There are some great ways to increase revenue and profits without massive monetary investments, including today’s topic — conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Simply put, CRO is the practice of testing your conversion content pieces to determine how even minor changes on a page can impact the number of visitors taking action. It’s a measure of how well you’re motivating visitors.

This involves creating a number of pages with slight variations in design, wording, etc. to test which version(s) encourage the most downloads, registrations, or whatever action you’d like visitors to do.

CRO is the very heart—or at least tests the very heart—of modern marketing. It helps you understand what types of content and triggers your prospects respond to. Then, CRO generates data that can have a real impact on your bottom line.

We will help you see effective methods to drive your business revenue growth with the use of conversion rate optimization in this article.

• How can Conversion Rate Optimization Drive Revenue to your Business?
• What are the Steps of Conversion Optimization?
• How does Conversion Rate Optimization Work?
• How to Building an Effective Conversion Optimization Strategy
• Step-by-Step Process to Double Your Conversion Rate
• Why is Conversion Rate Optimization Important?

How can Conversion Rate Optimization Drive Revenue to your Business?

1. Reduce Your Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the count of how many people visit a page on your website and then direct navigate away from your site. If this number is high, you know that visitors aren’t finding what they thought they would find (or that they found their answer right away – but that’s another topic).

Read Also: Top 10 Sales Strategies to Boost Conversion Rates

If you have a high bounce rate (generally over 60-70%), your page is most likely not relevant to the search performed by the visitor, or the quality of the page or its content didn’t appeal to them for some reason. There are a lot of reasons visitors might steer away from a given page on your site, and guessing at these is an exercise at futility.

Conversion rate optimization, on the other hand, can test variations of a page and offer metrics on the people bouncing. Reducing bounce rates means more people are continuing to engage with your site, accessing gated content, and continuing down the sales funnel.

2. Drive More Downloads

A high bounce rate on landing pages means few people are completing the registration form to access your gated content. Testing and optimizing these landing pages will result in a higher number of downloads and more visitors being exposed to your content.

After all, what’s the point in content that no one sees? Putting content behind a gate can be risky—unwilling to sign up for another mailing list, some visitors will forfeit accessing content that they would have otherwise found relevant and useful.

This means CRO is critical on these landing pages. You don’t want to send prospects bouncing away from both your content and your email list. But once you’ve optimized your landing page, the number of downloads are sure to grow. And so is our next topic, your email list.

3. Build Your Email List

As mentioned above, an increase in the number of downloads of your gated content also translates to more email addresses in your list. A larger email list means more potential clients. And this isn’t a list of random addresses – these are targeted visitors to your website.

The fact that they visited your page in the first page suggests that they have interest in your industry, content, services, and in pursuing a relationship with your firm. They might not become clients overnight, but getting them on your email list brings them one step closer to doing business with you.

For even greater email list efficacy, gather some other data on the landing page. Information like industry, company size, geographic location, or visitor’s position in their company can help you tailor your email marketing to them.

Advertising doesn’t just promote your services – it can also play an important role in driving content downloads, increasing both your expertise and visibility.

4. Create Better Pages

We’re defining “better” here as more effective at creating conversions. Design and messaging will not always align with conversion rates. This is because design choices and selection of the best messaging are fairly subjective endeavors.

But remember that with CRO, your bottom-line is the number of conversions. Strong design and messaging prowess are important – and can certainly help conversions – but it’s also possible to have pages you find less visually appealing increase conversions. Finding the right combination of design elements and messaging is what CRO is all about.

5. Improved Decision Making

Decisions based on guesswork and gut feelings have little place in the age of data. There are a lot of software platforms designed specifically to help you track conversion rate optimization efforts.

Some good examples of these include Optimizely and Experiment Engine. They offer hard numbers on the statistical significance of observed conversions and bounce rates. This helps you make informed decisions when building or redesigning your website that are backed by data.

