The purpose of marketing is to attract visitors and leads that can be converted into sales. As increasing your traffic might result in more sales, it’s also crucial to focus on converting your traffic into paying clients. As a result, you may be wondering if there is anything more you can do to boost conversions.
Yes, there is! And that’s why we have Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)!
A CRO marketing strategy is a never-ending cycle of observation, analysis, and improvement. It offers new possibilities to make your consumers’ shopping trips quicker, simpler, and more delightful at every stage.
You can even fine-tune your website by conducting extensive testing and analysis that will encourage consumers to buy a product.
Are you finding it hard to implement Conversion Rate Optimization processes for your business? You’re not alone.
In this guide, we’ll offer you a complete introduction to CRO marketing strategy and teach you how to calculate conversion rate.
Table of Contents
- What is CRO Marketing Strategy?
- What Exactly is a CRO Rate?
- What is a Good CRO Rate?
- What is the Goal of CRO Marketing Strategy?
- CRO Marketing Strategy & How to Get Started
- Best Practices for CRO Marketing
- CRO Marketing Tools
- Final Thoughts on CRO Marketing
- How Can Metricks Help You
What is CRO Marketing Strategy?
CRO marketing strategy is also called Conversion Rate Optimization. CRO marketing strategy boosts the fraction of website visitors who complete a purchase (or, in marketing terms, ‘convert’).
It uses persuasive theory to convince customers to do specific actions. Conversions are pretty necessary. They’re the exciting moments when a random customer walks into your business and purchases one of your items.
A conversion, on the other hand, might also mean:
- Signing up to receive marketing emails and other content
- Dedicating to a specific length of time on your website
- Adding personal information such as an email address to a database
- Accessing information such as white papers and reports via downloads
- Increasing the tier of service.
What Exactly is a CRO Rate?
CRO rate is the total percentage of visitors who execute a task, such as filling out a web form, registering for a service, or buying a product. An increased CRO rate indicates that your site is well-designed, well-formatted, and attractive to your target demographic.
Some issues regarding the performance or design of your site can lead to a low CRO rate. Poor CRO rate is frequently caused by lagging sites, a faulty form, or text that fails to express the value of the offer.
Then, what is a good CRO rate? Let’s find out!
What is a Good CRO Rate?
Various factors determine a “good” CRO rate. They include your business sector, niche, objectives, traffic route, and demographics of your target audience.
For instance, in the third quarter of 2020, the worldwide average conversion rate of eCommerce websites was 2.17%, below the 2.37% of the previous year. However, in the United States, the e-commerce conversion rate was 2.57%.
The average varies by year and nation, but it also varies by niche. For example, e-commerce sites in the food and beverage industry have a conversion rate of 5.5%.
On the flip side, those in the hair care sector have a conversion rate of 3.5%. So, here’s the time to strengthen your CRO rate if it’s lower than your expectation – whether it’s below standard in your niche, more down than your best competitors, or just failing against your objectives.
Conversion Rate Optimization can occur on your homepage, blog, landing pages, price section, and other website areas. So, you must optimize each site to enhance the chances of turning website visitors into paying clients.
Before we delve deeper, we’ll walk you through calculating the CRO rate.
How to Calculate Conversion Rates
Calculating your current conversion rates will provide you with a baseline before adopting conversation rate marketing. It will later help you determine whether or not your efforts are successful. You can approach this task in different ways.
First, you’ll need to evaluate a few things relevant to your firm before you start calculating numbers. These include:
- Leads: Make sure you know what constitutes a lead in your context. Someone who clicks on a particular key or enters their email address, for instance, falls into this category.
- Website traffic: If you haven’t tracked visitors to your website, you need to do so. Because it will serve as the foundation for many CRO computations.
- Conversions: The most popular type of conversion we’ll explore is completing a purchase. However, since there are many types of conversions, you’ll need to decide how to define the phrase.
These three parts are crucial to the success of your marketing funnel. It will be easier to adopt an essential CRO strategy if you have a deeper understanding of your funnel.
That said, let’s focus on the most basic method of calculating Conversion Rate Optimization percentage.
The primary method is to divide the number of conversions, say purchases, by the total number of engagement/completed actions (ads click) within a given period. See the image below.
For instance, if you achieved ten sales out of 1,000 interactions in a month, your conversion rate was 1%. Therefore, you’ll need to determine what defines a valuable engagement because computing all possible actions at once can lead to unbalanced rates.
