Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO is a science of increasing sales by persuading your leads and prospects to take desired actions by optimizing your website, thereby, making it an efficient sales tool. CRO involves data mining by analyzing stats that give website insights to improve the percentage of converted leads on your website. CRO works best when there is a symbiosis between marketers and developers. This can help chalk out effective strategies in both the scopes. CRO is no easy walk but a process of continuous testing and analysis where you put yourselves in customers’ shoes and jot down all the issues that hinder your conversion rate success.
The businesses of any size can leverage CRO to increase their website performance with some high impact measures like reducing the page load speed or placing proper CTAs to improve the overall user experience on the website.
CRO aids in achieving these two business targets:
- An Increase in Sales and Profits
- Better Lead Generation
Collecting Data to Make Informed Decisions
Before you start optimizing your site, you should first collect all the possible data inputs from multiple sources.
Discovering Consumer Personas
CRO can be achieved by studying consumer personas and then adapting sales & marketing techniques depending on the user profile. This can be done using target words and content that relate to your respective personas. There are many consumer personas for instance Competitive, Spontaneous or Methodical that will perceive your brand in a certain way.
You can identify your prospective customers by segmenting and targeting them based on the following factors:
- Demographics
- Value Proposition
- Geographic
- Psychographics
- Risk Reversal
- Buying Criteria
Hence observing user behaviour might help in better conversion rates.
Common issues that most of the sites face
Certain website aspects are going to impact the success or failure of the website. It affects not only the traffic, search engine rankings but also conversions and user-friendliness.
Poor website navigation
Website navigation is one such aspect you do not want to mess up. Whenever your web audience and up on your site they expect strategically placed horizontal navigation with vertical elements place down hierarchically. The main idea behind this is to help a user find the page they are looking for easily.
Some bad website navigations include:
- Navigation bar with too many options
- Non-responsive website navigation
- Unimportant links in the navigation menu
- Many flyout submenus
- The different primary navigation menu on each page
- Irrelevant text labels of the menu items
Low quality and junky traffic quality
It is a no-brainer that you need to drive traffic to your website to increase leads. But sites are easily overwhelmed by high numbers of traffic. Thus, when it comes to website traffic, it is important to focus on the quality of the traffic than its quantity.
Below are five signals that can help you measure the quality of website traffic:
- Conversion rate
- Regions with high traffic
- Engagement on the site
- Lead generation
- The bounce rate of the website
Lower page load time
Low page loading time kills the website experience of your audience. Very few people have the patience to wait more than a few seconds for a page to load–especially when they’ve become used to fast-loading high-quality websites. If the website doesn’t load on time, quite likely, your visitor won’t find what they are looking for. If your customers must wait to get to your content for more than a couple of seconds, you are probably going to lose them.
Poor layout and site design
Good website design is a mammoth task. And it is slightly difficult to get it all right. And some common layout mistakes drive the visitors away. These issues create a bad user-experience making your website an unprofitable one. It is important to keep in mind that a website is created for visitors also and not only for search engines to avoid website blunders.
Below are some poor layout and website design issues:
- Typography mistakes
- Graphic issues
- Poor content and whitespace
- Usability errors
Sales funnel isn’t optimal
A sales funnel is each step that a user must take to become your customer. It is very crucial to understand the sales funnel of your business to find niches from where your potential customers can drop off. The sales funnel has four steps – Awareness, Interest, Decision and Action. Each step requires a different approach to help the user move forward through it. An unoptimized funnel does nothing but sends the wrong message at the wrong time, thereby driving away the potential customers.
No clear CTA’s
A website needs to have a clear and strong call to action to help the user understand what the next step would be. A clear call to action (CTA) refers to the text on the buttons that encourage visitors to take a certain kind of action. E.g.: ”Read more articles”, “Sign-up for our newsletter”, etc.
A poor CTA design fails to communicate with the user what lies ahead, thereby leading to a lower number of leads.
Benefits of CRO
- Higher Conversion Rates
- Improved User Experience
- Improves Customer Journey
- Gives Competitive Edge
- Hyper-personalization will Increase Consumer Trust
Conclusion:
Use real-time page statistics, heatmaps, A/B testing taking into consideration all the points mentioned above while designing your website, testing and deriving insights from it. There are many schools of thought for conversion rate optimization which works alongside search engine optimization and Merkle Sokrati is here to give you the best of both worlds!
Reach out to us for a free SEO audit.
