Is your website turning visitors away? You might need Conversion Rate Optimisation.

The main problem with online traffic is that it is inconsistent. It’s not like a physical shop where your potential customers might walk past the door on a daily basis. In the online world, if you don’t get visitors to enter your conversion funnel from the outset, then the chances of them ever coming back are low. This is a lost opportunity, and the secret to real online success would seem to be to increase your conversion rate.

So, the big question is how do you get them to enter the funnel when you have got them there on your landing page? The answer lies in an effective conversion rate optimisation (CRO) campaign. Get your CRO game right and you can save time, money and effort. It will also allow you to explore other growth strategies that might have been out of your reach with a lower CRO.

The main focus of CRO is to try and understand the user experience and then harness this power to get a handle on customer behaviour. Once you figure out how customers react and how your site affects them, you can start to make the small changes that will have big CRO effects. 

How CRO works

The main thrust of CRO is to improve your landing page so that visitor behaviour is altered to your needs. In order to do this, you need to follow a series of actions.

The first of these is the research stage. This is where you take the time to study your site and others in order to work out what is missing and what could be added or improved. This will help you with the next stage of the CRO process, which is the hypothesis phase. This is when you construct an effective plan for how you’re going to optimise your site. 

Next comes the prioritisation phase, where you work out which areas you’re going to test and work on first. These should be ranked in order of most effective changes first, with the smaller, more incremental, changes coming later. 

Then there should be a testing phase, where you select the correct methods for testing your CRO improvements and run experiments to see if they’re having the desired effect. This leads into the learning phase, where you analyse your results to make sure the changes are working the way you want them to. If not, then you need to repeat the process from the beginning or try and action some of the other changes that you identified in the first run through.

The main elements of CRO

There are several main elements where you will need to focus your attention during your CRO assessments. The first is the landing page. This is the main area that determines the usability and success of your website. The better this is designed and the more effort that has gone in to understanding the user experience, the more effective this will be. After all, this is almost always the first page that visitors are going to see when they land on your site and it’s the key part of the process for getting them into your funnel.

Of course, the web content that appears on this site is also very important. The words and images used are an integral part of hooking in your reader and getting them to continue further into your site. So, you need to consider every aspect of your content. The headline is particularly important as it forms the main aspect of the page content and is the first place the eye of the reader is drawn to. 

The main body of copy on your page needs to be concise and easy to read, and you should also pay attention to the physical aspects of the page such as the font type, backgrounds and text colours. The formatting is also very important. 

You also need to make sure you have at least one call to action in a prominent place. This is the key to getting visitors into your funnel. Whether it’s directing them to a sales page or simply getting them to subscribe, the call to action is the key active part of your landing page and your chance to ensure this visitor comes back to your site and isn’t lost forever into the internet ether. 

A well placed and designed CTA can increase your conversion rate by as much as 60%, so this is not something you can afford to ignore. 

You also need to make sure that your site is well structured and easy to navigate. If your site is a real maze of pages and is hard for customers to find their way around, you’re quickly going to lose your visitors’ attention. Look at your site map and test it out to make sure you can easily glide from one section to another. 

You should also have the right forms in place, especially in your sales funnel. Your forms should have as few fields as possible. If you want to ensure that people sign up, then you need to make it easy to create passwords and keep the amount of information required to a minimum. 

Other factors also come into the equation, such as the page loading speed. Studies have shown that even minor delays in loading can be enough to put people off and send them elsewhere.

Getting your CRO right can have a big impact on your business. You can improve your marketing ROI, enhance the user experience and gain better insights into the behaviour of your visitors. This information can then be fed back into your site to create a positive feedback loop. 

If you would like more information about how CRO can work for you or would like to discuss the issues confronting your site, then get in touch with a member of our team. We are always happy to talk about CRO and the factors that make this such an important part of your online success.

We look forward to hearing from you.