eCommerce businesses nowadays are already taking the necessary steps to increase website traffic.
To increase traffic to their website, they have PPC marketing campaigns set up, Facebook advertisements running, and influencers on TikTok and Instagram doing paid collaborations. Not to be forgotten is SEO or Search Engine Optimization, which drives that organic traffic.
However, despite their attempts to increase traffic to their websites, the majority of them still have trouble getting customers to make purchases. According to a study conducted by Episerver, 92% of online shoppers don’t purchase their first visit.
This demonstrates that the majority of e-commerce websites have a conversion problem rather than a traffic one.
Conversion rate optimization marketing can help in this situation.
The goal of CRO is to optimize conversions using the current traffic, so you don’t need to drive more people to your website to see an increase in conversions.
Making hypotheses, conducting A/B test tests to validate your ideas, and making adjustments to your website if the variations perform better are all made easier with the aid of CRO marketing.
This article will discuss CRO, including how to get started, the tools you’ll need, the importance of CRO marketing, how to define CRO goals, and what a CRO marketing plan is.
Are you eager to learn more? Let’s get started then!
What exactly is CRO?
The percentage of your current traffic doing the required action on your website rises thanks to conversion rate optimization, often known as CRO marketing.
As more and more websites emerged, the competition grew tough, and marketers wanted to differentiate themselves as a result of their heavy investment in lead generation but low conversion rates.
As a result, in 2004 tools were created to assist marketers in experimenting with website layouts, content variations, and design.
The introduction of Google’s free web optimizer in 2007 significantly increased the use of conversion optimization as a marketing strategy.
Many firms are still bringing traffic to their websites and landing pages fifteen years later. However, most of them struggle with getting more visitors to become paying clients.
Why is CRO so important?
Every business needs conversion optimization because it improves your ability to understand and serve your customers better. Customers today tend to stick with companies they feel have a good understanding of them.
Therefore, CRO marketing gives you a competitive advantage that you can use to provide positive experiences across your entire business simply by assisting you in understanding your customers.
Qualitative and quantitative research, as well as numerous other elements like hypothesis design, and A/B testing are all part of the CRO marketing process.
Your hypothesis is formed using the information you learn from conducting conversion research, and it is then confirmed or refuted using A/B experiments.
CRO marketing also assists you in lowering the cost of acquiring new leads, which is an additional benefit. Without implying that top-of-the-funnel acquisition is ineffective, you can only benefit significantly more from the traffic you are already receiving if your website is optimized and you are regularly conducting A/B tests to increase your results.
Goals of CRO
Optimization of conversion rates is not a stand-alone process. To determine whether your experimentation program is effective or not, you need clearly defined goals.
You must have clearly defined business objectives before establishing your CRO objectives so that the conversion specialists can successfully align the CRO program with them.
If this isn’t done, the CRO marketing team will only be forced to work on experiments that have no bearing on the company’s quarterly goals. We don’t want conversion specialists and business owners to become frustrated as a result of this.
Moving on, there are two categories of goals in CRO marketing. There are two types of goals: the macro goal (which is the main conversion that matters to every business) and the micro goals (which seem like distractions and unnecessary). Nevertheless, every experienced experimenter is aware that achieving your macro goals requires consistently achieving your micro goals.
A purchase is a primary conversion for an eCommerce website; that’s what they want and that’s what they’re looking for. This is an example of a micro goal that affects direct conversion.
More abandoned carts can be recovered by setting up an abandoned cart flow in their email service provider, which enables them to contact users who paused their purchase process and recover some sales, which appears insignificant but is a significant step toward this macro goal.
For this eCommerce website, the win-back flow to encourage previous subscribers and customers to make new purchases is another illustration of a micro goal that increases sales. The macro purchase goal is directly impacted by the number of repeat buyers, who increase orders by doing so.
Who is CRO for?
When a brand wants to get to know its users better and enhance its user experience, that is the ideal time to start using CRO marketing.
Here, improving their customers’ online experience might entail
- Making it simple for website visitors to switch between different pages.
- Showing the right products in the right places for website visitors.
- Enhancing the mobile checkout process to increase sales and decrease cart abandonments.
Although there are no restrictions on starting a CRO marketing program as a business, let’s focus on the fundamentals of doing it well.
You don’t just begin with CRO as a brand. The best way to do this is to have company goals, then set up CRO goals that align with your brand goals. These goals could be things like increasing sign-ups, getting more people to download lead magnets, buying more than one item or a specific best-selling item, etc.
You must benchmark your current performance as you create CRO marketing goals that are consistent with the overall vision of your brand to accurately assess your performance and record your lessons learned for the CRO marketing program.
Setting realistic expectations is something else that should be done at this point. Conversion rate optimization specialists don’t wave their hands and improvements and increased revenue appear of their own volition. This is the mental image that many businesses have, so it’s important to inform them that CRO marketing is a long-term objective and that you have processes in place to help the business achieve the desired conversions.
Once these foundational elements are in place, the next step is to examine your website analytics using software like Google Analytics to identify the pages that are pertinent to your CRO objectives and how users interact with them. Is the bounce rate high? What is the typical time spent? What is the difference in conversion rates between various devices and so on?
You want to gather qualitative data after conducting quantitative research, which entails examining Google Analytics data and examining user replay sessions using a program like Microsoft Clarity or HotJar. This data will help you understand the “WHY” of customers.
Understanding the reasons behind your customers’ actions on your website is essential to identifying the barriers to conversion and what is already working that you can scale up to boost conversions.
How to do CRO right
Although the term “best practices” has been misused and overused by marketers across the internet, it doesn’t follow that there aren’t any legitimate best practices for experimentation.
Your experimentation program will run smoothly if you adhere to these three guidelines:
- Make no changes to your website without solid data to support them. Data should guide your choices.
- Don’t imitate your rivals. You can use their ideas as inspiration, but you should A/B test the concept to see if it works for your target audience.
- A working experiment shouldn’t be stopped, edited, and then restarted. Your research findings are in danger.
- Have a clear plan for your CRO marketing; we covered this in the strategy session. You’ll skip some crucial steps in your experiments if you don’t follow a set procedure, which will skew the results.
- Testing each experiment before running it. This is a wise practice for CRO marketing. Verify that all of your objectives are being tracked and that the variation is rendering properly for the users.
CRO the easy way
Conversion rate optimization is a complicated process. It requires a dedicated team with years of experience.
Hiring an in-house team that can take care of this is time-consuming and expensive.
This is why Nopsbit exists. We are a CRO agency focusing on helping D2C eCommerce brands reach higher conversion rates and average order values.
Contact us for a free consultation call to find out if we can help take your business to the next level!
