A Beginner’s Guide to CRO

Cotswold Web • Feb 12, 2020

CRO, or conversion rate optimisation to give it its full name, is the process of getting people to take action when they visit a website.


So that could be making a purchase, signing up for a subscription or downloading some content. By designing parts of your website in a certain way, you can increa

se the chances of visitors becoming leads or customers before they leave your site.

Most websites want to attract as many visitors as they can. But getting more traffic doesn’t always mean more quality traffic and you could just be attracting people who are less likely go ahead with a purchase or become a lead.


So CRO takes things to the next level – by focusing on your existing traffic, instead of attracting endless new traffic to your site. CRO is about making your content work smarter for you, rather than you having to work harder to keep producing more and more content.


On any website, there are many possibilities for improving your CRO. Think of all the relevant pages on your site, such as your home page, landing pages, blog and pricing page. All of these can be optimised to increase your sales.



What can you do to make each page work better for you?

Home page

Your home page will probably have a lot of information on it and is the perfect place to start CRO. It’s often where visitors get their first impression of your business, so you want to make sure you can hold onto those visitors for as long as possible and encourage them to look further into your website.

Ways to do this include clear links to key products and services, a sign-up button or a live chat tool, which is available to answer visitors’ questions in real-time while they are on your site.

Landing pages

Landing pages are where people end up if they are already very tempted to take an action – whether that is making a purchase, booking an event or signing up for a free lead magnet, like an ebook.

To optimise your landing pages, you need to bring whatever it is you are offering to life – so include a brief excerpt of your ebook or a video of last year’s event. These small changes may be all it takes to see significant growth in your conversions.

Blog

With all that valuable free information on offer, your blog is a huge conversion opportunity. If visitors are interested in, and trust what you have to say, on your blog, they are more likely to trust your products and services too.

So add calls to action to your blog, which could include downloading exclusive free content by submitting their email address, or even referrals to key products on your sales pages.


Pricing page

A confusing pricing page can be make or break when it comes to CRO. To really optimise your pricing pages to increase sales, make sure your pricing structures are transparent and include a range of options.

It should be obvious what each price package includes, so include clear descriptions. Offering a choice of one-off, monthly or annual payments means as many customers as possible will be able to benefit from your products and services.

When faced with a big purchasing decision, a bit of reassurance from a human being is always helpful, so include a phone number to answer any specific or difficult queries.


What is your conversion rate?

Once your business is well established and your site is attracting a decent number of visitors, it makes sense to work out just how many of them are converting to become leads or customers.

Using your analytics data, you can work out your conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions from a particular page by the number of people who visited that page. You can get this information for your blog posts, your home page, your landing pages and any online advertising. Once you have this data, you can start to focus on CRO and ultimately increasing the number of visitors who convert.

Your conversion rate isn’t a number eg ‘we want 100 more people to convert every day’, because that could be 100 out of 100 visitors or 100 out of a million visitors. A meaningful conversion rate is expressed as a percentage. So what you might actually be looking for is 100 more people to convert for every 2000 people who visit your home page.

If your website gets 20,000 visitors a month, generating 200 leads and 20 customers, your visitor to lead conversion rate would be 1%.

If you wanted to get twice as many customers every month, you could try to get 40,000 visitors to your site (and hope that they are of similar quality to your previous visitors), or you could work on optimising your conversion rate to generate more leads from your existing 20,000 visitors.

The reality is that doubling visitors to your site won’t necessarily double your sales – and it isn’t easy to do anyway. More visitors is not the same thing as more good quality visitors. By using effective CRO and increasing your conversion rate from 1% to 2%, you would be doubling your leads and customers, without needing to double your visitors.




CRO marketing strategies that could work for you

There are lots of ways to improve your CRO, but here are a few that may work for you.

Include pop-ups on your blog

A small number of unobtrusive and relevant pop-ups on your blog can make it easier for visitors to take the action you want them to take. There are a variety of options including slide-in boxes, drop-down banners or pop-up boxes, which will make it easier for your readers to click through.

Your pop-ups should attract attention and offer your reader something of interest – whether that is a discount, free delivery or more information from a free ebook.

Include calls to action in your blog

If you want your readers to take action, don’t always wait until the end of a blogpost to encourage them. Many visitors will only read the first few lines of a post and others will ignore a call to action (CTA) in a banner. Banner blindness is a real thing - many people just don’t see them!

