When you want the most from your web marketing efforts, the benefits of conversion rate optimization (CRO) cannot be overstated.
Whether you’re looking for subscriptions, leads, sales, or a higher return on your marketing investments, conversion rate optimization is the path to follow.
The thing about CRO is that it works. The Weather Channel managed to increase conversions by 225% by simplifying their homepage, for instance. The Olympic Store boosted conversions by 7.74% through the simple act of improving site navigation.
Those are just two examples of the benefits of conversion rate optimization.
Here are eight benefits of CRO that you’ll want to put into place starting today to get better web marketing results for your time and money investment.
Why is Conversion Rate Optimization So Important?
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.
What is Exactly the Purpose of Conversion Rate Optimization?
The purpose of conversion rate optimization is simply to make your website more efficient at driving visitors toward your business goal.
You aim should be to have every element of your website working together, from the layout and design to the images and text, as well as videos, plugins, and all the rest.
CRO is about finding the exact combination of elements that will work together to maximize your conversions.
This means that every element must be carefully considered to determine if it’s optimal for your audience.
This will require looking at your site with fresh eyes and from the top down, from the headline and navigation to images, text, videos, graphics, and everything else visitors to your site will experience.
Conversion rate optimization is about ensuring that every single part of your website is the best it can be, and that the whole site drives to leads, sales, revenue, or all of the above.
8 Incredible Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Telling you that conversion rate optimization will make your site better is one thing, but it’s quite another to spell out all the ways your website and conversions will be improved with CRO.
The fact is, your website hasn’t come close to reaching its true potential if you haven’t attempted conversion rate optimization to any degree.
Many businesses claim that gaining higher quality leads is one of their biggest obstacles.
Image Source: Trew Marketing
When you put effort into making your website as valuable as possible, and one that’s tailored strictly for your audience, you’ll be able to focus on only the leads that show strong interest. That’s precisely what you want, as those individuals have a higher likelihood of becoming paying customers.
Here are eight other benefits to CRO that should inspire you to get started:
Benefit #1: Understanding 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.
Image Source: The UX Blog
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.
Benefit #2: Boosting Sales
When you improve your website’s conversion rate, you essentially grease the skids to higher sales.
You also shorten the time from lead to purchase, which makes your site not only more successful, but also more efficient.
Once you find out who is visiting your site and what’s stopping them from converting, you can use that information to make your site more audience-friendly, and sales-worthy.
You’ll know your conversion rate optimization is working when you manage to get more sales from the same number of visitors. To do that, you’ll need to engage in a variety of CRO techniques, such as:
- Website testing
- Upgrading your site’s visuals
- Reducing navigation options and form fields
- Enhancing your text content
Once you get all your site’s elements working together for a cohesive goal, you’ll find your sales improving and your overall return on investment growing as well.
Benefit #3: Stealing Customers from Competitors
This is one of those benefits of CRO that few people think about.
No matter what industry your website falls within, it’s probably a given that there are at least one or more brands competing against you.
When you engage in conversion rate optimization, thus making your site as appealing to site visitors as possible, you’ll potentially make yours the go-to website in your field.
When your images, videos, graphics, navigation, and text work seamlessly together, you’ll make your site so valuable and efficient that visitors would have to be gluttons for punishment to choose a competing site over yours.
After all, why would customers select a site that wasn’t as visually appealing, that was slower to load, and that didn’t offer as much value as yours?
CRO will ensure that your site is superior to others you’re competing against, helping you take more market share while boosting conversions and profits simultaneously.
Benefit #4: Lowering Your Cost Per Lead
If you use paid advertising, you are likely frustrated with all those clicks that don’t end up converting. These wasted clicks cost you money and don’t result in revenue.
Imagine, however, how efficient your website could be if most of the people who clicked on your paid ads actually converted. That’s what CRO can do for you.
Conversion rate optimization is about finding the right ad-to-landing page pairs, as well as the right combination of elements onsite, in order to maximize the amount of people who click-to-subscribe, click-to-buy, or take some other action.
When you lower your cost per lead, your budget stretches further and you put more profit in your pocket at the end of the day.
It also costs money to publish a website, set up email marketing, and so on.
With conversion rate optimization, your investments might stay the same, but the amount you get back in return will grow.
Therefore, if your website isn’t very profitable, conversion rate optimization can expand your bottom line exactly as you expect.
Benefit #5: Incremental Business Returns
A prime benefit of conversion rate optimization is that every change you make to your site that leads to an increase in conversions is an incremental win.
Let’s take the example of an online merchant looking to optimize purchase rates on a high-end product.
If they increase their conversion rate just 1% by running a successful A/B test, that extra 1% of revenue will keep coming in day in and day out. If they have a high volume of sales, 1% can actually translate to thousands of extra dollars for their ecommerce business.
Even if you typically have a low volume of sales, if you run several successful A/B tests, collectively the incremental lift can be significant in terms of dollars brought in by CRO tactics.
And that’s assuming a very modest conversion rate increase from an A/B test. Ecommerce company WallMonkeys saw a 550% increase in conversions when they tested a new variant on their homepage!
