Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing your site to increase the likelihood that your visitors will complete these actions. CRO is all about creating a website experience that will turn your visitors into customers and increase your leads and conversion rates.
So what are some of the ways that you can impact your CRO? Here’s the list you should be focusing on:
- A/B Testing: A/B or split testing is the process of comparing two versions of a site page against each other and seeing which has a better performance rate in terms of visitors. These results can help you to understand your current website design, validate new design changes, and ultimately improve your conversion rates. There are a number of really great online tools available to help you with your A/B testing; check them out in our latest post here.
- Segmentation: your website has many different types of visitors: some may have found you by accident and will browse a few pages before leaving, never to return again, while others may have found you through a PPC ad and may purchase from you in the future, and still others may have typed your website directly into their search engine and intend to buy from you this instant. You obviously want your focus to be on the visitors who have found your site through paid advertising or SEO search engine results, and especially those who have searched directly for you: hence, segmentation. Properly segmenting your website content to these different types of visitors will help you to convert them more efficiently. For example, you may choose to present a different call-to-action button depending on the type of visitor.
- Buyer’s Journey Analysis: The Buyer’s Journey is the research process a person goes through, leading up to a purchase. This is a model that is used to help sales and marketing understand a buyer’s needs, problems, and behaviour through the buying cycle. From this, you can develop appropriate content to address each specific stage of the journey and help guide prospects along the way. Collecting and organizing the way that your customers research your products and services, and the way that they use your website, is the best way for you to truly understand your customer base and how you can encourage them to take specific actions once they’ve reached your site.
These are just a few of the ways that you can experiment with your conversion rate optimization, and therefore, your overall conversion rate. CRO isn’t about pushing all of your website visitors to convert, but rather, guiding already-engaged prospects through the optimized pages of your website until they’ve achieved a goal that is beneficial to both of you.
To get some more help on the website-design aspect of conversion rate optimization, check out our free creative brief template, and learn how you can make some easy improvements.