Whilst driving more traffic to your website can certainly help to increase the volume of conversions, it's equally important to ensure that your digital presence is optimized for your users to take the desired action.
After all, why invest all that money in media only for a user to install your app or visit your website and leave immediately if their user experience isn’t as it could be - a wasted opportunity surely?
Missed Opportunity
One of the most underutilized strategies we see that can really move the needle for businesses, centers around conversion rate optimization. CRO by its nature, is a cross functional initiative spanning marketing, product, UX and analytics departments and this is perhaps one of the reasons why it is often overlooked. It requires departmental collaboration and who is responsible or accountable is often not clear.
Nevertheless, it is one of the most cost-effective ways to improve ROI for businesses.
CRO by Numbers
Let's do some quick maths, to see how it could be worth taking a bit little time to work together and put together an effective CRO strategy:
Our example website has on average, 20,000 visitors a month, a conversion rate of 3% and an average order value of $150. Our revenue can be calculated by:
Visits per month X conversion rate X order value.
In our scenario 20,000*(3%)*$150 - $90,000 in revenue
Now, if we were to take some time to understand user behaviour and see where our site could be optimised, let’s check the output.
Applying an improvement in conversion rate of 1% increases our revenue to $120,000. Let’s assume marketing wins the battle for a budget increase and they take this $30,000 and invest it into media. The benefits multiply if we maintain this conversion rate coupled with an increase in traffic. A more efficient way to do things right? We have seen the efficacy in practice with a project we ran for our client.
Planning For Success
So we know that CRO can be a highly effective way to increase the ROI for our organisation but what specifically can we do to achieve this? Well the first step is to develop a CRO programme that includes goal setting, creating hypothesis, testing and analysis. Putting together a comprehensive strategy takes a little time and is a crucial first step, but beyond the scope of this article. However, let’s look at some quick considerations for tactics we can employ.
CRO Thought Starters
A/B Testing & Multivariate Testing: A/B testing is synonymous with CRO and is perhaps the most thought of tactic when the topic is discussed. Testing two or more versions of a website or landing page to see which performs better in terms of conversions is a great way to identify which elements of your website or landing page are most effective at converting visitors into customers, to take learnings to future website iterations.
Improve Site Speed: We know that a faster site can lead to increased conversions. Slow-loading sites can lead to higher bounce rates, which negatively affects your ROI as visitors don’t stick around long enough to see what you offer so make sure that your site/app is responsive.
Use Clear and Compelling Calls-to-Action: A clear and compelling call-to-action (CTA) tells visitors what action you want them to take and why they should take it. Ensure that your CTAs are prominent and intuitive.
Create Effective Landing Pages: Landing pages are designed to capture a visitor's attention and encourage them to take a specific action, such as filling out a form or making a purchase. Dedicated landing pages to achieve specific outcomes for marketing campaigns can improve performance dramatically – give them a try.
Personalize Your Content: Personalizing your content based on visitor behaviour with the intelligent use of data can increases conversions significantly. By delivering content that is tailored to each visitor's interests and needs, you increase engagement and offer an overall better customer experience
Optimize for Mobile Devices: More and more people are accessing the internet on mobile devices, and if your site isn't optimized for these devices, you could be missing out on potential customers with friction in the user journey.
Use Social Proof: Showcasing positive reviews and ratings on your site gives the user a feeling of trust, critical for increasing desired actions.
Simplify the Checkout Processes: Lengthy checkout processes lead to abandoned carts and lost sales as users get frustrated with overly complex funnels. By simplifying the checkout process, you make it easier for visitors to complete a purchase and thus, increase your ROI.
Summing Up
So then, if you're not currently focused on CRO, maybe now is the time to start. Increasing conversion rates of your existing visitors/customers is one of the best places to get fast, tangible results and growth. Gather your teams together, decide on a well thought out plan and if you need help defining or implementing – you know where to find us!
