Are you an online store owner looking to boost your sales? If the answer is yes, you’re in the right place. In the competitive world of e-commerce, generating sales requires careful planning and execution at every stage of the sales funnel. From website building to marketing strategies and customer service, each step plays a crucial role in achieving success.
In this article, we’ll delve into a crucial but often overlooked aspect of the sales funnel – conversion. After all, it’s the conversion that can turn a casual visitor into a paying customer and transform abandoned carts into revenue.
The Goal of Conversion Rate Optimization
At its core, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is all about getting more people to take specific actions on your website. Whether it’s signing up for your newsletter, scheduling a consultation, or making a purchase, the ultimate aim is to convert as many visitors as possible. While CRO and SEO (search engine optimization) share the goal of increasing sales, they take different routes to get there.
SEO focuses on improving your website’s visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) to attract organic traffic, while CRO concentrates on enhancing your website’s performance to transform visitors into customers. Together, they create a winning formula for online success.
Where to Implement a CRO Strategy
Now that we’ve introduced CRO, it’s crucial to determine if it’s the right fit for your online business. Not every website is ready to dive into CRO, as it demands specific prerequisites:
1. Adequate Budget
CRO is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It requires investment in expensive tools and services, coordination across multiple teams, and time. If you’re on a tight budget, it may not be the best choice.
2. Sufficient Website Traffic
CRO thrives on a substantial volume of website traffic. If your site attracts only a minimal number of visitors, your resources might be better spent on other strategies like SEO or advertising.
3. Commitment to Testing
CRO involves frequent design changes and testing, which necessitates the involvement of design and development teams. For smaller websites with limited traffic, this could be an inefficient use of resources.
Once you’ve assessed your readiness for CRO, let’s delve into its significance and explore tactics to achieve the best results.
Why Is Conversion Rate So Important?
A well-executed CRO strategy directly impacts your company’s sales and revenue in several ways:
1. Boosts Leads and Sales
CRO ensures that your website guides visitors smoothly, making it easy for them to take action. When users find the information they need effortlessly, conversion becomes natural.
2. Improves Customer Satisfaction
By addressing your audience’s specific needs and pain points, CRO enhances user experience. This leads to increased customer satisfaction as visitors feel understood and catered to.
3. Provides Better Customer Insights
Understanding your leads better allows you to create targeted and valuable content. Whether it’s a catalog, brochure, or case study, CRO helps you identify what your leads want and where to find it.
4. Simplifies Selling
CRO encourages messaging tailored to your ideal buyer persona(s), making it easier to sell your products. It shifts the focus from product features to customer benefits.
5. Enhances Ad Effectiveness
With a solid CRO strategy, your ad writing and targeting become streamlined. This optimization reduces wasted ad spend and improves conversion rates, ultimately increasing your ROI.
CRO Formulas
To fully grasp CRO, let’s look at some essential CRO calculations that will help you understand and measure its impact on your website:
CRO Calculation 1: Conversion Rate
Conversion Rate % = (Leads Generated ÷ Website Traffic) x 100
CRO Calculation 2: Number of Net New Customers
Number of New Customers = New Revenue Goal ÷ Average Sales Price
CRO Calculation 3: Total Orders Received for the Day
Total Orders Received on your eCommerce site Number of New Customers ÷ Lead-to-Customer Close Rate %
Now, let’s see these formulas in action with an example:
Suppose your website receives 10,000 visitors per month and generates 100 leads, resulting in 10 customers. This gives you a 1% website visitor-to-lead conversion rate.
But what if you aim to have 20 customers each month? You could try doubling your website traffic to 20,000 visitors, but that’s risky. Instead, consider optimizing your conversion rate. If you increase it from 1% to 2%, you’ll double both your leads and customers, as shown in the table below:
| Company | Monthly Site Traffic | Conversion Rate | Leads Generated | New Customers |
| A | 10,000 | 1% | 100 | 10 |
| B | 10,000 | 2% | 200 | 20 |
| C | 10,000 | 3% | 300 | 30 |
As you can see, a simple increase in the conversion rate can lead to significant growth in your business, all without the need for more website traffic. Think of it like fixing a leaky bucket – increasing traffic without addressing the conversion rate is like pouring more water into a leaky bucket; it won’t fix the root problem.