So a text-based CTA is a good way round this. Your CTA could be fully embedded in your blog copy or could be a line on its own in the style of a sub-heading. Small-scale tests have shown these to be far more effective in converting leads than a banner at the end of a post.

Test your landing pages

Your landing pages are some of the most important pages on your site. They are where a visitor becomes a lead and an existing lead becomes a customer or regular customer. So you want your landing pages to really work for you. But how do you know you’ve got them right?

You need to perform split testing, or A/B testing, to get the most from your landing pages. Test different versions of each page, making small changes each time, so you can find out which version of your copy works best (and how much copy is the optimum amount), which images are right, which font size and colour work and where best to position the various elements on the page.

Use automation to boost sales

You can use automation on your website to boost sales. Options include an email to people who abandon a shopping basket, to remind them that they’ve still get items waiting.

Your sales team can also get alerts when someone has looked at a key page, such as the pricing page, which may indicate that they are looking to go ahead with a purchase. This could generate a live chat pop-up or your sales team could get in touch directly to see if they need any help or further information.

For high ticket services, you could also use automation to generate emails to set up a meeting between a lead and your sales team.

Make it easy for leads to take the next step

Sometimes visitors are ready to take the next step immediately and want to speak to a member of your sales team. These people are known as marketing qualified leads (MQLs). In short, they are visitors who are more likely to become customers than other leads, based on factors like the pages they have viewed, what they have downloaded and how they have already engaged with your business.

Every business will be different, but there are likely to be common actions taken by leads who become MQLs. It is always best to run tests to find out what it is that generates the most customers. So if the key for your business is visitors who sign up for a free demo, who spend two minutes on your pricing page or who download three free ebooks, optimise your website for these processes.

The important thing is always to make the path from lead to customer as smooth as possible.


Optimise your best performing blog posts

If you’ve got a lot of posts on your blog, some will perform much better than others. These posts are the ones you should focus on for CRO.

Use your analytics tools to identify the posts with lots of traffic, but relatively low conversion rates. These are the perfect posts for optimisation. So make sure the message in these posts is really clear and that the content is closely aligned to your CTA.

You can even optimise posts which are already converting well to make them convert even better. Take time on your SEO (search engine optimisation) to make sure the posts are coming up in searches for the keywords you want to rank for, and make any tweaks needed to your copy.

Also take time to make sure the content is still relevant – a popular post written in 2016 will probably need a few updates to make sure it is still relevant in 2020.


Use live chat on high performing pages

Live chat means visitors can chat with your business in real-time – which is very useful if their decision whether or not to buy is based on getting a quick and easy answer to a question. To increase conversions, add live chat capability to high performing pages, such as your product or pricing pages.

Alternatively, you could make live chat specific to an action rather than a page – so if someone has spent more than a minute on a page, you could automatically offer to help.


Use retargeting to bring visitors back

You can put a lot of work into your CRO, but the reality is that many visitors will still leave your site without making a purchase or signing up for a subscription. But just because they’ve left, it doesn’t mean that they are gone forever or that you should give up on them.

By using retargeting, you can continue to engage with visitors who have left your site – and hopefully bring them back. Retargeting with something like Google Ads or Facebook Ads means visitors will see adverts for your products and services when they are elsewhere on the internet.

For these ads to be a success, you need to focus on an enticing image, brief but engaging copy and potentially a special offer that can’t be ignored.


Getting started

We’ve shared a lot of information here, which we hope you will find helpful. But you may be wondering where to start. Every business and every website is different and you need to focus on the actions which are going to make the biggest difference for you.


Before starting work on CRO, consider every action (eg optimising your best blog posts or testing your landing pages) in terms of its importance, ease and potential. Answer the following questions in relation to each of the strategies in the section above and give them a score between one and 10:

  • How valuable will the improvement be? (importance)
  • How easy will it be to implement the improvement? (ease)
  • How much of an improvement can you make? (potential)


Add the scores from the three questions together for each of the strategies, to give you an overall score out of 30. You should start work on the highest scoring strategies first to give you the biggest and quickest wins.

With a bit of time and effort, CRO can make a real difference to your business. 

Once you have got it up and running, you should ensure that it is fully embedded in your business, so that every time someone uploads a new web page to your site, they are considering CRO right from the start.

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