Landing more leads and converting them into sales is the key to long-term growth for your company, but it isn’t always easy.

But how do you get better at driving traffic?

Well, that’s where Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) comes in!

Instead of just relying upon new traffic or search engine rankings alone, you can reach your existing traffic and leads who will make you more money later down the line (and beyond).

In this guide, we’ll go over everything you should know about CRO and why businesses like yours should focus on improving their conversion rates if they want to expand their horisons.

Conversion Rate Optimisation Definition

To start, let’s go over some basics and discuss what conversion rate optimisation means.

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the procedure of augmenting your website to boost your number of leads. This can be achieved through split testing, content enhancements and workflow improvements.

As a result, businesses gain highly qualified prospects, lower acquisition costs and an increased revenue base when they implement CRO into their marketing strategy effectively.

Conversion rates vary by industry and demographics, but they’re important for understanding how well your site performs. For example, the global average conversion rate of eCommerce sites was around two percent in 2020’s third quarter, which went down from the near two and a half percent from last year.

Not only does the average differ by year, but it differs by niche as well. For instance, the food and beverage sector had a five and a half percent increase while hair care retailers were at three and a half percent.

How Can Conversion Optimisation Help Your Business?

Conversion Rate Optimisation is about getting better results from your website traffic while also ensuring you target qualified leads.

With CRO, it’s not just enough to have a good product or service; if people can’t find what they need on your site then you won’t be making nearly as many sales as you expect to.

Whether you’re an established brand or just getting started, conversion rate marketing can help significantly increase the number of qualified leads that convert into customers and advocates on your site, thus boosting revenue and allowing your business to truly thrive.

What is CRO Strategy?

For conversion optimisation to work effectively, you’ll need to come up with a strategy that best caters to your distinct business model.

There are four main areas in which CRO can be implemented to boost your conversion rate:

  • Blog: A blog is a great way to engage your readers, drive traffic and generate leads. You can use CRO by adding calls-to-action (CTA) throughout articles or inviting those who are interested to submit their email in exchange for a free product like an e-book or whitepaper.
  • Homepage: Homepages make a good impression on potential customers and help guide them into deeper parts of your site. You could offer links that lead users further down the page, ask questions about products they might want via chatbot technology or provide a free signup button.
  • Landing Pages: Landing pages are the perfect way to get your business’ name out there. Conversion rates for this type of signup form average at 24 percent, which makes them an excellent place to acquire new customers. You can optimise designs with videos or other preview content to encourage visitors to take action.
  • Pricing Page: Modifying price intervals on your site, classifying product highlights within each price point and inputting a phone number for prospects to call are all excellent methods in helping you convert more customers.

Within these sectors of your CRO marketing, these kinds of strategies will make a huge difference in your conversion rate optimisation. Try them out and see the impact it makes for yourself!

What Businesses Uses CRO?

Many types of companies from various industries utilise CRO, but there are four main ones to take into account that benefit highly from this valuable marketing tool.

Marketing Agencies

Conversion rate optimisation is no doubt a very useful tool for any marketing agency.

CRO not only allows you to better serve your clients (other businesses) with increasing lead conversions, speeding up return of interest (ROI) and improving client retention but helps them with their own internal marketing as well.

B2B and SaaS

It’s important to focus on customer-centred marketing when you’re working with B2B or SaaS companies as they thrive by maintaining a loyal customer base.

Research shows that CRO will assist your customers in finding what they need faster, support their purchasing decisions all while increasing their engagement levels in the process.

E-commerce

The most significant challenge for e-commerce businesses is that shoppers abandon their carts. This wastes billions of dollars in sales each year, according to a Baymard Institute analysis.

Over half the visitors who leave do so because there’s difficulty completing the checkout process, there are hidden costs they weren’t aware of or they just simply got distracted.

Running an effective CRO campaign can help you identify and overcome these bottlenecks which will improve your site’s conversion rate significantly.

Media

The goal of any media company is to appeal to a broad audience while continuing engagement, which is critical in promoting long-term success in the long run.

You can do this by testing different promotions including email sign-ups, recommended content, social sharing icons or surveys to offer suggestions.

