Conversion rate optimization services have been around for quite a while and unlocked numerous opportunities for those who focused exclusively on traffic before. Regardless of business type, you want users not only to land on a webpage but also engage with your content and convert into paying customers. To make that happen, you need to do constant optimization: define and tackle pain points, improve the user experience, perform A/B testing, tweak calls-to-action, and more.
Customer journey analysis and tuning the website to your visitor’s needs will translate into increased micro (newsletter sign-up, whitepaper download, quote request, etc.) and macro conversions (product/service checkout).
In time-critical marketing campaigns (and aren’t they all time-critical?), investing in CRO helps you push products through the sales funnel. The technique enables agile experiments and quick changes in line with customer feedback and conversion stats.
CRO is not rocket science, it’s a data-driven approach to metrics, user behavior, and sales funnels. With the CRO management guidelines under your belt, you don’t have to resort to guesswork – you check new hypotheses against verifiable data.
Here are a few perks conversion rate optimization is meant to deliver:
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- Increase sales
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- Beef up the subscriber base
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- Boost brand awareness
- Build a reputation to help you stand out from the crowd.
Why can’t you prune conversion optimization budgets and get away with it?
Read on and learn more about the CRO rationale and results in this posting.
The CRO essentials
Streaming quality leads
Organic traffic of your website is a key source for leads. Your product or service will attract lots of people who type in their keywords in Google and land on your webpages. You don’t want to lose the traffic and let these visitors bounce easily. To improve conversion rates, marketers use a slew of engagement tools that may include tailored content, surveys, contact forms, webinars, live chat, and more.
CRO helps you test what you may have taken for granted and revisit your concepts. By modifying copy, CTA, design patterns and measuring how visitors respond to change, you can streamline your funnels to work their best.
From landing to conversion
Landing pages are instrumental in user decision-making. Research reveals that one-fifth of all web-based businesses admit their LPs require optimization. Page flaws may impede ROI growth and bolster churn and abandonment rates.
Addressing the issue, CRO solutions will help marketers analyze all the touch points and see if they fit the target audience, product positioning, usability requirements, and user expectations. It’s wise to sort things out internally before you launch paid campaigns. Otherwise you might end up wasting the funds on low-performing landing pages and poor creatives. CRO is there to rectify this.
Increase conversion rates
At the bottom line, this is what CRO is all about. Efficient performance marketing may bring in a multitude of high-quality leads but that’s your job to close the deal. Pay attention to your online form, try copy variations for your submit/check out/’ask for a quote’ button, consider fewer fields, make the LP itself shorter so the visitor is faced directly with your key message.
The rule of thumb here is: Keep your forms simple and see that your paid promos are aligned with the actual site content. Never use bait-and-switch to improve conversion rates.
Prioritization is key
Odd as it may sound, the majority of businesses allocate less than five percent of their marketing budgets to CRO programs. The lion’s share goes to user acquisition. This current stance is prone to change though – with the advent of dedicated software solutions, active enlightenment in the field, and reasonable cost of CRO tools.
While turning the budget pyramid upside down might be a tad extreme, greater CRO spend will definitely result in decreased cost per acquisition (CPA). Try focusing on engagement and retention rather than acquisition which is pricey and often unpredictable. Prioritizing CRO over other marketing activities gives you the fundamental leverage – verified information. This way, you’re renouncing flimsy guesses and adopting data-driven hypotheses.
Slowly but surely more businesses come to realize that CRO investment yields tangible returns. CRO proves handy where SEO doesn’t move the needle. Imagine your site’s CR oscillates around 5–10 percent. Bring in more traffic, costly leads, and visitors – you may end up with the same 10 percent tops. Whereas reasonable investments in conversion rate optimization, related tools and professional advice could boost your conversion rates up to 20–25 percent. Now, this will be the pivotal moment to scale up and pull more traffic.
Pay for conversion rate optimization? How much?
SEO and CRO – the two pillars of your online marketing. Whereas SEO gets you organic visitors, CRO holds up its end in achieving specific business goals. That’s why CRO expenses have been showing an upward trend in both B2C and B2B. The market welcomes new product analytics and business intelligence solutions with their upscaling functionality, performance, and automation. However, the question of CRO budgets is still a matter of debate. How much should you spend on CRO?
While there is no all-round formula for this, a few factors to consider include your user acquisition costs, the customer’s average order value, lifetime value, and abandonment rates. Solid CRO management helps you pinpoint UX flaws and other discrepancies that meddle with seamless conversion. Calculate your losses and match them against your advertising and other marketing expenses. Would thorough testing and optimization have remediated your losses? Would your ROIs look brighter now if you’d made the essential improvements at an earlier stage? After all, it’s all about P&L.
Conversion rate optimization tools
If you break down CRO into standalone components, this will boil down to the following:
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- Creating high-quality content
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- Fine-tuning CTAs
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- Improving touch points and logic flow
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- Delivering the USP
- Optimizing order pages.
What kind of tools will help you cater to these CRO aspects? There’s a long and ever-growing list that you can further supplement by occasional googling, yet the essential categories remain unchanged: qualitative (session-based) analytics, qualitative (consumer-based) analytics, testing tools, and workflow tools. What’s the cost of CRO tools? Some solutions are free, others are paid and worth paying for. Jot down your needs and see which one best fits your goals.
That said, no tool can substitute comprehensive consultancy – conversion rate optimization services. Don’t hesitate to initiate a thorough website audit by a competent third party. Real CRO experts know the pain points and growth factors applicable to your type of business and may promptly come up with a custom optimization scenario. Your contractors may charge on an hourly basis or offer you a flat rate which is apparently more beneficial in ‘neglected cases’. The check list of deliverables usually includes a CRO brief, tests and results, and an elaborate, scalable action plan.
Within an all-in-one optimization package, conversion experts will take charge of your content from A to Z. After an assessment of your market segment and target audience, they’ll come up with recommendations for existing content or create relevant SEO-optimized copy, creatives, and layouts from scratch. Once the landing pages are fully deployed, the CRO pros will do a series of tests for various designs and determine the winning options.
In conclusion
A thousand mile journey always starts with a first step. Have a critical look at your website today, detach yourself from battle-hardened marketing budgets, and see which CRO solutions may accommodate your objectives. Pick the right tools and the right team to help you through the process. Remember your site structure and content are not written in stone. Employ heatmaps and behavior engines to see what sparks your users’ interest and what turns them away, do A/B testing and optimize the LP.
Invest into user acquisition first. Do your proper SEO. Once you’re on the right track – discover the multiplication factor of CRO and channel funds into conversion rate optimization tools.
What’s your relationship with CRO? What are your typical expenses? As always, feel free to share your thoughts and experience!
