What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?

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• What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
• Benefits of Conversation Rate Optimization
• Different Parts of Your Website to Optimize for CRO
• How to Calculate Conversion Rate Optimization
• Types of Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies

Almost every company has sales goals centered on bringing in more qualified leads for your sales team to reach out to and close. The most effective way to attract your target audience and gain valuable leads is through optimizing your website to earn more conversions. Learn more about what conversion rate optimization (CRO) is, its benefits, how to optimize parts of your website for it, and the different strategies to use.

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?

A conversion occurs when a consumer visits your website and completes a certain action. This action can be anything like filling out a form, requesting a quote, or purchasing your product or service. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete an action on your site. Conversion rate optimization is the processes and strategies your business takes to improve your content and website to increase conversions. The more well-designed, formatted, and user-friendly your website is, the higher your conversion rate is.

Optimizing your website to receive more conversions helps you more directly appeal to your target audience as you create content catered specifically for them. Consumers can complete conversions throughout your entire website, from your homepage to your blogs to your landing pages. If you optimize each of these pages accordingly to allow for conversions, you’ll see a large number of your visitors convert into high-paying customers.

Benefits of Conversation Rate Optimization

When you start optimizing different sections of your website to better target your audience and bring in more leads, you’ll see higher conversions, along with additional benefits, including:

• Increases number of highly-qualified leads: Your sales team is most likely searching for sales leads who have a guaranteed interest in your product and can easily convert to long-lasting customers. Properly targeting your website to bring in these people makes it a great place for sales to turn to when they need more highly-qualified leads.
• Lowers customer acquisition fees and costs: Since your website is well-optimized to bring in quality leads, you’re already gaining more value from these current visitors. If you continue properly optimizing your conversion rates, you can continue increasing your revenue per visitor and acquire additional customers, essentially cutting your acquisition costs.
• Obtains more long-term customers: Optimizing your site to account for conversions means you’re building valuable content that’s targeted toward your specific audience. As you continue building and publishing quality content pieces, you’ll gain more long-term customers who will have a strong connection with your business and will continue using you as a trusted source of information. This helps establish yourself as an industry thought leader and makes you stand out from competitors.
• Boosts revenue and profits: Visitors may land on your website and find quality information and content posted on your site that they find valuable and beneficial. This often helps them build trust in your company’s knowledge and credibility, which leads them to reach out to your sales team more often to learn more about your product and if it’s the right fit for them. Before you know it, you’ll see a high boost in profits and revenue.
• Gains more customer insights: Once you start regularly optimizing your site, you can view your data and analytics to learn what visitors are engaging and interacting with. This helps you better understand which content pieces or webpages they’re more likely to view based on their needs and preferences. You can use this information to gain more insights into these customers and accurately target them to bring in even more conversions to your site.
• Improves ROI: As you gain higher conversions, you’ll notice the money you’ve invested in becoming more worthwhile as you gain more conversions without using a significant amount of your budget to attract more leads and other potential customers.
• Enhances user experience: When you optimize your site to bring in more conversions, it makes your website easier for visitors to use and explore. If your loading time is quick and your browsers are easy to navigate around, people will want to continue using your site. A strong and user-friendly site can reflect well on the performance of your product or service, making more people interested in it.
• Builds trust with customers: If customers are having an easy and simple time using your website and have a strong trust in your content, they’ll feel more confident relying on you as their product or service of choice. They’ll have more trust in both your brand and your site, especially if they’re making purchases through your site and are inputting their credit card number or personal information.

Different Parts of Your Website to Optimize for CRO

You can use the CRO process to help you better understand how visitors move through your site, the different actions they take, and what may keep them from taking certain actions on specific pages. Here are the different parts of your website that have the most potential to see higher conversions and ways to effectively optimize them:

Homepage 

Your website’s homepage is most often the first page your visitors land on when exploring your site. This is the location where customers will gain their first impressions of your website, brand, and company. Make sure this page is easy for them to navigate through. Whether they’re simply browsing through your site to learn what kind of information is on it or if they’re searching for a specific content piece, they shouldn’t have any trouble finding what they’re looking for on your site.