These CRO strategies make a whole world of difference in both your customer retention and conversion rates.

CRO Calculation

A conversion rate is a number that tells you how many people convert into customers compared with the total number of visitors. To calculate conversions, you just need to use a simple CRO formula.

CRO’s are quite easy to calculate. Here are the three formulas that are most commonly used so you can better identify, analyse and refine conversion rates for your business.

Calculation 1: Conversion Rate

[Leads Generated] divided by [Total Website Traffic] times [100] equals [Conversion Rate percent]

In order to calculate your conversion rate, divide the number of conversions (or generated leads) by total web traffic and multiply that amount by 100. The resulting percentage is your conversion rate.

Calculation 2: Number of Net New Customers

[Your New Revenue Goal] divided by [The Average Sales Price] equals [Total New Customers]

To calculate the number of net new customers you attract in a given time, divide your revenue goal by the average sales price.

Calculation 3: Lead Goal

[Total New Customers] divided by [The Lead-to-Customer Close Rate Percent] equals [Your Lead Goal]

Finally, calculating your lead goal will involve taking the number of new customers you have and dividing it by your lead-to-customer close rate. This is the percentage of your total leads divided by your total customers.

Where To Start with CRO?

Okay, so you’ve got all this information on conversion rate optimisation and how to use it for your business, but right now, you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed on where to start.

Here are some essential starting points that are sure to give you an advantage.

Utilise the PIE Framework

The PIE framework is a great place to start. Using PIE will get you thinking about how you want each element of your CRO efforts prioritised. These elements are Potential, Importance and Ease.

Before diving into any project, ask yourself the following questions and answer them by ranking each strategy from one to ten based on the PIE framework.

How much total improvement can I get from this strategy?

What’s the value these improvements will give me?

How hard will it be to make these improvements?

After each strategy has been designated a score, add up each number and divide the total amount by three—this will give an average score for each strategy and help you determine which one will make the biggest impact.

CRO can be challenging to navigate, but the PIE framework give you an easy and systematic way to approach it. It encourages collaboration among colleagues from project managers through executives in order to maximise impact on company results.

Begin with the Three Formulas When Starting CRO Conversation.

We’ve already provided you with the three formulas that are necessary to use for conversion rate optimisation, now all you have to do is use them!

We’ll demonstrate how these formulas work with an example:

Say your site receives a total of 15,000 visitors each month which generates 150 leads; giving you 15 customers each month. Your website conversion rate would be one percent.

Now say you want to double the number and make it a goal of 30 customers per month.

That would also mean that you’d have to double the amount of visitors to 30,000 while trying to make sure your traffic value doesn’t plummet.

To avoid this, you’ll need to pull leads from your current traffic. That’s where conversion rate optimisation comes in! This will make doubling up on your numbers less of a risk and will greatly increase your chances of improving your bottom line.

Conduct A/B Test to Determine What Strategy Works for You

With A/B testing, you can instantly and easily identify which features of your content or design cater to your target audience best and which will need adjustments.

It’s an effective marketing tool that will allow you to run tests on multiple versions of web pages, website copy, images, content offers, form questions and many other marketing platforms and compare which produce the best results.

Using A/B testing, Hubspot was able to boost conversion rates by 50 percent in 2021. They discovered this after they reduced the number of fields they had in their opt-in forms from four to three.

In 2021, Hubspot was also able to increase their opening rate by half of a percent when they used A/B testing in email subjects, which resulted in 131 new leads.

We know that Hubspot is a large and highly successful company, but the numbers don’t lie. Even a start-up small business could make these leaps in their CRO.

You’ve got your business– and if you’re still reading this, you’ve now got what it takes to be a true CRO SEO. All you have to do next is take advantage of all the knowledge, tools and strategies we’ve gone over in this article. Once you do that, your business will be set to boom with abundance.

Author Bio

After working with over 1,000 startups, and hundreds of established businesses over the past decade, Ryan Chute set himself apart as a CEO who goes to great lengths to help fellow entrepreneurs achieve their goals. Ryan Chute, CEO of Wizard of Sales.