Talk to any business owner about their marketing goals and you will likely hear the same thing: they all want to increase their sales. The process to achieve this goal, however, can involve different actions depending upon your marketing strategy. You can spend a great deal of money on advertising to reach your target audience, but wouldn’t it be fantastic to close more sales with the least number of customers? Don’t threaten me with a good time!
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) can be defined as the practice of increasing the percentage of people who perform specific actions on a website, or those who “convert”, based on the goals of your campaign. A conversion can be a purchase, phone call, or form fill among others. An increased conversion rate can yield a greater return on your marketing investment but how does one go about running a successful conversion rate optimization plan?
It’s All About the User
In order to increase the conversion rate, we must understand our customers (website users) and the things that drive them to convert. Without this understanding, we are not able to make data-driven optimizations to ad campaigns or websites and changes made would be baseless. Once we understand our users and their behaviors, we can adjust ads and websites to influence more conversions.
The CRO Toolbox
There are a number of different applications that can help identify user pain points on websites, track user behavior, and provide insights on your audience profile. Hotjar is a website analytics tool that tracks and records user behavior including clicks, scrolling, pageviews, and cursor hover. By viewing recorded web sessions, you can identify areas for improvement in design or functionality and make changes that improve the user experience (UX). Google Optimize is a tool that allows you to easily set up and measure the results of A/B tests of different landing pages. Google’s Analytics tool can help you identify your audience by providing user information such as demographics, interests, and other products that interest them. This can be crucial to helping you form proper messaging within your website and ad copy.
Winning CRO Strategies
Now that you have the tools to help you understand the behaviors and interests of your audience, you can analyze the data and get to work on making and testing website and ad adjustments. The goal of conversion rate optimization is obviously to improve the conversion rate of your campaigns. There are a number of different methods you can practice in order to drive a winning CRO strategy. Since every business and customer profile is different, figuring out which methods work the best is a natural part of the process. Here are some questions you may want to consider:
- Does the customer fully understand my product/service and the value it provides?
- Does my web page contain too much industry jargon?
- Is there a way to convey a sense of urgency that could drive more conversions?
- Is the customer left with too many unanswered questions that may cause them to choose to buy from a competitor?
Through an evaluation of your website content using CRO tools, adjusting your web pages might be simple. If you hypothesize that a change might work better than the current content, it’s important to test the hypothesis using methods such as A/B testing (one of the CRO tools). Keep in mind that conversion rate optimization is a cyclical process of collecting data, analyzing data, adjusting content, and testing. Understanding your customers’ interests and behaviors can make a huge difference in revenue.
Improving ad campaign performance through conversion rate optimization is 2nd nature to us and we love collaborating with businesses and their owners in order to drive campaign success. Give us a call at 713-309-6380 or reach out through our contact form on the website.