Having the ability to convert leads into paying customers is one of the most important skills in the digital marketing industry.
Businesses no longer focus solely on sending traffic to their website but also on how they can best make users take an action that they want. This could be either to make them purchase something, sign up for an email, or any other action.
The need to get the most out of your website traffic is known as conversion optimization. Although traffic is an essential part of digital marketing, it doesn’t end there. You need to convert your website users into paying customers.
This is where conversion optimization comes in for you. It helps you achieve goals with your website visitors. In this guide, you’ll learn what conversion rate optimization entails and how to use it to boost your business.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion is simply working to get your website visitors complete a task you intend to achieve. Conversion rate optimization may sound complicated, but it really entails improving website elements (designs, contents, etc.) to make your website visitors more likely to act on your desired outcome.
When you have a business website where you offer some kind of product or service, your aim is to make your visitors purchase your products or service. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is, therefore, a series of steps and processes that allow you to maximize the number of website visitors who will convert into customers.
Why Is CRO Important To Businesses?
Conversion rate optimization benefits businesses in several ways.
Here are a few:
1. Better Understand Your Customers
With CRO you get to know what they want so you can find out how to satisfy those wants.
Successful businesses are problem solvers. They know what their customers want and give them just that. CRO helps you make better decisions to optimize your website and make it easier to complete your goal.
2. Increases Revenue
It is evident that businesses want revenue, which is why they are optimizing their site in the first place. CRO increases your return on investment by helping you convert as many of your website visitors into customers as possible.
3. Improves User Experience
One goal of CRO is to ensure your website engages with the user and makes the process of navigating your site more fun and less stressful. A bad user experience may be caused by unnecessary or conflicting website elements.
CRO will make your site more accessible to operate.
4. Reduces The Cost Of Customer Acquisition
Conversion rate optimization is not necessarily about increasing your website traffic, but about converting a significant percentage of your existing visitors.
For example, if you’re getting a conversion rate of 10% from 1000 visitors, CRO looks to improve the conversion rate to 20%. This saves you the costs of having to acquire more website traffic and instead focuses on getting the most out of your visitors.
5. Builds Trust
If you follow CRO best practices, your website looks more professional, which builds trust with your website users. When you gain the confidence of your website users, it makes it easier to convert them into customers.
How Conversion Rate Optimization Is Calculated
To calculate CRO, you need to divide the total amount of website conversions with the total number of website traffic and multiply the result by a hundred. This gives us the result of the website’s conversion rate in percentage.
The formula is given below:
Total Conversions/Total Website Traffic X 100 = Conversion Rate
Conversion may mean sales, sign-ups, downloads, registrations, or any other action as defined by you. To better understand, consider this example.
Suppose a website has 14,500 monthly traffic with 2,850 conversions. This means the site has a 19.7% conversion rate.
Important Metrics To Track
Amount Of Website traffic
To determine how to optimize, you need to know the total amount of traffic your site receives. This will give you insight as to how you can increase your conversion rate with the number of visitors you get.
Sources Of Traffic
Traffic sources are another conversion metric to keep track of, and you must know where most of your traffic comes from to double down on it.
To optimize your site, you need to keep track of your traffic source. This way, you can put more effort into getting more traffic from sources that send the most users to your site.
Pages Visited
Keeping track of pages visited by users is a vital metric to monitor because it can tell you why your users visited such pages.
Track pages with the most visits to understand what they like about such pages. Ideally, you can replicate the same with other pages.
User Interactions
This means tracking and analyzing how website users behave on your website. You can use tools to record how your website visitors interact with your website. This can help you track sections they view the most, if they read your posts to the end, if they are having difficulty navigating your site, and more.
Revenue Per Visitor
This metric tells you how much you make from website visitors. To calculate, simply divide the total revenue earned by the total visitors on your website.
Bounce Rate
Bounce is one vital conversion rate optimization metric to track. You are not going to achieve your goal of website visits if they leave almost immediately when they visit your website. To get them to convert, they need to stay on your website longer.
Exit pages
Sometimes you want to know at what page your users choose to leave your site. You need to find out what might be making them exit your site before they complete the action you want them to take.
Exit pages pinpoint things you can improve on to optimize your website.
