Often working hand-in-hand with SEO, CRO (conversion rate optimisation) is an essential part of digital marketing strategies.
If you are a marketer, pulling traffic is an important part of your role, whether it’s through SEO, ad campaigns or SEM. However, successfully generating traffic doesn’t necessarily guarantee conversions. You need your users to take action to achieve high conversion rates, but how?
In this article, we will explain what CRO is, how it works and why it is important.
What is CRO?
The purpose of CRO (conversion rate optimisation) is to optimise your entire marketing strategy. It’s the practice of compelling users to engage with your content and, most importantly, take action. This may include subscribing to your newsletter or purchasing a product.
Many marketing strategies focus on generating quality leads, grabbing the attention of a target audience, and improving site traffic, but these only make up for barely half of the journey toward getting your users to the end goal – which is to act. Your conversion rate is the number of people who take your desired action.
The average conversion rate for a website is 3% and under, but you may wonder how it is possible to increase conversions. With the simple yet powerful strategy of CRO, anyone can reach their goal of greater revenue.
How does CRO work?
CRO gives you greater control over how your users interact with your content. It puts you in charge of the paths they take to achieve conversion, but it isn’t always easy to get them to complete their journey.
To achieve conversion rates, users must take action on your website either by getting in touch with you or buying a product. A successful CRO increases profits and website traffic and ensures you are being customer-centric. Optimising your conversion rate includes analysing and gathering data, running tests, and finding solutions to form a new hypothesis. The core components of the CRO process are website and customer analysis, site experimentation and A/B testing, implementation, and evolution. Once you have done these, you repeat until you have figured out what it is you do (or don’t do) that increases your conversions, whether it’s to do with your content quality, webpage loading speed, CTA placements, or visuals.
Why is CRO so important?
CRO is important as it ensures you generate sales. No matter if your website gets millions of visitors per month, if you have a conversion rate of zero per cent, then you aren’t going to make any money. It is also important as all marketers know how expensive it is to generate traffic. Whether you use Google or Facebook ads, or another PPC platform to drive traffic to a website, you may wonder why you’re spending so much money but not generating any sales. CRO ensures you maximise your ROAS (return-on-ad-spend). It’s a cost-effective solution that gives you the results you want.
How can I maintain successful conversion rates?
It is difficult to achieve high conversion rates, let alone maintain them, especially if you are a small company. However, once you reach your goal, it is important to keep repeating the entire CRO process to try and maintain your sales. This means regularly analysing your website and customers, and thinking of new ways to improve UI (user interface) and UX (user experience).
If you need help with understanding or enforcing CRO processes, get in touch with our marketing experts today.