Warning! You’re Losing Money by Not Using Conversion Rate Optimization

8 min readJan 29, 2019

Your business’s website is meant to attract the attention of prospects who can benefit from your products and services. Ultimately, you want it to generate quality leads that have a high likelihood of converting to sales. You might think that the best way to do this is to get more eyes on your site using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. The truth is, unless you’re using conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools and techniques, those additional visitors won’t amount to more sales. In fact, you’ll lose money and ground against your competition.

What is a Conversion?

A conversion is a generic term used to describe actions taken by a website visitor. They can be categorized under two main headings, macro-conversions and micro-conversions. Macro-conversions are big picture activities like a customer making a purchase, whereas micro-conversions are smaller, albeit just as important, visitor actions.

Examples of macro-conversions include:

A visitor completing a purchase or subscribing to a service.
Filling in a form to request a quote or additional information.

Micro-conversions include:

Signing up for an account or joining an email list.
Adding a product to the shopping cart.

The conversion rate is a ratio calculated with a simple equation: Total Transactions divided by the Total Site Visits multiplied by 100. Optimizing the conversion rate for both types of conversions is key to accomplishing a website’s goals. This is accomplished through conversion rate optimization, or CRO.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

The best way to describe conversion rate optimization is that it’s a process of increasing the number of visitors who take the desired action. It’s a systematic approach that involves gaining an understanding of how visitors use your site and what actions they take. It’s also about figuring out what’s stopping them from taking the action you want them to. From there, you can alter your offer, improve your call-to-action (CTA), and make other changes to improve the conversion rate.

CRO isn’t about guesswork. It involves using analytics and user feedback to analyze and improve your website’s performance. Although it can be used to improve any of your key performance indicators (KPIs), it is generally associated with new customer acquisition, registrations, and other macro-conversions. It’s about improving the visitor experience and encouraging them to convert from a passive browser to an active participant.

Why Should You Care About CRO?

There are three main reasons you should care about and focus your attention on CRO. The main reason is that you’re most likely paying for website traffic in one way or another. When your conversion rates are high, your return on investment (ROI) also increases. Improving the conversion rate for your current visitors is also more cost-effective than attracting new visitors. Finally, CRO helps overcome a visitors limited attention span by providing them with what they want without them having to spend too much time looking for it.

CRO Best Practices & Tools

Understanding what CRO is, and why it’s important is just the beginning. Capturing the attention of your visitors and holding it long enough for them to convert requires action. Following are some CRO best practices and tools that are proven to improve conversion rates:

Personalize the Visitor Experience

Personalized website experiences are expected by the vast majority (88%) of prospects and customers according to a report by Evergage. Whether your business caters to consumers (B2C) or other businesses (B2B) you simply can’t afford to offer a generic experience to your visitors. If there’s nothing to set you apart from the competition, your conversion rates won’t be any better than theirs.

Personalizing a visitor’s website experience can be accomplished in several ways. Segmenting based on location, demographics, browsing and shopping behaviors are just a few. Those segmented visitors can then be delivered landing pages, recommendations, special offers, and pricing tuned in to them. According to a study by Accenture:

65% of visitors will buy from a retailer who’s familiar with their purchase history.
58% of people will purchase when they get preference and past-purchase based recommendation.
65% of people are more likely to buy when promotions are personalized and relevant.

Provide Visitors with Answers

Whether you’re selling products or offering services, you have to provide visitors with the answers they need to make a decision. If you don’t, you risk frustrating them and you will lose the conversion opportunity. Consider that around 83% of respondents to a Pew Research Center survey say that being able to ask questions is important when buying something they’ve never bought before.

A comprehensive FAQ page is one way to provide the information visitors need. The best FAQs use customer and prospect inquiries, commonly asked questions, and important product or service information as their base. It’s also important to give visitors an option to contact you to ask additional questions without having to call you.

Getting around the aversion to making a call is a simple matter of providing a ChatBot or live chat option for visitors. While it may seem like an impersonal way to communicate, it’s actually preferred by visitors. A joint study performed by Bentley University and NeuraFlash revealed that most people would rather have a ChatBot conversation, especially if it will save them time.

85% of the study’s respondents said they’d rather use ChatBot during a routine transaction.
100% of those interviewed said that if a ChatBot made finding answers easier and faster they’d use it.
100% agree that ChatBots are most useful when they incorporate a contextual understanding of the visitor’s problem and pain points.