This removes the guesswork from the equation and grants your firm the confidence that its choices will pay off in greater conversions rates. This means more clients, higher revenue, and greater growth—all at very little expense.

What are the Steps of Conversion Optimization?

Whether you’re creating a blog post or landing page, the ultimate aim is to convert your website visitors into customers Now, the big question is: how do you ensure your website visitors take the actions you want them to take?

There are a lot of amazing (and some not-so-amazing) tips out there, but at the end of the day, it’s all about one thing: conversion optimization.

Whether you’re getting great results or poor results, conversion optimization is a must: testing, analyzing and optimizing will ultimately lead to better results – and there’s always room for improvement when it comes to sales and conversions. 

Step 1: Create an optimization strategy

To improve your conversions, you have to outline a strategy that will guide your tasks. Rather than throwing everything at the wall and hoping something will stick, using a strategy to guide you along the way can help you get more hits than misses. 

This is true of all types of marketing strategies, but it’s especially important when performing conversion optimization tactics; that’s because conversion optimization requires a lot of testing and a lot different steps.

For example, if you want to generate more downloads for an e-book you’re offering on your site, then you’ll want to optimize your e-book landing page. With a clear strategy in place, you can make sure you’re testing and analysing all the different elements from your landing page, from its design to the shape and colour of your call to action button and to your copy. 

Some vital tasks to include in your optimization strategy include:

• Setting goals
• Creating buyer personas
• Stating optimization tasks
• Tracking results

With a sound strategy, it becomes easier to get the right information about your visitors and use it to improve conversions. A tool like Monday.com can help you draft your conversion optimization strategy and allow collaboration between your team members.

You can plan different stages of tasks like website design, landing page design, or A/B tests using this tool. It’s easy to assign tasks to each team member and follow up on their progress, as well as see when you need to analyse results and when you need to move on to the next test. 

Step 2: Ask visitors about their user experience

Knowing why visitors leave your page can help you make the right changes to your pages. You can use different mechanisms to gather information from your audience to understand their pain points.

Some ways to get these pieces of information are:

• Polls
• Survey
• One-on-one interviews

Through these, visitors can tell you if your page design is poor or they’re just unmoved by your offers. With a tool like Qualaroo, you can create surveys for your visitors. It allows you to set conditions on how the survey is delivered to them.

It’s vital to ask the right questions from your prospects as this will improve the quality of answers you can get. When you get the right information, you can refine your buyer personas and form new hypotheses.

Step 3: Find your sales funnel leaks

Identifying the pages with low conversion rates can lead to making the right changes.

That’s why you must study your sales funnel to see where visitors are dropping off your pages. A tool like Google Analytics is very useful in finding these pages – and readily available to anyone with a website. Through the behavior flow, you can see how visitors move through your website and where they quit: 

Which pages have high bounce rates? Why are visitors bouncing off those pages? Which pages keep visitors longer? 

After answering these questions, you should view these pages to gain more insights about their performance.

Likewise, on important pages like your landing pages and sales pages, you should set conversion goals and easily track your conversion rates:

Step 4: Make simple landing pages

One of the most important rules in creating a landing page is to keep it simple.  The big reason why a simple landing page tends to perform better is that it provides little distraction to your visitor. Every element on the page is optimized towards conversions.

Through analysis, you’ll always find ways to make your landing pages simpler in order to improve conversions. 

What are the characteristics of a simple, effective landing page?

• A simple page design
• Clear and non-technical page copy
• A single offer
• Use of image or video with a clear message
• An obvious call to action button
• Mobile responsive
• No navigation bar

With this in mind, you can strip down your landing pages (and sales pages) until you have only elements that contribute to conversions.

A tool that can help you build simple and effective landing pages is Elementor. With it, you can create your landing page right in the WordPress dashboard. You can also insert your lead capture forms into the page to capture leads’ information for future processing.