When visitors have an easy time using your homepage, you’re able to retain them further and guide them deeper into your website through various pages. Ways to optimize your homepage to capture more leads include:

• Sharing and emphasizing various links to more information about your products or services.
• Providing a “sign up” or “learn more” button somewhere on the page.
• Linking them to helpful content pieces that answer their questions or solve their problems.
• Sharing a chatbot or messaging system at the bottom of the page ready to answer any of your visitors’ questions that they may initially have or gain later on as they learn more about your business and its products or services.

Pricing and Costs Page

If you target your messaging toward a business-to-business audience, then you should already know how important pricing is to other organizations. This is why your pricing page should be optimized accordingly to convert your visitors to customers. When prospective leads arrive at this page, they’re expecting to immediately find your prices either by year or month so they can take note and compare them to others.

Your prices should be listed within their respective packages in ascending order, with the price-per-year or price-per-month featured clearly. You should then describe your product features within each package in concise bullet points for the visitor to quickly and briefly scan. This also helps them compare your product’s features to its price and to the features offered by competitors. For larger or customized service offerings, include your phone number so they can request a price quote from your sales team.

Blog 

Your blog is one of the key elements of your website that has the ultimate power to convert your readers to leads. When target audience members are searching for information and answers to their questions, your website’s blog content should follow SEO best practices to appear at the top of the search engine results. Once they click on the link and arrive at your site, visitors should have access to plenty of valuable, thought-driven articles. Providing consumers will quality content helps them build more trust in your company and makes you the place they turn to for solutions to their problems.

It’s important to use this to your advantage by providing readers with ways to encourage your readers to explore your content further. You can do this by adding calls-to-action and internal links to more information on related subject matters throughout your pieces. Another tactic to try is to build larger content pieces, like eBooks or white papers that go more in-depth on certain topics they may be interested in. Create forms for visitors to fill out with an email address and other basic information to reach out to them through targeted email campaigns or other marketing efforts.

Landing Page

These pages are designed with the intention of encouraging your visitors to take action and convert. You can build landing pages to serve all kinds of purposes customers may need, like the chance to download step-by-step instructions on a complex subject matter or a page to have them sign up for an event you’re hosting.

You can optimize the page further by providing previews of content or other types of teasers to show what visitors will be gaining access to if they take action by downloading a content piece or filling out a form.

Ways to Calculate Conversion Rates

Image via Flickr by stockcatalog

You can use a basic calculation to find your conversion rate. You can then calculate further to help develop specific goals for your company to improve its conversions. Common conversion rate calculations include:

Basic Conversion Rate Calculation

You can find your conversion rate by taking the total conversions on your site, divided by how many people visited your site. You can simply find these numbers by heading to your website analytics. Downloads, forms filled out, quotes requested, or any other types of action took on your site are considered conversions and should be included in your conversion numbers in this calculation.

Your web analytics should also tell you how many people have visited your website, so you can easily take this information and input it into your calculation as well. Multiply your total conversion number by 100 to get your final conversion rate percentage. Here’s what your basic conversion rate calculation should look like: Conversions / number of visitors = conversion number x 100 = conversion rate

For example, if your website received 300 visitors this month and 230 of them took a desired action on your site, your equation would be 230 / 300 = 0.77 x 100 = 77. This means your site would have a 77% conversion rate. You may be wondering what you can do with this number when it comes to building an effective marketing strategy.

Your conversion rate should be a goal you set for yourself stating that for every certain number of people who visit your site, you want a specific amount of conversions over a certain time period.

New Net Customer Calculation

To help you better analyze your conversion rate and develop strategies to improve it, you can use additional calculations to give yourself other numbers to work toward. After finding your conversion rate percentage, you can figure out your number of new net customers to aim for by developing your new revenue goal. You can calculate it by dividing your net revenue goal by your average sales price. Here’s the calculation to follow: New revenue goal / average sales price = number of new customers.

Lead Goals Calculation

Knowing your conversion rate also helps you develop your lead goal so you can work on optimizing your website to attract a specific number of leads to it. To get this number, you’ll take the number of new customers that you just calculated and will divide it by your lead-to-customer close rate. This number is the total amount of leads you currently have divided by your current total number of customers. The calculation for that would be: Total number of leads / total number of customers = lead-to-customer close amount x 100 = lead-to-customer close rate.

For example, if your total number of customers was 250 and your total number of leads was 100, then your equation would be 100 / 250 = 0.4 x 100 = 40. This makes your lead-to-consumer close rate 40%.

