Earned & Owned
As an online business owner, you are constantly trying to implement the best practices for your brand.
Between running ads, improving your web design for user experience, and constantly working at bettering your site’s SEO, you and your team are always focused on increasing brand awareness, maximizing web traffic, and (of course) generating leads.
But, even with all of this in mind, one of the most important things you can do for your brand is implement conversion rate optimization.
According to HubSpot:
“A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action (in other words, convert). For instance, a desired action may be completing a web form, signing up for a service, or purchasing a product. Conversion rate is calculated by dividing your number of conversions by your number of visitors and multiplying that number by 100 to get the percentage.”
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the number of people who take these desired actions by enhancing your content, ads, or website.
A high conversion rate means that something you’re doing is working, whether it’s your design, your formatting, your audience appeal, or all of the above.
Oversimplified: it’s an exercise in productivity. With the right CRO, you can convert your current traffic into leads or sales more efficiently, allowing you to generate more sales from the amount of traffic you already have.
When you’re working with the right CRO strategies, you’ll find it’s worth optimizing all aspects of your content: from your web pages to your marketing campaigns.
The best way to get started is by taking the time to evaluate your sales or conversion funnel and create hypotheses on what will increase these conversions.
From there it’s all about split testing to see what will work—but it’s well worth all the effort.
Every aspect of your online presence contains the potential for conversions, but it’s important to remember that CRO and your marketing efforts are a two-way street: the more content you optimize for conversions, the more benefits you’ll reap from the process.
Your site’s homepage is a goldmine for conversions. Not only is it the place where your brand makes its first impression, but it’s also where you can convince your visitor into staying on the site or moving to the next phase of your sales funnel.
Retaining these visitors and guiding them further into your site is key. Some ideas to achieve this include impactful call-to-action buttons, highlighting product or service links, and adding a chatbot.
The pricing page is often the deal-making or the deal-breaking page of the site for website visitors. This is where your site visitors will decide whether or not to move forward with your services.
While the numbers and their own budgeting will hold most of the power on this page, there are plenty of optimization opportunities. If you’re looking to test different CRO tactics on this page, consider:
Blog posts are fantastic opportunities for CRO, especially if you’re conducting keyword research (with resources such as Google Analytics) and including call-to-actions within them.
Because the nature of the blog is to answer queries your target audience may be searching for online, these pages are a great way to convert readers into customers.
To further optimize your blog posts, try implementing multiple CTAs throughout the page. You can also invite the reader to learn more about a topic by offering them an eBook, course, or a white paper in exchange for an email address.
As you already know, landing pages are already designed to urge visitors to take action, whether that’s visiting a site, signing up for a newsletter, etc. Part of your landing page A/B testing will already include testing different CRO tactics that affect design, verbage, and content.
In other blog posts we’ve created, we go into detail on how to improve your on-site and off-site SEO, and while CRO may not directly affect your ranking or your SEO practices, it does offer an indirect effect through a handful of ways.
CRO helps you find a better understanding of your existing website traffic, allowing you to comb through your audience and find quality leads and new customers in the traffic you’ve already attracted!
Search engines pay attention to the site’s visitors, and CRO is a great way to find out what works for your audience and what doesn’t. Things like faster load times and including case studies can help with UX, SEO, and CRO. Plus, if your website can make your users feel smarter and more empowered, you may earn a few evangelists.
Your website is your top salesperson: if you’re expecting potential customers to enter their personal and credit card information into your site, you need to make sure that you’re doing everything you can to create a professional, helpful website that allows customers to feel comfortable enough to make purchases.
While SEO tends to focus on increasing web traffic, CRO allows you to grow your business with the traffic you already have. This will reflect positively on your site SEO-wise, and revenue-wise as well.
All of the previously mentioned points—improved trust, scalability, UX, and customer insights—all help you achieve one basic goal of business: to maximize your ROI. By really taking advantage of acquisition efforts, you’ll be able to obtain more sales and conversions. This will grow your business without you having to expand your audience.
