Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is all about making your website more conversion friendly. Learn everything about improving conversion rate in this post

Conversion Rate Optimization and A/B testing are both popular services today because of their direct and indirect benefits on businesses’ bottom line.

The primary aim for all web marketers is to increase the traffic coming their way (while acquiring it at a reduced cost) and improve the conversion rate.

Undoubtedly, Conversion Rate and Traffic are the key performance metrics. They’re used for determining the success of a landing page, a website, an email, or other web properties.

Even the slightest of changes you make on any of your web properties can, intentionally or unintentionally, affect the conversion rates.

Before we get deeper into the topic, let’s quickly understand what is CRO (conversion rate optimization).

Also Check – Psychology Behind Conversion Optimization – AdPushup

What is CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)?

Conversion rate is a term that is most commonly used in the marketing world. And conversion rate optimization is the process of improving the percentage of visitors to a website who take the desired action.

These actions could include making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. Business owners struggling with sales can use CRO to improve the ROI of their online marketing campaigns. 

There are multiple ways to optimize conversion rate. These include A/B testing, multivariate testing, and user experience testing. As part of the CRO, those who manage the newsletter part of the marketing campaigns may need to conduct email list cleaning to guarantee better deliverability. The latter ultimately impacts conversion rates. Businesses can test different web page elements to determine which combinations are most effective at driving conversions. 

Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization

1. A Better Understanding of Customers

To be genuinely helpful to your customers and meet their needs, you must find a solution to their pain points. You can do that by empathizing with them and understanding their challenges.

It is advisable to start by walking a mile in their shoes and observing their journey, product experience, and more.

The most effective conversion rate optimization strategy involves understanding every aspect of your customer’s journey. This helps you identify areas in which their experience can be improved.

By providing customers with a better experience, you increase the likelihood that they will convert.

2. Lower Cost Per Acquisition

Conversion rate optimization is all about working smarter, not harder. If you’re making efforts to get people to your site, you need to ensure you’re getting the most out of that traffic by converting it into customers.

The better the customer experience, the more customers you’ll get from the same amount of traffic. This results in happy marketers and a lower cost per acquisition (CPA).

This way, while still increasing your conversion rate, you will be able to understand your customers better. Furthermore, you can apply this knowledge to other aspects of your marketing objectives and expect greater outcomes.

3. Rank Higher on Search Engines

Conversion rate optimization helps you boost your SEO efforts and aids Google’s ranking algorithms by providing user-behavior data as a ranking factor.

Google is constantly becoming smarter about how it ranks pages. It is becoming more and more user-centric and prioritizing websites that serve users with the best possible experience.

That means any website that provides a smooth and seamless customer experience will have a higher chance of ranking higher on the search engines.

All your efforts to optimize your conversion rate will not just result in increased conversions. But it will also push your website higher in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).

Now, even though A/B Testing and conversion rate optimization are both quite popular, this is what the latest stats have to say:

Few Statistics on Conversion Rate Optimization Benefits

• Across all industries, the average website conversion rate is 2.35%. Therefore, if your website converts visitors at this rate, you perform just like most of your counterparts. (Wordstream).

• Best-performing websites convert at a rate of 11%. If your conversion rate is below 11%, your website has room for improvement. Focus on increasing conversions on your website (Wordstream).

• The desktop conversion rate is 4.14%. Therefore, businesses should focus on their websites. Still, they shouldn’t neglect their mobile websites (Statista).

• Tablet conversions account for 3.36%, and smartphone conversions for 1.53%. Brands should make their websites responsive across these mobile devices (Statista).

• 94% of web traffic comes from organic search results. Work on generating organic search results rather than paid results (Monster Insights).

• The average conversion rate for organic leads on e-commerce sites is 14.6%. Outbound leads only convert at 1.7% (Monster Insights).

• E-commerce conversion rates worldwide are 2.58%. According to Statista, traditional shopping remains the most preferred option among buyers, despite the popularity of online shopping.

This shows that about 97% of the visitors on a website are not interested in what is being offered to them. They do not react to the CTA (Call to Action) that is being measured.

This figure definitely shows how long a conversion rate optimization still has to go and how big the market potential is for the CRO industry.

But Why are the Conversion Rates so low?

The majority of the experts suggest that it is due to the fact that improving conversion is not an easy job.

It’s a challenge for most businesses, especially when they do not measure the effect of CRO keywords or any changes that they make. Performing proper testing also goes a long way in increasing a website’s conversion rate.

Recent trends suggest that it is continuously becoming harder for businesses to improve their conversion rates.

10+ Stats on How Busines Owners Improved Conversion Rate

• 82% of marketers say successfully tracking and successfully testing conversion rates is highly or moderately challenging (Transaction Agency).

• More than 48% of sales happen after four to ten contacts. In 8% of cases, there is only one contact (RAIN Group).

• When a website does not load in 3 seconds, most visitors abandon it. It is, therefore, critical to make sure that your site loads quickly (SwayHub). This can end up affecting all your conversion optimization efforts.

