What is conversion rate optimisation and why is it important?
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of increasing the number of conversions you receive via your website. Depending on your business’s goals, this might mean increasing the percentage of website traffic that performs a desired action – for example, that:
- Purchases a certain product or service, or adds it to their cart or wishlist (for ecommerce sites)
- Clicks on a certain link
- Signs up to your email list
- Fills out a form
This list is by no means exhaustive though. In fact, conversion rate optimisation can be used to optimise almost any metric or key performance indicator relevant to you and your business.
To calculate conversion rate, this is the total number of conversions divided by the number of visitors multiplied by 100. For example, if your store received 20 sales and 500 visitors last month, your conversion rate would be 20 divided by 500 multiplied by 100, so 4%. It’s worth bearing in mind though that a lot of analytical tools, such as Google Analytics, will calculate this for you.
The average conversion rate for websites is thought to be between 2.63 – 4.31%, though this can vary by industry and geographic location. If your website’s conversion rate is lower than this, it could be a sign that your website is poorly optimised for conversion.
Ensuring your website is conversion rate optimised is one of the best ways to get new customers, increase revenue, and effectively grow your business.
What does conversion rate optimisation involve?
Generally speaking, there are a few main web pages that will benefit from conversion rate optimisation. These are:
- Your homepage (as this is where visitors get their first impression of your site)
- Your pricing page (as this is often what makes or breaks a sale)
- Landing pages (as there are typically designed as a call to action, making them inherently important in the conversion process)
- Blog posts (which are viewed as being one of the most valuable opportunities for conversion)
- Other high-value pages that are underperforming
There are a range of different techniques that may be used to increase conversions, which may be used at every stage of the conversion funnel. These include:
- A/B testing (also known as split testing), where two versions of the same page are presented to visitors at the same time to see which yields the better conversion rate
- Using high-converting pop-ups (known as lead flows) that command attention
- Chatbots or live chat services, which improves the user experience by allowing website visitors to ask you questions in real time
- Adding calls to action partway through blog posts or other content
- Presenting calls to action as a heading or line of text rather than as banner ads (which are often ignored by visitors)
- Retargeting, where you display online ads for your business to visitors after they navigate away from your website to other sites
- Having pop-up opt-in forms (for example, to sign-up to your mailing list or register for a callback to receive more information about a product or service)
- Sending abandoned cart emails when visitors navigate away from your site after adding items to their cart
- Creating an email workflow (that is, a series of emails) that drives customers at every stage of their purchasing journey
- Optimising your paid search engine ads
What does the conversion rate optimisation process look like?
At Tomedia, our experienced digital strategy consultants are ready to take the hard work out of your website’s conversion rate optimisation.
Here’s what the process might look like for you:
1. Initial consultation
We’ll start by asking you some questions, so that we get to know you and your business. For example:
- What does your business do?
- What products or services do you offer?
- Who are your current and potential customers?
- What are your long and short-term goals?
We’ll also ask you some questions about your current conversion rates, including what kinds of conversions you are wanting to achieve, what your conversion rates are looking like at present, and what your conversion goal is. If you are not sure, we can help you to calculate this.
2. Strategy development
We’ll then go away and start building a conversion rate optimisation strategy for your business.
We’ll put together a plan, which will detail our recommendations for the conversion rate optimisation techniques you should be using. We’ll also prepare a timeline for implementation.
We’ll then ask for your feedback on this, and make any adjustments required.
3. Implementation
Once you’ve approved our proposed conversion rate optimisation strategy, it’s time to start implementing it.
Exactly what this phase looks like will vary depending on the specifics of the strategy we’ve designed for you. Essentially though, we’ll be making the necessary changes to better optimise your site for conversions.
4. Post-launch
Once we’ve launched your conversion rate optimisation strategy, we’ll continue monitoring it to see how well it’s performing over time.
If we identify any shortcomings (for example, if a certain technique or part of the campaign is not performing as well as we expected), we’ll put together a list of recommendations for improvements. We’ll ask for your feedback and thoughts on this as well, prior to implementing any changes.
Get started
If you want to increase your revenue, attract new customers, and grow your business, conversion rate optimisation could be the key!
To find out more about how you can improve your conversion rates, contact us today at [email protected] or 0419 697 016.