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We’ve all heard the term, “Work smarter, not harder.” What if we told you, you could optimise your website to follow this advice and garner more qualified leads and customers without all the associated grunt work? It is highly possible thanks to conversion rate optimisation (CRO).
While most businesses focus on generating high website traffic volumes on the assumption that it’ll convert into qualified leads, you can implement CRO strategies for sustainable, long-term growth with your existing leads and traffic.
Need help creating, implementing, and testing your CRO strategies? Give us a call!
Curious to learn more on your own? We’ve compiled everything you’ll need to know to get started. In this comprehensive guide, you’ll find answers to all your CRO-related questions and bonus expert advice and tool suggestions.
So, without any further ado, let’s get right into all the nitty-gritty details of CRO.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is a practice that focuses on increasing the percentage of website visitors or users who complete specific actions to increase the number of leads you generate.
The lower acquisition costs and highly qualified leads generated through CRO make it an optimal choice, especially for startups. You can achieve CRO through various techniques, including workflow improvements, split testing, and content enhancements.
What Does Conversion Rate Mean?
Conversion rates represent the number of website users or visitors who complete a specific action, such as purchasing a product, signing up for a service, or completing a web form. Conversion activities may include:
- Creating an account
- Subscribing to a newsletter
- Booking a demo
- Signing up for a free trial
- Making a purchase
If you’re enjoying high conversion rates, it could be because of your website’s appeal, formatting, and design. In contrast, a poorly designed and formatted website could lead to low conversion rates.
Some common reasons for a low conversion rate include:
- Copies that ineffectively convey the value of your offers
- Broken forms on the website
- Slow load times
- Poor website performance
Examples of Conversions
If you have an eCommerce store, the primary goal of your website would be to sell products, which makes product purchases macro-conversions. However, there are certain micro-conversions that typically take place before your customers make the final purchase. This can include actions like signing up for the newsletter.
Here are some examples of macro- and micro-conversion:
Micro-Conversions
- Adding a product to the cart
- Creating an account
- Signing up for email lists
Macro-Conversions
- Subscribing to a service
- Requesting a quote
- Purchasing a product
What Is Considered a Good Conversion Rate?
Various factors determine what a good conversion rate would be for your business. Things like your audience demographics, traffic channel, goals, niche, and industry help identify a good CRO rate.
For example, Online shopper conversion rates in Great Britain increased to more than 4% in 2022. However, in the same year, the eCommerce websites were only able to convert 2.3% of website visits to purchases.
It’s probably time to optimise your conversion rate if it’s below your goals, top competitors, or your industry average. There are specific areas of your website where CRO would be most effective. We’ll discuss these later on. So, keep reading.
What Is the Purpose of CRO?
The primary purpose of conversion rate optimisation is to increase the probability of desired action by visitors on a webpage.
What Is a CRO Strategy?
A CRO strategy is implemented to increase the number of visitors who convert into paying customers. The general steps of the CRO strategy among varying companies may be the same with a few changes to processes and executions.
Here are the general steps for a CRO strategy:
- Identify the target audience and key metrics
- Collect data, such as user feedback
- Run A/B tests for conversion-focused improvements.
8 Key Benefits of CRO
Let’s explore some of the key benefits of CRO strategies:
1. It’s a Relatively Lower Effort Activity
With CRO, you won’t have to start from scratch, since it requires you to leverage existing content for improved conversion.
2. It Increases Revenue & Sales
CRO helps boost revenue and generate more sales by getting more and more users to convert.
3. It Gives You a Competitive Edge
Utilising CRO strategies will give you an edge over your competitors by helping you drive more results through your web pages.
4. You’ll Better Understand Your Customers
You’ll need to go beyond data and analytics to understand your audience on a deeper level. Not to diminish the importance of numbers and figures, but some blockers to conversions may not be quantitative. As a result, you’ll be forced to understand your customers and their behaviours more closely.