Implement User-Generated Content

You know your business better than anyone and you’re a great source of information and expertise, but that may not be enough. No matter how long you’ve been in business, how great your products and services are, or highly you talk about your company it’s difficult to gain the trust of visitors. The reality is that people are far more likely to trust a company’s previous customers than they are to believe their self-promoting claims. In other words, if you want to win people over you need to show some social proof.

User-generated content (UGC) such as reviews and ratings are prime examples of social proof generation. In fact, According to Pew Research Center, over 80% of people read and consider user reviews before making an online purchase. If you’re an e-commerce company you may already include reviews on your product pages and you’re probably seeing a fair amount of conversions because of it. Optimizing user-generated content to create a more visual experience will also improve your conversion rates.

According to a study performed by Olapic:

25% of people say they’ve bought a product after seeing it in user-generated content.
56% say they’re more likely to buy if the UGC was positive and relatable to them.
52% of respondents say that the most appealing form of UGC is photos either on social media, product pages, or a company’s website.

Optimize the Checkout Experience

Your website’s shopping cart and checkout pages are the last steps in a customer’s purchase journey but that doesn’t mean everything will go smoothly once they get there. Even if they’ve had the ideal experience from the beginning, there is still a chance they’ll change their mind and not complete the purchase. Keeping the checkout process simple, and ensuring that the information necessary for customers to make the right choice is imperative.

E-commerce retailers experience an extremely high rate of shopping cart abandonment. According to a Baymard Institute, nearly 70% of all online shopping carts are abandoned for one reason or another. The most common reason people cite for abandoning a cart is that they are simply looking around and not quite ready to buy. In fact, this is the case around 56% of the time. So, what about the rest?

Baymard interviewed more than 1,700 people and they found that:

60% of respondents say they’ve abandoned a cart because of extra costs like sales tax, shipping, and other fees. This is especially the case when those added costs aren’t made clear.
37% say they’ve abandoned a cart because the website required them to create an account to check out.
28% of people abandoned a cart because the checkout process was either too complicated or took too long.

Essential CRO Tools

The vast majority of the time companies have no real clue as to why their customers abandon carts or fail to follow through with other desired actions. Since the internet is littered with tools that can help you get to the bottom of these issues, there’s really no excuse. As a digital marketer, it’s vital to your business to continually update your toolkit so that you keep up with the latest trends and techniques for CRO.

Here are five of the most recommended CRO tools available:

Hotjar — This tool creates heat maps of how your visitors interact with your website. You can see what areas they’re spending time in, what they’re clicking on, and where you’re losing them. It also includes polls that can ask visitors open-ended questions about what they want, or why they decided not to purchase.
Optimizely — A/B testing is an essential activity that allows you to test variations of your campaigns to see which converts better. Although this tool is geared towards enterprise clients with bigger budgets, if you can swing it, it’s worth the money for all its features and ease of use. If you can’t, working with an agency with the means is the next best thing.
Verify — Gaining feedback from customers isn’t just important, it’s imperative. This tool allows you to build surveys and keep an eye on the way visitors click around while on your site. With thousands of enrolled testers, it’s a better feedback system than any beta testing. Real-time reports organize all the insights so you can take action and improve your conversion rates.
GTMetrix — If your pages are slow to load, you’re going to lose visitors before they ever get to the conversion point. With this tool, you can not only test your page speed, but you’ll also get in-depth instructions on how to fix any issues. It’s more powerful and useful than Google’s Page Speed Insights and offers more actionable solutions as well.
PollDaddy — Surveys and polls are a great way to find out what your customers are thinking and how they perceive your products, services, and your website. This tool will not only help you create surveys and polls, but also provides reporting and filtering tools. Responses can be sent to your email address, website, or even your mobile device so it’s also extremely convenient.

Successful CRO

Understanding what to optimize, where to optimize, and who you’re optimizing for are the three keys to successful CRO. This can only be accomplished by gathering the appropriate data, analyzing it, and taking action. You can’t just make changes based on gut feelings and hunches, it’s just a waste of time, money, and energy.

Following the best practices laid out in this article, as well as incorporating CRO tools, however, ensures that you’re making decisions based on real data. Consistently applying these tools and techniques will result in an improved conversion rate and ultimately higher revenues.

This article first appeared on JeffLizik.com