How is your marketing performing? Are you seeing your marketing efforts increase your conversions?
Having a steady flow of leads is great, but if they’re not buying your product, they’re no help to you and your business.
In the world of digital marketing, there are a lot of metrics people focus on. Some companies focus on ad spending, some focus on click-through rates, and others focus on even more metrics. It’s easy to lose sight of what’s important.
Today, we’re going to talk about conversion rate optimization. We’ll go over what it is, why it’s important, and how you can track it in your business.
By the time you’re done reading this, you may walk away with a different perspective of what’s important when it comes to your marketing channels. Who knows? You may even walk away with some new KPIs and processes for your team.
Let’s get going.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Your conversion rate is the measure of how many of your leads convert into customers. How many leads end up taking the action you want them to take?
Conversion rate optimization is the practice of gearing your content and your marketing efforts toward maximizing this metric.
What a “conversion” is can be different for every business. There may be a form you want people to fill out, a digital guide you want them to download, or a product you want them to buy. To increase the number of people that take your desired action, you’re going to need to update your website.
Your content needs to be creative and engaging. It needs to provide information to your website visitors, and it needs to provide it to them quickly.
We’re all familiar with the concept of a sales “funnel.” The idea is that customers get filtered through your marketing process and ultimately end up as a conversion or sale. Optimizing your website and other marketing for conversions eliminates bottlenecks in your funnel.
If it’s done properly, you’ll start to see more people convert, which will ultimately lead to more revenue for you and your team.
How To Calculate Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is a hard number we can solve based on your marketing performance. The calculation to arrive at your conversion rate is pretty simple.
Conversion Rate = (Number of conversions/Number of visitors) x 100.
A short math example might help us here. Let’s say you had 100,000 visitors to your site last month. Of those visitors, 15,000 of them filled out your form or ordered your product.
Based on those numbers, last month’s conversion rate would be 15%.
How Does Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Work?
It doesn’t matter when a particular lead came into your system. They can be a person that came into your funnel last week, or they can be a person that came into your funnel last year.
Anytime you can convince a lead to action, that’s your end goal; that’s a conversion. As long as you see this number start to increase, your CRO efforts are working.
To optimize your site effectively, you’ll want to offer multiple points where your leads can convert. Give them an opportunity on your home page, on your blog, or order page. Some businesses will even use landing pages that are optimized to get people to convert.
The more ways you give them to convert, the higher your conversion rate will be. Think about your own life. You like doing things that are easy, right?
This is part of the reason why Amazon has been so successful. You’re telling us we can order pretty much anything we’d ever need and receive it in two days or less? Sign us up!
You have to think of conversions the same way. Make it as easy as possible for users to navigate your site. And make it as easy as possible for them to take your desired action.
Once your CRO efforts are dialed in, you’ll be turning your leads into repeat, long-term customers.
Effective CRO Strategy
Knowing that conversions are important isn’t good enough. You need to know exactly how you’re going to go about converting more of your people into “sales.”
Below, we will go into some key points of an effective CRO strategy to help you do exactly that.
1. Metrics, Metrics, Metrics
Your marketing numbers are like a roadmap. You’re not going to succeed at getting where you want to go if you don’t have any guidance. That guidance in your business comes in the form of KPIs and metrics.
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators. These are the numbers that make your business move. They are going to vary from industry to industry.
For a software development team, examples might be something like the number of downloads and usage time. Keeping track of how many people download your app is a direct link to how your app performs—the same with usage time.
If people aren’t staying on your app for a very long time, it may be a sign that you need to tweak things. But you wouldn’t know any of this information if you weren’t monitoring those numbers.
Again, your KPIs are going to vary depending on what a “conversion” actually is to you and your team. If you’re unsure, it may be worth having a meeting with your development team to find out what metrics are the heartbeat of your business.
There’s an old marketing saying, “what doesn’t get measured, doesn’t improve.” This couldn’t be more true for your conversion rate.
2. Call-to-Actions (CTAs) Are Your Friend
People can’t take your desired action if they don’t know what that action is. It seems like common sense, but so many business owners make this mistake.
Don’t be afraid to make “the ask.” This is where CTAs come in handy.
CTAs are forms, buttons, banners, or text. They are usually brightly colored, and they are meant to catch your website users’ eyes. Many development teams do hours and hours of research on color schemes and design elements to grab site visitors’ attention.
