You already know it’s important to get traffic to your website and it’s great if you’ve achieved a solid traffic stream. But the truth is, all that traffic isn’t worth a whole lot if it isn’t converting into sales. The trick is to provide compelling information to the right people to make those visits profitable. And, once you’ve got your first purchase from your customer, you need to keep them interested. 

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

Conversion Rate Optimisation, or CRO, helps you drive more relevant traffic to your site to increase your sales potential and helps you to make your current traffic more profitable. 

Conversion optimisation allows you to fully evaluate your current offering on a scientific level and see how you could be converting more clicks into sales. You’ll need to look at your conversion rate currently and create a hypothesis regarding what you feel could affect your figures in a positive way. 

Testing is key and you’ll be surprised at the sort of things that can boost your conversion rate. Conversion optimisation means putting in small changes and tracking their progress to understand how this affects your sales numbers as a percentage in comparison to your traffic. 

Even things as small as copy changes, colours, layout or font can change a customer’s mind and create a successful conversion. Conversion optimisation is your chance to test out different things on your website and track the effects. You should keep a record of what you’ve changed and the conversion percentage you get during that time. 

Why Put All That Effort In? 

It might seem like a long process, but the truth is that this should be ongoing throughout all the stages of your business. There’s always room for improvement and the results you’ll get are worth it. If you knew you could put your conversion rate up by 5% just by changing colour on your website header, you’d do it, right? That small change can give you a great deal of satisfaction, knowing that you’ve made a step forward for your business, with minimal effort. The more testing you do, the higher your return on investment will be.  

You must consider costs. What would you be doing if you weren’t looking into conversion optimisation? Lots of businesses waste copious amounts of money on paid advertising. The issue with this is that it’s usually focussed on getting more traffic to your website. It doesn’t necessarily focus on what happens when you get the traffic there. There’s also very little you can do to convert your existing customers to make another purchase through paid advertising. They already know you exist, and a paid advert just reminds them of that, it doesn’t mean they want to purchase again. 

Testing changes to your website to make it more appealing to your target audience will really help you to convert new customers but also generate renewed interest in your existing customer base too.  

How will I Know Conversion Optimisation is Working? 

Let’s say your business normally converts 10% of the people that visit your website over a month period. This 10% equates to 100 visitors that make a purchase out of 1000 visitors in the month and each purchase earns $5.00. So that’s $500 that you’re earning without any conversion optimisation.  

You decide to change the wording on one of your call-to-action buttons to see if it will affect your conversion rate. Good news… it boosts your sales, converting an extra 50 people the next month. You’ve now got 150 visitors making a purchase out of those same 1000. Your conversion rate is now 15% and you’re earning $750 per month instead of $500. An extra $250 per month just by changing a few words. Worth it, right? 

By making these small changes you could get to the stage where you’ve doubled your conversion rates through conversion optimisation and that will cut your acquisition costs in half. You’ve basically paid for your paid ads to get more customers by barely lifting a finger. 

You just need to continue on your optimisation journey to convert those new customers purchasing in a constant improvement cycle. Simple. 

A/B Testing and its Uses in Conversion Optimisation

So, we’ve established conversion optimisation is a great idea. Now to investigate the different ways you could do this. 

You could do what we suggested above and make changes month-on-month towards continuous improvement. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, but the issue is, it could take a long time to make the changes that are right for you. 

A/B testing is the solution to this. If you haven’t got quite as much time, you could create two versions of your website, the same, apart from the couple of elements that you want to test. 

You’d send 50% of your traffic to one website and the other 50% to the other. Out of the 50%, you’d need to look at conversion rates for each version. The most successful version is the one you switch to. 

You don’t just have to stick to two versions either. You could even create three or four and select the best version from these. 

The only issue is that you’re splitting your customer base and the 50% that you’re sending to version A may have actually preferred version B if they’d seen it, therefore the conversion rate would have been higher if they’d been sent to version B, so it’s not particularly scientific. 

Do I have to Test or can I just Copy Others?

The answer is yes, you do have to test to be successful. Conversion optimisation for your website won’t work if you’re going off results from someone else’s. Not only is it an unscientific test, as it doesn’t properly reflect your customer base and what their needs are, but it means you’ll have no record of your changes and may make repeated mistakes in the future. 

The only way you can get to know your customers is by creating tests using those customers. 

Gathering Data

There are a couple of ways you could keep track of your results and ensure you’re catering to your customer base:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an invaluable tool when keeping track of your traffic, where they’re coming from and how they move around your website. You can track your traffic on a weekly basis across your changes to see if a specific change may have pulled in more people to visit a specific page, or whether your change has really put people off. 

Satisfaction Surveys

There’s no better way to find out what your returning customers need than asking them. Send out a quick satisfaction survey. Ask short, closed questions that allow you to gather data. You could even send them examples of an A/B testing and ask which they prefer. 

Conclusion

Finding the right balance on your website can be difficult and can take time. You need to be patient, gather the right data and conduct a lot of tests. However, the results you’ll receive will change your business. Conversion optimisation allows you to get to know your customers and give them exactly what they need, whilst boosting your profits and reducing your acquisition costs. Give it a go, it might surprise you.