The answer is simple: if your website is attracting potential customers, you should be optimizing for conversions.
You’re always going to want to find ways to attract visitors and convert them into sales qualified leads, customers, and advocates for your brand.
And no matter how big or established your company already is, you can always afford to look into how this can be done with greater impact, reliability, and efficiency.
Even though it would great if you could say something as simple as “This month we converted 50 people; next month we want to convert 100 people, so we need to convert an additional 50 people,” this isn’t the case.
In reality, you’d want to attract 50 more people for every X amount of visitors. This is your conversion rate.
Conversion rate isn’t the only data you’ll want to know; below we’ve included three business formulas that are commonly used to help people understand, analyze, and improve their CRO.
Your conversion rate is key to know because it clues you in to a very important percentage: how many conversions came from how many visitors?
Figuring out your conversion rate is a simple formula:
Another number you’ll want to keep an eye out for is your number of net new customers because knowing this will help you quantify your growth.
To find out your number of net new customers, follow this formula:
If you’re focusing on learning how to continue to grow your business and create attainable goals, another piece of data you’ll need is your lead goal calculation.
The formula for finding your lead goal calculation is:
Let’s say that, per month, your website has 10,000 visitors which generates 100 leads, and out of these leads come 10 customers (each month).
Let’s find your visitor-to-lead conversion rate:
(100 Leads ÷ 10,000 Visitors) x 100 = 1%
Your website’s visitor-to-lead conversion rate is 1%.
Now, let’s say you want to increase your number of customers: You could aim to amp up your visitors to 20,000 per month, which could hypothetically double your leads and your customers, but your efforts would be better spent in using CRO tactics to double your conversion rate from 1% to 2% instead.
This is a safer, more efficient, and more economical way to double your sales and leads from your existing 10,000 visitors.
Why put so much effort into growing your audience to maintain the same conversion rate? Keep in mind that this is presuming that your leads and customers will grow in proportion with your audience; there’s always a risk that you could decrease your conversion rate using this method.
Conclusion: It’s much more effective to grow your business by focusing on enhancing your CRO rather than spending time, effort, and costs on doubling your traffic.
We’ve discussed the tools you can use to gather integral data on your conversion rates as well as why increasing your conversion rate percentage is an optimal tactic. Now, let’s dive into a few strategies you can use to achieve your goals:
By using the information we’ve gone over, you’ll be able to have a better understanding of your current conversions, the ability to create clearer, more attainable business goals, and ways to take the first steps and make progress.
Optimizing your brand for conversions and running A/B tests is a never-ending process, but it’s bound to lead to great rewards if you integrate these strategies into your typical business practices. Here are some of our favorite tools to help you get the job done:
[Updated June 26th, 2023]
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing your website or landing page to increase the percentage of visitors who take the desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. It involves analyzing user behavior, testing different elements, and making data-driven improvements to enhance conversions.
Conversion Rate Optimization is crucial for businesses as it helps maximize the return on investment (ROI) from their website or online marketing campaigns. By improving the conversion rate, you can effectively turn more website visitors into customers, ultimately boosting revenue and achieving business goals.
To begin with Conversion Rate Optimization, you should first identify your conversion goals and define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success. Then, conduct thorough user research, analyze website analytics, and implement A/B testing to make data-driven decisions and optimize your website for improved conversions.
Some effective Conversion Rate Optimization techniques include optimizing website navigation, improving page load speed, creating compelling and relevant content, enhancing call-to-action buttons, simplifying forms, implementing social proof elements, and conducting user experience (UX) testing.
The timeline for seeing results from Conversion Rate Optimization efforts can vary based on factors such as website traffic, industry, and the scope of changes made. Generally, it is recommended to track and analyze data over a period of several weeks or months to observe significant improvements in conversion rates.
