What does CRO mean in marketing?

Any e-commerce business that wants to succeed, including yours, should be conversant with Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) marketing. After all, what’s your business’s ultimate goal? To boost conversions and make a profit, right? 

Simply put, CRO is fine-tuning your website to increase its performance. It encompasses more than attracting visitors to your website; it also ensures they perform the desired actions, like subscribing to a newsletter, making a purchase, or contacting you for more details.

In this article, we will look at what conversion rate optimization is, why it is essential for businesses, and how you can use CRO strategies to improve the performance of your website. 

What Is CRO Marketing?

Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is a way to enhance your website and increase conversions. Leveraging CRO marketing, you can develop a plan to improve usability and conversion rates to encourage more visitors to take the desired action.

A conversion is more than just a direct sale; it can also mean:

  • Clicking a button
  • Contacting your business
  • Subscribing to an email list
  • Social media likes and follows
  • Registering for a programme
  • Downloading an ebook or guide

You define what a conversion means for your business according to the goals you set out to achieve. 

How Do You Calculate Your Conversion Rate?

Calculate your conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions your campaign has gotten by the total number of visitors. Then, multiply the result by 100.

Conversion Rate = (Number of Conversions / Total Number of Visitors) ×100

For example, if your website had 2,000 visitors in May, of whom 400 converted, your conversion rate would be 20% (400 ÷ 2,000 x 100 = 20).  

Why Is CRO Important?

It is pertinent to remember the importance of conversion rate optimization. It is the most critical factor in determining whether your online business succeeds or fails. The following are a few benefits that CRO offers:

Improves Customer Experience

Ensuring that visitors to your site become buyers is the goal of CRO. With a good CRO strategy, you can make your website more appealing to your customers, improving their experience when they visit your site. Minor changes to the fonts or color on your site could make the whole difference. Of course, improved customer experience will translate to a boost in your conversion rates.

Increases Revenues and profit

CRO is a technique that lowers waste to increase conversions and profits. This is accomplished by eliminating everything else and concentrating on the aspects that matter most to the customers.

A higher cost per acquisition (CPA) may not translate into higher conversion rates. Whether or not you optimize any aspect of your website, your initial investment will remain constant. Eliminating variable costs from your production line can increase revenue per unit.

Using CRO, you can avoid spending money on digital marketing campaigns and paid advertising to optimize your website. You will benefit from using fewer resources per user and making more money from each one.

More Website Traffic

When you optimize your website, you tell Google which content is most valuable to your users. When someone searches for something linked to your business, the search engine uses these signals to decide what content to display.

This implies that producing excellent content is essential to ranking high in organic search results. However, you should not stop there. You should also ensure that your website has everything it needs to turn visitors into customers.

Conversion rate optimization can help in this situation. By optimizing your website, you can help Google and other search engines determine what content is most relevant to your target audience. This increases traffic to your website, which raises conversion rates.

Data-driven decision making

You should never rely on chance or guesswork to run a business or make money. You can make better decisions when you let data guide your choices. You can place particular pages in front of your target audience, for instance, if you know that they usually visit those pages first.

To make better decisions, such as adjusting various aspects of your website for improved performance and profitability, CRO helps to guarantee that you have concrete facts about your target market. 

How to Develop a CRO Marketing Strategy

1. Identify your conversion type.

Identifying what counts as a conversion is essential when developing a CRO marketing strategy. Although the conversion path you want your visitors to take can vary from campaign to campaign, you should always define the goal for each campaign. 

2. Map your customer’s journey to improve conversions.

Analyzing your customer’s journey through your conversion funnel is the next step. Gaining a thorough understanding of how customers found and used your brand’s website is essential. This data lets you determine which touchpoints should be improved to increase conversions. To decide which customers are most likely to convert, you should first gather and evaluate information related to them. Data such as:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Occupation
  • Income range
  • Location
  • Interests
  • Behaviour
  • Priorities

Using actual customer data, you can create fictional characters known as marketing personas with this information. These personas will help you understand your target audience and how to reach them most effectively. Ensuring customers have a positive experience across all platforms and places they interact with your website is the key to creating positive feelings for them.

3. Analyze your current conversion process.

The next step is to examine your company’scompany’s ongoing conversion process. It would help if you analyzed your operations to know where customers typically stop interacting with your business. There are several reasons why people drop off, including:

  • Your page’s content may differ from your headline.
  • Your font size and color may make it difficult to read.
  • Your images fail to load.
  • The call to action (CTA) message lacks clarity and visual appeal.
  • Your CTA types are intrusive and take away from their experience
  • Your CTA button color blends in or doesn’t stand out enough to be a button
  • Your page organization is messy, so information is complex to find

You can investigate different elements to know what might be troubling your audience when you notice anomalies in your conversion process.

4. Perform A/B or multivariate testing (MTV)

Testing must begin as soon as you have determined which areas of your website need to be optimized. For CRO marketing, testing is essential. Testing is the only way to determine whether your changes are working as intended. 

There are two types of testing: multivariate (MVT) and A/B.

  • A/B testing is testing two versions of whatever you are optimizing while only changing one variable (for example, the color of the CTA button). You can identify the elements that require improvement by testing each one separately.
  • Multivariate testing (MVT) allows you to test multiple variables for different versions of the same piece of content. 

Before running tests, look carefully at each part of the web page to identify areas for improvement. Ensure the content is appropriate for the page’s context to avoid confusion and ensure message clarity.

5. Review and Iterate

The final (and ongoing) step is reviewing everything you have done and noting how your tested adjustments affected your conversion rate. The more you iterate, the more your conversion rate will increase. Therefore, as you monitor your conversion rate, determine which areas of your funnel require attention with a continuing CRO program.