• 85% of marketers fail to win back “hard-to-get” customers to their websites (Kyleads).

• Following the Covid-19 pandemic, the two biggest challenges with CRO are getting decision-makers’ buy-in and improving processes (2020 State of Conversion Optimization Report, CXL).

• Most marketers find personalizing a website to be somewhat difficult or extremely difficult (Econsultancy). Creating a personalized experience for your website’s visitors is key to providing them with a great user experience.
  
  This, in turn, will help facilitate your conversion rate optimization efforts.

• The companies’ satisfaction with their conversion rate has been decreasing in the last four years. Only about 22 per cent of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates. (Source: Econsultancy) Tweet this.

• Approximately 61% of companies carry out less than five tests every month. (Source: Bryan Eisenberg) Tweet this.

• More than 20% of businesses have reported that they do not have an effective strategy for landing page testing. (Source: IonInteractive) Tweet this.

• A one-second delay in page response time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. (Source: KISSmetrics) Tweet this.

• About 75% of businesses have problems finding suitable expertise for optimizing their landing page copy. (Source: MarketingSherpa) Tweet this.

There are a couple of important, notable points in these stats. For one thing, the majority of businesses fail to have an implementable, highly-effective strategy for conversion rate optimization.

You just have a few seconds to make an impression on your visitors, and if your landing page lacks what they are looking for, conversion rates are going to be low.

To make more effective changes for improving conversion rate optimization, marketers need to put in place a proper system.

Lack of testing abilities is another important factor that affects conversion rates. Companies need to understand the importance of testing if they are interested in improving their conversion rates. 

At any given moment, it’s important to track how well your conversion optimization efforts are paying off. One key metric is calculating your conversion rate.

How to Calculate Conversion Rate?

Calculating the conversion rate is relatively easy. Here is a quick rundown of how it works.

If the above formula is still difficult to understand, here’s an example that better explains the calculation.

As mentioned earlier, your conversion rate is the percentage of people who take the desired action on your website. 

In this case, the desired action is purchasing shoes. 

If your website received 100,000 unique visitors in the month of November and was able to sell shoes to 4000 people, the conversion rate would be 2%.

Top Conversion Rate Optimization Tools

With the right conversion rate optimization tools, you can save a lot of time trying to improve the conversion rate. Using these tools, you can immerse yourself in the market, get real-time insights into how people use your website, and draw connections between different sources of feedback. 

This way, you can constantly optimize your site to meet the needs of your users better, leading to an increased conversion rate.

1. Quantitative Techniques for Determining What’s Going on

Quantitative tools help you collect data, which helps track what’s going on in your website. This data can be very beneficial in helping you understand your website traffic and make decisions about your marketing strategy.

2. General Analytical Tools

One tool that is increasingly becoming popular for measuring website traffic is Google Analytics. This tool provides a wealth of data that can be used to understand how visitors interact with a website. 

3. Website Heat Map Tools

These tools aggregate the number of clicks, scrolls, and movements on a page; you can clearly see what’s working and what’s not. This data can be useful in understanding your website traffic and making informed decisions about your marketing approach.

4. Funnel Tools

Different tools allow you to measure exactly when visitors drop off from a sales funnel. This is important data for understanding where potential customers are getting lost in your conversion process so you can take steps to fix the problem.

Understanding your funnel drop-offs can level up your conversion rate optimization strategy and increase sales.

Though using these tools can be a great help in conversion optimization, they’re not the be-all and end-all. It’s critical to test and discover what works best, and A/B testing comes in handy here. 

We’ll get deeply into A/B testing later in this blog. But for now, let’s take a look at the benefits of conversion rate optimization and a few more highly valuable statistics. This will give you some insight into how you can increase your conversion rate.

How to Increase Conversion Rate: 34 Statistics

Here are some CRO statistics that can help you improve your conversions.

This section provides more statistics to help you build brand affinity, increase conversions, increase sales, and improve ROI.

• Videos on landing pages can improve conversion rates by up to 80 percent. (Source: EyeViewDigital) Tweet this.

• Increasing landing pages from 10 to 15 increases leads by 55% (Hubspot).

• According to Hubspot, brands with more than 40 landing pages received 12 times more leads than those with just one to five.

• The average opt-in rate for emails is 1.95% (SUMO).

• On average, personalized emails increase conversions by 10% (Aberdeen).

• Simplify. A 20% increase in decision simplicity results in a 96% increase in customer loyalty, an 86% increase in the likelihood of purchasing, and a 115% increase in the likelihood of recommending. (Source: CEB) Tweet this.

• User-generated content increased conversion rates by 161% on average across all industries. Yotpo says social proof can help businesses transform their operations.

• According to Hubspot, personalized CTAs generate 42% more conversions than non-personalized ones.

• Short-form landing pages with an above-the-fold CTA can generate 220% more leads than long-form landing pages (Marketing Experiments).