Benefit #6: Getting an SEO Boost
Google tends to reward sites that are valuable to search engine visitors. Conversion rate optimization is the best way to ensure your site is as valuable as possible, with the side bonus that this leads to more visibility in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
With more visibility comes more leads, which in turn leads to more customers and ROI.
CRO should attract more return business, as well, which continues the customer cycle and leads to greater profits and website success for years to come.
Benefit #7: Improving Brand Perception
When your images, text, graphics, navigation, and all other website elements are on-point, you’ll find yourself making quite an impression on new site visitors.
There’s nothing more refreshing than landing on a site and having it seamlessly guide you to your objective. Whether you’re looking for information or a product, an effective and efficient website will make your user experience more enjoyable, which in turn helps with referrals.
One of the biggest benefits of conversion rate optimization is that these pleased visitors might just start sharing your site on Reddit, Facebook, and other social platforms. This can improve the amount of leads to your site. And if you’ve done your job with conversion rate optimization, all those leads will have a higher likelihood of becoming paid and loyal customers.
Benefit #8: Increased Customer Lifetime Value
A website that is easier to visit and navigate makes you want to return over and again. This is great news for any businesses that need to put effort into recouping previous customers.
30% of customers said that they’d rather buy from a website they’ve already bought from previously.
A conversion optimized website is great for new and returning visitors.
How to Start a Conversion Rate Optimization Strategy (CRO)
Now that you know the myriad benefits of conversion rate optimization, the next step is to start putting CRO tactics to work for your site.
Here are just a few places to start:
Website A/B Testing
This conversion rate optimization method involves cloning a page you currently have on your site, making one change to the design, and tracking whether the change results in a higher conversion rate on a goal of your choosing (usually this is a purchase, subscription, or email signup).
There are many A/B testing tools out there that make it easy for you to identify whether your design changes have led to greater conversions.
Improving Visuals
Your audience will decide very quickly whether to remain on your site or bounce. For that reason, you need to make a great first impression. This can be done with:
- Lean and pretty visuals
- Easy-to-navigate menus
- A clean and simple layout
- Relevant and high-quality images
- Professionally-produced videos
If your visuals leave a lot to be desired, your conversions will likely be low.
Enhancing Your Site’s Content: Most visitors will land on your site looking for information. This means that your headlines, accompanying text, and all other written information needs to be factual, interesting, grammatically correct, and free of spelling errors.
Your text should also be formatted for skimmers, which means bulleted and numbered lists, small paragraphs, and plenty of space between paragraphs.
As far as length, some audiences respond to long text while others prefer shorter amounts of content. A scrollmap tool will let you know whether people are engaged the whole way down your page, or dropping off at a certain point.
Limiting the Scope of Your Site: Some people hate too many choices. If your website has too many focal points, you might end up confusing visitors, which in turn could harm your conversions. A good way to engage in conversion rate optimization is to hone the focus of your site.
Give site visitors one or fewer options and they just might comply, leading to greater conversions and higher ROI.
Reducing the number of form fields: Your website conversions might be hurting because your forms are too long.
As a rule, you’ll only want to ask for as much information as is necessary to convert a visitor. For many web marketers, a name and email address are enough.
If your forms ask for their business name, their role within the organization, their income level, age, and other information, you may be forcing visitors to abandon their forms before they have a chance to submit.
More site visitors may end up filling out your forms if you limit form questions. This CRO technique may seem frivolous, but you’d be surprised at how often conversions can get a major boost simply by cutting form fields down to a more manageable level.
Improving CTAs: Your site’s calls-to-action may not be very noticeable. The language used with your CTAs may not be very motivating.
CRO, then, is about changing the color of your CTAs from green to red or vice versa. It’s about changing the language from “Subscribe!” to “Get Instant Updates and 10% Off.”
You won’t know if your CTAs are effective or not unless you engage in proper testing and gauge the winner from your audience’s perspective, but the simple act of improving your CTAs could help your conversions soar.
Establishing Trust: You can run an A/B test to find out whether adding a trust element to your site like company logos, customer testimonials, or case studies results in greater conversions.
Start Using CRO Tools to Improve Your Conversion Rate
If all the above sounds time consuming and above your skill level, not to worry. Conversion rate optimization tools exist that will let you optimize your site bit-by-bit with simple yet powerful functionality.
Crazy Egg, for instance, is the first developer of the CRO tool heatmaps. These visual representations let you see how site visitors are interacting with your site, where they’re hovering, clicking, and navigating.
You can record site visitors and A/B test site elements in real time, and at any scale.
The best part is that Crazy Egg offers a 30-day free trial. That means that you can engage in CRO for a full month before deciding if it will help with your conversion rate optimization efforts.
When you can view how your site visitors are interacting with your site and you’re able to test and optimize your site with quality images, text, videos, and all other content, you’ll soon have on your hands a site that has finally become a “conversion-generating machine.”
Conclusion
Even with extensive market research, you might need to get to know your audience a little better.
You might need to test your images, videos, text, website layout, navigation, and form fields, before you find the ideal elements that contribute to maximum conversions.
This is conversion rate optimization in a nutshell.
By looking at your site from the top down and gauging every single element to determine which ones your audience most responds to, you can improve the number and quality of your leads, amount of sales, and boost revenue and ROI.
What’s better than improving your site so that it provides maximum value? That’s what CRO is all about.
Jason Little
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