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Conversion Rate Optimization: The Ultimate Beginners Friendly Guide

Everyone wants to drive more traffic to their website and landing pages, but not sure where to start. That’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in. Conversion rates are one of the most useful indicators of how well your website is performing. CRO is the process of maximizing conversions by converting visitors into leads. No matter your industry, size, or specialty, you can use and benefit from conversion rate marketing. Getting more out of existing traffic and leads (versus entirely new traffic) can propel companies toward long-term, sustainable growth. That’s why every website owner needs to invest in conversion rate optimization – to reap the benefits of their traffic converting.

Let’s look at some of the most important things you need to know about CRO. In this guide, we’ll detail what CRO is, what its benefits are, and key CRO elements.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is focused on persuading more of your website visitors to take the desired action you want them to take. Desired actions can include purchasing a product, clicking ‘add to cart’, signing up for a service, filling out a form, or clicking on a link.

By increasing your conversion rate, you increase your website leads without actually needing more traffic. To improve your CRO process, you need to understand how users move through your site, what actions they take, and what’s stopping them from completing your goals. Then, you use that understanding (and data) to make informed changes to your site to reduce drop-outs and increase conversions.

How to Calculate Conversion Rate?

Your site’s conversion rate is the number of times a user completes a goal divided by your site traffic. The equation is pretty straightforward, Conversion rate = Number of Goal Completions / Total Website Traffic.

For example, let’s say your website had 1,000 visitors and 200 conversions last week.

Conversion rate = (200/1000) x 100 = 20%

What are the benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization?

There are lots of benefits of Conversion rate optimization. Those benefits are not necessarily directly related to attracting organic website traffic or ranking on a search engine results page (SERP) but ultimately it will help to grow your business. Let’s look at some benefits you can get from having a better conversion rate.

• CRO allows you to analyze the performance of your site by running tests and looking for the best possible variations that improve your site’s performance.
• Conversion rate optimization allows you to lower your customer acquisition costs by getting more value from the visitors and users you already have.
• CRO helps you tweak your website and the funnels to make them easier to use for your visitors, thereby getting them to take the actions you want them to, and increasing conversions.
• CRO ensures that you get the hard data about your audience and use it to make better decisions including adjusting different elements on your site for better performance and profitability.
• As you apply more and newer CRO strategies to your eCommerce store, you find out things like what your visitors need, what they want, why they come to your site and other behaviors of your visitors.
• CRO ensures that you get to reach the right prospects and enjoy sustainable, repeatable, and consistent growth.
• CRO helps build this trust as you get to know when and how to target your customers with the right offers.
• SEO and CRO have a few overlapping areas. When you work effectively on CRO, you will reap the benefits of it for SEO.
• Even small changes in your conversion rate can increase your sales with the same traffic you already have which generates huge profits.
• Since CRO focuses on improving user experience to drive conversions, it can help you create higher-quality content.

Key Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Elements:

Unfortunately, there are no specific elements that will work every time. However, here is a Conversion Rate Optimization checklist that often has a big impact on increasing your conversion rates. Here are some applicable conversion rate optimization elements you can implement on your website. Understanding these elements and how they affect performance will help guide you through each stage of the CRO process.

1. Run A/B tests:

In A/B testing you can quickly and easily test different versions of your website copy, content offers, images, form questions, and web pages to determine which version performs better and results in the most conversions. That’s the reason A/B testing is also called Split testing. For instance, you can A/B test two versions of your homepage with differing CTA buttons to see which gets higher traffic. And with the result, you can collect valuable data and make careful and considered changes to your visitor experience. In short, A/B testing allows you to consistently alter and fine-tune your website, based on real user engagement.

A/B testing is important but you don’t have to A/B test every CRO improvement you want to make to your website. More A/B testing would require a lot of traffic, more time, and more effort. Ideally, you need to test different versions of your content (like different call-to-action buttons or different page layouts) to see which version increases your conversion rates the most. Low-cost A/B testing tools like VWO, and Crazy Egg are great places you can start.

2. Call-to-action buttons:

A call-to-action (CTA) is a request for customers to take the desired action. It is a short, concise, and verb-oriented phrase that tells your visitors what they can do next. This action could be anything from subscribing to a newsletter, purchasing, availing services, and many more.

