Beneath the surface of your current website, mobile app, online marketplace, or SaaS portal traffic, there’s a concealed treasure trove. You can unlock this potential stream of revenue by using conversion rate optimization.
Being a digital marketer and online business owner, you follow all the techniques out there to drive more unique traffic to your web properties or mobile apps. But, you tend to forget the audience who’s already engaging with your websites and apps.
Are all of them subscribers to your newsletter? Did all the visitors of your SaaS product sign up for a trial? Do you think all the visitors to your mobile app’s Google Play or App Store page download the app?
If you don’t have answers to these questions, no worries! Many online business owners don’t. Because we’re just hunting for new audiences, not cultivating the existing traffic base. That’s where conversion rate optimization comes in.
Let’s understand this digital marketing tool below and see how you can rapidly increase conversions for your product and service!
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a digital marketing tool to enhance digital interactions and thereby increase the number of actions you want your audience to perform. It focuses on refining user experiences to convert existing traffic into valuable engagements, such as sales, sign-ups, trials, demo requests, and downloads.
By meticulously analyzing user behavior, experimenting with the design of the product, tweaking the content or media, and employing data-driven insights, CRO aims to maximize the percentage of visitors who take intended actions.
This method transforms passive browsers into active participants, amplifying the efficiency of existing traffic. In a landscape where attracting new audiences is crucial, CRO shifts the focus towards optimizing interactions with the audience you already possess, ultimately boosting business growth.
Why Is CRO Optimization Important for Your Business?
The market for online business has become completely saturated. It’s challenging to acquire a new audience, visitors, or customers. However, if you’re already getting a good number of regular visitors but they aren’t engaging, you can use CRO to enhance engagement.
Thus, you don’t need to invest heavily in advertising or influencer marketing to bring a new audience every month. Simply follow the CRO guidelines to enhance the user experience and usability of your product so existing users will subscribe, sign up, and buy more.
Also read: Best Usability Testing Methods for Apps and Websites With Examples
How to Create a Conversion Rate Calculator for CRO Optimization
You must carefully calculate the conversion rate for your website, SaaS product, or mobile app. Else, you’ll get skewed results that are inflated or deflated. Find below two common conventions of CRO calculation:
Unique Orders and All Sessions
This method suits websites, marketplaces, and apps where visitors can engage in various ways. Like, they sign up for newsletters, fill up a feedback form, request a demo, sign up for trials, and buy different items. Also, they can do all these each time they visit the website, landing page, or mobile app.
So, all the visits are unique, as well as the activities performed. In such a case, here’s the conversion rate calculation formula:
Total conversion actions / Total sessions x 100
For example, if there are 10 sign-ups out of 100 visitors, the conversion rate is 10%.
Unique Orders and Unique Users
For websites or apps that sell capital goods or costly software that buyers buy only once, you can’t consider repeated visitations by the same user as unique visits. For example, Joe bought a subscription to a tech magazine on your website.
They aren’t going to buy the same subscription again, but they’ll surely keep visiting your web portal. In this case, the conversion rate formula changes to the following:
Total unique actions / Total unique visitors x 100
For instance, when there are 50 subscriptions from 2,000 unique visitors, the conversion rate is 2.5%.
To create a quick calculator, you can input the above formulas in an Excel worksheet and create reference cells for actions and visitors. For your assistance, I created one. You can download the calculator linked below and customize it if needed. It’s free to use and share, and there are no bugs!
Key Components of Conversion Rate Optimization
#1. Evergreen, Trending, and Dynamic Keywords
While evergreen keywords ensure regular visitors to your website, trending keywords enable you to capture the users looking for currently popular keywords.
Also, there are dynamic keywords that may have seen a spike in search but might not perform after a few days. Optimizing your website for all these types of keywords will help you get more visitors to your website.
#2. Website or App Content and Copy
The website content plays a significant role in optimizing its conversion rate. With persuasive copywriting, you can compel the visitors to take your desired action. You can focus on conversion copywriting to get maximum success.
#3. The Landing Pages of Apps and Websites
The landing page is the catalyst behind a higher conversion rate. Companies need to ensure that their landing page contains attractive headlines, great visuals, and a visible CTA.
#4. The Site or App Navigation and Structure
Without smooth navigation or a well-structured website, users will not get the optimum experience. Simplistic navigation, dropdown menus, and breadcrumbs are useful ways of CRO.
#5. CTA Buttons
Since CTA buttons drive more people to perform your desired action, you need to place it in a visible place, add a compelling CTA copy, and use contrasting colors.
#6. App or Page Speed
By increasing the page speed and app load speed, you can reduce the bounce rate responsible for a low conversion rate.
#7. Feedback or Contact Forms
With different forms, you can get the opinion of the audience and find out the bottlenecks responsible for lower conversion rates.
Also read: Best Online Form Builders for Your Business
Key Conversion Types in CRO Optimization
#1. Buying a Product, Service, or App
This is the most common type of conversion most businesses look for. Compelling product descriptions, HD images, and easy checkout can help with this conversion.
#2. Adding Items to the Shopping Cart
eCommerce websites aim for this conversion type. Offering limited-time discounts and displaying related products can influence the user to add more items.
