We’re facing a highly competitive digital landscape and simply attracting website visitors is definitely not enough. To achieve sustained success, businesses optimize conversion rates by transforming visitors into buyers. This is why Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) became necessary. The CRO process systematically improves the percentage of users from web traffic who take a desired action, like purchasing an item on your online store.
This guide will explore the definition of the Conversion Rate Optimization process, highlight key areas that benefit from CRO strategies and introduce the best CRO tools and how to gain more traffic to your ecommerce business.
Ready to earn those dollars? 😉
Start your online store today! 🚨
What is conversion optimization?
Conversion Rate Optimization is a data-driven comprehensive process where you can analyze user behavior to create targeted strategies to increase conversions on a website.
It aims to optimize the customer's journey by improving website elements, copywriting and buttons, enhancing user experience and guiding them to perform more desired actions.
Where can I use CRO strategies?
Some areas primarily benefit from a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) strategy and you must use them if you run an e-business. The sky is the limit since you can advertise your products through video marketing, content marketing and many other different ways. However, here are the more common targeted digital marketing media for Conversion Rate Optimization efforts:
- Landing pages: Landing pages are the entry point for many site visitors. The Conversion Rate Optimization strategy can optimize these pages by improving headline clarity, utilizing persuasive visuals and compelling CTAs to increase sales and reduce bounce rates.
- Website navigation: Effective navigation is extremely important to guide visitors to desired actions. CRO can enhance website navigation by simplifying menus to provide clear pathways to conversion pages and even optimizing search functionality.
- Product pages: While navigating on product pages, users will be attracted by optimized product descriptions that can showcase high-quality product photos or videos, incorporating social proof elements and persuasive CTAs.
- Checkout process: What’s more important than facilitating the life of a customer who’s trying to pay for a product? The checkout process is where many potential customers abandon their carts. Conversion Rate Optimization techniques can streamline the process by reducing the number of steps on the pricing page, offering guest checkout options and optimizing web form fields to make the checkout process faster and safer.
- Call-to-action (CTA) optimization: CTAs act as signposts for users, guiding them towards desired actions. Sometimes they can appear as phrases in the middle of a product description or a button on the same page. To maximize conversions, CRO strategies can involve testing different CTA designs, colors, placement, wording and overall visibility.
From a merchant to another: the best website conversions for ecommerce 🔥
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) plays an important part in your digital marketing strategy. Having an ecommerce brand is not easy as it looks, and you must ensure that your conversion goals are achieved to drive revenue and growth.
As a digital entrepreneur, you can leverage different online marketing strategies that can be applied to your business. We’ll introduce you to some common examples of website conversions in an online store.
Product purchases
Encouraging visitors to complete a purchase is a primary conversion goal for any ecommerce site!
Conversion Rate Optimization strategies can focus on streamlining the checkout process, reducing friction, and optimizing product pages to increase the likelihood of conversions. If customers think buying on your website is hard, they will probably give up their shopping carts.
Email subscriptions
Building a solid email list is crucial for email marketing and remarketing efforts. CRO will help you increase newsletter sign-ups by optimizing subscription forms and offering incentives such as coupons.
Do you really think the welcome email you received last week was just to thank you for the purchase? With email lists, businesses can reach you and promote their campaigns and customer surveys, increasing the visibility and value proposition of the email subscription call-to-action.
Form submissions
You probably know that online businesses are always debating ways of acquiring leads. Lead generation is a vital component of ecommerce strategies because leads are the objective of our conversion strategy.
Conversion Rate Optimization can be utilized to optimize lead capture forms, simplifying form fields to provide clear benefits to encourage visitors to complete registration or customer surveys!
Account registrations
If you have a business that sells subscriptions, memberships or personalized experiences, Conversion Rate Optimization ongoing process will help you build your strategy by optimizing the registration process.
This can include simplifying the registration form, providing logins and highlighting the value of having an account, everything to lead the customer’s journey to signing up on your site!
Calculate your website’s conversion rate
Once you start your online store, to calculate your conversion rate you’ll need to measure the number of conversions in relation to the total number of website visitors. You can check the formula below. 👇
Conversion Rate = (Number of Conversions / Number of Website Visitors) x 100
For example, if a website receives 5,000 visitors in a month and generates 700 conversions, the conversion rate would be:
(700 / 5,000) x 100 = 14%
From one merchant to another: the best conversion rate optimization tools 🔥
You don’t think you’ll be able to manage your website traffic without web analytics tools, right?
Now that you’re looking to build a strategy to receive more and more website traffic, you need to understand these numbers and how they can directly affect your website conversion rate.
With all the technology we have today, a lot of quantitative tools were invented and now can help us to understand a site’s conversion rate and existing traffic.
Google Analytics
One of the most famous conversion rate optimization tools, Google Analytics provides essential insights into existing website traffic, user behavior and conversion tracking. It allows businesses to identify and measure the effectiveness of Conversion Rate Optimization strategies, building a data-driven environment.