You may think that what you want your customers to do is obvious. We would say you may want to think again. People need to be guided through your process. That’s part of your website’s job as a marketing tool.
It helps to put CTAs wherever you can and as often as you can on your site. Now, your site can’t look tacky or “spammy.” If it does, Google will slap you on the wrist.
You need to find a happy medium between including the maximum number of CTAs and doing it tastefully. Keeping a visitor-friendly user interface is one of Google’s new Core Web Vitals, and it’s essential.
3. Don’t Underestimate Site Speed
While we’re on the subject of Google and your website’s user experience, let’s talk about site speed. Everything digital marketing-related runs through Google these days. The art of Search Engine Optimization has grown to revolve around what Google wants.
They are the watchdog of the internet. One of Google’s latest updates to its algorithm is aimed at protecting the user experience.
People use the internet for information. They need to get quality information from your site, and they need to get it quickly. If your site takes too long to load, users will leave.
The more users leave, the higher your bounce rate will be. If your site has a high bounce rate, it will be tough for you to rank highly in Google.
Ensuring you have proper hosting and website optimization to minimize features that take a long time to load is crucial to your website’s success.
4. Identify Pages to Optimize
Which pages you optimize on your website will ultimately depend on what you see as a conversion. The basic rule is that it makes the most sense to optimize the area of your website that receives the most traffic.
You’ll begin to see CRO results faster if you focus your efforts on the area of your website that’s already receiving the highest amount of traffic.
There’s no limit to the pages you can optimize on your site. For example, you may decide to optimize your homepage. It makes sense because this is usually the first thing people see besides landing or “squeeze” pages.
If your homepage design is attractive to your users, you may start to see them stay longer. From there, conversions will probably increase.
Another area you can optimize is your pricing page. If you are selling products, this would make a lot of sense. Make the content of this page as clear and engaging as possible.
Describe all the benefits they can expect to get from your product or service and what the cost is to them. Being clear and upfront with your visitors, with engaging content, is the easiest way to get more of them to click “add to cart.”
Website blogs are also a popular area to optimize. Writing engaging content that ranks for important keywords in your industry is a great way to increase conversions. If you are trying to increase readership or grow an email list, this may be the technique for you.
You can also consider optimizing your landing pages as well. These pages are meant to convert visitors. Making sure they’re engaging, easy to read, and provide value to your visitors is an easy way to get these pages to do their job.
Why Invest in CRO Services?
Optimizing your website and your conversion rate is not something you want to take lightly. If it’s done right, it can make your business soar. If it’s done wrong, it can hurt your results.
Here are three reasons why you should consider investing in CRO services.
1. Get to Know Your Audience
Knowing your target market’s buyer persona is important to any form of digital marketing. Investing in CRO services can give you tools at your disposal to get a better idea of what your customers are asking for and what sections of your site require optimization.
You’ll be able to see what features of your website are working for you and which ones aren’t. From there, you can test, track, and tweak different website features to optimize your website’s user experience.
2. Cut Costs
By investing in CRO services, you’ll be able to narrow in on who exactly is your ideal customer, what they like, and what they don’t like. You can decrease spending on other marketing channels or website features that aren’t bringing you conversions with that information.
Once you start marketing only to people who want to do business with you, you’ll see your cost-per-lead start to go down, which will ultimately increase your revenue.
3. Increase Sales
This is an obvious benefit, but we think it’s the one that business owners are after the most. Using CRO services, you’ll be working with a team of professionals who know exactly what to work on to increase your conversions.
You may need to update the look of your site, you may need to decrease the number of fields on your forms, or you may need to work on optimizing your content more. Working with professionals will help you make sure you’re making the right moves for site optimization.
Work With the Pros
Now you see what the importance of conversion rate optimization is in your business. Getting visitors to your site is great, but it’s only one part of the equation. You need to make sure those visitors convert.
And CRO for business is not something you want to leave to chance. We here at Nizek can help you to dial in your website and maximize your conversion rate optimization. We’ll be able to sit with you and take a detailed look at your current website.
Our CRO tools will give you insights into your website you haven’t had before. That way, we know we’re making the right moves to get your site to convert more visitors.
Contact us today if you have any more questions or want to get started with your CRO strategy. We’re more than happy to help, and we want to see you succeed.
