Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) provides your business with a significant opportunity to grow and develop. It is a scientific approach to optimising your website or websites and allows your business to convert more visitors and clicks into customers or subscribers, whatever your aim. Here we’re looking at exactly what CRO is and how to implement it effectively for your business.
Conversion rate optimisation is a structured and systematic approach focused on improving the performance of your website. It is highly influenced by insights, most notably analytics and user feedback. It is closely linked to and defined by the unique objectives you set for your business and your website, and it will maximise on the traffic you are already receiving and get the most from it. Conversion rate optimisation is not about guesswork or bringing in huge volumes of traffic with no focus on quality.
Where to begin with Conversion Rate Optimisation
Check your Google Analytics Setup
Before you attempt to give CRO a concerted go, take a look at your Google Analytics setup. It is essential this is in place first so you can benefit from your efforts. Ensure you have the right metrics set up including things such as sign-ups, purchases or enquiries, whatever is relevant to your business.
You need both existing data to compare your results too and a way of tracking optimised results too.
Identify your User Experience Problems
Why are people not staying on your site, signing up or becoming customers? You need to find out what the problem is to be able to build from it. Identifying these issues can be as easy as looking through old customer communications and finding out which areas you need to work on. You may find they don’t like your current purchase process or the navigation on your site. You can also use online services such as User Testing. If there are issues, you can work towards solving them.
Identify your Customers’ Issues
Why didn’t your potential customer buy from you? Why didn’t they submit an enquiry? Your target customer could be reaching your site and clicking off, and you need to know why. Ask for feedback, canvas opinion on social media and ask people you know in real life for impartial, unbiased opinions.
Find out what IS working
What do your current customers love about your product or service? What are their favourite things about it? Are you getting across the benefits they are most interested in and impressed by? Often business owners find the benefits that consumers rate highest aren’t those they thought were the most important. Be sure your message and product descriptions align with the customer’s experience.
Check out the Competition
How do you stand out from your competitors? What are they doing well or badly? Obviously, you don’t want to appear too similar, but you can learn from the mistakes or successes of the competition. Once again you can also canvas opinion from the market and look into what is being said about your brand and others in your industry.
Analyse and Evaluate
At this point, you have lots of information ready to be used. You need to look at all the data, work out where it is working and where it isn’t. You can pinpoint the areas of your website which need to be tested and redesigned or recreated entirely. It’s at this point you work out what you need to do to optimise your site for better conversion rates.
Start the Test Process
Testing is key to CRO. Create new versions of the page you are editing and changing and test their success against your current pages. A/B testing will help to ascertain which elements of your new page work best. Then you can put together the final page and move onto any others you need to work on.
Don’t Stop There
CRO is not a one-off process. Like many of the different methods for improving and boosting your online presence and your website success, it is evolutionary. Continue to run tests and make changes which fit with the tests results and satisfy your customer. Your website can evolve with the target market and be the go-to place in your industry if you are in tune with what the visitors to your site want.