Hotjar
Hotjar is another tool that can help you measure your conversion rate or even generated leads. It offers powerful CRO tools like heatmaps, session recordings and user feedback, providing an overview of your website’s average conversion rate.
Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange specializes in providing comprehensive website optimization and analytics solutions. With features such as heat maps, live chat functionality, conversion funnels, and form analytics, Lucky Orange enables businesses to gain valuable insights into how visitors interact with their websites.
Optimizely
Optimizely is a popular Conversion Rate Optimization tool that gives insights while analyzing quantitative data. It can be used to evaluate call to action, heatmaps and how the target audience performs a desired action.
The tool can be used to calculate the average conversion rate of a website (from a landing page to a pricing page) and different conversion rates (from a landing page to a pricing page).
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is another tool that can help you calculate conversion rate, offering heat mapping and scroll mapping tools to visualize how visitors interact with a website!
These insights help identify areas of high engagement, areas users ignore, and optimize design and content accordingly to boost conversions.
VWO
As an entrepreneur, you’re looking to increase sales since more conversions means a bigger revenue, right?
VMO is an all-in-one Conversi platform that combines A/B testing, heatmaps and many different features to help you increase conversions on your page.
It enables businesses to test different variations of web pages (from landing to pricing page), analyze user behavior, and optimize the customer journey for higher conversion optimization.
Enjoying our examples? Apply them on your own Shoplazza store
The six best conversion rate optimization strategies
Okay, we’ve already explained too much. Now it is time to show you some options to apply to your online store strategy.
The CRO process looks complicated but is simpler than you think. All you have to do is develop strong analytical skills, and then you’ll become a natural.
Search engine optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is optimizing a website to improve its visibility and rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). The ultimate goal of SEO is to attract more traffic to a web page, which matches Conversion Rate Optimization since we can convert these visitors into buyers!
It’s a great way to decrease customer acquisition costs. It involves organic digital marketing techniques such as keyword research, on-page optimization (related to layout and site speed) and link building to make a website more relevant and valuable to the search engine results page.
Split testing
Also known as A/B testing, split testing involves creating two or more versions of a web page, ad, email, or a different element to measure their performance and determine the most effective variant.
This multivariate testing will help you to identify the optimal design, layout, website copy and CTA’s for maximizing conversions.
For instance, these are three examples of Shoplazza posts. You can notice that they’re very similar, with only minor changes in the text or the center image.
To ensure you can measure the difference impacting conversions, you can’t change a lot of elements from one image to another even though you’re running multiple tests. This will help you to identify what performance point is making potential customers engage more with a post, such as the design, colors, layout, copy or CTA’s.
User experience (UX) optimization
When browsing the web, you probably skip pages that don’t have a good layout and make the navigation complex and slow, right? Your customer does the same.
Navigation is an essential part of user experience and must be taken seriously. Optimizing your website’s functionality must be a priority. Make sure to reduce friction and improve site speed to allow your customers to simply use your website features smoothly.
Knowing that today many people use their smartphones to make purchases, don’t forget to enhance its mobile responsiveness and even work on accessibility. Even high-traffic sites must create a seamless and user-friendly experience for everyone.
Personalization
Personalization tailors the website experience to individual visitors based on their preferences, behavior or demographic information!
By providing relevant content, product recommendations or offers, businesses can enhance engagement and drive more conversions.
For example, when buying a pillow, Amazon promotes personalized offers based on your preferences. Using machine learning, they know that users who buy pillows can purchase different sizes or pillow covers, so they offer customers another possibility to make them buy items.
Another personalization is to offer the target audience the possibility of performing the same actions on mobile devices, for example.
Social proof integration
Leveraging social proof, such as customer testimonials, ratings, reviews or case studies, instills trust and confidence in potential customers.
In the example, we can see ATUMTEK, a store that sells selfie sticks and tripods. Their products are evaluated by paying customers and help other customers to know if the items are really fit for their needs!
Positive testimonials and reviews can be accurate indicators of customer loyalty, credibility and quality of a product or brand.
Conversion funnel analysis
Marketing enthusiasts are all about the conversion funnel, but when we start working with sales, we understand why they talk a lot about this. 😩
Understanding the conversion funnel is essential for optimizing each stage of the customer journey. By analyzing user behavior, drop-off points and potential barriers, you can identify areas for improvement and implement targeted Conversion Rate Optimization actions.
Conversion rate optimization: conclusion
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is vital in helping ecommerce brands maximize their online performance and drive revenue growth!
By harnessing the concept of Conversion Rate Optimization, you can identify typical website conversions, focusing on critical areas that benefit from Conversion Rate Optimization strategies to increase your sales and make users perform a desired action.
There are a lot of tools available out there to help you implement effective strategies and even calculate your conversion rates. By leveraging it, you can improve your customer experience, make your users interact with your content and transform your company into a successful digital business with statistically significant leads.
