Introduction
Opportunities are waiting for you to push your customers closer to making a purchase, subscribe to your newsletter, etc on your website. By experimenting and analysis of your customers and the website, it is possible to make that final push. This is a process that helps in turning your current traffic into paying customers.
Usually, a website is full of actions such as button clicks, form fills, purchases, and many more events which pave the path to engagement and conversions. You must look at these actions from both macro (site-wide) and micro (visitor level) aspects to understand the visitors and map the business’s overall conversion rate.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) can be defined as the process of improving the percentage of users or website visitors to take a desired action such as buying a product, subscribing, or leaving contact details.
A conversion rate is also defined as the percentage of visitors who complete a goal, set by the site owner. You can substitute values in the formula below to calculate the conversion rate.
Conversion rate = (Conversions / Number of visitors) x 100
For example: 100 people visit your website in a day, and 20 of them purchase your products (your chosen conversion to measure). Your conversion rate would be 20% for that day.
How to start basic CRO on your website?
Understand the first impressions of your customers with your home page
Some of your customers might have an idea of what they need when visiting your website, and others might have no specific intention. So it is very critical to design the layout of your website to address both kinds of customers with the perfect theme and information. Decision avoidance is a tendency of mind common to everyone, so it is important to make your navigational flow super clear. It is proven that keeping the most essential information to the left and the rest to the right is effective.
Provide important information on product pages
First, you are going to need a variety of photos of your products. It helps shoppers to get the picture correct of your product. Organizing product descriptions should be done in a really cool and easy-to-understand manner. Most critical information such as price, size, colors should be on the top. Further information like reviews shipping and return information can be put inside a drop-down menu or in a link to another page.
Reassure the transparency and easiness of transactions
Product reviews make them legit. And it is much influential to make the return policy clear and easy to understand. Provide clear information about shipping charges, duties, and taxes. You will have to provide an easy-to-find place to put the discount code in the cart.
Create proper “About us” and “Contact us” pages
These pages reassure the legitimacy of your business. So it is important to include your testimonials and active contact information. Visitors would like to know whether the online store is authentic and what the brand stands for. This information makes the shopper confident about the product and the business and convinces, them to make a conversion.
Choose the right CRO tools
There are ready-made tools and strategies developed now to perform CRO. Consider the following aspects when selecting such a tool.
GDPR compliance
At each stage, you have to engage with visitor data, since it’s essential to ensure your data collection tools must be GDPR-compliant.
Integrations
To avoid complications and leaks while using multiple data analytics tools, make sure that the tool is compatible with other tools you use. It will prevent data duplication, confusion, and related uncertainties.
Security
Ensure the tool doesn’t make breach of data security, especially when running experiments. The Selected CRO tool must be safe and secure to use. Check the security features of your CRO tool, it must have up-to-date functionalities such as dual-step authentication.
A multi-user-friendly dashboard:
Make sure it offers an integrated dashboard with user-friendly features which makes your experiments and other activities easy. A user-friendly dashboard also should allow cross-team collaboration, which gives multiple-level privileges to the users.
After evaluating the above aspects, let’s take a look at trending CRO tools available in the field today.
| CRO Tools | Cost |
| Google Analytics | Free package and GA 360 starts from $12,500 per month and $150,000 per year. |
| VWO Insights | $169/month up to 10,000 visitors, $247/month up to 30,000 visitors,$310/month up to 50,000 visitors and custom pricing for Pro and Enterprise plans. |
| Heap Analytics | Three plans are available, including Free, Growth, and Enterprise. Only custom pricing is available. |
| Mixpanel | $0 up to 1000 visitors,$174 up to 5000 visitors, $304 up to 10,000 visitors, $524 up to 20,000 visitors, and Custom pricing for more than 20,000 visitors. |
| Usability Hub | $50 up to one test upgrade, $100 for regular user testing. Custom pricing for enterprise services. |
| Intercom | Two plans for smaller businesses start at $39 and grow up to $99, custom plans and pricing for most other businesses. |
| VWO Plan | Free |
| Test Rail | Professional Cloud starting from $34, Professional Server starting from $351/yr, Enterprise Cloud starting from $60/user, Enterprise Server Pricing starting from $2900/year |
| Test Lodge | Personal Plan – $24, Basic Plan – $49, Plus Plan – $99, Premium Plan – $199. |
Follow this link to find further information about the above-mentioned CRO tools.
Should you hire a CRO Specialist?
It is not just enough to see the numbers of conversion percentages, averages, and benchmarks and make the decisions about your business strategy. It is very much necessary to look beyond that and understand what is happening with the customers individually.
The more holistic approach is to think of it as the process of focusing on understanding what drives, stops, and persuades your website viewers. So that you can give them the best user experience possible. That’s what makes them convert and improves your website conversion rate ultimately.
This is a different study involving a lot of background knowledge in not just your business field, but also demography, culture, psychology, SEO etc… You don’t need to spend your valuable time on that since the time is the key factor for everything. If your business is very specific and focused only on a specific crowd, which will be a narrow market, you will be able to do it yourself. But when expanding a business, it is recommended to get assistance from a professional. This is where the CRO specialists come into the scene.
It is also important to choose your CRO specialist correctly, follow this link to read about how to find a perfect CRO specialist for your business.
Predefined CRO action plans and processes are already published by people who are interested in the field. These processes are used by the CRO specialized companies to boost the conversion rate
of their clients. One such process is a 3-step action plan
- DRIVERS-bring people to your website
- BARRIERS-make them leave
- HOOKS-persuade them to convert
Follow this read further about CRO action plan with 3 steps
Conclusion
Currently, most companies understand the impact of data-driven marketing and the importance of becoming revenue-orient by improving conversions. Since that, customer-centric, revenue-driven marketing powered by CRO is not something that we can skip at any cost.
When you finally have both quantitative and qualitative data and make use of it through a CRO process, you will understand what’s happening on your website. Testing tools and CRO specialists assist you to make reports to see whether your conversion optimization efforts are going in the right direction.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) has become highly valued, not only in digital marketing but in the customer web experience as well.