What is conversion rate optimization and why is it so important to modern businesses? Here is what you need to know as a business owner – and some valuable ecommerce CRO tips to help you get started:
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
CRO – conversion rate optimization – is the process of enhancing a website or landing page experience to increase conversion. This can mean improving user experience, reducing issues and addressing consumer concerns, and using collected data to maximize marketing efforts. The key is increasing the percentage of visitors to a website or social media site who become paying customers, subscribers, or members – whatever the business’s goal is.
Why is CRO Important?
Conversion rate optimization is exactly what it sounds like: an effort to optimize conversion rates from the traffic a website receives. Rather than just boosting advertising efforts, these services take a more targeted approach. Here are a few of the ways these services can help your business succeed:
- Maximizing ROI. Getting traffic to your business’s website and social media accounts is only half the battle. Making that traffic convert into paying customers is your priority – and that is the primary goal of conversion rate optimization services. Instead of spending endlessly to acquire more web traffic, CRO focuses on maximizing the traffic you already get.
- Improving user experience. What do your customers want? What would give them the best possible experience? These are questions CRO services can help you answer. These answers can create the building blocks for a successful customer satisfaction strategy and improve customer relationships.
- Reducing customer acquisition costs. Conversion can be expensive, especially for businesses with small advertising budgets. By improving the conversion rate of your current web traffic, your business can reduce the cost per conversion and make the most out of the budget you have.
- Providing insights into consumer behaviour. By testing and analyzing consumer behaviour, your business can acquire valuable insights that inform broader marketing and more effective advertisement strategies.
Top eCommerce CRO Tips
How do eCommerce services help your company improve their marketing efforts? While working directly with professionals can offer continuous guidance and assistance with these efforts, here are a few ecommerce CRO tips that can help you get started on your own:
- Simplify the navigation and checkout processes. Start by making things easier for your website visitors. Simplify the browsing and shopping processes, as well as the checkout process. Reducing the number of steps in these processes will encourage users to make more purchases.
- Use only high-quality images and videos. Humans are most engaged by visual elements. Your website and social media accounts should utilize high-quality images and videos to capture and keep the attention of consumers. Feature photos of your products, videos of customers using the items, and 360-degree shots of packaging to give consumers an accurate impression of these items. When customers can see what they are purchasing ahead of time, they are more likely to buy.
- Optimize your site for mobile users. These days, most web browsing happens on mobile devices. Part of good web design – and optimizing your advertising efforts – is ensuring that any site that your consumer visits works well on their mobile phone, tablet, or other device.
- Offer multiple payment options. Another way to ensure a pleasant consumer experience and improve the likelihood that a purchase will be made is by offering several ways to pay. This might include accepting cards, online payment processors like PayPal, and more.
- Leverage social proof. Social proof involves using other people – regular people, not celebrities – to endorse products and “prove” they are worth purchasing. This is why so many businesses partner with influencers. You do not have to invest in influencer advertising, though – you can utilize feedback from customers, reviews, and recommendations to harness the power of social proof.
- Utilize scarcity and urgency tactics. It is important to be honest with your customers, and lying through advertisement is not advisable. However, sharing limited-time offers, low stock warnings, and other urgent messages with consumers is perfectly ethical – and urges customers to buy now, rather than wait and possibly miss out on your products.
- Conduct A/B strategy testing. Consumer ideas and preferences change. Consistent testing of different strategies, website layouts, and other elements will help you determine which of these is most effective.
- Personalize user experience wherever possible. People love to feel like they are important to the brands they are patronizing. This includes your brand! Personalizing your consumers’ website user experience gives them this feeling of being valued and important – and makes them more likely to purchase from you.
- Optimize and reduce loading times. A slow website often leads to “bounce” or a visitor leaving to go elsewhere. Do not lose your customers to competitors because of slow sites and long loading times! Sahev them down and boost your business.
- Use clear and compelling calls to action. Lastly, a call to action is critically important. It tells your customers what you want them to do and urges them to do just that. Make those calls to action clear, compelling, and worth listening to!