5. It Enhances Trust & User Experience
Trust is crucial in determining whether or not a customer would be willing to share their personal information, such as email or credit card details, on your site. CRO implements strategies, such as live chat, CTAs, and customised messaging, to enhance this trust and make a sale.
In addition, conversion rate optimisation also requires testing what does or doesn’t work on your website. Ultimately, all the steps you take to extend page visits and generate sales will lead to a better user experience.
6. It Offers Better Scalability
CRO allows businesses to scale without running out of prospective customers and resources. Your business might grow without an increase in your audience size. In such cases, CRO is one of the most effective ways to grow without losing potential customers.
7. Improved ROI & Insights
CRO requires you to study the methods most likely to make your acquisition efforts fruitful. It focuses on increasing conversions without investing in acquiring new customers, ultimately helping you make the most of your current resources.
8. It Requires a Lower Cost per Acquisition (CPA)
Your CPA will be lowered as a result of CRO, which will enable you to cut costs related to tactic-driven conversions or investments in other channels, such as paid ads.
How Are Conversion Rates Calculated? (3 Common Methods)
The conversion rate is calculated by dividing the total number of conversions by the number of visitors. The resulting number is then multiplied by 100 to get the percentage of conversion.
The Formula: Conversion Rate = (No. of Conversion / Total Visitors) x 100
Calculating the conversion rate is relatively easy if you know how you're defining your conversions. You divide the two values and simply multiply it by 100.
Let’s say you run an eCommerce store and want to calculate a specific product’s conversion rate, like a smartphone. The conversion in this case would be the purchase of that particular smartphone.
The first step would be to gather the necessary data. Over the past month, your website recorded 10,000 visits to that smartphone’s product page. Among these visits, 200 resulted in the purchase of the smartphone.
Here’s what the formula would look like to calculate the conversion rate for the smartphone: (Number of Purchases / Total Visits) x 100.
Conversion Rate= (200/10,000) x 100
Conversion Rate= 2%
You can apply this method to evaluate the performance of other products on your online store. It’s pertinent to remember that you’re only supposed to count visits to the webpage where each specific product is listed.
For example, if you want to calculate the conversion rate for a laptop listed on your website, only include the number of visits to that laptop’s specific product page.
Alternatively, you can divide the total number of conversions for every conversion opportunity on your site by the total number of visitors to calculate the website’s overall conversion rate.
The following are the three commonly used formulas to improve, analyse, and understand CRO.
1. Lead Goals
The lead goal is calculated by dividing the total number of new customers by the lead-to-customer close rate percentage. The lead-to-customer rate is generated when you divide the total number of leads by the total number of customers.
The Formula: Number of New Customers / Lead-to-Customer Close Rate %
For example, an email marketing campaign’s goal may be to increase the number of qualified leads through an email list. In this case, you’d calculate your lead goal by analysing your set targets and the current performance.
Let’s say that over the past month, your email campaign reached 5,000 subscribers, which generated 250 leads. Ultimately, 25 of them became new customers.
The first step would be to calculate the lead-to-customer close rate percentage:
Lead-to-Customer Close Rate % = (Total No. of Leads / Total No. of Customers) x 100
Lead-to-Customer Close Rate % = (250/25) x 100
Lead-to-Customer Close Rate % = 1,000%
The second step involves calculating the lead goal. Let’s assume you want to increase the number of new monthly customers to 30.
Lead Goal = Number of New Customers / Lead-to-Customer Close Rate %
Lead Goal = 30 + 1000%
Lead Goal = 0.03
This result indicates that you should generate 0.03 leads for each customer you acquire. This can be achieved by optimising your email campaign and increasing the conversion rate from leads to customers.
Your CTA effectiveness, segmentation strategies, and content can significantly improve the quality of your leads and increase the number of new customers–without solely relying on your subscriber list.
This approach addresses the primary reasons for inefficiencies in your campaign and minimises the risk of diminishing returns linked with blindly increasing the size of your email list.