When it comes to increasing your website’s conversion rate, Calls to action (CTA) is one of the most effective ways. To improve your CTA’s effectiveness, improve the wording, style, color, size, and location of them on your pages. Websites can have many different CTAs since they need to suit many different customer needs, but landing pages should be focused on a single goal and have only one CTA. This prevents people from getting distracted by all the different choices.

3. Design Landing Page:

When your prospects click on an ad, sign up for a webinar, or download an ebook, they’ll go to a landing page. So landing page is the first time prospects learn deeply about your company. To define the usability and success of your website, landing page design is the first and foremost element. Make sure your landing pages are focused, uncluttered, and fulfill your visitors’ main needs to improve your conversion rates. While adding any elements to your page, remember to keep things simple and if you feel that a certain line of text takes away from the objective, then consider removing it instead of cluttering up important space. Ensure that the design of the landing page matches the rest of your site, don’t turn your landing page into a microsite that confuses the visitor.

4. Navigation Menu:

In the Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) program, the navigation menu is one of the first things you should improve because it plays an essential role in your site’s user experience. The easier your navigation experience is, the more time users will spend on your site. Provide your website visitors with a responsive, optimized navigation bar and you’re guaranteed to see an improvement in your conversion rate. Try to ensure your visitors are easily and quickly able to accomplish their goals and able to move to important sections of your site.

Optimizing your site navigation is all about putting your customer front and center so you need to put some effort into making it more customer-friendly. One of the most common mistakes of websites is putting standard navigation elements in unusual places. Put navigation in standard places where people expect to find it. Also, limit your navigation to as few items as possible. Websites with hundreds of links on the home page look cluttered and distract user’s focus. In addition, having a mobile-responsive navigation menu is essential to any website.

5. Copy:

A well-designed website always gets more traffic, at the same time publishing blog articles opens the door to a big opportunity for conversions. Your Content can verbally hook your visitors and convert them into potential leads. If your text doesn’t grab the attention of your visitors and intrigue them to read the rest of your content, then there will be a greater chance of them exiting your website, lowering your conversion rates.

To make your content relatable, keep it simple. It must also be clear, concise, and to the point, and portray your brand’s persona in the most efficient manner. Headlines are typically the first and foremost thing that defines their first impression of your business. Use headlines that attract visitors to read your content. Use necessary subheadings to break down the content into glance-able chunks. That way, you can convey information quickly without delving into extensive explanations or long walls of text. Focus on the font type, font size, and color to ensure it captures your visitors’ attention and is easily readable. Bulleted and numbered lists are also helpful since they’re easier for visitors to scan and understand quickly.

6. Forms:

Studies show that forms tend to generate more leads and conversions. But a lot of times we forget about the importance of optimizing and tweaking our forms for maximum conversions. Try to add forms on the landing page, because the ultimate purpose of a landing page is to impress and convince people enough to make them take the desired action. It’s the influence and engagement that matter.

Most studies point out that when placing your forms and CTAs on your landing page, placing them just above is more likely to bring engagement. Make sure you aren’t scaring away your visitors and customers with too many form fields. Adding excessive form fields is the best way to kill your form conversion rate. That’s why you should avoid intimidating form fields that seem to take forever to fill out.

7. Speed Test:

A faster loading site is not just good for improving your conversion rates but also for improving your SEO rankings. So with other tests and optimizations, you have to test the load times of your website and landing pages. If they aren’t loading fast then make it a priority to fix that first.  You can check how your website performs using GTmetrix, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Page Speed Insights. These tools usually offer you suggestions on how to fix whatever is slowing down your website.

How to Measure CRO Program Success?

Increasing conversion rates and driving more total conversions isn’t the only way to measure CRO success. While measuring the success of your CRO program, you need to look at your CRO results from many angles. This means you need to consider metrics like bounce rates, time on site, shopping cart abandonment, cost per conversion. It takes little effort, but with that little effort, you can generate more sales and dominate your industry.

Wrapping Up:

CRO is not just a tool to enhance your site performance; it’s a whole process of making you stand out! There are always things to improve on, so it’s an ongoing process rather than a one-off test.  Even if your site has only a small amount of traffic, with Conversion Rate Optimization, you can generate more sales and increase your revenues and profits.  

Let us know if you have suggestions regarding CRO. We appreciate further comments, support, or suggestions!

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