Step 5: Add social proof

Social proof can save you a lot of stress in convincing your prospects. When you have 3 million customers, then the general assumption is that you’re doing many things right and your business is safe.

And if 4,000 people rate your business 4.7 out of 5, that’s louder than any sound you can make about your business.

Showing your page visitors that other people like them have used your product and loved it will have a more positive effect on conversions than anything you can say.

Common ways to use social proof are:

• Number of customers
• Testimonials
• Online reviews and ratings
• Number of products bought
• Number of products left

Step 6: Make your pages mobile-friendly and fast

In most industries, more people will visit your page on mobile compared to desktop. Even for Google searches, 60% of them are on mobile devices. Not only that, but even Google is now using mobile-first to examine and rank a page. 

If your page doesn’t work well on mobile (even if theoretically it is optimized for mobile devices), visitors will simply leave the page and find a suitable alternative. 

While building your website pages, it’s vital to use a website theme that’s mobile responsive. Likewise, if you’re creating a landing or sales page, you should use a builder that makes your pages mobile-friendly.

You can use the Google mobile-friendly test tool to see how mobile-friendly your page is. It will also provide recommendations for actions to take to increase mobile-friendliness.

If your page takes ages to load, you’ll get a single result: visitors will bounce. In fact, Google found that the probability of bounce increases by 32% when a page loads for up to 3 seconds.

That’s why you need to improve your website speed. Use a tool like Pingdom to get details about your website speed and what actions you can take to reduce your page size and increase speed.

Some common actions to take to increase your website speed include:

• Using a fast website host
• Minimizing page elements
• Compressing images and videos
• Using a content delivery network

Step 7: Carry out A/B tests consistently

After gathering information about your visitors and forming hypotheses, A/B tests help to discard or validate these hypotheses.

When you have a hypothesis that a change to your page will cause an increase in conversions, you can experiment by implementing that change on a variation of your page. If the change leads to lower conversions, you can discard your hypothesis.

However, if it leads to higher conversions, you can test for a longer period to reach statistical significance. After this, you can implement this change permanently.

It’s vital that you only test a single page element at a time to know the change responsible for your results. Some of the most important elements to test on your page are:

• Headline
• Page layout
• Call to action
• Offer
• Page copy
• Media (images, videos, etc.)
• Background
• Placement of buttons

A tool you can use to carry out A/B tests is Crazy Egg. Added to A/B testing capabilities, it also provides heat maps that show where your visitors dwell most on a page and you even have access to video recordings of how users navigate your website.

To give you an example of how powerful a single change can be on a webpage, 160 Driving Academy got a 161% increase in conversions after making one small change: replacing the stock image they used on their landing page with a unique image.

How does Conversion Rate Optimization Work?

Conversion rate is a ratio. It tells you what percentage of visitors to your website actually convert.

The equation is pretty simple:

Let’s say 100,000 people visited your website last month. Of those visitors, 3,000 bought a product.

Your conversion rate would be 3 percent (3,000/100,000*100).

If 10,000 people converted, your conversion rate would jump to 10 percent.

Depending on your site, you’ll usually have one of these conversion actions as your primary goal:

• Purchase
• Demo request
• Trial or free account signup
• Filling out a lead form
• Clicking an ad
• Becoming an email subscriber

This primary conversion goals are also called macro conversions. They’re the main goal of your entire site.

Your site might also have micro-conversions, these are small steps that a visitor takes towards the larger conversion goal. They include things like social media shares, viewing specific pages, adding products to a shopping cart, downloading PDFs, watching videos, and that sort of thing.

We focus on the primary goal (the macro conversion) of the site when talking about the overall conversions rate.

The Biggest Benefit of Conversion Rate Optimization

Let’s look at the impact from having a better conversion rate.

For our fictional business, we’ll say that the company is selling just one product worth $300.

In our first calculation, we came up with a conversion rate of just 3 percent. Three thousand people bought the product, which produced gross revenue of $900,000.

