The Big Picture of Conversion Rate Optimization
This is a writing sample from Scripted writer Tiersa Buckley
Want to succeed in the Digital Marketing Industry? If your answer is yes, then you need to know how conversion rate optimization works and why it is so important. Understanding how website visitors move through your website and what they do once they get there is critical. If gives you the insight you need to complete your website goal, whether it's selling a specific product or a service. Think of a conversion as a website visitor who has now completed filling out a form on your website such as signing up for a subscription or simply completing the checkout process. Ultimately, the purpose of increasing CRO serves to reduce the cost of business while also improving profitability at the same time. In more relatable terms, it just means trying to improve the sales that your website is accountable for. With CRO there are so many variables that can affect the way you acquire and retain actionable website visitors such as design, branding, social proof, pricing process and your call to action. It can be hard to know what part of your website needs an overhaul and that's where several factors come into play when trying to figure out your conversion rate in order to get the highest optimization experience. In order to optimize your CRO, you have to know first where to begin. Your business needs to first gather quantitative data such as site analytics, surveying and segmenting website visitors (the people method) and tracking your conversions. Google Analytics is just one example of those solid tracking platforms. Analyzing all of this valuable information will help you to know where to better focus your efforts as a business and where the majority of your niche visitors are coming from. For a digital marketer, optimizing your site and improving lead value can increase the number of leads for a particular volume of website visitors leading to a later increase of visitor volume. By increasing visitor volumes your digital marketing efforts are then multiplied. Your quantitative information combined with real people stats will let you know what page your visitors engaged most on and what product or page appealed most to them? Pay close attention to what words your consumers use to describe your business or product. There are certain things that real life analytical data stats can't clue you into and just improving your site traffic is not enough! Improving your company CRO has unmistakable benefits such as:
- · Finding the right target customers for your business (not just increasing the volume of the wrong website visitors)
- · A higher ROI (Return on Investment) ratio
- · Better Expandability (turning more browsers into buyers)
- · Better User Experiences-Find out what works for your website and expand on it offering users a feeling of empowerment.
- · Solid Basis of Trust-Your website is an extension of your business or brand and when users feel comfortable using their credit card or other sensitive information to buy a product, it's a big deal!
Streamline your website to be professional, courteous and prompt when answering visitor's questions. Let's talk about something called a "conversion funnel". A conversion funnel is basically just a phrase that refers to the consumer journey. The journey a consumer takes when navigating an e-commerce website and converting that to a final sales goal. I like to think of it as a visual tool to gage where your prospects are in essence making their buying decision. Your sales funnel should be wide, capturing brand awareness near the top and then slowly narrow channeling to the bottom with the most sales and repeat customers. This illustration below shows an example of a conversion set for inbound Marketing with three conversions in the pipeline.
You can clearly see when business owners improve the first conversion rate by 10%, this would then double the number of leads. In addition, by increasing the number of leads by 10% for each offer, this would also increase the number of sales ready leads by over 8 times. Too often, businesses fail because they try and convert the top visitor into a sale right away instead of moving the customer through a series of small conversions. Timing is a key factor and your real goal is just to keep them coming back. Attraction marketing and brand awareness are so important. They can't buy from you if they don't know you or your product exists. Pay per clicks used to be the old standby for getting your business website attention, but with rising costs it's easy to see why better optimizing your CRO can do better by helping to get the clicks that you do get actually pay for themselves tenfold. Let's face it, the competition is stiff out there and most digital marketing companies compete for your customers business across the board. This is yet another reason why implementing a better CRO is so beneficial. If you want to convert your sub section of page visitors into actual sales, then you need to have a streamlined website that is easy to use and funnels those visitors to your call of action seamlessly. Just about any form of digital marketing is expensive, so it's important to keep generating an increase of unique visitors who make purchases. This in turn helps to reduce the cost of digital marketing as a whole. This chart shows an example calculation of the conversion rate for each conversion. Finally, CRO improves the ability of other marketing efforts such as affiliate marketing. When a larger percentage of visitors click through your website to actually make a purchase your affiliates and social media marketing campaigns make more as well. CRO is really a win-win situation for online retailers and digital marketers looking to make the most out of their online businesses.
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