests can help you understand your customers’ needs. This is important to make positive improvements to your site to generate qualified leads and conversions.

Testing variations of your site is how you can improve your CRO. Adjusting CTA position, text, colour and or changing the vocabulary will make you see what drives the most engagement and conversions. The beauty here is that whatever elements perform the best, you can make these a permanent change.

5.Mobile optimisation

One of the key factors for CRO on mobile is page load time. Users are shopping on the go from multiple devices and expect the same page speeds as they would get on a desktop.

With 46% of online shopping orders generated from smartphones in the first quarter of 2019, getting your site optimised is vital. Site speed on mobile can be improved by reducing images file sizes, minify CSS, improve server performance and adding Google AMP pages.

When should you consider CRO marketing?

Fundamentally, if there is any sort of traffic reaching your website, you should consider CRO marketing as part of your digital marketing strategy.

The bottom line is that you should be focussing on turning ‘browsers’ into qualified leads, customers, and repeat purchasers.

For more information on how to boost conversion rate optimisation on your site, give us a call on 0121 369 5874 or email us at success@5874commerce.com.