In the modern and ever-evolving world of business online, Conversion Rate Optimisation is a topic at the top of everyone’s agenda. It is vital to have a full and in-depth understanding of what CRO is. It is also important to understand different CRO tactics and how improving certain aspects of your website, ads and social media can drastically improve your Conversion Rates.
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation
Conversion Rate Optimisation is fundamental to every business with an online presence. In a digital world where every aspect is calling for your attention, CRO is one you should definitely pay attention to. After all, a company can spend large sums of money on all the advertising in the world to bring users to your site. However, it is a waste of time and money if the users are not spending money or following your call-to-action when they get there.
Attracting traffic to your site is a key part of online business, however once on your site, the question is, what is keeping them there? And more importantly what will make them invest their time and money in your offering? If you do not give users a clear way and reason to engage on your site, they are going to leave. This means that all the effort to get them to your business is wasted.
CRO is therefore the different ways in which you can turn traffic into customers that convert – or follow your call-to-action. It is a key strategy for ensuring the money you do spend on ads and content gives you a good return on your investment.
To put it in really simple terms, Conversion Rate Optimisation is the process in which a business optimises its website, social media and advertising to turn potential customers into paying customers.
Keeping Conversion Rate Optimisation Simple
Conversion Rate Optimisation is as simple, or as complicated as you make it. While you could spend large sums of money and every waking hour trying to hack your CRO, the simplest changes often make a difference.
There are a wide variety of ways you can work on CRO. It is such a diverse process. You can change and test so many different aspects all to help you understand what works and what doesn’t. Things like having a great landing page, removing navigation and changing your call to action are good places to start. Once you get the hang of it you can venture into AB Testing or ensuring your checkout and registration process is easy to use.
The importance of Conversion Rate Optimisation
As mentioned above, Conversion Rate Optimisation is the process of improving your Conversion Rates. Whether you want users to sign up for your email list, buy a specific product or service, or follow your social media accounts, CRO is the way to get them to do that. This allows businesses to lower the costs of acquiring customers because you increase the value of the visitors you already have. In turn, this allows you to increase revenue while spending less to gain new customers. Which essentially means growth for your business.
A huge part of understanding and improving conversion rates is having a clear understanding of what your customers want. You need to know what makes them want to buy from your business. So if you are new to CRO, the best place to start is knowing your target market.
Why businesses should focus on CRO
Anyone who is in business, or who has even thought about starting a business should have an understanding that keeping costs low while gaining customers is a great way to increase profits. The same applies in the world of online business.
Attracting customers to your business can be an expensive process. Whether your business makes use of Cost-Per-Click (CPC), Social Media Marketing or Influencer Marketing, you want to spend less while making more.
Conversion Rate Optimisation allows this to happen smoothly. It helps businesses ensure that the return on spend is worth their while. Ultimately, you want the users that land on your site to spend money with your business. This means you want to increase your conversion rate. Regardless of which platforms you are using.
Is CRO the same across Platforms?
The short answer is: No. Each platform is unique and has a unique algorithm. What you do on Google to improve your conversion rates organically and with paid ads is even a little different. So you cannot expect what you do on Google to work on Facebook or TikTok.
Subsequently, how the platforms find and show users content is not the same. For example, Google is a search engine and it bases what it shows users on keywords. Therefore for Google, you would need to optimise keywords to match search terms. On the other hand, Facebook does not use keywords, but rather has a very specific targeting system to ensure your page and products reach the correct audience. Separately, TikTok and Instagram both make use of hashtags.
This means that for each platform you are using you should be clear on your audience and your CRO strategy. What works on Facebook won’t necessarily work as well on Google or Instagram.
The Role of Social Media in your business’s CRO
All this said, the role of social media is not to complicate and confuse your business’s CRO efforts. Social media is a fantastic tool for businesses to improve their CRO and help grow their audience. Social media allows users to become familiar with your business and what you offer (your goods or services). It also allows you to build an “omnipresent” online presence over all the platforms you choose to use.
Additionally allowing your customers to find, follow and interact with your business on social media helps build your brand up. This allows users to recognise your business as trustworthy and safe.
Increasingly social media has become the place for potential customers to check out your business. If users like what they see, and have a good experience they are likely to remain loyal to your brand. To add to the customer retention that you may gain, using social media allows your business to reach audiences across the world (if that is what you want).
When businesses use social media in ways that naturally lend themselves toward improving CRO the impact can be profound. In fact, there are three main ways that social media leans towards improving your CRO.
