What is meant by conversion rate optimization in digital marketing?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of tweaking or making changes to a website, mobile app or eCommerce portal for the purpose of increasing the conversions that are generated through it. The process generally tends to involve generating ideas for elements on your site, portal, or app that you can improve upon. After that, you need to validate those hypotheses by means of A/B testing as well as multivariate testing.
These conversions are desired actions that you want your visitors and users to take on your site, app, or portal. These actions could be about making a purchase, clicking the 'add to cart' button, signing up for a service, filling out a form, clicking on a link, or even signing up for a newsletter.
It is essentially the process of figuring out what causes your customers to take action, what makes them hesitate from taking that action, and what would influence them to take that action and complete your conversion goals. This would enable you to offer the best digital customer experience possible and take your conversion rate through the roof.
How do you optimize your conversion rate?
To optimize your conversion rate, you need to get into your customers' heads and figure out which particular drivers bring them to your website, which barriers make them want to give up and leave your website, and which hooks make convince them to convert and take the action that you desire them to take.
Not all the issues that are limiting your conversions will be obvious. Sure, there are times when you can clearly see that there is a particular bug that is holding things up and leading to a lower conversion rate. Those are times when you could have a quick fix, but there are going to be quite a few situations in which you'll have to delve deeper, hypothesize, come up with potential solutions, implement them, track the results, and go by to the drawing board.
There are times when you'll have clear data telling you what you need to do in order to improve your conversion rate. Sometimes you'll even need to take insights from neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience studies to see how you can get visitors and users to flow through the conversion funnel and achieve a higher conversion rate for your business. CRO tools help you get access to all these data
How to calculate conversion rate?
To calculate your conversion rate, you'll need to divide the number of conversions (desired actions taken or conversion goals achieved) by the total number of visitors on your website, eCommerce site, or app and multiplying the result of that figure by 100.
The conversion rate formula
Conversion rate = (Number of conversions/total number of visitors) x 100
The average conversion rate for websites is generally between 1% and 4%. But that figure varies depending on the conversion goals. It could also be different because of the type of audience you have or the type of business you are in. Figuring out the average conversion rate can be useful for benchmarking purposes, but you can't really hold yourself and your business to those standards of conversion optimization too strictly.
What are some conversion rate optimization best practices recommended by experts?
Conversion experts recommend certain CRO best practices, but you should use them with caution. Don't go in blind with them in your online marketing activities, doing that could actually do some damage and lower your conversion rate.
Some CRO best practices include:
- Placing your CTAs above the first fold on your website's landing pages.
- Using a strong, eye-catching color for your CTAs on your website.
- Creating scarcity (showing that stocks are limited).
- Creating urgency (by introducing limited time offers) to induce the fear of missing out.
- Reducing the number of fields on your forms.
- Displaying social proof in the form of reviews and testimonials.
In addition to that, if you have an eCommerce site, you can use cart abandonment emails, and if you have a Shopify store, you can engage in conversion rate optimization by making use of conversion triggers on your Shopify chatbot. This helps you in conversion rate optimization by triggering messages with promotional offers and discount codes from your Shopify chatbot based on your shoppers' actions. You can send these messages when your shoppers land on a product page, scroll through it or spend a certain amount of time on those webpages. These messages can even be triggered when your shoppers add products to their shopping carts, thus increasing your Shopify conversion rates.
What are the steps of the conversion rate optimization (CRO) process?
Here's a 4 step breakdown of the conversion rate optimization process:
Research & collection of data
A lot of online marketers think they can just copy CRO techniques and strategies that other companies used and they will give them a higher conversion rate. But that's not the best idea. You need to gather data and see how visitors are reacting to your website and figure out why they're reacting in that way. You need to make decisions that are informed by data. Engage in quantitative data analysis and qualitative data analysis.
You can use tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics to collect quantitative data like traffic sources, demography, CTRs, time on site, bounce rate, etc.
You can collect qualitative data through tests like polls, on-site surveys, user interviews, focus groups, satisfaction surveys, etc.
Hypothesis
Based on the data that you collected, figure out what's causing your target audience to behave the way it is and come up with ideas to convince these people to act the way you want them to.
Prioritization
You've come up with a bunch of ideas for you to get started on your optimization efforts. But your organization can't start on all of them at the same time, your need to prioritize and figure out which initiatives would have a larger impact, and then double down on those key activities.
Implementation and testing
Put your ideas into action and test them out. Use A/B testing, split testing, multivariate testing, and other techniques to improve your conversion rate on your website, app, or portal.
Why conversion rate optimization is important? What are its benefits?
CRO is extremely important because it empowers you to get more customers out of your existing visitors, making them flow down the conversion funnel in larger numbers. One of the major benefits that you get from this activity is that your customer acquisition cost tends to go down substantially.
There is always room for improvement and you should constantly try to enhance your digital properties and improve your conversion rate.
%20(1).jpg)
