How CRO is Essential to the Growth of your eCommerce Business
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
CRO or Conversion rate optimization is the continuous process of growing the rate of conversions you get on your website.
You do this by perfecting the design and processes of your website and adding elements that will bring users to do what you want them to do, which is the CTA or Call-to-Action.
CRO improves elements of your website, including the following and more.
- Design
- Loading speed
- Ease of Navigation
- Convenience of Usage
- Content
- Automation
- SEO or Search Engine Optimization
- Mobile Accessibility
- Other Features for Users
You will have to test these elements using A/B tests to determine which ones will work best for your website. The features should make the UX or user experience pleasant to entice a user to go for your CTA.
What is a CTA?
A CTA or Call-to-Action is the end goal that you want the users of your website to do when visiting your website. So, conversion means that a user does that particular action.
Some examples of CTAs are the following.
- Shopping and checking out or completing a purchase
- Subscribing to a service for a payment
- Booking a meeting
- Submitting an email
- Read an article
- Go to another page
When someone navigating your website does any of the examples, that is a conversion. The more users click or tap on your CTA, the higher your conversion rate.
What is a conversion rate?
Your conversion rate is how much of your website visitors convert within a duration.
So, your conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the number of users and translated into a percentile.
Conversion Rate = ( Number of Conversions / Number of users ) x 100
For example, on a Wednesday, you had 200 visitors. And 60 of them submitted their email via your exit pop-up.
Then, your conversion rate for that day and CTA is 30%.
Why is Conversion Rate Optimization important?
CRO is crucial because it enables you to decrease your customer acquisition costs by leveraging value from the existing guests using your website. When you optimize your conversion rate, you will improve your revenue per visitor, win more customers, and expand your business.
For example, let’s hypothesize that one of your landing pages has a decent conversion rate of 10%. If it gets 3000 visitors per month, the page will generate 300 conversions monthly.
If you improve the rate to 15% by implementing CRO improvements to your page elements, the number of conversions jumps by 50% (150 more). The increase gives you 450 conversions monthly.
The best thing about CRO is that you can continuously improve on what you have by creating better experiences for users, which results in greater conversions.
How do you optimize your conversions?
There are three pillar steps to optimizing your conversions.
Step No. 1: Determine your CTA flows.
A simple example of this is what could happen after a person clicks on your ad from social media and lands on one of your pages.
From that landing page, where do you want the lead or user to go? And then where to next, and how will you finally monetize an action?
If your ad is about a 50% off promo code, the landing page is probably a contact form where a user enters an email address to receive the code.
Let’s say you get that conversion, and the user is now enlisted for your email marketing. But digressing from email engagement and assuming your content and design is already effective, the user can simply go to the inbox and click on the link you sent to use the promo code at once for shopping at your store.
Let’s say the promo code is focused on a single product bundle, and the user completes the purchase using the promo code. Then, that is another conversion, this time giving you substantial or direct revenue.
You can implement various CTA flows on your website.
You can have someone go through a rabbit hole of blogs to simmer their trust in your authority and expertise on the topic of your product genre. Also, you can nudge people who already have items on the cart to add supplementing items.
Another flow is getting someone to share your product for free advertising. Or you can get people to give you feedback or ratings and recommendations.
Step No. 2: Design Variable Elements for Testing.
After figuring out how you would like to move website users along your lines or conversion flows, you should start creating the elements of your website.
Base your design and content on what your audiences prefer. So, to ensure that you are working on elements that would likely test well, do your research.
You can use surveys and FGDs (focus group discussion), and it would help to look at how your close competitors do their websites.
Here are 15 tips for creating an excellent website.
- Base the thematics and design on what your niche audience likes.
- Make things simple unless your market prefers technical-ish navigation.
- Faster load speeds are always an advantage.
- Figure out what the competition does well and do it better.
- Figure out the market needs and gaps that the competition doesn’t fill and do exceptionally well.
- Make checkout simple and allow guest checkout.
- Reduce form fields.
- Add as many payment options as possible.
- Offer free shipping and advertise it clearly on your pages.
- Use as many trust badges as you can and make sure that you make the checkout feel exceptionally secure.
- Get excellent PR so you can display recognitions for added trust.
- Prepare excellent and valuable articles and various media.
- Use images with people for relatability.
- Create trustworthy About Us and Meet the Team pages that have compelling content.
- Implement personalized chat automation.
Prepare these elements and processes and run them on A/B tests with people who represent your niche audience.
Step No. 3: A/B Testing and Implementation or Integration.
When you have your elements ready, you can proceed to A/B testing.
Here are 7 excellent CRO testing tools of 2021.
You can use any of these tools for your tests. And what elements that the tool you used tested best will be your final elements.
This way, you are using what elements and processes work best to build or rebuild your website or its pages.
CRO is a Non-Stop Process.
When you release your new content to the public, you will learn more about each element’s performance. Also, you will see if the changes work as well as the A/B test predicts.
For those that do not work as predicted, you would have to start from step one and repeat the process until you nail it.
On the other hand, the optimizations that work today might change in performance in time as preferential and technological trends continue to upgrade at a fast rate. So, you will have to keep your guard up for innovations and jump on promising ones as early as you can.
The problem is that CRO is a highly technical art and science. So, if you are a business owner who is more product-inclined than technically versed, you will need expert help from a marketing group.
