CRO is a process of optimising your website to convert more visitors into customers.
CRO can help businesses generate more revenue, but it can be difficult to implement CRO successfully without the right knowledge and skills.
This blog post will provide you with tips and tricks that CROs use to help small business owners increase their conversion rates on their websites.
Investing in CRO provides a lot of benefits to small businesses including increasing revenue and improving the number of leads that you generate through your website, as well as increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty by making it easy for them to complete important actions on your website, such as purchasing products or subscribing to newsletters. CRO is also good for SEO, as Google becomes more and more complex and intelligent, it can understand the usability of a website and thus uses its findings to contribute towards keyword rankings.
At its core, is the definition of and measurement of a test, followed by implementation. This incremental approach to changes on the site ensures you are only implementing aspects that are confirmed to have a positive effect on both user traffic and sales/enquiries. CRO is therefore split into four key parts:
Analysis – This is the analysis of the current state of your existing site and its performance, including onsite content and sales funnel. CRO can be applied to any part of a website but it's important that you know what areas require optimising before starting work, otherwise you can end up making changes that do not directly impact the target outcomes.
Design – Once the areas for optimisation have been defined you can then look at design principles and how the concepts of what you wish to test, are translated into physical changes to the website design and copy, with a view to either nurturing the lead or sale and directing them to take positive action on your website.
Optimisation – CRO is not a one-off project, it's an ongoing process that requires constant monitoring to ensure you are still on track for your KPIs set out in the analysis stage. There are multiple different types of tests that can be performed including A/B testing and multivariate testing.
A/B testing is a single identified test on one aspect of the page, whereas multivariate testing is the process of testing multiple components of a page through a random presentation sequence. This then defines a winning outcome or combination of outcomes, that can then be implemented directly on the website permanently.
Testing – This continued test allows you to incrementally improve your website over time. By increasing your website conversion by only a couple of per cent through these changes, you can massively affect both profitabilities of digital marketing campaigns as well as capture more customers.
For example:
This can often be achieved at a far less cost than that of increasing visitors to 50,000 to achieve the same outcome of 500 sales/leads.
You can see how powerful CRO can be!
Now you have a basic understanding of what CRO is, here are some basic tips that can help you improve your conversions:
Make "Call To Action" clear - this sounds like a given, but in many cases, CTA's are not even present on some websites, let alone provide clear instruction to the user..
Keep the number of "Calls To Action" to no more than 3 contact routes. Too many CTA's can confuse the user. Think Goldilocks and the three bears. We are looking for just the right combination of CTA's and clarity to achieve the highest conversion rates.
Colours - Do not use too many colour combinations on the screen. This can confuse the eye, making it difficult for the user to navigate.
Keep user journeys as easy as possible. Think of the path of least resistance, and make what you want the user to do, as an outcome as easy as possible. We have seen it many times where websites inadvertently make it difficult to contact the business or perform a given action.
Ensure your website works on mobile and is fast - This is something more important today, than ever as Google is using site speed as an indicator or website quality, which directly translates into a website's ability to rank.
In this day and age you should be using a responsive design that renders to a mobile device. This doesn't however mean that how it renders is in any way optimised, as a lot of websites simply use a stacking method, which doesn't always work.
There are of course lots of changes that can be made to a website to improve conversion, the above is merely a starting point, so due consideration is given to how you can get your website converting more effectively.
If this is something you’re not comfortable with doing or you want to implement a wider optimisation campaign, feel free to contact us on 0151 321 2320 or email hello@weareweb.com and we will happily talk through how we could help you get more sales and leads.
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