2. Number of Net New Customers
Take the number from your net revenue goal and divide it by your average sales price to calculate the number of net new customers.
The Formula: Number of Net New Customers = New Revenue Goal / Average Sales Price
3. Conversion Rate
As mentioned earlier, the conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of leads generated or the number of conversions by website traffic or the total number of website visitors. The resulting number is then multiplied by 100 to get the percentage of conversion.
The Formula: Conversion Rate = (Leads Generated / Website Traffic) x 100
SEO vs. CRO: What’s the Difference?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) involves practices to enhance a website’s visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). These practices are focused on increasing sales and boosting organic traffic.
In contrast, CRO boosts conversions and converts website performance into conversion. SEO and CRO practices have different approaches to the same end goal: increasing sales.
Enhancing the website’s functionality and optimising it for greater visibility can set your brand up for success with increased conversions.
4 Prime Website Areas to Implement CRO
As promised earlier, the following are the four key areas of your website where CRO strategies are more likely to work their magic:
1. Landing Pages
Landing pages, among all other signup forms, have the highest average conversion rate, accounting for almost 23% of all conversions. This makes sense since landing pages are inherently designed to prompt visitors to take action on a website.
For example, you can optimise a landing page for an eBook with preview content to encourage visitors to download it in exchange for their email. You can also optimise a landing page for an upcoming event with previous year’s event videos to encourage website visitors to register.
2. Blogs
A blog presents one of the most significant opportunities to convert visitors into paying customers. In addition to using them to share helpful, authority-building content pertaining to your niche and industry, you can also implement CRO strategies into your blogs.
For example, you can prompt readers to sign up for your newsletter or submit their emails to add to your email list in exchange for a comprehensive eBook on a topic of their interest. You can also add calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout your blog posts as a CRO strategy.
3. Pricing Pages
Website visitors often make ultimate decisions about your website, brand, and products after viewing your pricing page. You can implement CRO on these pages to convert visitors by:
- Adding a pop-up form
- Adding a phone number for price quotes
- Detailing the product features for each price
- Modifying the price intervals (for eg., price per month vs. price per year)
4. Homepages
One prime candidate for CRO is your homepage, which is responsible for creating a lasting first impression for your target audience. In addition to this, homepages also guide customers and present opportunities for online store owners to retain visitors.
There are simple yet effective CRO strategies to implement on your eCommerce website’s homepage. These include a live chatbot option that asks visitors to ask questions to clarify anything if needed, a signup button, or even a simple emphasis on links to product pages.
The 11 Most Powerful Conversion Rate Optimisation Strategies
Now that you’re familiar with the key areas of your website to implement CRO, it’s time to take a look at some of the most powerful conversion rate optimisation strategies.
1. Re-engaging Visitors with Retargeting
An easy way to target visitors who leave your website without taking the desired action is retargeting them on other platforms, such as social media. This process involves tracking visitors and targeting them on other websites and social media platforms with online ads.
Your retargeting efforts should also incorporate compelling offers, engaging visuals, and well-crafted copies–much like any other inbound strategy.
2. High-Performing Blog Post Optimisation
As mentioned earlier, a blog post is one of the four key areas to integrate CRO and boost conversions. If you already have blog posts on your content, you may already be familiar with the leads and views they’re capable of generating.
Here are some ways to optimise your blog posts:
- Include text-based CTAs as H3s or H4s
- Adequately highlight the benefits and value of your offers
- Implement SEO strategies to increase visibility
- Ensure your content is relevant and fresh
As a starting point, focus on blog posts that have low conversion rates despite generating the highest levels of web traffic.
3. Live Messaging Features on High-Converting Web Pages
Integrating a live chat option on high-converting web pages will enable you to offer guidance to visitors in real-time. Product and pricing pages are two examples of high-converting web pages that especially benefit from this feature.
