Conversion rate, i.e. the proportion of the visitors of your website who take your desired action (not necessarily make a purchase; rather anything from signing up for email newsletter or a blog update or downloading an app), has become a buzzword for marketers over the past few years. After all, it judges the success of a site and, ultimately, your own. As marketers are constantly seeking ways to improve their conversion rates, it was only a matter of time before techniques like conversion rate optimization (CRO) saw the light.
By definition, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of changing (and upgrading) funnels of your website in order to make it more effective and result in conversion. In other words, it increases the percentage of website visitors who experience a moment, transforming from passive browsers to valuable conversions.
If you are wondering why you need conversion rate optimization, chances are that you are still new to the concept of conversion rate. Luckily, you are in the right place to find out why you should care about CRO and embrace it as part of your marketing plan. Here are ten reasons that make CRO a must-have for marketers.
1) It Gets Websites More of the ‘Right Kind’ of Traffic
One of the important reasons to adopt conversion rate optimization is that it can attract the right kind of traffic to your site. Rather than focusing your marketing efforts on anyone or everyone, CRO offers you the opportunity to channel your marketing efforts to the ‘right’ kind of people – i.e. people who love your product and who have a better shot at converting.
Even so, having acquired the right kind of visitors is not nearly enough, CRO practices can be very helpful since they take this a step further and effectively convert potential visitors. As a result, CRO multiplies the return on your investments (both the current and potential ones) by capitalizing on your website traffic.
Since you are already aware of the funnels which attract users to your site and convert most of them to loyal customers, you get to spend your marketing budget carefully by allocating funds accordingly into these funnels. As a result, your CRO strategy is immensely cost-effective and essentially free.
Summing it up, the most glaringly obvious reason you need CRO is that it is an essentially ‘free’ way to acquire more visitors and effectively convert them to leads and sales.
2) Pay Per Click is Getting More and More Competitive
Pay per click (PPC) advertising tools like Google AdWords have risen in popularity in recent years. Small businesses which are relatively new in the market especially find that the best way to boost their marketing efforts and attract customers is to invest in PPC ads.
However, with the rising popularity (and thereby, increasing competition) of PPC, comes rising costs. This means that not all businesses are able to afford to run PPC ads as the cost exceeds their limited budget. This is especially true if all of the clicks fail to convert to sales as the ROI is not much to talk about. As a result, they need to find another way to attract visitors and effectively convert them.
An alternate method to PPC is CRO. Not only is CRO cost effective, but it is also a brilliant way to overcome the many other shortcomings of paid advertising like PPC. For one, CRO does not require additional money to convert your current traffic. Moreover, it helps you identify any problems you might be having with your conversion funnel, which makes it easier to address them without denting your budget.
3) The Cost of Digital Marketing is Equally as Expensive
Another reason which makes CRO a much useful and needed tool for businesses is the cost of digital marketing on various publishing platforms. Whether it is print, online or television marketing, all of them have become extremely expensive. Not convinced? Just compare the marketing costs of today to that of 6 months ago and you will see how quickly they have risen.
Even if you invest large chunks of money on digital marketing, there is no way to guarantee that it is going to pay off as high as you expected. After all, how can you be sure that your targeted audience converts? In such a case, a CRO can be a brilliant strategy to combat and thwart the shortcomings of digital marketing. This can be done by focusing your marketing efforts towards the visitors who make the final purchase, which will improve your site’s conversion rate in turn.
Rather than sinking additional money into digital advertising and PPC ads, you can now gain more consumers by improving the number of existing users who convert in your current budget. By helping your traffic become more efficient, CRO also helps you save money and generate profit.
4) Profit is Directly and Intimately Tied to Your Conversion Rate
While it is true that not everybody who converts ends up becoming a happy and satisfied customer, you cannot discount the financial importance of conversion in terms of the profits it generates. In fact, you would be surprised to know how incredibly sensitive your profit is to your conversion rate. The greater your conversion rate, the more traffic you attract, and eventually the more business you get. As a result, you get to reap a greater profit.
Not only do you generate more profit through increasing conversion rate and thereby increasing market share, but you also you cut back a lot on marketing expenses (digital marketing, PPC etc.). Though this may not exactly mean that you save money, you will be able to spend a lot less on potential customers for effective conversion. After all, there is no additional cost incurred to acquire these conversions. All in all, it is safe to say that CRO is a spectacular strategy to follow if you wish to increase your business profits. And, as you already know, more profit means more money available to finance your marketing efforts and improve your CRO practices.
5) CRO Directly Improves your Website’s Efficiency
The actual goal of CRO is not to force potential visitors into converting. Rather, CRO centers around appearing user friendly and making it as easy a journey as possible to generate interest on your site and engage visitors until they successfully convert. To do so, you need to maintain and improve your website’s efficiency.