That sounds great. But what if we boosted that conversion rate to our second equation, which quantified conversions at 10 percent?

In this case, revenue jumps to $3 million (10,000 people bought a product worth $300). Big difference, right?

Conversion rate optimization really comes down to one major benefit.

You’ll get more customers from the same amount of traffic.

This has a huge impact on most businesses.

You probably have a monthly marketing budget that you use to maintain your traffic volume. Maybe it’s in paid marketing, maybe it’s in content or social. Either way, traffic costs money.

Conversion optimization, after it’s live, gives you more customers from the same amount of money.

In turn, you’ll see several great changes in your business:

• The acquisition cost per customer will come down. When your marketing budget stays the same and you get more customers, each customer costs less to acquire.
• Your profit per customer goes up.
• With more profit every month, you can invest more to grow your business faster or take more profit out of your business.

Spending a few weeks or months on conversion optimization can unlock the next step in your business.

Understanding the Parts of Conversion Optimization

Conversion rate optimization has a lot of moving parts. Here’s what they all mean:

• Call to action (CTA): Tell your visitors exactly what to do next.
• Conversion funnel: This is the series of steps that someone has to take in your site in order to complete the primary goal of your site.
• A/B testing: A common practice to verify conversion improvements. Two (or more) versions of your site are shown to visitors. Conversion rates are measured on each version to see which one is most effective.
• Multivariate testing (MVT): A version of A/B testing that tests multiple variables at a time.
• Usability: A set of best practices and processes for making your site more user-friendly. Often, this increases conversions by removing friction in your site.
• Customer development: Tools and processes for understanding your customers better. When you deeply understand your customers, it’s a lot easier to design websites that convert a larger percentage of your visitors.
• User recordings: A tool that records users as they move through your site. Gives lot of feedback on where people get stuck and where they really want to go. It’s a great source of ideas for increasing conversions.
• Analytics: tools for measuring visitors and users. Measurement is a key piece of improving conversion rates.
• Heatmaps: A type of report that shows where people click on a page using “hot” and “cold” colors. It’s a great tool for coming up with ideas to improve conversions.

Tell your customers exactly what you want them to do with a large, attention-grabbing CTA.

How to Building an Effective Conversion Optimization Strategy

Are you searching for conversion rate optimization tips? Let’s look at the list of metrics above. You need to know your starting metrics — a baseline if you will — so you’ll know whether your CRO methods actually work.

You can get lots of information for free via Google Analytics.

For instance, let’s say you want to start by focusing on bounce rate and time on page. Other metrics that might influence those numbers could include page load time and UX.

Start with a strategy that looks something like this:

• Condense all images to the smallest size possible
• Improve top-level navigation and add breadcrumbs
• Sprinkle internal links through every page to encourage click-throughs
• Use big subheads on pages with lots of content to keep people reading
• Add unique CTAs to every page

This is a good starting strategy. Test every one of them using both A/B testing and multivariate testing to see how you come out, then repeat the process.

E-commerce Conversion Optimization

In the e-commerce world, conversions often happen at prodigious paces. That’s especially true if you sell inexpensive products.

You have to make the purchase as simple and easy as possible. Shorten the checkout process, offer more forms of payment, and allow customers to buy products as “guests” rather than having to create an account.

Step-by-Step Process to Double Your Conversion Rate

Conversion rate optimization best practices can help you improve your results from the very beginning. In other words, you won’t have to start from scratch.

Following are some of the tried-and-true best practices I’ve used to accelerate my websites’ growth. You’ll learn how to do conversion rate optimization:

1. Identify your potential customer

Who belongs in your target market. And, sometimes, more importantly, who doesn’t? You want every marketing message to find its target. It must be so specific and compelling that your ideal customer can’t refuse it.

2. Survey users

Ask your users to complete surveys or polls. Keep the questions brief and few so you get more responses. Avoid repetitive or boring questions. You’re looking for insights into your target customers’ specific wants and needs.

