Almost anyone running a business with any kind of online presence will be at least aware of conversion rate optimisation (CRO). As its name suggests, CRO is centred on improving the experience of those visiting a given company website so that a greater proportion of them convert into paying customers or carry out another desired action.
However, many business owners simply know about CRO but make little effort to incorporate it into their marketing campaigns, instead investing the bulk of their time, money and effort into such other strands as content marketing and social media.
Indeed, a mere 39% of marketers have cited CRO as a priority – but below are just some of the reasons why the remaining 61% are wrong not to account for it in their plans.
CRO has been proven to be effective
Conversion rate optimisation isn’t one of those forms of marketing that are more inspirational on paper than they are effective in the ‘real world’ – it really does work, being based on metrics, analysis, tests, research and studies.
A/B testing, for example, is one of the most central elements of CRO. Also known as split testing, it involves the use of controlled settings to determine which version of a site – ‘site A’ or ‘site B’ – attracts more conversions. Should there be a noticeable difference between the two, the site owner can easily tell which feature is responsible for boosting the more successful site’s conversions.
Just one change could bump up your site’s conversion rate by hundreds or even thousands of per cent – and CRO is a methodical and proven way of doing so.
It allows you to measure the difference
There are many marketing methods out there, and some of them work, and some of them don’t. Much depends on how the specific method used – such as social media, video marketing or paid search – interacts with that business’s specific situation and goals.
Conversion optimisation, however, is different. If your business has a specific conversion rate – such as 1% or 2% – there’s a lot of scope for improvement, and through a process of testing and analysis, you can see exactly how much difference certain changes make.
CRO delivers an impressive ROI
While certain marketing techniques promise to bring you improved results in terms of a greater number of visitors to your site, CRO works with the visitors that you are already getting to your site. This use of the potential that already exists on your site helps it to deliver an amazing ROI compared to many other marketing methods.
It helps, too, that you don’t need to invest much money or time into the optimisation of your site – simply modifying some of your site’s written copy or paying someone else to do so for you can make a great difference to your conversion rates.
It becomes more powerful with the passage of time
While the exact ROI that your CRO efforts deliver will depend on various factors, one thing that you can depend on is your ROI increasing over time. The more you optimise, the greater rewards that you will stand to gain, both now and with the medium-term passage of time – not least given that the more you optimise, the more effective you will also become at optimising.
Compare this to the situation if you didn’t do CRO at all. It would mean that with every passing day, you would be potentially earning less than you would have otherwise done.
Simply by doing CRO, your business will stand out
As the 39% statistic that we cited further up the page indicates, so many businesses don’t do CRO at all, which indicates how much scope there is for your company to mark itself out from the rest simply by embracing this easily forgotten-about marketing approach.
Don’t miss out on such an obvious chance to put your company ahead of most of its competitors as we approach 2017.