Steps To Conversion Rate Optimization
To optimize your website for more conversion, there are steps and processes you need to follow to achieve your conversion goal.
Here are four steps to follow:
1. Know Your Customers
This simply means getting to know who your business appeals to. Define your target audience. You need to understand their needs and how you can meet those needs. Take the time to learn their demographics and profile.
This means researching your target audience to build an effective conversion funnel. With a proper understanding of your target audience, you can create an effective conversion path for your website.
2. Define Your Conversion Goals
To define your conversion goals, you need to answer the question: “What do I want to achieve from my website users?”
The answer tells you which metrics to track that will allow you to achieve your goals. With those metrics, you can improve on your conversion funnel to convert better.
3. Create A Conversion Funnel
A conversion funnel is a path your website visitors go through before they take that action you want.
After you have defined your conversion goals, you need to create a conversion funnel, otherwise known as sales funnel.
To do this, follow the process below:
Get A Traffic Source
To create a conversion funnel, your target audience first needs to be aware of your products.
You need to attract your audience to your funnel, whch is why you attain a traffic source. You can create a traffic source from search engines through pay-per-click advertising, organic search, or social media.
Build Customer Interest
Getting your audience from your traffic source is just the first part. You also need to build your customer’s interest in your product or service. This is usually done via the content on your website. You need excellent copywriting skills to make them interested in what you have to offer.
Create Desire
After creating interest, you need to create a desire for your product or service. To achieve this, let them know what your product or service helps them achieve and how it can solve their problem.
Encourage Action
This is where your customers complete the action you want.
There is little you can do as to whether they complete this or not, but you can maximize the chances of this if you’ve optimized the steps above.
Analyze Results
Here, you analyze your results while keeping an eye on important conversion rate metrics.
Look out for things that are working well and areas where you can improve to boost your conversion.
You can analyze your results by using conversion rate tools listed in the section below.
Perform A/B Test Analysis
A/B testing is a way to quickly check what might influence your web visitors to perform a conversion action. A/B testing works by first creating two versions of your website to see how your web visitors react to a change in one element of a website version in relation to the other version.
Consistently performing A/B tests can help you improve your website or landing page for more conversion.
Conversion Rate Optimization Tools
There are a lot of CRO tools you can use to optimize your conversion rate.
Here are five tools you can use to maximize your conversion:
Hotjar:
Hotjar is a tool that allows you to record the behaviors of visitors who come to your website. It shows you heatmaps to tell you the areas where your website visitors focus on the most.
With these video recordings, you can find out if they have problems going around your site.
Hotjar is also a feedback tool that allows you to collect feedback from your website visitors.
This feedback can greatly assist in making your website better for users, which might result in more conversions.
Survey Monkey
Survey monkey, just as the name suggests, is a tool for taking surveys.
You can use it to collect surveys on your website visitors to understand better what they want and don’t, which can be used to optimize your site.
Unbounce
Unbounce is a landing page maker you can use to create pages for your products or services.
With Unbounce, you can also create pop up bars to capture leads. You can also create any page you want from the many templates they offer if you don’t want to make one from scratch.
User Testing
This is a tool for testing the experience of your website users. With this tool, you can create user tests and get the opinions of your customers, employees, or any other people. Your website users can engage with you through live conversations, recorded videos, or live videos to discuss what they think of your website.
They can describe areas they like and areas they think need improvement. This conversion rate optimization tool can give insight into how to optimize your website.
Visual Website Optimizer (VWO)
VWO is a tool for split-run testing. It can be used for A/B tests to ascertain what works and what doesn’t. With VWO, you can carry out experiments to test how a certain element on your website improves user experience and conversion.
This tool gives you ultimate control over your website. You can also perform session recordings, surveys on your webpage, and heatmaps to optimize your website further.
Helio
This tool provides you with a platform to get the opinions of many professionals about your website ranging from designs to marketing questions. You can find people who fit into your target audience to give you their thoughts about your products and site.
Helio allows you to perform surveys and tests from its audience.
Conclusion
With conversion rate optimization, you can achieve a lot on your website. Many businesses get traffic to their website but find it difficult converting them into customers. The CRO processes, tips, and tools listed in this article will allow you to growth hack your business by increasing your conversions.