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Why Conversation Rate Optimization is important - Review
Importance of CRO
It is highly important to understand what the digital visitor of your website is looking for. This is what Conversion Rate Optimization is about.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be useful mainly to bring traffic to your website or landing page.
With the right SEO strategy, one can even have thousands to a million visitors per month to their website.
But is bringing traffic to your website the only goal?
With websites having bounce rate >80%, it is difficult to get fruits from your website traffic if you have not done Conversion rate optimization . To be more specific, if not done correctly.
With Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), you have to ensure that each layer of the "funnel" make the visitors to go to the next step.
You can leave thousands of dollars on the table and ignore the low-hanging fruits, if CRO is not in place.
There are critical skills required to be a competent optimizer in conversion.
Good CRO can save you Money
In fact in many terrible cases, companies have lost millions of dollars because they assumed that their marketing and promotion would work fantastic.
Result?
They spent huge amount of money on branding, imagery, etc. only to get declining sales in just few weeks.
You may not be doing business in that scale.
But as a marketing person or agency, you are dealing daily with new campaigns, websites, and funnels.
The difference in making good sales and having losses comes down to your design of your next marketing move.
Is it an informed move or a biased move?
There are multiple biases that come into play, including - confirmation bias. Confirmation bias tends to approve the idea we had in mind about a particular thing beforehand.
If we are having a lot of ideas, it is better to create a list and keep the ideas' database ready. It can be a simple spreadsheet, nothing fancy.
The ideas should have a clear hypothesis. I choose to go with idea A. I expect B to happen as measured by C and D. Here, B is the result we expect. C and D are the measuring tools like Google Analytics.
For the unfamiliar, let us start with defining the term CRO.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
One of the definitions available at CXL Institute is
"A way of approaching your website in which you collect data to understand how changes to your website are going to impact your visitors and thus their willingness to sign up, subscribe, or buy from you."
We can understand this definition better with different examples of conversion rate optimization best practices.
We will get an overview of what things matter in general when it comes to expectations of the digital visitor.
One of the best quotes, also quoted in one of the courses at CXL institute in advertising to understand:
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted;
the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
–Tom Wanamaker, marketing pioneer and father of modern advertising
For our better understanding, we will discuss the topic of Ecommerce as good conversion optimization examples recommended by CXL Institute.
CRO Best Practices in Ecommerce Category Pages
When it comes to e-commerce category pages, there is high importance of using filters. This will help them in avoiding an analysis paralysis and make a better product selection.
When appropriate, use selected badges like "New" or "Top Rated". This will help in highlighting few products. Eventually leading towards purchase decision by the digital visitors.
Sorting tools are friends of Customers. You can add a sorting list for price, customer ratings, etc.
When it comes to photos of products, smaller photos are less likely to convert. Make the product photo appealing so that the details are clear. So, if you use large, high quality product and product category photos, your visitors are more likely to convert.
Breadcrumbs are SEO Friendly, so are they conversion friendly. Customers do not feel lost when they know exactly where they are on the website.
Ecommerce registration or Signups
Many of your visitors would be first time visitors. You should avoid forcing them to register if they want to check out. They do not want to enter a relationship with you.
All they want is buy the product they selected and checkout. For this, ensure that you have the possibility of guest checkout.
Instead, you can provide the offer for account creation after checking out on the “Thank You” page.
One more approach that is useful in conversion is incentivizing account creation. Something like "Save your details and get 25% off on your next order".
To gain more insights for analytics, you can provide option for registering via social login.
Usage of right words is all the way more important. When you are selling something, you have to ensure that each word of yours is copywriting. One word, one form, all these micro copy contribute to your overall conversion.
So you may want to avoid the general word "register" and instead use "new customer" or similar. This performs and converts better.
Let's also discuss the payment page and its practices.
Ecommerce payment or Checkout Pages
It is a good practice to test different add to cart notifications and designs. Clarity is key here.
Your customers must know what is in their carts during their journey on your website. Also, how to edit the cart.
The "checkout" button should be in sight clearly on the shopping pages. If it is along page, you can add one on the top and one on the bottom of the page.
For the payment options, you would want to provide them more options to buy with. Examples are usual credit cards like VISA, MasterCard, American Express and also online payment platforms like PayPal, Payoneer, and Amazon.
If you have some perks to offer like free shipping or fast shipping, trust badges, and return options, remind your customers about them.
If you can, try to design the payment form to look like an exact credit card. This will help eliminate any doubts, if any.
For increasing trust among customers about their financial information, use trust badges and other security features.
Also, it is good to show the security features you have implemented, clearly on the payment page. Examples include SSL, encryption, etc.
If possible, also provide option to select storing the credit card information in your system. This will help in faster checkouts and payments for returning customers. Re-entering information is also a cause of increase in drop-out rates on payment pages.
Now, let us discuss briefly the importance of copywriting in Conversion rate optimization.
Importance of Copywriting in CRO
For effective conversions, one has to learn copywriting. Copywriting is not like any other writing about business or academics or fiction or novels.
Copywriting needs to be creative. As David Ogilvy famously said:
"If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative."
You can find a brief importance of copywriting in my another article here.
Research is one of the key elements for a good copywriting. Each page on a website has its own different approach and layout for effective copywriting.
The complete web page conversion is tied to several micro copy distributed over the website. The copy of your home page will be different from the product page. Copywriting of sign up or check out page will be totally different.
So one has to research, make a draft, test, measure, analyze and improve.
Conclusion
There are a lot of benefits of CRO that are not apparent on the surface.
It requires hard work, patience and testing. It also needs that one come out of the biases and ego.
CRO is about testing and science. It has a true scientific approach.
CRO bridges the gap between a Scientist and a Marketer.
Those benefits are apparent when it is implemented with the right conversion optimization design. You'll need to use the right conversion rate optimization tools. The methodology is also important.
The above review is from the learnings by CXL Institute in their course Conversion Optimization Minidegree.
Additional Readings on the blog of CXL Institute:
What do you have to know about Conversion Optimization
10 Conversion Optimization Myths that Just Won't Go Away
How to Sell Conversion Rate Optimization to Your Boss
Social Login and CRO: 9 Things You Should Know
The author of this article is also a regular contributor at Medium can be reached at Twitter and Linkedin.
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