CRO Strategies
Now that we’ve established the importance of CRO, let’s explore strategies to get you started:
1. User-Friendly Design
Ensure your website is easy to navigate, with clear calls to action (CTAs) that guide visitors towards conversion.
2. A/B Testing
Experiment with different webpage elements, such as headlines, images, and CTAs, to discover what resonates most with your audience.
3. Mobile Optimization
Given the prevalence of mobile browsing, ensure your site is mobile-friendly to capture a wider audience.
4. Streamlined Checkout Process
Make the purchasing process as smooth as possible, reducing friction and cart abandonment rates.
5. Customer Feedback
Listen to your customers, analyze their feedback, and use it to make informed improvements to your website.
The Myth of Average Conversion Rates
Many businesses grow overly concerned with the average conversion rate for different goals or industries. However, this information is hard to find and largely unreliable due to all of the potential variables. For this reason, while you may be curious to know what the average conversion rate is for other building materials companies, you shouldn’t use any such data in your strategy.
Your current conversion rate is the best metric you can use to guide your conversion rate optimization strategy. Use your current conversion rate to establish a benchmark that you can compare to going forward as you make changes in an attempt to improve your conversion rate.
Why Is Tracking Your Users’ Actions Important For Measuring Conversion Rate?
Data collection and tracking are essential for CRO — you cannot achieve high-quality CRO without a solid data collection strategy and accurate tracking setup.
Tracking conversions is based on relevant collected data from your users — without having this data, you can’t see the preferences of your audiences. This means you cannot provide products and services that would interest them and increase the conversions on the website.
Deciphering Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Conversion Rate Optimization (often referred to just as CRO) is pretty easy to get your head around. It’s simply the process of optimizing your website design for more conversions.
A conversion can be any valuable action such as signing up for a newsletter, following your brand on social media, or filling out a contact form.
However, in e-commerce, making a sale is typically seen as the most valuable conversion.
So:
Conversion = doing something valuable
Optimization = improving your website to drive more conversions
But what about the ‘rate’ part?
This is simply how conversions are measured. The most widely accepted calculation for your conversion rate is:
(Number of conversions / Total number of visitors) * 100 = your conversion rate percentage.
For example, a website that gets 500 visitors a day and makes 10 sales would calculate its conversion rate like this:
(10/500) * 100 = 2%
This means they convert 2% of their visitors into paying customers.
The Significance of Improving Conversion Rates
Improving your conversion rate is important for online stores as it’s crucial to ensure a sustainable revenue model and drive profitability. Focusing on CRO can also help improve user experience and increase customer satisfaction. Ultimately, developing a more robust conversion rate will help you create a better Return On Investment (ROI) from your marketing and sales activity.
You can learn more about the benefits of conversion rate optimization in our dedicated article on why it’s worthwhile.
Top Conversion Rate Optimization Tools
Now that we’ve grasped the concept of CRO, let’s explore the tools that can help you boost your conversion rates.
1. Web Analytics
Web analytics tools provide insights into what’s happening on your site.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool, and it will help you track hundreds of metrics including average time spent on a page and the number of pages visited per session. Google Analytics is also the best multi-attribution tool, allowing you to collect data from across websites.
Heap
Heap is the fastest way to visualize your customer journeys so that you can make sure your users are getting the right content in the right places. With just one snippet, it provides the most complete data. The only downside is that it isn’t free.
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is a strong contender for user pathing and reporting. By recording all of the actions taken on your site and allowing you to explore it in detail using an Excel spreadsheet, Adobe Analytics provides a technical interface for reviewing site data.