3. Collect and analyze data

Remember those metrics we mentioned earlier? Start tracking them. You can use conversion rate optimization tools like Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and Google Analytics to make sure you cover all your bases.

As you gather more data, look for patterns. Maybe most of your customers find you via Twitter, for instance, or read your about page before looking at your products. You can use that information to boost conversion rates.

4. Run A/B tests

We can’t stress enough how important it is to run A/B tests. You should always test every aspect of your offers because you don’t want to leave money on the table.

Tools like Crazy Egg have built-in A/B testing functionality. This means you don’t have to comb through the data yourself and develop a pounding headache. Instead, you know the “winner” and the winning variant gets the majority of the traffic even before the test concludes.

5. Discover the exact journey visitors take through your site

Mapping your buyers’ journey can yield lots of tasty nuggets of data. Do they read lots of your blog posts? Do they follow you on social media? How far do they scroll down each page?

6. Focus on the content that matters using heatmap analysis

The most important pages on your website, such as your landing pages and product pages, deserve special attention. Run heatmap analysis on those pages to see where people click and how they use the page. You can then optimize it for maximum conversions.

7. Create the perfect page with A/B testing

A/B testing doesn’t stop after just one test. In fact, you might need dozens of tests before you craft the perfect page.

Test your headline, body copy, hero image, CTA, CTA button color, font size, font color, and anything else that might impact conversions.

8. Don’t “guess”

Everyone starts out with a guess, but that’s where the guesswork should stop. Once you’re actively collecting data, make decisions based on what the numbers tell you.

9. Guide your customers

CTAs and directional indicators can help you guide your customers where you want them to go. Be strategic about where you place CTAs, arrows, navigational panels, and other elements.

10. Reduce friction

Remove any elements that give the user pause or promote objections. For instance, if you don’t need a paragraph of copy on your sales page, delete it. Or, if you want to make the information more digestible, turn it into bullet points.

Why is Conversion Rate Optimization Important?

Conversion rate optimization is important because it allows you to lower your customer acquisition costs by getting more value from the visitors and users you already have. By optimizing your conversion rate you can increase revenue per visitor, acquire more customers, and grow your business.

For example, if a landing page has a conversion rate of 10% and receives 2000 visitors a month, then the page will generate 200 conversions per month. If the conversion rate can be improved to 15% by optimizing different elements on the page, the number of conversions generated jumps by 50% to 300 per month.

There is always room for improvement when it comes to increasing conversions, and the best companies are constantly iterating and improving their sites and apps to create a better experience for their users and grow conversions.

Identifying Areas To Optimize

Once your conversion metrics have been identified, the next step in the conversion rate optimization process is to identify which part of your conversion funnel you want to optimize.

Typically, you will want to begin optimizing the portion of your conversion funnel that receives the greatest amount of traffic or generates the greatest numbers of conversions. By focusing on these pages you will be able to see the results of your changes faster and have a larger impact on your business.

Read Also: Email Marketing – How to do it Right For Effective Sales Conversion

Other potential places to start include your highest value pages or pages that are underperforming compared to the rest of your site. Again, improving these areas can have the greatest immediate impact on your conversion goals.

For example, a clothing retailer may find that their page for hats receives a lot of traffic but has a conversion rate that is much lower than the rest of the site. By improving the conversion rate of that page, the retailer will be able to see a big improvement in sales for their CRO efforts.

Conclusion

Conversion optimization is not an exact science. You need to gather information about your visitors, form hypotheses, and test those hypotheses.

Then you need to do it all over again … and again and again, because conversion optimization is a continuous process. There’s always room for improvement when it comes to conversion rates and customer behaviour and preferences are constantly changing. 

Follow the steps outlined in this guide to help you develop a conversion optimization strategy, put them into practice and start generating more leads, conversions and sales for your business.