Lucky you! There are tools available to help in sorting through some of the options. Google, in particular, provides conversion tracking for use with Google Ads. This allows you to define conversion activities that are exclusive to your company.
Now, let us pause for a moment and consider the rate in the light of Conversion Rate Optimization. To do so, you’ll need to figure out your conversion rate depending on the number of website traffic and how many of them convert into leads.
Next, to determine your visitor-to-lead conversion rate, divide the number of generated leads by the number of website visits within a specific time frame. See the image below.
So, let’s assume you have 1000 website visitors and ten leads. Your total visitor-to-lead conversion rate is 1% for that month.
When it comes to creating goals, you might believe that you need many website visitors. As a matter of fact, Conversion Rate Optimization can help in this situation.
In this scenario, many website visitors did not convert into leads. It implies that there may be areas where you need to optimize so your visitor-to-lead conversions can increase.
We’ll look into the lead-to-customer conversion rate, but it’ll be the last. It is calculated by dividing your overall conversions (the number of times a lead converts to a paying customer) by the total number of leads in a given period.
In our second example, there were a total of ten leads. And if we assume that those leads convert within a month, our conversion rate from lead-to-customer would be 3%.
Remember, these formulas can assist you in setting targets and comparing monthly totals. It helps in evaluating if your CRO marketing strategy effectively increases the Conversion Rate Optimization you desire.
That said, keep reading as we look into CRO marketing goals and how to get started with CRO marketing strategy.
What is the Goal of CRO Marketing Strategy?
The sole goal of CRO is to remodel the website and landing page structure and quality. What CRO in digital marketing does is to make the most significant proportion of site visitors complete a specified action.
And the business will be achieved without having to increase advertising spending.
CRO marketing, like any creative endeavour, will cost money in exchange for the service. But the increased conversions will make it a worthwhile investment that will ultimately affect the bottom line.
CRO Marketing Strategy & How to Get Started
You may be wondering where and how to start a CRO marketing strategy? Worry no more!
Below are some conversion rate marketing strategies you may evaluate and execute at your firm.
1. Provide a Pop-up on your Website
Sumo’s research found that the average conversion rate for all pop-ups is 3.09%. And if you’re doing it right, you may hit the upper 10% of pop-ups, which have a 9.28% CRO rate on aggregate. This single tweak will skyrocket your CRO rate.
Here are some brief recommendations to help you obtain the best Conversion Rate Optimization possible:
- Experiment with various offerings (PDFs, premium content, other items, and other freebies) until you reach that number that you can sense right away. However, a thirty seconds delay period on the pop-up prevents them from becoming infuriating.
- Make it simple to close the pop-up window.
- Create a cookie to ensure that the pop-up shows just once per user. This is something that most pop-up tools allow you to accomplish.
This mix will offer you a significant increase in conversions while reducing complaints to their barest minimum. You won’t irritate anyone, and you’ll get all the benefits. The effect of pop-up on your conversion will be so significant that you may skip the remainder of this list.
2. Generate CTAs that are text-based in blog entries
Using CTAs in a blog post is an excellent practice. But they don’t always work to lure readers into carrying out the intended action. Why is this so?
Advertisement blindness is a true phenomenon that occurs when people develop a habit of disregarding banner-like information on websites.
Their inability to focus and because site visitors do not read everything on a blog article (rather, they “glance” at content) need a different strategy. This is where a text-based CTA can help.
When you link a single line of text to a landing page and structure it as an H3 or H4, it converts more visitors into customers than standard CTAs beneath a web page.
Another Conversion Rate Optimization element to add to your site is a lead flow. Lead flows are high-converting pop-ups that bring awareness while providing value.
In addition to that, you need to strengthen your CTA copy. Basic CTAs such as “Sign up” and “Start trial” will not result in the highest conversion rates. A few minutes spent tweaking the copy will simplify Conversion Rate Optimization.
3. Test your Landing Pages
Landing pages are an essential aspect of CRO in digital marketing and, as previously stated, are critical to Conversion Rate Optimization.
The reason is that a landing page is where a website visitor converts to a client. It is so where an established lead engages more deeply with your business. Therefore, there’s a need to run A/B tests.
A/B tests determine your best layout and content features for audience members when optimizing a landing page.