2. User Behavior Analytics
While web analytics help you understand who is coming to your website, behavior analytics dive beneath the surface to reveal how users are interacting with it.
Hotjar
Hotjar is another heatmap tool that combines a visual heatmap with feedback tools to help you dial in the customer experience based on your specific users.
FullStory
By combining qualitative and quantitative data, FullStory aims to eliminate data gaps and give you a complete picture of how your users interact with your website.
Lucky Orange
Through heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and other online tools, Lucky Orange helps increase your site’s conversion rate and collects insightful data on those who visit your site.
3. CRO Testing
Conversion rate optimization testing tools help you keep track of different variables so that you can understand the true impact of every change you make. The following three CRO testing tools are recommended by Google as Google Analytics (after Optimize sunsetting) will be directly integrated into any of these.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg combines a visual heatmap with a wealth of analytics to help you track user behavior. With Crazy Egg, you can even look at a specific user’s journey on your website, which is extremely valuable for conversion rate optimization.
VWO Testing
VWO Testing is ideal for running A/B tests across your website. By displaying different versions to different segments of your audience, you can compare the layouts, wordings, and placements that perform best. Split testing also allows you to make improvements much faster as you can compare multiple versions at once.
AB Tasty
AB Tasty allows marketing, product, and engineering teams to collaborate and improve user experience across digital platforms using omnichannel strategies. With AB Tasty, you can A/B test different marketing ideas to gather engagement data and discover what works best for your audience.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization requires a calculated strategy and a handful of metrics to see real, consistent results. Here are some common mistakes you should avoid when planning for CRO.
1. Not Having a Goal
If you don’t have a specific goal in mind, there is nothing to optimize for. Define your conversion goal and start figuring out what that conversion is worth to your business before moving forward.
2. Focusing Too Much on One Element at a Time
If you try to optimize one element at a time, you’re going to end up investing far too much time and energy into the CRO process. Make use of split testing tools so that you can effectively test multiple elements and versions at once.
3. Testing Only One Type of User
Your website gets many different visitors, and each one has various needs and priorities based on where they came from. Keeping the referral source in mind will help you avoid going back and forth with a CRO strategy that only seems to work half the time.
4. Neglecting Mobile Optimization
In today’s mobile-dominated world, neglecting mobile optimization can be a costly mistake. Ensure that your website is responsive and user-friendly on various devices to capture a wider audience.
5. Ignoring User Feedback
Your users can provide valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t on your website. Ignoring user feedback can lead to missed opportunities for improvement.
Ready to Begin Your CRO Journey?
Conversion rate optimization is a powerful tool in the world of online sales. It not only boosts leads and sales but also enhances customer satisfaction, provides valuable insights, simplifies selling, and optimizes ad effectiveness. By understanding and applying CRO strategies, you can transform your website into a conversion powerhouse.
Ready to supercharge your online sales? Start your CRO journey today and watch your business thrive!
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the main goal of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
The main goal of CRO is to get more people to take specific actions on your website, ultimately converting them into customers, leads, or subscribers.
2. Is CRO suitable for all websites?
No, CRO may not be suitable for all websites. It requires a sufficient budget, substantial website traffic, and a commitment to testing and optimization.
3. Why is tracking user actions important for CRO?
Tracking user actions is essential for CRO because it provides valuable data about user preferences and behavior. This data helps in making informed decisions to optimize your website for better conversions.
4. What are some key CRO metrics to monitor?
Key CRO metrics include conversion rate, bounce rate, cart abandonment rate, and average order value.
5. What are the benefits of CRO for small businesses?
CRO can significantly benefit small businesses by maximizing the value of their existing website traffic, reducing customer acquisition costs, and increasing overall ROI.
6. Why is mobile optimization important in CRO?
Mobile optimization is crucial in CRO because a significant portion of internet users access websites through mobile devices. Neglecting mobile optimization can lead to a loss of potential conversions from mobile users.
