There’s no time like the present to consider a CRO program.
Suddenly, you’re faced with an all-too-familiar scenario: You have a limited budget and aggressive sales goals. Now, you’re deciding where to invest your budget to generate the strongest impact. How you invest your budget will determine whether you meet your goals, and whether you meet your goals will determine your performance. The pressure’s on. This is the hard part, right?
It certainly doesn’t have to be. It’s time to consider investing in a robust Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) program.
Alright, fair enough. But why?
Let’s take the next few moments to walk through the benefits of a CRO program together. By the time you’re done reading this article, you should be well equipped to decide whether your website and business could benefit from CRO.
Spoiler alert: It very likely can!
Defining CRO
Common sense tells us we need a solid definition for CRO before we can really dive in head first.
Generally, we can define Conversion Rate Optimization as a set of methods used in digital marketing to increase the percentage of users on your website who convert. Conversion in this case refers to users who take desired steps forward on your website, either converting them directly into customers, or bringing them ever closer to becoming one. In other words, CRO is all about improving your website’s effectiveness on its users to drive sales.
On paper, it almost sounds like the marketing scheme of some evil mastermind… except in our scenario, it’s a plan that actually works.
Pretty neat, huh?
Now, let’s begin exploring some of the advantages of our potential scheme plan.
The Advantages of CRO
When it comes to CRO’s strengths, there are several key benefits that distinguish it from other website investment opportunities. Here are the major highlights:
CRO is unique in that focuses on your website’s current traffic.
Think of it this way: People who are visiting your site are already in your sales funnel, regardless of how close they are to the end goal. If they’re visiting your site, it must be because they’re interested in something you offer (sparing an accidental visit from a cat walking across the keyboard).
Imagine how exponential your results could be if you began optimizing your website for these users.
(Brain Bytes Creative is based in Atlanta, so sometimes traffic has a …slightly different meaning to us.)
CRO also reduces the cost of acquiring customers.
It doesn’t involve paid ads, emails or other forms of pricey advertising. Simply put, you’re making the best use of what’s already on your site. In other words, it’s not cheap, it’s working smart.
Here’s another way to think about it:
Have you ever been in a typical department store and thought to yourself something along the lines of, “I can’t find what I’m looking for?” If you know another store has the item in question, you might be tempted to leave and go there instead.
In this scenario, CRO would be the equivalent of optimizing your store’s layout for those customers that are already in the store, so that you can ensure they always find exactly what they’re looking for.
On the other hand, a paid ad would be trying to reach people who are either not inside your store, or don’t know about it yet. It’s much more lucrative to focus on those who are already closer to converting. You don’t want them to leave because of inconveniences.
Taking a valuable lesson from the example above, we can also glean that CRO helps you tap into your most valuable customers.
Research suggests that the highest quality leads come from organic traffic. If your traffic isn’t converting, this suggests that your website is clearly not persuading its users to buy in. This is why CRO focuses on creating the best service experience for your users as is possible.
CRO builds trust and brand perception.
One of the major components of CRO is improving your site’s overall design, which offers clear trust points your users are looking for.
Here’s a right on the nose example.
If you looked at two different sites that were offering the same product, who would you be more willing to trust with your business? The website that’s designed with a clear intention and is easy to navigate, or the site with a few broken images and missing links (or dare I even say: Comic Sans)?
It’s kind of a no brainer, isn’t it?
(On the one hand, at least he wasn’t making his website’s logo in MS Paint…)
But let’s think realistically now.
Even in the smallest of instances, CRO’s design oriented marketing strategies may yield an incredible impact that would otherwise very likely go unnoticed by many great thinkers in marketing.
One of my favorite examples I found was when Veeam Software, a data management company, changed one single word on their website and saw their click through rate increase by 161%!
Can you imagine that?
Using a survey on their website, they asked their users what additional information they would like to see on their product pages. The number one response was “pricing.” Of course, the company was unable to publish their pricing information given they sold explicitly through partners, whose discounts may vary.
The solution?
In one simple but clever move, they changed the text on their “Request a quote” link, which would lead users to a sales inquiry page, to “Request pricing.”
What likely accumulated into a two minute change led to a 161% jump in their click through rate. At the risk of sounding cheesy, that’s the power of CRO.
So, it’s not just the website with the nicer design that will win people over, but also the website that provides its users with the experience that is closest possible to their desired expectations. Which leads us to the next benefit…
CRO helps you steal business from competition and earn repeat customers.
