Many marketing teams make it a priority to drive traffic to their respective websites. The general philosophy is simple: the more users that visit a site, the more chances of acquiring those all-important conversions.
However, a focus on simply generating traffic is not a sustainable approach on its own. It’s like gathering up all your potential customers, throwing them at a wall covered in glue, and hoping that some of them stick (metaphorically speaking).
You need to understand how to get more from your traffic and existing leads. Doing so makes achieving long-term and sustainable growth possible – but how is this actually achievable? The answer: conversion rate optimisation.
This guide will explain what is conversion rate optimisation, its benefits, how to get started with conversation rate optmisation, and more.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)?
First, what is conversion rate optimisation? Fortunately, it’s not complicated – the clue is in the name!
Conversion rate optimisation is the practice of boosting the percentage of conversions for a website. Typically, a “conversion” means a site visitor making a purchase; however, the word also covers a wide range of actions. These actions include filling out a form, signing up for a newsletter, or clicking on a specific link.
Say you have a landing page with the conversion goal of acquiring a user’s email address. You are currently receiving 1,000 weekly visitors to this landing page, and it’s generating 100 leads during that time: The result: the page has a 10% conversion rate.
With this in mind, what does conversion rate optimisation do, exactly? Well, the intention is to take that respectable 10% and send it to much greater heights. Even with just a 5% increase, that’s an extra 50 leads generated every week.
What Are the Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimisation?
You now know what is the purpose of conversion rate optimisation, but what benefits are gained from adopting the practice? As you’ll see with the following list, it’s not just about boosting those conversion numbers – that’s only the beginning:
- Increase in revenue: Of course, what is conversion rate optimisation without a boost to your brand’s income? Whether you’re improving sales numbers or signups, it ultimately leads to increased returns for your business.
- Understand customers better: When learning how to optimise conversion rate numbers, a lot of testing and refinement is required – which involves understanding more about your target market and what makes them ‘tick’.
- Leverage current website traffic: You don’t necessarily have to bring in additional traffic. You’re simply working with the existing traffic your website is attracting, which means the process doesn’t involve the need to improve your SEO and other digital marketing efforts.
- It improves SEO: Oh, but it does naturally enhance your SEO efforts. So, what is conversion rate optimisation in SEO terms? More refined content lowers the bounce rate and results in users clicking through to other pages on your site. Google judges these metrics favourably and might reward your website with a beautiful search ranking boost.
- Lowers customer acquisition costs: Naturally, your customer acquisition costs are reduced when you optimise conversion rates. You’re spending less on a customer-by-customer basis.
How to Nail Conversion Rate Optimisation
We’ve covered what is conversion rate optimisation and its benefits. Next, it’s time to look at the process of implementing your own CRO strategy.
If you’re unsure where to start with conversion rate optimisation, worry not; we’ve highlighted a few important steps below so you, too, can benefit from this customer-boosting method.
Understand the Market
First of all, you have to be fully aware of your market and targeted customers. Without the right approach or knowing what your target audience actually wants, you won’t be able to deliver the content that provides maximum results. That means you’ll be missing out on conversions.
If you’re wondering how to increase revenue with conversion rate optimisation, an important component to understand is how conversions play to the desires of your audience. If you want a potential customer to, say, buy your product, you need to supply them with value.
Of course, this can become a trickier prospect when you only want an email address or potential customers to complete a form. Still, for a person to opt into something or fulfill any sort of action, there needs to be an enticement.
As an example, a cooking blog that wants email addresses may provide a free recipe book in exchange. On the other hand, a fashion retailer might offer a 10% discount code for email newsletter signups.
Test your Tactics
Testing your techniques is essential when trying to optimise web pages for results. With any standard web page, there are many elements you can test and tweak – headlines, subheadings, images, videos, formatting, body copy, etc. You need to find the right balance that’s most compelling for your audience overall.
One way of achieving this goal is split testing. This method is where you test out individual elements at a time and see which one conjures the best results.
Focus on Clarity
No matter what you offer, a highly recommended tactic is emphasising clarity. What does this mean, exactly? Well, when you want a website visitor to take some form of action, you have to be clear and concise about what you want them to do.
Suppose you want a potential customer to download a file that’s present on a landing page. In that case, the landing page should be straightforward and clearly instruct the customer to download the file and why they would benefit by doing so. Plus, that download button should be bright and clear, and it’s wise to accompany this with reassuring text.
Not just that; you must also avoid confusion about what the visitor will receive once they reach the end of the landing page.
Use the Right Tools
You can use numerous tools to assist your conversion rate optimisation efforts, which is particularly important when it comes to tracking metrics – allowing you to gain a deeper insight into your current strengths and weaknesses. By using the right tools, you can also measure performance when making optimisation-focused changes, which shows you if your strategy is working or not.
Many conversion rate checkers and optimisers exist, with some of the best being:
- Google Analytics: a favorite free analytics tool with handy conversion features
- Mouseflow: an excellent heat map tracking software to drive more conversions.
- Instapage: a superb platform for building and optimising landing pages
- ConvertBox: This is one of the best conversion optimisation tools for executing and optimising CTAs and opt-in forms.
- Plerdy: a comprehensive conversion rate optimisation tool enabling you to understand visitors’ behaviour on your site. It offers heat maps, an SEO checker, session recording, and sales performance monitoring.
- Lucky Orange: An excellent conversion rate optimisation software that’s affordable.
- Attention Insight: This is the only conversion rate tool to use AI to create heatmaps, allowing you to optimise your website before it sees traffic
- OptimizePress: This one is a handy WordPress plugin that can build entire sales funnels. It also includes useful A/B testing and detailed funnel analytics.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider tool replicates how Google crawls websites. It’s a powerful tool with many capabilities – but a common question is this: “can I check conversion rate optimisation on screaming frog?” While it’s not a CRO tool, its quality SEO analysis can help drive more conversions through SEO.
Conclusion
Now you know what is a conversion rate optimiser (i.e., the entire CRO process and the tools you can use). The next step is to start optimising your website. After all, with all of the advantages, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t want to boost your conversion rate. Even a small increase can make a big difference to your sales and your SEO.
Need Conversion Rate Optimisation Help?
As one of the UK’s leading digital marketing specialists, Click Intellience is also an experienced CRO agency providing professional conversion rate optmisation services. If you need expert assistance with boosting your website’s conversion rates and want the pros to get the job done for you, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our friendly CRO gurus today!
