Setting up a new website is an exciting time, and as a website newbie, it’s crucial to know which steps to take to secure a strong customer base. That’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes into play. It’s vital to make the right steps to optimize a website, which we discuss in our free webinar training. Getting traffic is excellent, but CRO isn't only about traffic, it’s about making sure visitors convert into customers and keep returning to buy more!
Before we dive into the benefits of CRO, let’s first take a look at what makes it so important from Crazy Egg:
No results are ever gained in digital marketing without a “conversion.” Depending on what type of website you have and what your goals happen to be, a conversion could mean something different from one marketer to the next.
If you have a landing page with a web form, for example, a form submission would be considered a conversion.
E-commerce sites will be more interested in sales conversions. Some websites may want more subscriptions or phone calls to the office.
The definition of a conversion should be established very early on when developing your web marketing campaigns.
However, once those are defined, your next job will be to turn your website into a “conversion machine.”
This might mean ramping up the amounts of leads you receive, sales you generate, and revenue you earn.
Whatever your definition of a conversion is, CRO is about improving your results as much as you possibly can.
Done correctly, conversion rate optimization can help you create a monster subscription list, help you sell out of your inventory, and expand your bottom line beyond your expectations.
Now that you have an overview on CRO let’s dive into some of some of its benefits. The first one from Crazy Egg is knowing your audience better.
As a digital marketer, it’s critical that you understand your customers and their motivations for landing on your site and potentially buying from you.
You have probably developed a buyer persona, which is an amalgam of your ideal customer. Your persona may include demographics information, such as location and salary, type of car, house, or apartment, and other information that allows you to comprehend your audience just a bit more.Even if your market research is conducted thoroughly, one of the biggest benefits of conversion rate optimization is the ability to become even more familiar with your leads, prospects, and customers.
When you take the time to observe their website navigation behavior, identify where they’re getting stuck on your site and understand what they’re looking for through CRO tools like heatmaps and user session recordings, you’ll have a much better sense of their pain points and challenges.
If you have an ecommerce site, then Ecommerce Academy Training says that getting more customers is the ultimate goal (makes sense to us!). And even if you don’t have an ecommerce site and are selling an ebook on your blog, for example, it’s also ideal to get more customers. That’s why CRO is so vital — it helps you secure and keep customers! We all know that the more customers you have, the more money you’ll make.
You are probably already trying to reduce your cost per acquisition —conversion rate optimization (CRO) can help you do that in eCommerce.
When you continuously optimize your online store, you tend to understand your customers better which leads to an improved overall shopping experience. The better the user experience for visitors, the more customers you acquire from the same amount of traffic you’re already receiving—meaning you don’t just save money, but you actually make more of it since it’s costing you less to acquire each additional one.One of the biggest benefits of conversion rate optimization is that it works with the current traffic that you already get to your online store. While there is the initial monetary and time investment in getting a page optimized, once it starts working, you really start making the most of the traffic your webpage already receives through SEO and other marketing efforts such as social or email.
CRO isn’t about driving more traffic, but about making sure those visitors convert into customers.
If you have an advertising strategy in place that’s good, and CRO will help you figure out what is and isn’t working. SEO Pressor reveals more below:
Paid advertising is an excellent strategy – especially if you are using it to compliment your organic SEO strategy. Not only can you use it to increase exposure of your brand and bring in more visitors, but you can use it to test out keywords too. However, paid advertising is not only expensive (and growing more expensive), but it’s extremely competitive as well. You’re probably wondering what exactly this has to do with CRO.
Well, the way paid advertising works is that you are paying for every visitors that arrives at your website. If they leave without opting in, then you’ve just wasted that money. By improving your conversion rate, you’ll make your paid advertising campaigns worth the money that you’re putting into them.
Moz lets us know that CRO helps with many things, from better ROI to better scalability. What does all of this mean? You figure out how to turn buyers visitors into customers and make use of the resources you have.
Improved customer insights. Conversion rate optimization can help you better understand your key audience and find what language or messaging best speaks to their needs. Conversion rate optimization looks at finding the right customers for your business. Acquiring more people doesn't do your business any good if they're not the right kind of people!
Better ROI: Higher conversion rate means making more of the resources you have. By studying how to get the most out of your acquisition efforts, you'll get more conversions without having to bring in more potential customers.
Better scalability: While your audience size may not scale as your business grows, CRO lets you grow without running out of resources and prospective customers. Audiences aren't infinite. By turning more browsers into buyers, you'll be able to grow your business without running out of potential customers.
It makes sense that the more customers you convert, the closer you are to becoming the number #1 website in your industry. An upward-trending cycle is an ultimate goal, which SEO Pressor discusses below:
You may not realize it, but the more visitors that you convert, the more you hurt your competition. Every visitor that you don’t convert can end up on a competitor’s website, which means that when improve your conversions, you are taking away potential customers from your competition.
CRO can help boost your marketing budget – Since you are increasing your profit by increasing your conversion rate, you can put more money into your marketing budget. With an increased budget, you can boost your marketing efforts, which in turn will bring in even more visitors that you can convert. Using CRO, you can increase the amount of those visitors that are converted, thereby creating a very nice upward trending cycle.
Good news – CRO doesn’t cost much. It’s free! Use it to your advantage because it will help your online site grow and flourish. SEO Pressor reminds us that CRO is an excellent way to figure out what is going wrong on your website and how to fix that so you can convert more customers.
All of these aforementioned CRO benefits don’t do much good if you can’t afford it. The thing is, CRO is basically free. You’re capitalizing on what you already have, after all. CRO just helps you to increase your current investments. In fact, using CRO is much more cost-effective than attempting to attract new visitors altogether.
These CRO benefits are looking pretty good to you now aren’t they? CRO isn’t some magical strategy that has somehow managed to elude everyone – really it’s all about understanding that your website can always use improvement.
CRO is a method for identifying problem areas with your website and fixing them in order to improve your website’s performance. It’s as simple as that!
Of course, what it is and why you should do it are simple – but actually implementing CRO does require some effort, especially when considering the fact that there are a number of conversion points you’ll need to look at, and plenty of numbers that you’ll need to crunch.
To continue to get an edge on your competitors you need to keep to test and use the knowledge you learn from CRO to grow. Don’t give up – Countour This says if you have the advantage with customers you’ll make more than your competitors (which will help your company succeed).
In an Olympic race, the difference between gold and silver is often only a split second, but the reward is the difference between a 1 million dollar endorsement and your name in the newspaper.
When you have the advantage in value per visitor, you can edge out the competition in all marketing channels, bringing you more visitors and more conversions. It's a vicious cycle that can result in a bigger market share.
Check out our free webinar training to learn about more about CRO, how to convert customers and make more money!
Sources: Ecommerce Academy Training, Crazy Egg, SEO Pressor, Moz, Contour This
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