For example, A/B testing allows you to test multiple versions of your website copy quickly. You can also check content offers, graphics, faqs, and web pages to see which one works best for your target demographic and leads.
As a result of A/B testing, China Expat Health boosted its lead conversion rate by 79%. One of the most noticeable updates was replacing the headline “Health Insurance in China” with “Save Up to 32% on Your Health Insurance in China.”
This strategy provided visitors with an instant value offer. Customer testimonies were then used to back up this claim. One of our most popular articles gives more details on this, and you can find it here.
4. Help Leads to Become Marketing Qualified
Many visitors love going straight to business. They skip some areas of the buyer’s journey (rather than being nurtured). It will help if you promote these high-intent visitors to take specific actions to convert them into marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
They can be converted through smartly designed websites, attractive and clear language, and clever CTAs.
If you notice that visitors who sign up for product demos convert more than those who sign up for free product trials, you have some work.
You need to optimize your website and conversion channels for users who want to schedule appointments with a sales representative.
This, of course, depends on your item and sales procedure. But we suggest that you do a series of experiments to see what brings in more people. And after that, optimize. The objective is to seek methods to make your selling process more frictionless.
5. Create Processes to Help your Team
With marketing automation software, you can design various automated workflows to support your staff. It’s easy to send automated emails with processes using marketing automation, for instance.
Then, with a single click, leads can schedule meetings with salespeople. Likewise, salespeople will receive reminders when leads do high-intent activities, such as visiting your website’s price page.
Alternatively, if you work in an e-commerce store, you can send an email notification to those who left their shopping cart. According to Moosend’s study, abandoned cart email is quite successful. It has a high 45% open rate. Only 21% of emails are opened, and only 21% click. Approximately half of those who engaged bought an item.
6. Provide a Money-back Guarantee
As affiliate marketers and eCommerce owners, we that customers shun risk. Nobody would risk their hard-earned money unless they’re sure they’ll get what they paid for.
As a result, a money-back guarantee can help to alleviate concerns and overcome objections. Don’t be concerned about losing all of your sales due to returns.
Money-back guarantee is just a simple technique to boost your conversion rate. It also fosters trust and makes the customer feel safer.
To add to that, you can back up this method with a timer. As time is running out, it’s normal to feel nervous. So, incorporating a stopwatch into your landing page could be something you’ll have to capitalize on this impression.
It can heighten the sense of urgency, resulting in a more significant Conversion Rate Optimization.
Before dwelling on the available Conversion Rate Optimization tools, let us guide you on the best practices for CRO marketing. That way, you’ll better understand how to enhance CRO marketing for your business. Let’s go!
Best Practices for CRO Marketing
1. Clearly Define your Goals
The first item on our list of Conversion Rate Optimization best practices is to have clearly defined objectives. Goals will help you comprehend what you’re aiming to achieve and can position your company to succeed. Conversion goals could be:
- Increased sales
- Software download
- Increased sign-up (email)
- Increased firm submission
If you understand your goals, you will take the necessary steps to increase your CRO rate.
2. Understand your Target Audience
Ensure you know your target audience. It is essential to target the right audience to boost Conversion Rate Optimization. Though, it is challenging to increase your CRO rate unless you target people interested in the items and services you provide.
All you need to do is examine a typical customer for your business to discover your target audience.
You may decide to gather pertinent information, such as:
- Location
- Job
- Income
- Hobbies
Collecting this information will help you develop imaginary marketing profiles to promote to new and related clients. These marketing profiles provide a better understanding of your target demographic, allowing you to reach more people looking for your products or services, and increase conversions.
3. Track your Goals
What exactly do we mean by “tracking”? Tracking is the measurement of your aim, such as form submissions, sign-ups, button clicks, link clicks, page visits, etc.
You can do this at the page or activity level. The good news is that goals may be set directly in the testing tool. And all you have to do is define the event click, link click, page destination, etc.
In certain circumstances, testing tools link directly with your analytics platform. Thereby allowing you to select your pre-defined goals. Regardless of how you attach your goals, test to ensure your goal tracking is in order. If not, you’ll have to redo it from the beginning.
CRO Marketing Tools
Many CRO tools exist to assist in mapping quantifiable data when doing research. Quantitative tools, such as web analytics, provide information about what’s going on with your website. Heatmaps, scroll maps, questionnaires, and other qualitative tools explain why things happen to your site. Below are some of the top CRO research tools.
