Conversion Rate Optimisation or CRO has been a buzz word in online marketing recently with some promoted case studies sounding too good to be true (but which are actually true!). Hype aside however, CRO is extremely important for any online marketing strategy and should be a focus for any conversion focused company with a web presence.
Simply put, CRO is the process of improving your website design to increase sales or leads from the people visiting your website (an increase in the conversion rate). The improvements can range from button colour changes, right up to full redesigns with the focus on small increases in the conversion rate. You may wonder why anyone would bother to spend time and money on CRO for a small increase in conversion rate, however the table below shows you the importance and benefits from this strategy. Despite the percentage increases being small the increase in sales or leads are clearly valuable.
The best part about CRO is that it affects all parts of your marketing, whether you are advertising in a newspaper, running PPC campaigns or dropping leaflets out of a helicopter – the increase in your websites conversion rate will ensure that more of your website visitors convert into a sale, increasing the ROI on all of your marketing spends.
The first step in the CRO process is an audit of your website to identify the key areas that are potentially losing you sales or leads. After these areas have been identified they need to be prioritised and either implemented directly on the website, or even better, split tested. Split testing is a key element in CRO in which you send 50% of visitors to one version of a web page and 50% to the other, monitoring which version of the page causes the most visitors to convert. Once the winner is found for the page another split test can be started with the small increases in conversion rates adding up to a huge increase in sales.
CRO is going to be extremely important in the coming years as with online marketing costs rising the number of sales for each marketing source will need to increase at the same rate in order to remain profitable. It takes time to split test and improve web designs so I recommend that you stop increasing your marketing spends to get sales and start optimising your website now.
