Today, the central tasks for any marketing or sales team are to drive quality website traffic, convert visitors into qualified leads, move these leads down the conversion funnel, and persuade them to complete the desired actions. But that’s just part of the effort required to ensure sustainable business growth.
Many businesses are looking to make the most of their existing website traffic and inbound leads instead of focusing exclusively on bringing in new visitors. That’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes into play.
Companies that focus their marketing efforts on CRO strategy development and behavioral targeting can uncover information that lies beneath cold statistics, like how visitors interact with a given website, what events precede the completion of conversion goals, and what impacts user activity and overall conversions.
In this short guide, you’ll learn about the importance of developing a CRO strategy and why your company needs to concentrate on improving its conversion rate (CR).
What Is CRO, and Why Is It Significant?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a process that involves tweaking the elements of your web resources — your website, its product pages, landing page optimization, etc. — to boost conversion rate and increase sales.
Conversion is an analytics metric that shows the proportion of visitors who took the desired action following a marketing campaign or effort. The targeted actions may differ depending on the industry and your business’ marketing goals. Any valuable action like a phone call, sign-up, purchase, form fill, or app download can be reported as a conversion.
The frequency of such actions reflects how well your website, landing page, or app performs and gets your target audience to complete these actions.
The CRO process improves the probability of visitors completing the desired action by utilizing user behavior analytics (UBA) and a conversion rate optimization tool. Such tools and solutions help companies determine the effectiveness of their marketing initiatives, highlight areas that require improvement, and deliver the best user experience (UX).
Let’s take a closer look at the four essential CRO elements that help businesses increase their chances of converting more visitors, leads, and customers and boost their sales.
Source: Slideteam
Companies equipped with a CRO analyzer, like Phonexa’s HitMetrix, can leverage advanced web and user behavior analytics tools that offer complete visibility and actionable insights in real-time on conversions, friction events, fraudulent activities, and more.
Utilizing HitMetrix and other products from Phonexa’s suite of marketing automation solutions — such as the all-encompassing lead management system, LMS Sync — can be a game-changer for those looking to streamline the user journey, improve conversion outcomes, and leverage user behavior analytics tools.
When used in tandem, HitMetrics and LMS Sync arm product managers, CRO experts, and UX designers with customer satisfaction scores, usability testing, visualized heatmaps, and friction insights. Ultimately, these solutions help businesses activate a comprehensive view of their leadgen tactics, user behavior, lead traits, the conversion funnel, and other extensive data sets.
Mastering Conversion Rate Research and Analysis
The purpose of conversion rate analysis is to help marketers reveal the most effective copy and web resources used for promotion, tap into insights from heatmaps and user recordings, and assess the impact of the hypothesis on conversion during the A/B testing process.
But businesses must remember that a lot happens before conversions take place. Therefore, companies must also assess and identify specific marketing drivers, obstacles, and hooks that precede the final and most valuable action and outcome.
Here are the steps you need to take and questions you must ask to optimize your conversion-driven web assets effectively:
- Identify marketing drivers: What compels your target audience to visit your website? Understand what drives users to your app, landing or product pages, and website to ensure that they stop at specific touchpoints and successfully proceed to make a purchase.
- Outline the obstacles: What prevents your product or service from gaining traction among users? Tap into user behavior analytics, statistics, and lead tracking data to discover why users leave.
- Determine marketing hooks: How can you grab the attention of prospective customers and convert them? Pay attention to how your brand communication works. Examine how you build customer relationships, leverage hard data, and discover why your target audience behaves the way it does.
Conversion research also entails watching exactly what visitors do on your website. This way, you can identify the blind spots in your efforts, like page elements that visitors find hard to use.
The CRO tools can come in handy at this stage as well. In addition to user behavior recording, utilizing HitMetrix heatmaps and click tracking solutions, like Phonexa’s Lynx, can help you get clarity on paid campaigns and landing pages within your website and uncover content, images, or CTAs that can drive more clicks.
Those equipped with such solutions can rest assured that their website’s conversion rate optimization and lead generation efforts work together seamlessly to drive the best results.
Nonetheless, marketers also have to do the work and look for ways to keep the business running. One of the ways to achieve this mission is CRO strategy development.
How CRO Marketing Programs Work
A CRO marketing program — otherwise known as a CRO plan or strategy — analyzes all potential obstacles that precede targeted actions. The plan’s ultimate goal is to optimize web assets and increase conversions.
As mentioned before, companies need to understand the principal drivers that prompt and convince visitors to go to their website and help them convert website traffic. If you base your marketing efforts on assumptions instead of identifying specific drivers, that might be the reason behind declining conversion rates.
