The beginner’s guide to Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

When it comes to digital marketing, there’s no shortage of acronyms: SEO, PPC, CRM… the list goes on. But today we’d like to cover one acronym which many small businesses might be inadvertently ignoring – and it’s one which could transform their fortunes. So, let’s jump in and talk about CRO – or Conversion Rate Optimisation – and discover why it’s an acronym you might want to add to your business arsenal.

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

While internet technology is evolving at an astonishing rate, consumer behaviour is actually fairly predictable. It’s for this reason that you could have the most beautiful website, you could have the perfect SEO strategy, and you could have thousands of visitors per day – but you might not make a single sale. The role of Conversion Rate Optimisation is to assess a visitor’s journey from landing on your website to making a purchase. This customer journey, or sales funnel, is easily overlooked but is actually one of the most important factors of digital marketing success.

The ingredients of CRO

At its core, CRO aims to make the customer journey as frictionless as possible – but what does this look like in real terms? Well, there are several factors which come into play with CRO, and here are a few of the most important:

• Customer journey analysis. This refers to monitoring a customer’s path to a sale (or lack thereof) and analysing where the weak points lie.

• A/B testing. It’s not always easy to know which website change might result in increased conversions, which is why A/B testing is so useful. Trying different versions and comparing the results will give you confidence.

• Customer surveys. There’s nothing more valuable than direct feedback from your target audience. With a quick survey, you can discover key website strengths and weaknesses.

How to get started with CRO today

It’s clear that CRO can be hugely beneficial to online businesses, but where do you begin? That’s a big question, as all websites are different, but the first step should always be a top-down analysis of the current user journey. Using tools like Google Analytics, you can discover the most common paths users take to a purchase, and can even see where they drop off. This is your first piece of actionable data. From here, you should look into a round of A/B testing to try out new web design and written content – it all plays a key role in securing those conversions.

We’ve really just scratched the surface of CRO today, so if you’d like to learn more about optimising conversions and boosting your bottom line, get in touch with the Excalibur Digital team today.