You can also target specific actions on your website to prompt your chatbots and messaging. For example, if a visitor has spent a certain amount of time on your website, you can ask if they have any questions or offer to help.
4. Automated Workflows for Your Team
You can use marketing automation software to integrate automated workflows and enable your team. For example, some marketing automation tools allow you to send automatic emails to leads, encouraging them to book meetings with sales representatives with the press of a button.
So, instead of writing and sending emails, your sales representatives can focus on high-intent actions taken by your website visitors.
If you’re familiar with running an eCommerce store on builders, such as Shopify, you may already be aware of email automation tools. These tools can be used to send out emails to visitors after they take a certain action, such as when they abandon their carts.
5. Turning Leads Into Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
Sometimes, your visitors may want to speak to a sales representative right away–skipping the nurturing phase of the buyer’s journey. Such high-intent visitors become marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) after completing specific actions.
You can encourage them to complete these actions through smart CTAs, clear and compelling copies, and meticulously designed web pages. However, most strategies surrounding this depend on your particular sales and product processes.
You can run a series of tests to discover what works in your favour and generates the most customers. Once you find your answer, optimise for that process while ensuring you’re removing clashes from your sales process.
6. Test Landing Pages for Content & Design Features
Another element of your website, integral to conversion rates and an essential tool for marketers, is landing pages. On this specific webpage, your existing leads take a deeper dive into your brand and new website visitors are more likely to convert into leads or customers.
To assess and finalise the best content and design features for your audience, consider running A/B tests.
You can utilise this testing method to compare different web pages, form questions, images, content offers, and website copies to shortlist those your leads and target audience respond to the most.
For example, through your testing phase, you might find that your forms are too long and, consequently, hinder conversions. One quick way to optimise your forms would then be to shorten them.
7. Integrate Lead Flows Into Your Blogs
Lead flows are well-designed, attractive pop-ups that help increase conversion rates. Depending on your specific offer, you can choose between a pop-up box, a drop-down banner, or a slide-in box.
8. Add Text-Based CTAs Within Your Blogs
CTAs, despite being one of the most important elements of your blog posts for conversions, often go unnoticed by visitors, resulting in a low conversion rate.
The reason? It’s getting easier for audiences to consciously or unconsciously ignore banner-like information on websites. This phenomenon is popularly known as banner blindness. Due to this reason and the fact that most of your visitors will likely skin through your blog posts, you need to implement a different CTA strategy.
Instead of creating banners and buttons, bring back simplicity to your CTAs with simple, stand-alone text.
9. Update Your Headings & Subheadings
Effective and efficient content incorporates clear CTAs and key information. It is also easy to scan and well-structured. Your headings and subheadings should include these features to improve conversions.
Here are some clear-cut methods to write strong headers:
- Make your readers curious with thought-provoking questions
- Highlight the benefits of your product, service, or content
- Include relevant keywords
- Use action words, such as increase, improve, or drive
- Run A/B tests to find out what works best
10. Focus on Above-the-Fold Content
Above-the-fold content are page elements that visitors see without scrolling, hence grabbing their attention and urging them to take your desired action. The following are some tried-and-tested methods of optimising this specific content type:
- Declutter your page and ensure there’s a lot of white space
- Utilise high-quality and eye-catching visuals
- Select a visible location on the page to place your CTA
- Use concise, clear, and compelling messaging to communicate the primary purpose or the value proposition of the page
11. Improve Your Page Load Speed
Page load speed is one of the driving factors when it comes to the average time spent on each webpage. To encourage your visitors to stay on your page longer and eventually convert into paying customers, you’ll need to ensure your pages have an optimal page load speed.
According to Google, most of your web pages should be able to load all of (or the main) content within just 2.5 seconds. The following are some of the tactics you can use to improve your page load speed:
- Lazy Loading: This will load images only once they’re in your user’s view.
- Caching: Your static resources will be stored locally on browsers, making your page load speed faster every time a user reopens a page.