Let’s examine in more detail what marketing and sales teams should focus on when developing a CRO marketing plan.
Concentrate on UX & Personalization
Regardless of the source — whether a Google search or a simple recommendation — that brought visitors to your website, you must implement link tracking solutions like Lynx, make an effort, and focus on carefully mapping user experiences and prioritizing the personalization of your brand messages. Aside from measuring your website’s performance, you could additionally design it in such a way that maximizes the odds of success. The way you do that is through design heuristics. Usability heuristics essentially are rules of thumb for a good design. Back in the 90ies, Jakob Nielsen formulated 10 key rules. They’re still relevant – perhaps, now more than ever. If you’re struggling to develop good design internally, consider hiring a UX agency.
Build a Conversion Funnel
Building and analyzing a conversion funnel is one of the finest ways you can develop a comprehensive CRO strategy and program. It allows for identifying users who end up on the final conversion point, as well as those who bounce and at which stage they left.
It’s crucial to ensure that a prospective client’s engagement or experience with your brands is detailed and carefully plotted. As a marketer, you must set goals for the top, middle, and bottom stages of the sales funnel, and carefully track user behavior to optimize and generate more interest and traction.
Here are a couple of examples of the customer flow through the conversion funnel:
- eCommerce website homepage → product page → shopping cart → checkout → success page
- Lead magnet → valuable guides, assets, offers, or entertainment → landing page with a gated form → thank you page
Get Customer Feeback
Obtaining a clear picture of what efforts require more of your time and resources and what you should stop doing is the most efficient way to convert more of your website traffic and future visitors.
Building feedback loops and launching post-purchase surveys and re-engagement flows can help businesses identify the top issues, fears, objections, and marketing hooks.
Here are some examples of questions you can ask your customers in a post-purchase survey:
- Did you find all the items you were looking for?
- What stopped you from purchasing today?
- How would you rate your overall experience with (the name of your brand)?
- Was the checkout process simple for you?
- What is the one thing you would improve about the shopping experience with (the name of your brand)?
Leverage Split Testing
After building a case and determining the changes and adjustments you need to apply, the most impactful ideas, hypotheses, and solutions should be tested. This way, you can understand if tested changes can affect user behavior and have a short or long-term impact on future conversions.
Check this short guide on running A/B tests and increasing conversion rates.
Naturally, the optimizations and changes you implement in pursuit of conversion rate optimization can positively or negatively impact user behavior, UI, and UX. Therefore, expanding on the thought that user behavior data matters in the CRO process is essential.
The Importance of User Behavior Analytics (UBA)
Since the central goal of conversion rate optimization is to convince existing and new users to visit a website, open an email, sign up for company news, or download an app, businesses need to find ways to understand how they can transform visitors into paying customers.
User behavior analysis and customer behavior modeling (CBM) help brands systematically accomplish this goal.
Source: Cooladata
Analyzing and predicting customer behavior are equally important. These processes offer tangible advantages to marketing teams, including a streamlined conversion process, the opportunity to discover and capitalize on specific user behavior patterns, essential information to develop models that work, and insights that help avoid mistakes and pitfalls in the future.
Many businesses also use behavior data to segment and target customers based on their behavioral patterns. After all, behavioral marketing is the key to higher engagement, increased conversions, and positive customer experiences.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the role of conversion rate optimization in digital marketing?
CRO is the process of increasing the number and percentage of website visitors who take targeted actions like making a phone call or signing up for newsletters.
Why is conversion rate optimization important for sales and marketing teams?
CRO is important for several reasons. It helps companies save money and bring in more high-quality website traffic, increase conversions, and boost sales. Ultimately, CRO optimizes the user experience, fosters business growth, and improves revenue per visitor through actionable data.
Where can I get data on user behavior?
Depending on the industry your company operates in and your business goals, you can use Google Analytics if you’re looking to get a better understanding of what happens on your website. Additionally, companies often use tracking, distribution, and CRO solutions like Phonexa’s suite of marketing automation products featuring singular solutions like HitMetrix, LMS Sync, and Lynx.
When used together, the three provide a 360-degree view of any conversion flow, from the moment a prospect clicks on a link on the search engine, to the moments they’re exploring your website, all the way to the second they click and become converted customers or more interested prospects.
What kind of tools are used for conversion rate optimization?
Businesses use multiple CRO tools like heatmaps, customer satisfaction scores, form builders, friction insights, split testing, and many more unique tactics to gain actionable data and visualized reports into the consumer journey.
Schedule a consultation with one of Phonexa’s experts to learn how our marketing automation solutions like HitMetrix, Lynx, and LMS Sync can help you build a CRO strategy, track user behavior, and convert more leads into paying customers.
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