How-To Implement Conversion Rate Optimisation Techniques On Your Website Immediately

When the new age of digital sprung up upon us, so did a whole array of new lingo. You might have seen the term ‘CRO’ surfacing more persistently. An abbreviation of ‘Conversion Rate Optimisation’, it’s simply the process of improving the conversion rate of a website through enhancing and experimenting with different visual elements. On average, companies are spending as much as $2000 a month on CRO tools. Read on for a dip in the water; Chromatix guide you from the shallows to the deep end.

Simplified into a formula, conversion rate is simply the fraction of your website visitors who convert, be it a sale, a sign-up or a phone call. CRO is especially important if your website is flooded with large volumes of traffic but visitors are leaving without taking the desired action. A current statistic uncovered that for every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them. Bit silly (in most cases), when the priority is to make a sale, not acquire more window shoppers.

Source from Wall Street Prep

Improving on the effectiveness of your site to boost sales with the same amount of traffic means an increase in efficiency, a shorter time between lead to purchase, and more value from every marketing dollar spent.

How To Tackle CRO Step By Step

• Conversion checkpoints that you should be focusing on
• Basic parameters you should analyse 
• Popular CRO tools that you can use to measure these effectively

A good conversion rate generally lies between 2% – 5%, but don’t get too tied up with numbers. At the end of the day, a good conversion rate for your business, is simply a higher one than the rate the previous month!

Let’s start with the term ‘conversion funnel’, in short a web journey that a customer takes as they

1. Become aware of your brand
2. Show interest in your brand
3. Consider buying something
4. Buy & ultimately convert

There are various checkpoints along this journey which allow a customer to ‘convert’. It is these checkpoints, or what you can call ‘conversion opportunities’ that you should improve. Depending on whether you are a service-based industry or an eCommerce website, the conversion opportunities should be tailored to your industry and target market.

Conversion Checkpoints Examples

• Call-To-Action Buttons
• Ebook Download Form
• Webinar Signup Form
• News & Blog Page
• Checkout Form

Technically, optimising all the checkpoints should result in higher conversions. However, the flaw is that it will be much harder for you to confidently identify which data points are converting and which are underperforming (we don’t believe in guesswork). Instead, isolate singular elements to study, so when you compare results, you will essentially have a control baseline to work off (also known as A/B testing).

Parameters To Analyse

• Conversion Rate of Call-to-Action Buttons
• Rate of exit (no. of people who leave a page without any action)
• Rate of abandonment (no. of people that enter a conversion journey but do not convert)
• Scroll depth on a page

Now that you have selected a few conversion checkpoints to work on, and jotted down the current parameters to compare with, you’re ready to swim into the zone of experimentation (it’s alright, we’ve got floaties). 

A Couple CRO Strategies Unpacked Here

Content Design – content length might be the issue, especially if you have overwhelming chunks of text. Improve the digestibility of your content; break up your paragraphs and add some bullet points. Change out the iconography set for something more minimalistic. Change out the images if the resolution is subpar. 

Call-to-Action Copy – is the text within your button. This space is often overlooked, with creative thinking often allocated to other areas of a website. However this is the primary button you want your users to click so it should be anything but generic. ‘Submit’ just doesn’t cut it anymore. Your users are human, so consider more conversational copy to engage their emotions. As an example, changing out ‘Send’ for ‘Let’s kick things off’.

Headlines – with an increasing number of people versed in the SEO game, it’s not surprising that headings need to get smarter. Finding that perfect balance between writing for Google and your customers is a tough challenge. On top of that, you need to work out the best tone to engage with your customers to make your website more compelling to them. Heading experimentations you can consider include

• Command
• Question
• Problem-solving
• Instructional
• How-to

Other Effective CRO Strategies

• Decrease number of Call-to-Actions on a page
• Decrease number of form-fields in a form
• Enable auto-fill of form fields
• Add testimonials
• Increase website speed
• Change entry pop-ups to exit-pop-ups
• Use video content (explainer, testimonial, interviews)

CRO Results & Findings

• An analysis of 150,000 headlines by the Content Marketing Institute found that a title with 8 words performed the best. These titles received 21% higher click through rate than average
• Headlines that contained odd numbers had a 20% higher click-through rate than headlines with even numbers
• Imagescape saw a 160% increase in submissions when they decreased form fields from 11 to 4. 
• Call-to-Actions that are surrounded by more negative space and less clutter increases a conversion rate by 232%

Some CRO Tools To Help You

With so many variables to work on and parameters to consider, CRO can be a confusing space. So we’ve highlighted a few professional services that you can enlist to help you optimise your website with confidence.

Crazy Egg – helps with heat map generation, scroll maps and confetti maps so you can see a visual representation of where people are clicking and where people drop off on a page. When an area of a page is a bit quiet, you can consider improving optimising this area to bring back some love.

Full Story – lets you legally watch videos of how your users interact with your website. Watch how they journey through your site and track their rage clicks.

CoSchedule – bump up the impact score of your headings by testing and analysing various headlines

HotJar – a multi-functional CRO tool that allows you to observe heatmaps for various pages, watch screen recordings of your users and feature an on-site feedback survey for your customers.

Optimizely – a go-to tool for A/B testing; make decisions based on automated reporting and dig deep to understand why different versions work better

How We Can Help You With CRO

As a conversion-centric agency, this space is our focus and priority. If you’d like some more professional help unpacking how to optimise conversion on your website, please give us a call on 03 9912 6403 (be sure to ask for Irwin too)! Our team would love to share our Chromatix Conversion Framework with you so all your key conversion checkpoints perform at their full potential so that your website can really become your best salesperson.