Insights
Head of CRO
CRO
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) increases the number of browsers that turn into buyers. Marketing Sherpa advised that 74% of CRO plans lead to increased leads and sales. By analyzing data, you can identify where the top drop-off points are and why this is happening. Once you have quantitative and qualitative insight, you can write a data-supported test hypothesis and launch your experiment to determine if the proposed changes have affected the overall evaluation criteria (OEC).
While increasing conversion rates, CRO creates a virtuous circle of benefits that improves all channels. By making better use of current spending by ensuring more conversions, the optimization process increases ROI without increasing advertising spending.
Designed to maximize visitors’ value, CRO focuses on the customer journey in each of your channels, driving more conversions while improving the overall experience of your brand or service. Combining web analytics, user experience/interface (UX/UI) design, persuasion psychology, and usability testing, CRO optimizes performance across all channels.
Baymard’s recent study revealed that up to 94% of top-grossing sites are not compliant with the four core accessibility requirements for images, links, form fields, and keyboard navigation. This means that despite the best efforts of many, there is still plenty of room for companies to improve their visitors’ user experience.
Understanding why drop-off points occur is critical to informing your CRO strategy. Do they differ by device or source? Is this different with new and returning customers? Build a library of audience behaviors that can be used to inform your strategy.
User objections gathered from key drop-off pages will help identify why visitors did not convert and help you understand the customer perspective. This can be achieved by using feedback polls to collect insight from diverse types of visitors. Data from converted customers can then be used to help inform how your brand positions itself to reach more similar visitors.
For example, polls from an accommodation client exposed difficulties around visitors understanding what exactly was included with the room, appearance, and availability. Recognizing the opportunity for improving the ease of access and articulation of room benefits and appearance, we ran an experiment, which led to a 10% uplift in visitors moving from the product list page to the product details page.
All data received from users is an opportunity to gain perspective, optimize your site’s experience, and boost cross-channel performance.
This case study is a helpful example to illustrate the effects of CRO on an award-winning travel company. Conversion research identified drop-off points and areas of the website that would drive the most value in the shortest timescale.
Following A/B testing and working with the Technical SEO team, the client saw a 28% improvement in overall conversion rate and 8.5% in leads. The annualized result of this had a significant impact on the company.
Qualitative and quantitative conversion research is the key to identifying what and where to experiment. Asking questions about your site’s experience allows you to tailor the user experience around the traffic source.
Break down the behaviors on each channel to allow you to start the ideation process and prioritize the opportunities for improvement. For example, customers from direct traffic are much more likely to be aware of your brand. Recognizing this creates space for a more personalized experience, understanding that the traffic will potentially benefit from less brand identification messaging and more from an intuitive presentation of relevant products.
Non-brand paid traffic is more likely to benefit from brand explanation, building trust, and persuasive tactics to guide them to the point of conversion. A rigorous experimentation program is the only way a company can discover the right combination of changes required to drive online growth.
CRO should not be limited to only focusing on online performance. Offline performance is growing in opportunity as companies adopt measurement strategies and a test-and-learn methodology.
It is impossible to scale to a higher level without experimenting and drawing data from your audience.
Short-term trials, tests, and tweaks are vital to nurturing your brand’s performance. For example, Amazon’s immense growth as a leading marketplace is steeped in experiments, from testing different page layouts to the current Prime Air drone experiments. A constant test-and-learn approach is driving innovation that is revolutionizing Amazon’s service. As its founder, Jeff Bezos, stated, “If you double the number of experiments per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.”
Implementing an internal culture of experimentation speeds up discovering what works best. While many manufacturers have adopted a test-and-learn approach, many consumer companies have been slow to embrace it, ultimately delaying their growth.
Read more about conversion rate optimization’s potential in our “Ten ways CRO can grow your online revenue” blog.
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Insights
Insights
Insights