• CRO is used by 70% of marketers to make other marketing decisions (Marketing Experiments).

• Businesses with over 40 landing pages generated a whopping 12 times more leads than those with 1-5 landing pages. (Source: HubSpot) Tweet this.

• You can get 120% more conversions by reducing the number of fields from 11 to 4 in lead generation forms (Unbounce).

• The average conversion rate for multi-page forms is 13.85%, while the average conversion rate for single-page forms is 4.53%. If you segment your form into several pages, you can minimize the number of fields on each page (Formstack).

• “Click here” is a better wording for CTA buttons than “submit”. For the former, conversion rates are 30%, while for the latter, they are 3% (Unbounce).

• 61 percent of customers read online reviews before making a purchase. Use Online Reputation Management to Improve Conversions. (Source: Econsultancy) Tweet this.

• Conversion rate optimization tools improve businesses’ ROI by 223% on average (VentureBeat).

• 65% of consumers begin their buying journey on their mobile phones. This highlights the importance of having a mobile-friendly site (Yotpo).

• A desktop visit costs four times as much as a smartphone. Despite that, mobile-friendliness is crucial because many buyer journeys begin with mobile phones (Adobe Digital Insights).

• More than 90% of visitors who read your headline also read your CTA Copy. (Source: Unbounce) Tweet this.

• It is estimated that 34% of people who see contests being conducted will complete the form. However, they are usually low-quality leads. So, contests can boost conversions if the quality doesn’t matter (Formstack).

• With a conversion rate of 3.74%, referrals are the most effective customer acquisition channel. Consider running a brand ambassador program (Marketo).

• According to Shareaholic, social media drives 31.24 % of referral traffic to websites. Conversion rates increase when your goals and your users’ goals meet. (Source: Conversionista) Tweet this.

• A video can increase landing page conversions by 86% (EyeView).

• A nurtured lead generates 47% more sales than one that isn’t nurtured. It highlights the importance of nurturing leads (Annuitas Group).

• One-CTA emails boosted clicks by 371% and sales by 1617%. When sending marketing emails, focus on one goal per email (Wordstream).

• Long landing pages can generate up to 220% more leads than above-the-fold call-to-action. (Source: Marketingexperiments) Tweet this.

• When your lead generation form asks for their telephone number (Unbounce), conversions drop by 5%.

• Using marketing automation increases qualified leads by 451% (Business2Community).

• A landing page without navigation bars can increase conversions by up to 100% (VWO.com).

• In order to increase conversion rates, businesses should perform 50% more tests (Econsultancy).

• Using correct targeting and testing methods can increase conversion rates by up to 300 percent. (Source: Steelhouse) Tweet this.

• Mobile optimization triples the chances of mobile conversions by 5% or more (Outgrow).

• 96 percent of marketers agree that segmentation is the most effective strategy for increasing conversion rates (Econsultancy).

Marketers are using multiple methods to increase their conversion rate. Some methods include usability testing, segmentation, copy optimization, customer feedback, and competitor benchmarking.

Any one of these mentioned methods can affect the performance of your campaigns. Furthermore, you need a testing system to measure the effectiveness of the implemented changes. This is where A/B testing comes in.

It offers conversion rate marketing experts or any marketer the ability to target, split visitors and test conversion optimization campaigns. This allows businesses to see what works and doesn’t, helping them increase their conversions.

A/B Testing for Conversion Rate Optimization:

You need to have a clear understanding of what works for you. Split testing is popular, but still, a large number of businesses have not used it.

Very few people test-drive substantial improvements. The reason for the same is probably insufficient knowledge about what the consumer or visitor needs.

• A/B testing is the most used testing method for improving conversion rates. (Source: Steelhouse) Tweet this.

• The use of testing among companies has increased from 27 percent to 38 percent. (Source: Econsultancy) Tweet this.

• President Obama raised an additional $60 million using A/B Testing. (Source: Event360) Tweet this.

• Only 44 percent of companies use split-testing while trying to optimize conversion rates. (Source: SeoGadget) Tweet this.

• Only one out of eight A/B tests have driven major changes in conversion rate optimization. (Source: ConversionXL). (Source: ConversionXL) Tweet this.

• A/B testing is performed by 77% of organizations on their website and by 60% on their landing pages.

• A/B testing is most commonly used to improve the conversion rate of corporate websites, with 77% of organizations running such tests.

Similarly, one of the biggest assumptions among people is that testing is a one-time process. Some assume that after a single test, they’ll have a better-performing and well-optimized campaign that will help them get the maximum bang for the buck. But that is not the case.

Testing is an ongoing process that you ideally never stop. You perform testing to improve, and improvement should never stop.

I’ve also said this many times. However, the market dynamics change at a fast pace, and your best-performing variation is unlikely to remain the best, given the test of time.

Hence, closely watching analytics and continuously testing, optimizing and improving is crucial. By now, we hope you understand what is CRO and how to get the most out of it. 

Frequently Asked Questions on Conversion Rate Optimization

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