Because CRO is a continuous and never-ending process, adopting it helps you ensure that your website is running smoothly and considered ‘browsable’ by visitors. Unlike SEO, the results are immediate; there is no waiting around to see if updating your website funnels garnered positive results or not. This will further ensure continuous and increasing conversions.
Since you take user comfort seriously, you need to test and upgrade your site’s efficiency regularly. Doing so ensures that people who visit your site stick around (and hopefully convert) rather than bolt toward your competitor’s site. Also, website efficiency ensures better ranking on the search engine result page (SERP).
6) It Makes You More Valuable to Affiliates and Potential Partners
CRO does not only improve your website’s efficiency and relevancy for visitors, it also improves the effectiveness of your overall marketing efforts, making your site (and business) more valuable to potential organizations such as affiliate marketers who are looking for online retailers to cross-promote their products with.
How come do affiliate marketers or potential partners find your site valuable, you ask? Because of the high click through rates and, consequently, the high conversions your website generates. In other words, not only do you make more money for yourself, but also for your affiliates and pay per click advertisers. Therefore, CRO is a win-win solution for all the parties involved as it makes you more valuable (while your competitors become less valuable) to affiliates. This makes CRO an extremely useful strategy if you are looking to broaden your business scope and marketing horizons by attracting potential affiliates and partnering up with them.
7) Competition is Becoming Increasingly Dense (as in crowded… they are getting smarter every day)
Another benefit of conversion rate optimization is that it allows you to stay ahead of your competitors on so many levels. As an online business owner, you probably have an idea of the increasing global competition in the e-commerce industry. It is even more difficult for small businesses and retailers to survive the intense competition and come unscathed. Large corporations are always eating up the market share, with small retailers having nothing to do but exit the industry. If you wish to survive (and thrive) in the industry, you need to beat the competition by staying ahead of your competitors.
CRO can help you with this endeavor in a number of ways. You can ensure that the visitors on your site stay there (rather than bouncing to your competitor’s web page) by delivering good user experience and carefully guiding them to take your desired action. There are various ways you can improve the user experience, including removing potential barriers, simplifying forms, and clarifying navigation. Get expert help for more details. Once your website usability improves and it eventually results in more conversions, you can attract affiliate marketers (before your competitors do so) and make sure that you stay ahead of competition.
8) The Attention Span of Your Audience is Limited
In order to effectively convert visitors, you need to first attract them to your site and then persuade them to click on your desired outcome. The question is: how do you persuade them when their attention span is limited? Yes, consumer attention span is continually shortening, a claim proven by many psychological studies and medical journals. If your consumers don’t find what they are looking for in that short span of time, you can forget about them spending another minute on your site.
Conversion rate optimization can be very helpful in combatting this new trait in people. Because CRO provides visitors with what they are searching for sooner (rather than later), it helps marketers capture their attention, helping them around the problem of internet users’ limited attention span.
9) CRO Gives Your Business or Site a Credible and Legitimate Outlook
Since conversion optimization revolves around continuous testing, improvement and upgrading, it serves as an ingenious strategy to give your business a legitimate outlook. After all, the fact that you are constantly making changes means that you are an active member of the business community, therefore your site is trustworthy.
Building trust and credibility for your site is important because there are already plenty of online scams out there. Therefore, if you want your visitors to complete an online purchase via your site, you definitely have to add credibility and authenticity to your site. You can do this through many CRO practices, including:
- Having a clear and easy to find Call to Action
- Improving your site’s navigation and overall usability
- Displaying customer testimonials
- Adding a FAQ page on order process, shipping charges and other details
By relying on CRO for legitimizing and streaming your business, you also benefit through the new changes. For instance, having an easy-to-search-through inventory with clear categories is definitely a plus. Moreover, ensuring the visibility of the shopping cart and making it easy to access will improve user experience and bring more people to your online store.
10) It Makes Your Business More Robust
Conversion rate is vital for your business’ growth and success. Because of an increase in conversion rate, you can increase your profits and easily access various other marketing avenues both online and offline to promote and advertise your business on. Spending money to market your products on professional business platforms like Google’s AdWords and acquire new customers is no longer an issue for you thanks to your site’s high conversion rate. That aside, being able to afford advertising on other platforms makes your business appear more robust and successful.
Taking on conversion rate optimization for the first time can be quite challenging and overwhelming. However, in order to optimize your conversion funnel, you need to have a proper strategy in place. Random hunches or guesses have no place here. So, get ready to put in the necessary effort or hire a consultant to handle this task on your behalf.
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