Social Media helps Improve Personalisation Across Channels
You want to build an understanding of your target audience and build campaigns that align with what they want, need and are looking for. In this way, social media leans into CRO. Not only do you have an abundance of information about your target audience at your fingertips, but you also can gain an understanding of what your competitors are doing. These two aspects allow your business to be competitive and help personalise your offering across different platforms and audience groups.
Businesses can Improve their Trustworthiness and Credibility on Social Media
By ensuring your business has an online presence across a variety of platforms, you naturally build trust and credibility with your audience. When a potential customer searches for your business or the products/services you offer, it helps you have a pre-existing base of followers. This, paired with their reviews and testimonials, allows potential customers to feel comfortable spending money with you.
Additionally, reviews are great because it shows that you are what you claim to be, without you having to put in any additional effort. What about some negative reviews? Well, it is all how you respond to them. If you ignore them, that can be a red flag. If, however, you respond and engage with the unhappy customers to find a solution it lends itself to both humanising your brand and building trust. It shows that you take your customers seriously.
Social Media Humanises your Brand & Increases Engagement
One of the key aspects of Social Media and its role in CRO is that it has a humanising factor. It allows users to see that you – as a business – are made up of people. Human beings. Ultimately people want to engage with other people and further, people want to buy from people.
Engagement is an equally important factor in improving conversion rates. By engaging on social media in meaningful ways with your customers and target audiences, your business is able to build trust and loyalty. A bonus from this is that it also increases referrals which is again another great way to improve your CRO.
Improving your CRO on Different Platforms
There are a wide variety of platforms that you can use to market your business online. And when it comes to conversion rates, you need to work not only on your website but also on your Google and Social Media conversion rates too.
Website CRO
Of all the avenues of CRO, working on your website CRO is possibly one of the most important aspects you can improve. Website CRO involves making small changes to your website and measuring the results to help improve how many visitors follow your call to action. Anything between 2% and 5% is considered a good conversion rate, although a lot of this depends on your industry, products and such.
There are a few things you can do on your website that can help your conversion rate. From optimising your landing pages to including testimonials and reviews or even making use of A/B Testing, you can make sure your website lends itself to improved conversion rates.
Social Media CRO
These days it is so easy to run your business from Facebook (among other social media platforms) without even leaving the app. More and more you find online businesses relying on social media shopping tools to help improve sales.
Needless to say, conversion rate optimisation has become a top priority for social media sales as well. After all, businesses want to see a good return on their investment and in many ways that means improved conversion rates.
While social media pages for businesses are a great resource for improving conversion rates, there are some other ways you can help improve your conversion rates on your social media shops.
Google CRO
When it comes to online marketing and advertising, Google is the first platform you think of. It is naturally an important tool for your business, and improving your conversion rates on Google is a task no business should skip over. It is always imperative that you are tracking your goals to make sure that your ads are working to convert your potential customers into paying customers.
Google however makes it quite simple to track, analyse and adjust your ads to your goals. You can make use of tools such as conversion tracking or negative keywords to help your campaigns. Additionally, by ensuring your ads are highly targeted and you have a well-defined target audience, you can improve your conversion rate and ROI.
The best Tools for CRO
Conversion Rate Optimisation is so broad and so beneficial. Conversion Rate Optimisation is such a broad term that it works differently across different platforms. However, whether you are looking to improve your conversion rates on Google, your website, or social media pages, there are tools that you can use to help you. Ultimately these tools can help you implement different CRO strategies to improve your conversion rates.
Conversion Rate Optimisation tools are tools that help businesses collect data about your website, social media and Google ads. This data ranges in nature but generally, it helps you understand what is working and what is not. CRO tools ultimately help you understand what visitors are actually doing on your pages and websites. It can also help you understand what changes you can make to help improve your conversion rates.
While thousands of CRO tools are available online, they tend to fall into three main categories.
1. Web analytics CRO tools
These are the tools that help you understand what is going on on your website. They can help you look at where your traffic is coming from, and what that traffic is doing on your site.
2. Behaviour analytics CRO tools
These tools help you understand the why. Why are the users who are visiting your site behaving in certain ways? What drives visitors to your site and understanding the actions they take on your site are important for your CRO efforts.
3. CRO testing tools
Testing tools for CRO are the tools that can help you once you have identified the problems and hiccups on your website. Once you know what the problems are you can make changes and adjust things on your site. However you need to identify if these changes are working, this is where testing comes in.
What Are CRO Experiments
These are the ways in which you can adjust your website to test what works best. There are endless experiments and possibilities when it comes to CRO. You can pair these techniques with testing tools to help you understand what is and what is not working for your site.
