How marketers can master conversion rate optimisation

With UK consumers already cutting back on spending, and expectations of a difficult second half to the year, online retailers are now under increasing pressure to get as many visitors as possible to make that final click – whether it be an email sign up, form submission or purchase – to increase their potential customer base.

According to a report by Econsultancy and Decibel, many brands understand that the link between the quality of users’ digital experiences and business outcomes is growing stronger, with nearly half stating that overall customer digital experience was critical to the success of their company. One of the simplest ways to do this is optimising customer experience on site. 

Identifying their app or website’s most optimised format is a must for any brand – Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) can provide marketers with the data they need to enhance their customer journeys by executing experiments where needed and analysing the results. But for the uninitiated, CRO can seem complex. To truly understand how it can effectively improve the target business outcomes, it is worth going back to the basics.
 

What is CRO?

Essentially, CRO helps improve the rate at which a site visitor completes a specific goal predetermined by a brand. Although an obvious choice for many businesses, this doesn’t have to relate only to sales; goals can be volume of products in a shopping basket, newsletter signups, website form submissions or app downloads, to name a few.

Businesses that see an increment on their main goals will understand that its website visitors are completing the desired actions set by the business and can provide confirmation that features, such as website design, are performing as required. CRO can also be used to better understand the journeys that consumers are making through a site or app, allowing brands to see what may be stopping them from taking the desired actions.
 

Harnessing CRO to measure success

Two key changes of mindset are needed in order to increase CRO and deliver more effective consumer journeys.

The first is ensuring that all website decisions are analytically driven. Relying solely on ‘gut-feeling’ or the opinion of the loudest person in the room is not going to result in the best CRO outcomes. Taking the time to look into the numbers will provide a more granular understanding of what is driving conversions.

The second change should be making sure all decisions are made with the user's viewpoint in mind. It is the user who will be navigating their journeys on the website or app, so prioritising good user experience is a must. A successful CRO strategy focusses not only on what is being optimised, but who it is being optimised for.
 

Strategising for success

From here, brands can start the experimentation phase of the CRO process. Marketers should avoid making ROI the be all and end all when optimising for CRO, however. Finding customer pain points and understanding the problems they are trying to solve should be the priority – ROI will follow if these are resolved.

Marketers need to use both their creative and analytical mindsets in this process, carrying out the ideas they generate with scientific precision. Every hypothesis to increase CRO must be fully tested, measured and optimised. Using a testing tool, such as Google Optimise, can be useful for measuring these results.

Testing doesn't need to be complex, and indeed simple methods such as A/B testing can provide powerful results. For the uninitiated, this means applying a change to a website, app or ad and serving it to half of visitors. The other half will be served the original format, allowing marketers to compare results directly and assess whether the modification is effective.

Ultimately, testing is the name of the game when it comes to improving CRO. Home pages, or pages with high bounce rates should be given special attention, with page elements moved and changed until they’re fully optimised. Testing can identify which points in the sales funnel turn potential customers away, highlighting hard to navigate elements that can cause friction.
 

Tools of the trade

Luckily, marketers aren’t just left to their own devices on their CRO journey – there is a whole host of powerful solutions that can help them dig into the data.

Firstly, there are analytics tools, with Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics being accessible options. These allow brands to gain the data needed to start making decisions around their digital customer journeys. Then there are User Experience Tools, with the likes of User Feel, Hot Jar and User Testing available. Finally, there are specific CRO tools, including Kibo, AB Tasty, Adobe Target, VWO, Dynamic Yield, and Google Optimize.

Employing a combination of these tools is the best way for marketers to increase their CRO, but caution is needed; solutions should be carefully selected and integrated if they are to be used to their full capabilities.

CRO shouldn’t mystify marketers. This very simple metric should be at the core of all decisions relating to the customer journey, helping to maximise the outcome of every customer visit. The next step for marketers is to use CRO to improve click-throughs and decrease bounce rates, combining both granular data with a holistic overview to create a lasting, iterative strategy to improve on-site experience, and therefore, outcomes.