Your website is not just the face your company puts forward to your target audience – it’s a tool to help you turn casual visitors into paying customers. And despite the popularity of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, the majority of actual monetary transactions will still take place on your own .com.

Of course, like any other tool, you need to ensure that your website and the digital footprint stemming from it are in tip-top shape. And if you want your website to do the job of converting visitors into leads, clients or customers, you need to make sure it is optimised to do so.

In this article, we’ll discuss how hiring the right conversion rate consultant can drastically change how your company does business on the internet. Not only can these individuals help you find new ways to reach your target audience, they can show you how to push that audience through a carefully-designed sales funnel to get you the results you desire.

Conversion Rate Basics

The average business website can fulfil a lot of different functions, from detailing company history to providing an overview of products and services. However, the globalising effect of the internet means there are more websites just like yours out there. This, in turn, means you need to cut through the noise to reach your audience and act fast to turn them into customers – YOUR customers.

For this reason, many businesses are overhauling their websites to maximise their ability to get visitors to perform some sort of action. This could be to sign up for a mailing list, send an email, request a phone call or make a purchase. The number of visitors your website manages to get to perform the allotted task, is your “conversion rate.”

This can be represented by a simple formula:

Conversions / Total Number of Visitors X 100 = Your Conversion Rate %

What CRO Consultants Do

Conversion Rate Consultants are professionals, usually with a marketing background, who implement a variety of techniques and strategies to get that final “%” listed above as high as possible. This can usually be done irrespective of your website’s current conversion rate, providing instant results in the form of increased ROIs, an improved user experience and – of course – more leads and sales.

Optimising your website to convert as many visitors as possible can also help you learn more about your target audience. As they perform micro-optimisations such as filling out forms or membership details, you can gain valuable insights about just who is interested in your products and services. Ultimately, this can help you better establish a connection with them.  

Below, we’ll list some of the primary ways the right Conversion Rate Optimisation Consultant can help your business.

Sales Funnel Optimisation

As I mentioned, any website designed to get visitors to accomplish a task technically has a sales funnel in place (even if the final goal is not to sell, per se). Your professional conversion rate optimisation consultant will not only identify your funnel, but which parts of it need improvement.

Again, your website will have a specific page or section where the vast majority of conversions take place. However, once this part of the process is optimised, your consultant can extrapolate that optimisation to your other pages and social media sites.

Hunt for Valuable Data

Those insights your customers provide you are not just a bonus to the conversion rate optimisation process, they are the primary way you can continue to refine it. For this reason, CRO consultants are talented at mining this data for information that will help you better connect with your target audience and thus develop the ability to laser in on your customers’ needs.

This starts with behavioural analysis research and then moves on to more detailed customer sign up forms. For instance, you can often get website visitors to offer up valuable demographic information. This data can then be used to enhance your conversion approach as well as in your other digital marketing efforts.

Establish Metrics and Analytics

A good CRO Consultant won’t just blindly try to increase your conversion rates – they’ll want to establish a way to measure success. This means working with you to set clear goals and devising a step-by-step plan to achieve them. The purpose in doing so is not just to allow your consultant to point to their accomplishments, but to help them more easily identify which efforts are working and which are not, saving valuable resources and time. 

Work With IT

A good CRO Consultant is like an artist. They have “big picture” ideas that they want to bring to life for your website. Their goals are built around people – reaching them, motivating them and understanding more about them. And while a good CRO Consultant will definitely have these abilities, it can’t be ALL they have.

That’s because your CRO Consultant needs to be tech-savvy enough to work with directly your designers and programmers to bring his or her visions to life. After all, you don’t want to end up as the go-between trying to facilitate the optimisation process. For this reason, you need to find a consultant who doesn’t just know what needs to be done but can direct people in doing it. 

Conclusion

There is no such thing as a “perfect conversion rate.” This is why the process is called “optimisation,” implying that things can always be improved. No matter what stage of the optimisation process your website is in, and even if you don’t yet have a website at all, a good Conversion Rate Optimisation Consultant may prove invaluable to the future of your business. 

As more and more transactions move online, the rift between customer and company is growing wider. Conversely, consumers, in general, are becoming far less concerned with how a business’s products compare to the competition, but to who that business is and why they do what they do. 

Social media is one component is closing this rift, but the other is conversion rate optimisation. Your perfect target audience is out there, and they’re willing to tell you what will encourage them to buy. With a CRO Consultant, you can be better prepared to find them.