The online market dominates the business world these days. Anyone in business understands that success depends on making the right impression online and getting people to visit your business website. Much of the focus of marketers is the process of driving traffic to your website. But the additional step of turning that traffic into sales becomes the main goal of conversion rate optimization.
It is one thing to get people to click on your website. SEO, backlinks, and online reviews will direct online shoppers to a website. But conversion rate optimization will turn these visits into profits, and that is why you are in business in the first place. Conversion rate optimization determines strategies to hold onto customers once they find you.
Conversion rate optimization is the process of getting the most out of existing traffic to your website. SEO will get people there, conversion rate optimization will turn them into customers. Ultimately, no matter how sophisticated online marketing has become, the goals remain the same as ever: paying customers. This is what conversion rate optimization is all about.
What exactly is conversion rate optimization? What is a conversion rate? What are some of the successful strategies for conversion rate optimization? This guide will give you the best information on conversion rate optimization to get this marketing practice working for your business.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the set of strategies and processes designed to increase the percentage of visitors to a website who then move on to other actions. Obviously, sales are the primary goal, but CRO also aims to convince website traffic to enter their information into email lists and other types of direct involvement with the website.
CRO aims to generate leads and convert these leads into increased revenue. There are a number of tests involved in CRO, which we will discuss below, but the main goal of CRO is to convert online traffic into real engagement with your brand. Engagement can mean several things, but each step in the process is designed to generate revenue and profits. This is essentially what we mean by conversions.
What is a conversion rate?
To understand a conversion rate, we need to know what we mean by conversion. I conversion is a general term for when any visitor to your site completes a site goal. This means anything on your site that turns a simple click into an actual action on your site counts as a conversion. Conversions come in different forms. There are what are termed macro and micro conversions. These include:
Macro-conversions:
- Purchasing a product from the site
- Requesting a quote
- Subscribing to a service
Examples of micro-conversions:
- Signing up for email lists
- Creating an account
- Adding a product to the cart
Your conversion rate is the number of times a user completes a site goal divided by the total number of visitors to your site. Your site can track all the visits to the site. This is easy. You can then begin counting the number of times a visitor makes a purchase, adds their name to an email list, asks for information, etc. This will give you a conversion rate, and this is an ideal benchmark for how well your website is doing in funneling customers to your business.
SEO and other strategies direct visitors to your site. Conversion rate optimization turns those visits into conversions. A high conversion rate means your website is well-designed and it is working effectively.
What is considered a good conversion rate?
A good conversion rate is above 10 percent. Some businesses have achieved an average of about 11.5 percent. This is considered outstanding. A good conversion rate of 10 percent and above, puts you in the top 10 percent of global advertisers.
Just to put this into context, the average conversion rate is just over 2.5 percent. You should not be discouraged if you are not hitting the 10 percent mark.
How to Calculate Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is a simple calculation. You simply take the number of conversions and divide that by the total number of interactions that can be tracked during the same period. If you had 1000 hits on your site and made 50 conversions, your conversion rate would be 5 percent.
Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies
Marketing professionals will determine highly specific strategies for CRO based on your needs. That said, there are a number of general CRO strategies that work. CRO strategies may include:
Calls to action
Calls to action (CTAs) offer visitors to your site opportunities to interact with your site. As soon as a visitor begins to engage the site, they will likely begin the process of initiating a conversion.
You can also place text-based CTAs as a standalone block of text on your landing page. These usually appear in the H3 or H4 of your landing site. These frequently create conversions.
Place lead flows in your bog
Lead flows are high-converting pop-ups that are designed to attract attention and offer visitors to your site things they value. You can use things like slide-in boxes, drop-down banners, and pop-up boxes to ad spaces for visitors to continue to interact with your site.
Run testing on your website
Your landing page is an important part of how marketers use your website to create conversions. The landing page is the place where a lead becomes invested in your brand. To optimize a landing page, you will run what is called an A/B test. We will talk about his below, but the A/B test evaluates different versions of your website copy, content, images, form questions, and web pages to find out what works best with a target audience. By running sound A/B tests, you can determine which set of tools on your landing page are most attractive to a target audience.
Help leads make direct contact
Some visitors who want to skip the preliminaries speak directly to a sales rep. They do not need or want to be convinced of anything on your website. Making it easy for someone to skip the sales pitch and go directly to doing business is a great way to create conversions.
Add messages to web pages that already convert
Using things like live chat software with visitors to your website adds real-time interaction capabilities. You can add messages to these devices that offer information on things like pricing on your product pages. This allows leads to get a sense of things in real-time as soon as they land on your website. You can also program these chat capabilities to be triggered based on actions. For example, if someone spends a certain amount of time on a page, you can have the chat box set to pop up and engage them.
