In the current digital age, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is rapidly becoming one of the most essential tools for businesses to maximize their profits. By optimizing the rate at which visitors to a website take a desired action—such as completing a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading an app—businesses can increase their conversion rates and make more money. This article will explore why CRO is the future of business and why it makes sense for companies to invest in this type of optimization.
CRO is an incredibly powerful tool for businesses to increase their profits, as it is a cost-effective way to increase the number of conversions from each visitor to a website. It is particularly helpful for startups, as it does not require a large upfront investment and can quickly lead to significant returns. Furthermore, it is also beneficial for established companies, as it can help them unlock new audiences and expand their customer base.
CRO also helps businesses increase the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, allowing them to target their campaigns more accurately. By optimizing their conversion rates, businesses can better understand what types of content and ads are likely to drive more conversions and then adjust their campaigns accordingly. This can help them to save money by avoiding unnecessary marketing expenses and focus. Following are the reasons why CRO is the future of business:
1. Understand Your Visitors’ Behavior
Website visitors come and go for numerous reasons. But you want them to click that “Buy” button, download your latest eBook, or perform whatever desired action you want them to take. The main objective is to maximize such conversions whenever they visit your store.
That said, conversions don’t happen whenever someone visits your site. Only 2% of web traffic successfully converts on their first visit. This is why you need tools to measure conversion rate – so you can effectively target and convert the remaining 98%, or most of them, anyway.
Data from your sales and marketing tools will help you create buyer personas and segment your target audience into groups using variables like location, age, gender, browser used, and previous purchases.
With a conversion rate optimization solution, you can record user sessions using heat maps to identify strong areas and pain points on your websites and e-commerce stores. You have a picture of how they behave and navigate while on your site.
By incorporating data from your marketing tools, CRM, and CRO software, you will be able to recognize what’s attracting them to your site, which products get the most views, which items are getting wholly ignored, and so on. You then get this understanding of your audience so you can make the necessary adjustments to your websites to improve engagement and sales.
According to a recent study by Finances online, CRM data is very helpful in gaining a further understanding of your customers. It is better to leverage information from your CRM systems with your CRO software. This combination is ideal for understanding your customers’ wants, needs, behavior, and tendencies.
2. Simplify Buyers’ Navigation
According to Oberlo, the global number of online shoppers is expected to surpass 2 billion by the end of 2020. As online shopping becomes more convenient, safer, and more accessible for modern consumers, businesses must strive to constantly improve visitor engagement on their websites, mobile e-commerce apps, and other channels.
One of the pressing problems of e-commerce stores is the very high cart abandonment rate among modern-day shoppers. Over 75% of retail buyers leave their cart (and the store) without successfully completing the purchase.
Further studies on car abandonment cited the lack of product photos, unprofessional website design, confusing/unfriendly checkout process, and the lack of compelling abandoned cart emails as significant factors that drive customers to leave.
Many successful e-commerce stores implement conversion optimization for eCommerce. C-R-O can help you ensure shoppers immediately find what they are looking for. Leveraging conversion rate optimization software allows you to pinpoint what your site or app needs to attract traffic further. You make changes to the overall design of your site and apps. You add certain elements or change the positioning of your ads to give prominence to your content.
Simply put, by making it easy for your visitors to interact with your website, they will more likely convert.
3. Increase Profitability
Assuming you allocated $1,000 to attract 10,000 visitors and only 10% or 1,000 visitors convert, your total customer acquisition cost is $1 per customer.
Total Spend: $1,000
Total Visitors: 10,000
Conversion Rate: 10%
Visitors who converted: 1,000
Customer Acquisition Cost: $1 per customer
With the help of conversion rate optimization tools, you tweaked the design of your website, added photos, and placed some crucial design elements in strategic places. The website’s conversion rate improves to 15%. Even if you’re spending the same amount of money to drive the same amount of visitors, you are spending less per customer. Here’s how:
Total Spend: $1,000
Total Visitors: 10,000
Conversion Rate: 15% (+5% from the previous rate)
Visitors who converted: 1,500
Customer Acquisition Cost: $0.66 per customer
More than just lowering your acquisition costs, conversion rate optimization solutions also increase profitability.
4. Enhance SEO
While SEO and conversion rate optimization tools each have different ultimate goals, these approaches have overlapping and interdependent areas. To differentiate, SEO tactics are designed to give your website more visibility due to ranking at the top of search engine result pages, or SERPs. Meanwhile, CRO strategies are more concerned with getting visitors to perform specific actions when they visit your website.
All that said, effective SEO strategies can do wonders for your CRO tactics and vice versa. Here’s how.
CRO helps you identify and publish your website’s best, high-quality content. It aims to help make your sites and stores friendlier to your visitor. These tactics are also core to any SEO strategy. Great content, fast and responsive websites, and mobile-friendly pages are critical in improving your search page ranking.
If your web pages are optimized to enhance conversation rates, visitors will likely enjoy engaging with them. As visitor engagement increases, the likelihood of gaining more backlinks improves, too. Quite evidently, well-implemented CRO strategies can boost your SEO efforts and vice versa.
5. Improve Brand Perception
Most of any conversion rate optimization effort is ensuring your websites, online stores, and apps look legitimate and trustworthy. You have to understand that online shoppers don’t look for your store. They are searching for a product or a service that you happen to sell. And when people don’t feel your site is credible, they leave almost as quickly as they came.
According to Crazy Egg, you have less than 15 seconds to showcase your website to visitors and grab their attention before they decide to continue navigating or look elsewhere. If your site doesn’t look trustworthy, they will move on to the next one, even if you offer the best deals and fantastic promos.
Trust is a big deal among online shoppers, and much of it concerns the website’s visuals, especially among first-time visitors. Visual elements like colors, placement of content, size of ads, font types, and sizes all come into play. Other components, such as security badges, help customers discern whether a site is legitimate.
Conversion rate optimization helps you create a website visitors can trust right from the start. Bear in mind that trust always comes before sale.
Watch out for CRO Trends
The trends in conversion rate optimization are constantly changing, so businesses need to keep up with the latest techniques to stay competitive. Here are a few of the top trends in CRO that are gaining traction:
1. Personalization:
A popular trend in conversion rate optimization tools focuses on delivering a tailored experience to every customer. By leveraging technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), businesses can create personalized experiences for each user. This helps to create more engaging experiences that are more likely to convert.
2. Mobile Optimization:
With more and more people accessing the internet through their mobile devices, it’s essential for businesses to optimize their websites and apps for mobile. This means ensuring that all website elements are optimized for the small screen, including navigation, load times, and visuals.
3. A/B Testing:
A/B testing is a popular technique in conversion rate optimization. This involves testing different versions of a page or app to see which one yields the best results. This helps businesses to find the best design and content for their users.
By keeping up with the latest conversion rate optimization trends, businesses can ensure that their website is optimized to drive more conversions. By leveraging these techniques, businesses can ensure that they can maximize their potential revenue and increase their profits.
Conversion Rate Optimization is the future of business in today’s digital world. With the right strategies, businesses can increase their sales and profits quickly. HumCommerce is the perfect CRO partner for b2b companies. We have an experienced team of experts who can help with everything from landing page conversion rate optimization to A/B testing to website personalization. Our goal is to help you maximize your conversions and increase your ROI.