- Elements: Elements, such as images, and their overuse can lower your page load speed. Therefore, try to reduce such elements as much as possible.
- Compression: Compressing files, such as images and videos, can significantly improve your page load speed.
Getting Started With CRO: Expert Advice
CRO is a crucial part of digital marketing strategies, making it essential for online businesses. You would want to convert visitors into brand advocates, customers, and highly qualified leads–in the most reliable, impactful, and effective way possible–regardless of your company size or business stage.
One great way to get started is by utilising the PIE (Potential, Importance, and Ease) framework. Use this framework to rank each strategy of your CRO projects and answer the following question:
- How complicated will it be to implement this improvement?
- How valuable will this improvement be?
- How much total improvement can this project offer?
After assigning a score to each strategy, divide the total by three to get the score that shows the project with the highest impact. You can start working on the projects with the highest scores first.
CRO ensures you’re targeting qualified leads and getting more out of the existing traffic on your website. However, setting up CRO strategies isn’t as easy as understanding its concepts. The following are some expert tips and tricks to help you get started.
How To Get Started
Your CRO strategy should be driven by the insights you gain while trying to understand your customers better. These insights not only improve your business but also enhance the overall user experience. Here are a few essential steps to get started:
1. Identify Essential Conversions
Your goals and specific business type help determine which actions or conversions you should focus on first. So, your first step is identifying the desired action[s] you should target.
With that out of the way, you can prioritise optimising the rates at which your visitors complete the selected desired action[s]. Or, simply put, optimise your conversion rate. Utilise the conversion rate formula discussed earlier to get your results.
It’s vital to remember that you shouldn’t compare your results with other industry or business averages on the web, because:
- Conversion rates vastly differ based on conversion goals (or desired actions)
- Most businesses don’t share their conversion data publicly
- Every audience, page, and website is different
2. Analyse Your Conversion Funnel
Once you’ve identified essential conversions, it’s time to conduct a funnel analysis, which helps identify all the factors that may make your visitors leave your website without taking the desired action[s].
You can utilise analytics tools to identify the pages with a high exit rate and analyse all the conversion funnel steps. In addition, session recording, heatmaps, and other similar behaviour analytics tools can help you determine your target audience’s interaction with your website. These tools can help you find the primary reasons for low conversion rates on each webpage.
3. Gather User Data
As one of the most important CRO strategy steps, you should gather as much user information as possible to find even the smallest, less quantifiable conversion blockers. Some quantitative information may include insights, such as:
- Where users abandon your conversion funnel
- Who your customers are
- What browsers and devices do they use
- What referrer or channel brought them to your website
- Which features do they engage with the most
- Which page they land on as they enter your website for the first time
Sometimes, the problem can be as small as a minuscule bug that could discourage visitors from taking the desired action[s]. However, there may be times when everything is running smoothly, yet your conversion rates are staggeringly low.
In such cases, you’ll have to dig deeper to find out exactly why your visitors won’t convert. This is where the funnel analysis will come in handy. It helps determine the factors that attract visitors to your website. You can also create user personas to understand motivations and expectations.
Here are some additional ways to dive deeper:
- Satisfaction surveys
- User testing
- On-site surveys
4. Create Your Hypotheses
After collecting all the available data, it’s time for you to combine it all into hypotheses. This will help you determine which funnel features you should remove, adjust, or add to increase conversions.
5. Test the Hypotheses
Creating hypotheses from a significant amount of data can be daunting. For this reason, you need to test your hypotheses. It will help you identify changes to discard and changes that lead to impactful results.
It’s important to note that CRO is an iterative process and you may not get everything right on the first try. Therefore, this trial and error phase is absolutely essential. Your tests should be both qualitative and quantitative to understand the why and what of conversions.
For example, you can utilise the A/B testing method, discussed earlier, to determine which sales funnels and UX page designs work best for your business.
