How Conversion Rate Optimization Boosts Sales and Increases Revenue
E-commerce presents tremendous opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs and business veterans alike. Whether you’re starting a dropshipping store or selling a product of your own, leveraging the power of digital marketing can lead to exponential growth.
While creativity is a major driving force in digital marketing, recognizing that it is also a numbers game can help yield better results.
This post will discuss everything entrepreneurs need to know about conversion rate optimization (CRO). We will start by breaking down what conversion rate is in terms of marketing before discussing the benefits of CRO. Then, we will cover how to conduct a CRO audit to decrease the bounce rate and maximize your conversion rate.
Table of contents
- What is Conversion Rate?
- Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- How to Conduct a CRO Audit
- How to Optimize Your Conversion Rate
- Final Thoughts
What is Conversion Rate?
Conversion rate measures how many visitors take the intended action from your advertisement, website, or other marketing materials.
For example, if you’re using a landing page to sell a product, your conversion rate would be the percentage of people who came to that webpage and made a purchase. It is worth noting that purchases are not the only desired conversion. A sign-up, inquiry, or subscription are other examples of conversions.
You can calculate the conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors. This calculation can be simplified with the following equation:
number of conversions ÷ number of visitors = conversion rate
Using the same example as before, if 100 people came to your website and 10 of them made a purchase, your conversion rate would be 10%. If only 3 of those visitors made a purchase, the conversion rate would be 3%.
Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
As the term suggests, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of maximizing conversions to increase a conversion rate. There are several reasons that entrepreneurs focus on conversion rate optimization.
A higher conversion rate often equates to increased revenue, which is typically the primary goal of conversion rate optimization.
Prioritizing CRO also helps to prepare your organization to scale. Scaling will look different for every business model, but more qualified leads and increased revenue are definitely helpful.
In addition to the potential financial growth, CRO strategies create more awareness of insights and analytics. Having a clear understanding of various marketing metrics and how your business is performing helps to make more informed business decisions.
Ultimately, the process of CRO typically enhances the customers’ experience since it forces you to take a hard look at what your audience wants and what they respond best to.
How to Conduct a CRO Audit
Before you make any other CRO efforts, it is crucial to assess your current conversion rate so that you can determine how it can be improved. Entrepreneurs and marketers can access these insights by conducting a CRO audit.
The first thing to address in a CRO audit is your current conversion rate. Use the equation we shared before to establish the percentage of visitors who’ve been converted. In addition to the conversion rate, identify the bounce rate and click-through rate (CTR). Depending on the structure of your sales funnel, it might be a good idea to assess the lead-to-customer conversion rate, as well.
It is also a good idea to review your analytics to learn more about the users that are landing on your offer, and where they are coming from. This will help you see if you’re hitting the mark on your target audience. For example, if you are getting a lot of website traffic from a specific country that you don’t serve, you may need to make changes to retarget your marketing.
If your website analytics have heat maps, see where users tend to focus their time and attention. This can be a guiding force as you develop your CRO strategy.
Finally, identify potential gaps in your current strategy to identify what you could be doing better. Create your CRO strategy to fill in those gaps.
How to Optimize Your Conversion Rate
Once you’ve assessed the situation, it is time to take a calculated approach to optimize your conversion rate. Here are a few tried and true CRO techniques that you can deploy to increase the conversion rate for your online business.
1. Improve Your Copy
One of the first techniques you can use to improve your conversion rate is to enhance the copy in your ads, website, and other marketing materials. As you write your copy, make sure that it’s crafted in a way that resonates with your audience while maintaining your brand voice.
Another way to improve your copy is to present your offer as a solution. Think of your ideal customer’s pain points, and address them in your copy.
2. Optimize Forms
If your intended conversion involves forms of any sort, you should make the forms as user-friendly and straightforward as possible. Eliminate any extra fields that are not necessary to simplify the user experience.
3. Include More Strategic CTAs
Any time there is a desired action you’d like your viewers to take, you need to let them know with a call-to-action (CTA). Consider assessing and revamping your current CTAs to see if there is room for improvement.
You can apply the tips we discussed before for improving the copy for your CTAs to encourage your viewers to take action. It is also essential to place your CTAs in a spot that is accessible and eye-catching.
4. Enhance the Buying Process
Sometimes, CRO goes beyond marketing. Your buying process is one thing that can be enhanced to improve your conversion rate. One way to enhance the buying process is to make it as easy as possible.
5. Leverage Social Proof
Social proof is media that showcases past results from your product and service. Social proof is excellent for showing prospective buyers the benefits of buying from you.
Some examples of social proof include reviews, testimonials, and case studies. Written social proof is great, but videos and photos will help to seal the deal.
6. Use Pop-Ups
Pop-ups are a great way to get viewers’ attention and capture more leads. Use pop-up windows as lead magnets. Many e-commerce brands offer a particular discount or freebie in exchange for prospective buyers’ email addresses.
7. Keep it Simple
There is a lot of value in trimming down the fluff on your site and focusing purely on value. This is true for graphics, text, and so forth.
“Busy” is not always better. In fact, there is value in cutting out the white noise and incorporating white space, and it allows prospective buyers to focus on your offer.
8. Use A/B Testing
A/B testing is a technique that deploys two different versions of marketing materials for the same offer. You can use A/B testing to assess buyers’ responses to headlines, copy, images, and more.
9. Tweak Your Offer
If you feel that the moving parts of your marketing strategy are optimized, but you still aren’t achieving your desired results, consider tweaking your offer.
Make sure your offer is laid out in a way that is valuable to your customers. Consider adjusting your pricing so that it makes more sense.
10. Use Third-Party Support
There are a variety of third-party resources available to support the other CRO efforts that you’ve put in place. These resources range from sign-up support tools to dedicated CRO services from digital marketing experts.
We encourage you to look into all of the tools that are accessible to you.
Final Thoughts
Understanding important marketing metrics, such as conversion rate, will help you make more informed decisions for your e-commerce business. Once you’ve assessed your current conversion rate and created a well-crafted CRO strategy, it is time to put your plan into action.
If you need some help with your CRO strategy, to learn more about how Lounge Lizard can support you along the way.
