This blog post is the first in our brand new series dedicated to conversion rate optimization (CRO). Read on to learn what CRO is and the benefits of utilizing it.
Perhaps you’re generating web traffic through carefully crafted ads. Or maybe you’ve put your SEO hours in and have turned your website into a visitor magnet. Whichever way you’re driving traffic, the work doesn’t stop there. A good eCommerce site doesn’t just attract visitors; it moves website visitors down the conversion funnel to the point of conversion.
In today’s crowded digital landscape, competition is fierce and keeping a new visitor’s attention is becoming increasingly vital.
So, how can you reduce bounce rate and friction in order to produce more conversions? Enter CRO.
What is conversion rate optimization?
CRO is the process of optimizing a website or landing page to turn more visitors into customers. It’s all about digging deep into your customer journey, ironing out the creases and enhancing the experience until you’re left with a frictionless customer journey that’s tailored to each individual.
CRO is an ongoing process of learning, but put the time in and you’ll soon be reaping the rewards of a higher conversion rate.
How to calculate your conversion rate
To calculate conversion rate, you divide your number of conversions by your number of visitors and multiply that number by 100 to get a percentage.
Whilst the number of visitors you convert into paying customers is arguably the most important conversion rate, there are micro-conversions you can be measuring too. These could be the number of email sign-ups you generate or the number of people who follow your brand’s social media accounts.
The 4 benefits of conversion rate optimization
Now you know what CRO is and how to calculate your site’s conversion rate, let’s look at why it’s important and how focusing on CRO could benefit your business.
1. Understand your customers better
You know what they say: knowledge is power. So before you can start your journey of conversion optimization on your website, you’ll need to have an in-depth understanding of your customers. The aim is to know who they are, how they interact with your store and where the bottlenecks in the customer journey are that might prevent them from converting.
Data should underpin your CRO strategy, as it will allow you to create conversion-friendly segmentations based on your customer and potential customers’ actions, lifecycle stage and purchases.
2. Get more customers and lower your cost per acquisition
CRO is all about helping visitors to your store find what they’re looking for and speeding up the buying process. The more you understand your customers, the more you can tailor the customer experience and lead shoppers towards making those all important purchases.
CRO is also about efficiency. If you’re working hard to get people to your site, CRO should be a top priority to make sure you’re converting more of that traffic into customers. The better the customer experience, the more customers you’ll get from the same amount of traffic, which results in happy marketers and a lower cost per acquisition (CPA).
3. Boost your SEO efforts
It’s not a case of one or the other. CRO and SEO can sometimes go hand in hand. Search is becoming smarter, and Google itself has acknowledged that user behavior is now taken into account when ranking pages. This means websites that offer the best customer experience will rank higher. So all that work you’re putting into optimizing the customer journey will not only increase conversions, it could push your online store higher up the search engine results too and result in more website traffic.
4. Increase your customer lifetime value
That CRO research we talked about in point number 1 will help you create tailored customer experiences for new visitors to your website and loyal customers. Segment your loyal customers and shower them with affection in the form of ‘welcome back’ popups, personalized product recommendations in their most purchased product categories, and replenishment emails reminding them to repurchase. Optimizing your customer journey will turn one-off purchasers into loyal customers by anticipating what they want and making them feel special.
The benefits of conversion rate optimization are clear. By focusing on CRO you can gain a better understanding of your customers, convert more customers and lower your CPA, boost your SEO efforts and increase your customer lifetime value.
Read the second post in the series: 5 conversion rate optimization tactics for eCommerce.