Optimize blog content
Bog articles open the door to conversions. Even older blogs can still generate conversions. By optimizing blog content, you vastly increase your likelihood of conversions. Start with blog content that appears to have lower conversion rates. By applying SEO to these blog posts, you can start driving traffic to already existing content that has failed to generate leads and conversions. This is an ideal place to also optimize CTAs.
This is also a time to do some SEO analysis on some of your top blog content. Begin optimizing this content for search engine results pages (SERPs) and update as needed.
Use retargeting to re-engage visitors
The truth of online marketing is that most people who visit your site will not engage beyond the initial click. This is why retargeting is so important to CRO. By reaching out to users who have visited your site through social media and other platforms, you have a significant chance of converting these lost customers. Retargeting works by tracking visitors to your website and targeting them for online ads. This works especially well when you retarget users who visited your highest-converting web pages and content.
What is the purpose of conversion rate optimization?
The main purpose of conversion rate optimization is to turn general traffic to your website into meaningful interactions that become revenue. While not all conversions are revenue-generating actions in the short term, all can potentially become actions that become profits.
How to Run an A/B Test
A/B testing is sometimes called split testing. It is a marketing experiment in which you split your target audience into different variations to see which version of your marketing campaign and/or web design works better. It is a process whereby you show version A to one group and version B to another, then you can measure how effective each version is based on how test audiences respond.
A/B testing is important because it allows you to see how audiences behave, respond, and interact with different versions of your web design. Most important for CRO is that it helps marketers see real results from user interactions rather than relying on theories or “best practices” which frequently do not perform with real users and target audiences.
To do an A/B test you need to develop two different versions of your content. Each version must have a single primary variable that alters the version for each test audience. By measuring user interactions with the two versions that alter the single variable, you can determine conclusions as to how best to optimize your content and web design. The test is run over a specific period of time to make sure the user interactions are operating with a single variable and not other intangible variables that may have nothing to do with your content or web design.
How to Get Started With CRO
There are some standard steps to get started with CRO. These include:
Analyze your conversion funnel
Track how many people land on your site. Then track the number of users who add a product, proceed to checkout, then make a purchase.
Set specific conversion goals
Determine realistic goals based on current activity. Do not use things like industry averages and abstract benchmarks. You need to set goals based on the activity as it is really unfolding.
Tap into data
Use Google Analytics to determine quantitative and qualitative data that reveal how users are working with your site, where they are dropping out of the conversion funnel, and how they are using your site.
Identify variables for a test run
With the data you gain from analytics, you can generate some sound variables to test in some A/B testing runs.
Create a CRO strategy
Once you have isolated the primary points of resistance in your conversion funnel, run tests to determine strategies to begin optimizing at these points.
Conversion Rate Optimization FAQS
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the set of strategies and processes designed to increase the percentage of visitors to a website who then move on to other actions. Obviously, sales are the primary goal, but CRO also aims to convince website traffic to enter their information into email lists and other types of direct involvement with the website.
What is a conversion rate?
Your conversion rate is the number of times a user completes a site goal divided by the total number of visitors to your site. Your site can track all the visits to the site. This is easy. You can then begin counting the number of times a visitor makes a purchase, adds their name to an email list, asks for information, etc. This will give you a conversion rate, and this is an ideal benchmark for how well your website is doing in funneling customers to your business.
How do you Calculate Conversion Rate? Conversion rate is a simple calculation. You simply take the number of conversions and divide that by the total number of interactions that can be tracked during the same period. If you had 1000 hits on your site and made 50 conversions, your conversion rate would be 5 percent.
How can Hey Day Marketing help you improve your conversion rate?
As you can see from this guide, Conversion Rate Optimization can get complicated. To get the most out of CRO, you can leave things to professionals who are knowledgeable and will invest themselves in the success of your company. HeyDay Marketing Services provides CRO services that will help your business grow. HeyDay Marketing has the knowledge and insight into CRO procedures that serve your business needs.
HeyDay Marketing Services can build CRO strategies that will position your brand as a leader in your industry and create a positive image for your business in the media. We can help you find the points of resistance in your existing content and web design and optimize this for better conversion rates.
HeyDay Marketing Services offers professional insight and analytics to increase conversion rates. We understand that one size does not fit all. For sound CRO strategies that work, allow HeyDay Marketing Services to take over the conversion rate optimization for your website and content.