Here’s the calculation for your lead goal: Number of new customers / lead-to-customer close rate = lead goal. For example, if you have a lead to consumer close rate of 40% and 150 new customers, your equation is: 150 / .40 = 375, so your goal would be to reach 375 leads.

Types of Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies

To help you meet your newly established conversion goals, you can build strategies that effectively optimize your website to attract and engage new leads. The different types of conversion rate optimization strategies you can try include:

A/B Testing 

One of the most effective ways to test new elements on your website is through conducting A/B testing. This involves changing a single element on your website, then analyzing your data to see if it makes any difference. You can test several different versions of a portion of your website as long as you’re only changing one thing each time. For instance, you could run an A/B test on your homepage by displaying a CTA that takes them to a different page. For one test, your CTA could say, “Learn More About Our Products,” and another might say, “Discover How Our Software Solution Improves Your Efficiencies.”

Run each CTA separately for the amount of time and see how many people interact with it. If you want to try out a new CTA, you can run that additional one for the same amount of time as well. Whichever one gains more clicks and interactions is the CTA you can feature on your website to continue bringing in conversions. Continuously run A/B tests on your site to help you find new ways to engage and convert more leads.

Customer Value Proposition 

When your visitor gets to your website, your goal should be to immediately sell them on why they should buy your product. This is considered the customer value proposition (CVP), which is meant to clearly explain the value your product will bring to its customers. Your customer value proposition is what makes you stand out from competitors. It should demonstrate what your product brings to the table and which benefits to offers customers that other products can’t provide.

You should sit with your team to develop your customer value proposition, if you haven’t already. Once you know what your CVP is, go through your website and marketing material to find ways to demonstrate it to customers. Your CVP can be displayed through a headline, bullet points, or even an image. For instance, if you landed on a website for a web design agency and their homepage featured a headline that said, “We build, code, and write copy for your websites, so you don’t have to.” From reading this statement on their webpage, you immediately know what the company does and how they’ll benefit you.

CTAs in Blog Posts

Calls to action are a great way to get your visitors to take a specific action on your site. It’s important to make sure you’re trying out many different kinds of CTAs, rather than sticking to just adding a few of the same CTAs all over your site.

For instance, if you’re just adding banners to your website or buttons telling people to purchase or learn more about your products, customers may ignore it, since it’s just another type of advertisement. The same goes for CTAs at the bottom of a blog post. Most visitors are accustomed to seeing CTAs at the end of posts, so they purposely don’t look at the end so they won’t see it.

Include text-based CTAs within the body of your blog posts to naturally showcase the action you’d like readers to take. This CTA can just be a short line of text that catches the reader’s attention and prompts them to learn more about your service or any other additional information. Featuring text-based CTAs in the middle of the copy increases the likelihood of visitors seeing your ad and clicking on it.

Sense of Urgency 

Sometimes, when customers know they only have a limited amount of time to do something, they’ll do it right away. If you’re nearing the end of your deadline for your conversion goals and need to gain additional leads, consider implementing a sense of urgency element into your website content. A sense of urgency occurs when you tell customers that they have a set amount of time to take action until it’s no longer available to them anymore.

For example, if you’re selling a product, you can share content on your website that reads, “Only five items left. Buy yours now.” This helps your customers make purchasing decisions quicker without over-analyzing or constantly comparing their options. This helps them make a choice quickly. Once they pick you, it’s up to your product and sales team to show them that this quick decision was the right one.

Guidance and Support Offerings When Needed 

Many consumers nowadays are used to getting what they need as soon as possible. Your website should keep up with these expectations by constantly providing help, resources, and guidance as they browse through your site. An effective way to do this is by installing live chat software or messaging boxes, so they can ask for help as it arises. Having your support team chat with them makes them feel more comfortable with your company and increases their trust in you.

While chatting with them, your support team can also guide them through other parts of your website, eventually leading them to your products and potentially asking if they’d like to set up an appointment for a product demonstration or request a quote. Your chat system is a great way to encourage users to take action and complete conversions so they can become a strong lead.

Properly optimizing your website to bring in more visitors and encouraging them to take action allows you to gain more customers and build your revenue. Carefully review your website analytics to determine which parts of your website are well-optimized and which to improve. Regularly perform tests and find new ways to improve your optimization efforts. If you continue doing this, you’ll see positive results in no time.

jross

CopyPress writer

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