If you know anything about digital marketing, you may have heard of search engine optimization (SEO). This is a digital marketing strategy that involves optimizing a website in a way that helps drive more traffic to that site. But what happens with all that increased traffic? More visitors to your website does not always guarantee an increased number of leads, or that your revenue will improve. Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, helps you leverage this traffic in a meaningful way.
Here is what you need to know about CRO and how it can help you generate more qualified leads and on-site conversions.
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What Is CRO and What Does It Do?
A CRO strategy focuses on making improvements to a website to help motivate users to convert. Although it is related to SEO and paid advertising, and is often included in an overall digital marketing strategy, the goal of CRO is to make the most of existing traffic rather than increasing traffic.
A comprehensive approach to CRO involves several steps to get more out of the traffic already coming into the site, including:
- Setting measurable goals
- Enhancing website content
- Improving workflows
- A/B testing of landing pages
- Tracking progress with accurate analytics and data
- Making adjustments based on measurable results
What Is Considered a Good Conversion Rate?
Average conversion rates really depend on your industry and the type of products or services you provide. According to recent Statista data published, 2.17% of eCommerce website visits converted into purchases in the U.S. However, this number can be higher or lower for different industries and certain niches within your industry.
If you find that your conversion rate is below the industry average or lower than your competitors, implementing an optimization strategy can help boost those numbers.
How Do You Calculate Conversion Rate?
The simple equation for calculating conversion rate is dividing the number of visitors that took the action you intended, or converted, by the total number of site visitors. Then, you take that number and multiply it by 100 to get the percentage. A professional offering CRO services will use metrics and sophisticated software to collect data and get accurate conversion rate numbers for all your conversion goals.
For many eCommerce websites, the intention is to make a purchase. However, there are other conversion metrics for different industries, such as registering for a class or scheduling an appointment.
What Are the Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization?
By adding CRO to a digital marketing strategy, online retailers and other eCommerce businesses give themselves a competitive edge. You may be surprised to learn there are several additional benefits to CRO outside of just driving more conversions. Some of these include:
- Increasing Online Sales – Of course, the most obvious advantage of CRO is increasing website profits. What CRO does is help the existing volume of visitors produce a higher conversion rate without needing to increase traffic.
- Understanding Your Customers Better – Part of CRO is learning what your target market likes and digging deeper into their behaviors and how they interact with your website. Getting a better understanding of your customers can help your business overall.
- Lowering Advertising Costs – When you are getting qualified leads and they are converting at a higher rate, you do not need to put so much funding into expensive advertising.
- Improves Your Brand Credibility – When you have a polished website that is easy to navigate and gives potential customers convenient opportunities to make their purchases, it gives your brand professional credibility and legitimacy.
- Leveraging the Traffic from Other Marketing Efforts – If you are driving traffic to your website with SEO, PPC, social media, or email marketing, it will not help your business in the end if these visitors do not convert. CRO helps make all your marketing efforts more meaningful.
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How Can You Optimize Your Website for Better Conversion Rate?
Depending on your goals and the strengths of your website, there are different CRO tactics you can implement to help improve your conversions.
1. Call to Action (CTA) Text in Blog Posts
Engaging and high-quality blog posts often drive a lot of traffic to any website. However, these blogs are often missed opportunities when readers are not given an opportunity to convert. Adding text-based CTAs with specific anchor text to your blogs will help visitors take action. In fact, studies show that text-based CTAs within a blog post convert better than traditional banner CTAs.
2. Add Lead Flows to Blogs
Anybody who spends a lot of time online has seen lead flows but may not realize what they are. Leads flows are strategically placed pop-ups that are designed to offer value to readers and give them a chance to convert. Carefully introducing lead flows that slide in or pop up means your readers do not have to navigate your site to convert. It is as easy as one click.
3. Test and Analyze Landing Pages
Running split tests or A/B tests of different landing page designs, CTAs, page copy, images, or other page elements will help you understand what is most successful. You can collect data on what features your audience chose to engage with and what helped to drive more leads. This will help you create more optimized pages that improve conversions.
4. Provide Ways for High-Intent Leads to Convert Quickly
A lot of the time, people land on your website looking for more information about what you offer and want to do some research before making a decision. However, some visitors already know what they want and are ready to make a purchase.
You want to make sure to remove unnecessary steps in the sales process for these high-intent leads in order to reduce friction or frustration during the process. For example, you could funnel people who have already spoken with a sales rep or have made purchases before to a simplified landing page.
5. Consider Automation to Streamline the Process
There are different types of marketing automation software on the market that can help you capture potential leads at different stages of the customer journey to ultimately drive conversions. An example of this would be automatically sending an email to a visitor who filled out a form on your website that shares more information and includes a one-click CTA to schedule a consultation.
6. Optimize Blog Posts That Are Doing Well
Some blogs perform better than others based on the topic and the content. When a blog is doing particularly well, it makes sense to add CTAs or other opportunities to take action into the blog content itself. Identify your blog posts that get the highest levels of traffic and optimize them with compelling calls to action.
7. Retarget Website Visitors Who Did Not Convert
Retargeting is another impactful way to re-engage people who visited your website but failed to take action. Retargeting tracks website visitors or people who have viewed your ads and serves them highly targeted ads with clear CTAs that may help them complete the checkout process.
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Who Needs Conversion Rate Optimization?
A CRO strategy can benefit just about any business whose main goal is to convert website visitors. In particular, eCommerce sites that depend solely on online purchases will benefit from conversion rate optimization. However, any site that gets a high volume of traffic but has low conversion rates can take advantage of CRO strategies to drive that number up.
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If it is time to work with a professional digital marketing agency that can help you take your business to the next level, Salomone Digital Marketing offers comprehensive services to do just that. Whether your goal is to drive more traffic to your website or leverage the traffic you are already getting, we can help you improve conversions and build a more meaningful marketing approach.
To learn more, contact us for a free consultation and quote!