#3. Requesting a Quote for a Product, App, or Service
Companies that offer custom pricing for high-value or bulk services find quote requests highly valuable. With simple and short quote request forms, companies can encourage more users.
#4. Subscribing to a Newsletter or Email List
Creating an email list is important for lead generation and continuous engagement. Using clear CTAs and mentioning subscription benefits makes more people submit their email addresses.
#5. Requesting a Demo or Call Back
By writing a catchy copy describing the benefits of a product or demo, companies can get more callback or demo requests.
#6. Downloading an App
Companies offering apps focus on download counts as their target conversion. Engaging visuals and app feature highlights can get more people to download the app.
#7. Using a Free Trial of Mobile Apps and Web Apps
Freemium app developers can encourage more users to sign up for the free trial through an easy sign-up process and display the value of the product.
What Is the CRO Process?
- Platform Data Collection:
- Collect current website or app traffic and conversion data.
- Also, gather qualitative data like user surveys, feedback, and heatmaps.
- Data Analysis:
- Identify high-traffic pages and key user paths.
- Analyze user behavior, drop-off points, and interaction patterns.
- Creating and Ranking Hypothesis:
- Create multiple hypotheses to enhance the conversion rate
- Focus on improving elements that impact user experience, such as headlines, CTAs, and forms.
- Experimenting With the Hypothesis:
- Rank hypotheses based on potential impact and ease of implementation.
- Focus on high-impact, low-effort changes for initial testing.
- Create A/B tests or multivariate tests to compare variations.
- Implementing a Successful Hypothesis:
- Implement variations on your website or app using testing tools.
- Ensure accurate tracking and measurement of user interactions.
- Collect and Analyse Data:
- Gather new traffic vs. conversion rate data and see if there are any improvements.
- Iterative Improvements:
- Continuously work on the newly implemented web content, app interface, or SaaS sales funnel to improve conversion rate further.
- Monitoring:
- Keep monitoring the conversion rate regularly.
- If there are any drops in conversion numbers, create a new CRO project.
Conversion Rate Optimization Use Cases
CRO for Online Marketplaces (eCommerce)
Shopping cart abandonment is often the biggest challenge faced by online marketplaces. Running CRO campaigns will help these companies identify the causes responsible for this issue.
To improve the conversion rate and make more people buy products, eCommerce companies should remove distractions from their websites at the advanced stages of the funnel. Removing hidden costs at checkout, making the checkout and payment process easier, and reducing the delivery charge are other ways to optimize the conversion rate.
CRO for Mobile Apps
Most mobile apps come with one or two broken links for CTAs, feedback, sign-ups, carts, and so on. You can perform CRO optimization for your mobile app to tighten the loose ends. You must ensure the page links and flows are working all the time.
Also, you must strategically place CTAs, discounts, promotions, and buy buttons scattered around the mobile app so the visitors don’t miss the action button when they’re ready to act.
CRO for SaaS Business
Lead generation is the initial point of getting customer engagement for SaaS companies. Usually, they gather customer information through surveys and sign-up forms. CRO is a great way to achieve goals by capturing the interest of the users and offering them what they want.
For that, SaaS companies can find the web pages on their website that have the maximum potential of getting leads and make the content of those web pages more relevant and conversion-centric.
CRO for Websites and Digital Publications
The objective of digital publishing houses is to get a large audience base and keep them engaged with the website. To achieve these, they should ensure that elements like social sharing icons, email sign-ups, and other promotional options are placed properly.
They can also include recommended content in different sections of the website to grab the attention of the visitors. This will attract users and make them spend more time on the website.
CRO for Online Ticketing Agencies
While getting conversion is quite difficult for online ticketing agencies, it can be improved by making the booking process easier.
For example, such websites can make their interface clutter-free and bring essential information to the forefront. Thus, the audience can easily find out what they are looking for and will not abandon the website easily.
Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization (Brief)
- Increases conversions from existing traffic, optimizing the potential of your website, app, or SaaS platform.
- Maximizes ROI by utilizing data-driven insights to refine strategies and improve conversion efficiency.
- Reduces bounce rates and cart abandonment through improved usability and compelling calls-to-action.
- Informs product and content decisions by analyzing user interactions and preferences, leading to tailored offerings.
- Supports A/B testing, enabling systematic experimentation to determine the most effective design and content variations.
Conversion Rate Optimization—The Future Trend
The primary future trend is the increased adoption of CRO with mainline digital marketing strategies like SEO, PPC, etc. Other notable trends you’ll see in the upcoming years are as follows:
- Use of machine learning to understand each visitor separately. Then, use market and customer segmentation to offer unique experiences.
- There will be an increase in the use of recommendation engines on eCommerce and SaaS marketplaces to offer products to visitors that they prefer.
- Using extensive willingness-to-pay analysis, brands will surely try to implement extensive dynamic pricing to show different price points to different audience groups.
- The conversion and sales funnels will become short so prospects and customers can check out smoothly.
- There will be AI chatbots to answer complex customer questions directly on the website and mobile app to reduce customer support wait times.
The decision rests with you! Are you willing to witness an excessive growth rate in conversion numbers? Give the above techniques and try to see your brand grow like never before!
Now, you need any of these best conversion tracking software.