Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of improving the rate at which visitors to a website or mobile application take a desired action. This could be anything from subscribing to an email list to making a purchase. In this comprehensive guide, you'll learn everything you need to know about CRO and how to use it to increase your website's conversion rate. CRO shares many principles with direct response marketing, a marketing approach that focuses on tracking, testing, and continuous improvement.
If you use your website to sell products, the main goal (known as macro-conversion) is for the user to make a purchase. The conversion rate is calculated by dividing the total number of conversions by the total number of people who visited your website. When investigating visitor behavior on the BluTV site, Hype, a performance marketing agency of certified VWO partners, found that the conversion rate for mobile visitors was much lower than the average BluTV website. If a user can convert on each visit (for example, when buying a product), divide the number of conversions by the number of sessions (the number of times a user came to your website).
No matter how persuasive your call to action or how simple your website is, if you don't give visitors a sense of trustworthiness or confidence in your website, it's unlikely to improve your website's conversion rate. By adjusting different elements of the sales funnel, you can start to affect conversion rates, ideally increasing them. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who take a desired action on a website. ADT, a Tyco International company that offers security solutions for businesses and properties, changed its CTA wording from “Book a Free Survey” to “Get a Free Quote” and saw a 60% increase in its conversion rate.
Larger tests with significant potential, where more than two elements are optimized, will have a lasting and noticeable impact. In addition to color and text, the location of the call to action button also plays an important role in driving more conversions. This also means that your conversion rate will rise, fall, and even remain steady at different times throughout the testing phase. Usability testing is an effective way to evaluate the ease of use of a website from a customer's point of view, their engagement rate on a particular page, stumbling points, and similar drops.
But is it really that simple? Take a look at some of the best CTA strategies in the industry and you'll see that they all use basic psychology to define their CTAs.