These are the words you’ve probably been waiting to hear! If your site offers a better checkout experience than your competitors, it’s almost a guarantee that they’ll become repeat customers. Again, all you’re doing is simply maximizing your site’s usability. It’s simple, but effective.
CRO yields data that allows you to gain sharper insights into your customers’ wants and needs.
This next highlight is dedicated to that inner geek in all of us: CRO also includes a lot of data digging. The good kind! Any good marketer knows this is an information goldmine consisting of possible high-impact, far-reaching implications. Just take a quick peek at some examples of the sort of data CRO can return:
- User flow analysis
- Heat maps showing where users click and how far along they scroll
- Session replays showing user frustration
- Form analytics, including drop-offs and fields that slow users down
- And of course, good ol’fashion A/B test results (can’t live without them!)
CRO & SEO
One last thought here! Have I mentioned yet that CRO also works hand-in-hand with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? It totally does, and it’s glorious.
Anyhow, back on the topic of data (and geeking out)…
Now that we have a greater understanding of CRO’s benefits, let’s take a closer look at some of the data that shows proof that CRO is as effective as it sounds.
Let’s Look at Some Numbers
Within the past few years, many new statistics regarding the effectiveness of CRO have been surfacing, and they carry nothing but great news to go around for any marketers worth their salt.
According to the quotes found on Sessioncam’s “20 Conversion rate optimization stats you need to know”, the average ROI from CRO tools has been estimated at 223%! In addition, out of a total of 36 CRO tools that companies have studied, only two have failed to generate a substantial ROI. Only two.
With only 22% of businesses being satisfied with their inherent conversation rates in 2017, it’s no wonder Google is beginning to see a stark increase in searches for CRO and its related services.
Speaking of which, here at Brain Bytes Creative, we’ve seen more than our fair share of CRO successes too!
To name just a few:
- We generated 13 new leads in one quarter for an Orthodontics Manufacturer by identifying several opportunities to place CTAs.
- We saw an increase in “Request an Appointment” form fills by 46.95% and increased page value by 19.99% for an orthopaedic practice in the Southeast by simply moving a form field.
- We witnessed increased page engagement by 5.45% and form submissions (leads) from brokers by 0.35% for an insurance company by changing a single button’s text! …Sound familiar?
And the list goes on and on!
We use advanced CRO techniques as well as low-hanging fruit, as described in a few of the examples above.
(The More You Know: Originally, Brain Bytes Creative’s logo was a cartoony brain with a bite taken out of it. I wish we had kept it.)
Calculating CRO’s ROI
Moving on to the topic of ROI, Nabler mentions a KPI entitled “ROCRO” (Return on Conversion Rate Optimization) which calculates and measures the ROI you receive from your CRO efforts.
Let’s breakdown how to calculate ROCRO with a quick example using Nabler’s ROCRO calculator:
Imagine you’re a busy retailer who aims to primarily make sales online. The first thing you will need to do, is gather six key points of data:
- Your average website sessions per day
- Existing website conversion rate
- Average order (or lead) value
- Average contribution margin ratio
- Estimated annual cost of your CRO program
- Your estimated conversion rate lift from said CRO program
In this example, let’s say you roughly receive about 2,400 unique visits to your website a day, with an existing conversion rate of 2.5%. If the average order value is approximately $100 and the contribution margin is 50%, what sort of ROCRO could we generate if we bought a CRO program for an annual cost of $28,000 a year to help us manage our CRO program?
Even if you’re only estimating a 0.5% increase in your conversion rate lift (now 3% total), you’d be increasing your conversion rate by a mind boggling 17%!
Is It That Time Already?
So, by now you should have a solid grasp on why investing in a CRO program would greatly benefit you. To sum up, it’s a powerful and inexpensive tactic for a wise marketer who is taking steps towards leveraging the greatest possible results. Purely by optimizing your preexisting website’s design and usability, you will be taking massive, thoughtful strides towards hitting your conversion goals.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, now is the best time to consider investing in a CRO Program. More businesses are researching and investing in CRO each day, so now is the best time to get invested yourself, if you want to stay ahead of your competition.
If you’re interested in starting now, Brain Bytes Creative offers highly effective CRO services (not just speaking strictly out of bias here…).
But you don’t just have to take my word for it. Learn more about Brain Bytes Creative’s CRO approach by checking out some of our other wonderful articles here:
And of course, if you’re interested in contacting us directly to learn more, we highly encourage it! Drop us a line, and thanks for reading!