6. Review & Iterate
You’ll have to continue to review everything you’ve done to determine the effects of your changes on your conversion rates. Iteration can gradually improve conversion rates. So, it’s important to monitor and address any underlying issues blocking your conversions.
The Importance of a Customer-Centric Approach
Many CRO strategies revolve around benchmarks, averages, and percentages. However, taking an all-numerical approach to CRO isn’t going to land you long-term benefits. While CRO’s primary goal is to increase conversions, it’s also crucial to consider your target audience–the individuals behind all those actions and data points.
Having a more holistic approach to CRO better equips you to understand what encourages, demotivates, and drives them to convert or take action. It puts the most important people to your business–your customers–front and centre.
Bonus: 6 CRO Tools for Streamlined Process & Results Evaluation
CRO tools help marketers automate or simplify the process of optimising their conversion rates. They might help you with running experiments, gathering feedback, heat mapping, mouse tracking, analytics, research, or lead capture.
The following are some of the many popular CRO tools to consider:
1. HelloBar
HelloBar is a great pop-up builder, which allows you to incorporate different types of pop-ups into your webpage. You can use this builder to include forms on your web pages and enhance conversions. You can also use HelloBar for analytics, custom reports, and A/B testing.
2. Optimizely
If you want to run experiments such as multivariate and A/B tests, Optimizely is a great option to consider. You can use this tool to determine what’s working and what’s not and make relevant adjustments for improved conversions.
3. Hotjar
Hotjar features behaviour analytics and heatmap functions which reflect audience behaviours on your website. You can use the heatmap feature to collect data on specific actions, such as hesitations, and click information. This information will further aid you in identifying key issues on low-performing web pages.
4. Plerdy
Integrated with Semrush, Plerdy focuses on SEO and user experience with its set of CRO tools. You can use its Website Heatmap tool to discover the most-clicked elements on your web pages, or its Funnel Analysis tool to learn user behaviour at each funnel stage.
5. Landing Page Builder
In addition to its A/B testing tool, this builder offers an easy drag-and-drop editor to help build and launch landing pages. Landing Page Builder has over 400 templates to choose from, making the page-building process relatively fast and straightforward.
It also lets you integrate custom elements, also known as Smart Sections, which you can then use across all pages without the need to create them again.
6. SplitSignal
Every step of the A/B testing method mentioned earlier, from creating the hypotheses to launching the rest, can be completed in just a few clicks with the SplitSignal tool. You can use this tool to test element placement, headings, titles, and more.
Conversion Rate Optimisation for Best Results
Conversion rate optimisation requires low effort and resources but can offer significant results. To make your CRO strategy better, utilise scroll mapping and heat mapping tools, remember to trust insights over gut feelings, A/B test your web pages and content, and make your web content mobile-friendly.
It is also vital to remember to use the three formulas we presented in this article and experiment with a few CRO strategies with high PIE scores to find out what works best for your business.
Need more insights and strategies for your eCommerce store? Speak to our eCommerce strategy consultants now!
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) FAQs
How do I measure the conversion rate?
The conversion rate can be calculated by tracking the number of conversions and dividing the number by the total number of visitors. The result is then multiplied by 100 to get the percentage of conversion.
How can I analyse conversion optimisation?
There are several qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse conversion optimisation. The methods you use will depend on your specific goals, niche, target audience, and industry.
What is conversion rate optimisation (CRO)?
The practice of conversion rate optimisation focuses on increasing the number of website visitors who convert into paying customers or take the desired action[s]. The desired actions can be considered macro- or micro-conversions based on your specific business type.
How can I improve my conversion rate?
To improve your conversion rate, consider implementing the best copywriting practices, clearly highlighting your products’ value propositions, integrating SEO practices, and adding clear, text-based CTAs.
What is the goal of conversion rate optimisation (CRO)?
The primary goal of conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is to increase the percentage of conversion from a mobile app or a website.
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