Also, you can use these tools to gather visitor information and build data-backed theories for your CRO test campaigns. Here is a selection of tools that might help you with your CRO strategy.
1. CRO Marketing Tool: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is among the top online analytics tools for tracking website traffic. It monitors user activity such as session length, web pages per session, click-through rate, and, moreover, many web pages.
In addition, it provides statistics such as traffic source(s), visitor region and demography, site quality, and conversions. To gain additional in-depth information, you may upgrade to Google Analytics 360.
Monthly fee – None
2. CRO Marketing Tool: VWO Insights
VWO Insights is a well-known and essential user behaviour CRO marketing tool for CRO experts. It aids in understanding client behaviour by using heatmaps, session records, on-page polls, and other tools.
The qualitative user behavioural data VWO Insights provides help in the development of exclusive hypotheses for your CRO marketing strategy.
Monthly fee: Growth Plan: $169 for 10,000 visitors, $247 per month for 30,000 visitors, and $310 per month for 50,000 visitors. Prices for the Pro and Enterprise plans can be customized.
3. CRO Marketing Tool: Heap Analytics
Heap Analytics is another CRO marketing tool that monitors visitor activities like clicks, form submissions, and purchases and assists in identifying the most effective exercises and marketing paths.
Heap also includes a tidy data analytics dashboard that is useful and simple. You do not need to generate extra ‘events’ while using the tool to monitor simple website engagements, as with Google Analytics.
Monthly fee: There are three different plans to choose from Free, Growth, and Enterprise. Pricing is only accessible on a custom basis.
4. CRO Marketing Tool: Mixpanel
While Google Analytics shows you the activities on your website, Mixpanel shows who did what. Its visitor behaviour tracking and CRO marketing tools provide detailed information about which sets of web traffic reached your sales funnel, which ones are bouncing off, and visitor behaviour monitoring.
Mixpanel also includes an extra data channel for comparing figures to Google. It’s never a brilliant idea to rely solely on one CRO marketing tool for all analytical data.
Monthly fee: $0 for 1000 visitors, $174 for 5000 visitors, $304 for 10,000 visitors, and $524 for 20,000 visitors. For groups of 20,000 plus, special pricing is available.
5. CRO Marketing Tool: UsabilityHub
One of the most significant benefits of including UsabilityHub in your CRO marketing tool is that it removes the uncertainty from design choices by testing them with real users.
In other terms, it’s an opinion-gathering CRO marketing tool that allows you to sample comments from actual people and make creative decisions based on those responses.
UsabilityHub includes an online design survey, first-click testing, five-second tests, and preference tests to discover relevant user data.
Monthly fee: $50 for one test upgrade and $100 for regular user testing. Pricing for corporate services is customized.
6. CRO Marketing Tool: Intercom
In addition to the tools outlined above for user behaviour research, adding Intercom to your CRO marketing tool is essential. The technology aids in collecting critical information. Intercom allows experienced managers and optimizers to search for patterns in chat logs, phone recordings, and customer service threads.
Recurrent queries can provide essential insights into problematic sections of the website, which you could fix for a better user experience. Such insights are also helpful when developing testing hypotheses for your CRO strategy.
Cost/month: Start ($39) and Grow ($99) plans for small enterprises; custom plans and pricing for large businesses.
Final Thoughts on CRO Marketing
CRO marketing defines the phrase “work smarter, not harder.” Rather than pursuing new customers, it allows you to focus on your existing ones and guarantee you provide the best service possible.
If you’ve been boosting your website traffic without sales increment, CRO marketing should be your next step. This procedure is all about optimizing your site’s potential to create more revenue or signups from your visitors. Although it appears complicated, it is relatively simple.
You can skyrocket your sales and reap huge rewards with your CRO marketing when you do it right, following all the steps outlined in this guide.
Pro Tip: Take advantage of an affiliate marketing program with Metricks.io to further boost your CRO marketing efforts with the power of word-of-mouth marketing.
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Godsfavour is a passionate content strategist with an excellent flair for writing on various niches. With a bachelor’s degree in Accounting. Her natural knack for details, coupled with her love for the English language, helps her weave and spin words together to create a masterpiece. She’s passionate about business growth and development.
