With changes in Google’s algorithm and establishment of targeted search engines like Pinterest, tech-savvy marketers have changed their strategies for Conversion Rate Optimisation. Professional marketers use CRO as a tool to identify the success ratio of their marketing strategies. While CRO may seem easy to plan at first, it requires an advanced and actionable approach to convert your passive traffic into leads, and leads into customers.
The problem with conversion rate optimisation is that it is an ever-changing metric that requires continuous measuring to gauge the success of your marketing strategies. In-depth understanding and evaluation of CRO can help identify the potential risk in your marketing strategy, which in turn allows marketers to remodel their strategy accordingly. Simply put, accurate and constant measurement of CRO improves your brand reputation, expands your customer base, maximises leads and increases sales.
The competition in every niche has inevitably grown, but CRO results of similar businesses in a niche can be surprisingly unpredictable. This is because each website or business has its unique set of customers and source of visitors.
Online projection of a business also plays an important role in boosting its CRO. A high CRO is every marketer’s dream, and many manage to achieve it at some point. However, they often fail to sustain or improve conversion rates in the long run. Many factors affect CRO, including poor B2C communication, changes in search engine algorithm, new sources of traffic, security signals etc.
You can improve your conversion rate and sustain a good CRO with 4 simple strategies given here.
1. Multivariate Testing
The conversion rate is a product of various media elements used to design and develop your landing pages. In 2017, landing pages are commonly designed using multimedia such as text copies, pictures, videos, animations and UI buttons. Marketers use various CRO testing tools to determine what users think about their website. There are two types of testing techniques available for checking the functionality and impact of your landing pages –A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing.
A/B Testing analyses the traffic landing on different web pages. This technique distributes the web pages into home page, landing page etc. A/B Testing allows you to change the design or strategy of a page to see if a different version results in higher CRO. For example, if the visitors landing on your home page do not visit product pages, then your website probably has a navigational issue.
Multivariate Testing is the process of splitting a web page into different key sections and areas. The report generated after testing a web page reflects the response of visitors for specific areas, allowing you to change your marketing strategy of that specific area only. For example, if the Header of a web page is generating lower conversions, then changing the Header may help you to increase the homepage’s conversion rate.
2. Calculate the CRO Constantly
The conversion rate of your website changes constantly and strategies to improve CRO has become more complex in recent years. Hence, marketers need to assess the data at two levels. The first level is assessment of the traffic source based on geography and different screen sizes, which splits the traffic into mobile, laptop/desktop, tablets and smaller screens like smart watches. The second level is to assess the conversions based on your website’s performance, which has already been discussed in the first strategy.
Tools such as mouse tracking and heat maps allow you to find the most used buttons and segments on your web pages. These tools are ideal for planning your marketing strategy and identifying the most used segments on your website so that you can invest more time optimising them in order to maximise conversions.
Considering the aforementioned elements that affect your website’s conversions, it becomes vital to calculate your website’s conversion rate constantly. The math of conversion rate is becoming more complex. Therefore, a conversion rate calculator has become a necessary tool to maximise CRO gains.
3. Speed is King
Optimised content is crucial for attracting more visitors and improving a website’s position on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Once a visitor clicks on your website, loading speed should become your primary concern. 69% websites were reported as having a 2-second bounce rate in 2016, which means that a visitor will leave your website if it takes longer than 2 seconds to load. Hence, a delay of even one second over the average loading speed can cost you to lose at least 7% of potential visitors. Simply put, you can improve the conversion rate of your website by decreasing its loading time.
4. Focus on Your Conversion Funnel
A simple conversion funnel is as follows:
Awareness -> Interest -> Desire -> Action
The conversion funnel of your brand’s strategy includes category awareness, brand awareness, ad awareness, brand consideration and sale/purchase. A poorly planned conversion funnel adversely affects the bounce rate of visitors at each step of the sales process. Marketers need to plan an actionable conversion funnel, as well as plan strategies for visitors who did not convert into leads, and leads who did not convert into customers.