Some CRO experiments are possibly so obvious you wouldn’t even think of them, such as improving your site speed. This paired with ensuring your site is mobile-friendly across multiple devices tends to be one of the best ways to improve your CRO.
Among the many other things, you can try are slide-in CTAs and using freebies and other psychological hacks to help improve your conversion rates. But be sure to pair these changes with different tools and tests to ensure that what you do change actually makes the difference you are looking for.
Top Tips for Conversion Rate Optimisation
General Tips for CRO
CRO in general is a great tool to help your business grow and convert potential customers into paying customers.
There are a wide variety of ways you can do this but some of the simpler ways are often easier and best.
1. Personalised and Targeted Messaging
Making sure that you know about your potential customers, their interests and where they are in the buying cycle is an imperative aspect of CRO. You should make use of targeted messaging as well as individual user experience to help show potential customers you understand what they want or need. This gains their trust and is more likely to help them across the line.
2. Storytelling is an important part of Sales
Storytelling is a uniquely human process. In sales, storytelling helps humanise your brand and build rapport with your customers. It helps you take your customers on a journey with your brand, and it helps you build trust in the process.
3. Ensure a smooth User Experience
User experience is a very important aspect of conversion rate optimisation. Users are a lot less likely to spend money (or follow your call-to-action) when your site is not easy to navigate. Additionally make sure that your site is user friendly across different device types (computer, phone, tablet). It helps improve conversion as a large number of web users are using mobile technology to access sites.
Google CRO Tips
1. Make use of Conversion Tracking Systems
This is a great way for you to see what is working and what is not working in your campaigns. You need to understand whether your ads & content are working to your advantage. In addition to monitoring your campaign’s conversions, you will also be able to assess the click-through-rate and lead quality
2. Use Targeted Ads
Make sure your ads are highly targeted. Also make sure that the keywords you are using are equally targeted. This can help you achieve higher conversion rates. This again means having a clear understanding of who your target audience is and why they are likely to choose your business offering. Additionally using highly targeted keywords ensures that your ads are directed to the people who are actually searching for your products or services.
3. Include Negative Keywords
Another keyword tip is to incorporate negative keywords into your campaign strategy. If you are selling a product or service, a person who searches for any “free” variation of your keywords is not likely to spend money with your business. Therefore you should use clear and carefully selected negative keywords. This allows you to exclude these searches from returning your ads in the results. Additionally, it saves you money in terms of CPC costs.
Website CRO Tips
1. Optimise Landing Pages for Success
Ensure your links take your potential customers to the pages they think they are going to. This is a great place to start your customer’s journey with you. Additionally having a landing page that is well designed, effective and contains good content and the right value proposition can help bring your potential customers across the sales line. Ultimately your landing page should take customers where they want to go.
2. Have Clear Call-to-Actions
Your landing page should contains a clear CTA that is easy to understand and follow. This is a huge step to improving your conversion rate. Adjusting aspects such as copy, placement and colour can again improve your CRO efforts and help turn visitors into customers. Sometimes even using pop-up CTA’s can help your conversion rates and appear more friendly and interactive to potential customers.
3. Testimonials and Social Proof
Include reviews, testimonials and ‘social proof’ on your website and landing page. This naturally engender a sense of trust with potential customers. Social proof works similarly to word of mouth. By seeing what people outside of your business say about your product or service and customer care, you are giving your potential customers additional information without seeming biased. This is a great way to help your CRO.
Social Media CRO Tips
1.Make your Graphics Attention-Grabbing
Social media is flooded daily with people vying for attention. Most social media is saturated with huge numbers of stories, images and videos. By making sure that you have images and graphics that grab the attention of your target audience, you are one step closer to converting them from potential customers to paying customers. It is also important to use a variety of post formats to keep your audience interested.
2. Include a CTA in your Social Media Posts
Giving your audience a clear path for them to follow. It’s almost a surefire way to get them over the line. You can do this by including a clear and easy to follow call-to-action. This shows them exactly the steps you want them to take, you can improve your social media conversion rate. Adding your CTA in the form of a button as well as in your copy is a great way to start converting potential customers into paying customers.
3. Retarget audiences but Avoid Ad Fatigue
There is nothing worse than searching for something and then having the same ads show up on all your social media for days, if not weeks. Retargeting and remarketing to audiences who have shown interest but have not followed through on your CTA is an important part of marketing. It is also important to not hound your potential customers at the same time. Making use of different ads, and different formats is a great way to avoid ad fatigue while still remarketing to your target audience.
Conclusion
Ensuring that you have sound CRO strategies and ideas is an imperative part of marketing and online business. It is vital that you incorporate CRO into not only your website design and management but also your social media and Google Advertising campaigns too.
