CRO that will capture and convert your traffic.

So much of digital marketing is about the tactics, strategies and content directed to attracting new, targeted audiences. SEO, paid advertising, social media – it is all established to help move visitors down a funnel of awareness, interest and consideration of your brand. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of adjusting your digital platforms in order to encourage qualified visitors to convert at a higher rate.

And conversion doesn’t necessarily mean a sale – this can be any goal determined to fulfill an objective, such as the submission of an enquiry form or downloading a free resource in exchange for an email address, which could relate to a sale in the future. CRO can be small user experience alterations, like wording, colour choices, or the placement of the call-to-action buttons. Or it could be something much larger, like redesigning your website to improve the amount of time visitors spend on your pages, digest content, and eventually move from a passive visitor to an active one (in other words, from simply perusing your platform to converting).

Your conversion rate is the figure that success is built upon. If you’re asking what your conversion rate should be, you should really be asking what is my conversion rate now, and how can we improve it? The key to CRO is looking at the data and understanding your baseline. From here, you can start to plan a roadmap of actions to improve the conversions of your site, with staggered milestones of new rates over time. For example, your starting conversion rate might only be 2% of all website visitors. After introducing a series of CRO efforts, you may aim to boost this to 5% within 3 months, 7.5% by 6 months, and 10% at 12 months, effectively doubling your sales units within a year.

CRO can take a myriad of forms to improve a website, meaning measuring CRO has to fall within the context of the work performed and the attributable goal. For example, if you find a lot of the visitors to your ecommerce store fail to complete a transaction, you could choose to measure the reduction of abandoned carts after CRO methods. This will then tell you how specific actions have contributed to your overall conversion rate improvement.

No. CRO is about improving the conversions from website visitors drawn in through your marketing channels. Whether you are engaging in SEO, social media, or paid advertising on search engines, CRO efforts will leave these channels alone and simply improve the end result of their visit.

Are your sales figures starting to plateau or drop? Are you looking to scale your business to new heights? Most marketing campaigns will look to attract more audiences and build on their existing efforts, but why not refine your digital presence to make the most of the visitors you’re already attracting?

CRO is about making refinements to your digital assets for better UX and UI. You learn what experience your customer craves and make it as frictionless as possible for them to become a customer. When done right it means investing in one-off changes to continuously enjoy more sales or leads.

If your conversion rate is 5% and you are currently receiving 1000 monthly website visits, that is 50 conversions. Boosting your marketing efforts may put that to 1200 monthly website visits, leading to 60 conversions. If you had instead invested in CRO to improve on the UX and conversion rate to 10%, you would instead enjoy 100 conversions from that initial 1000 monthly website visits. And in the future, when you do wish to accelerate your other digital marketing efforts, that would be 120 conversions from the 1200 monthly website visits, and so on.

The insights garnered from CRO efforts can be used right across the business, and deliver greater return on investment for every other marketing channel.

CRO is designed to improve sales or lead generation. Whether you are a B2C or B2B business, a smart CRO strategy often works at different stages of the sales funnel to complete a series of smaller conversions that are likely to culminate in a larger conversion. This creates further refinement in the website visitor’s user experience, ensuring they find all of the information they need, when they need it, and are gently nurtured towards completing certain actions. If you are relying on a comprehensive digital marketing campaign to attract qualified traffic to your online platform, then CRO are the investments to improve these platforms in the eyes of that targeted audience, improving return on investment by prompting more to convert in the form of sales or lead generation.

While every CRO strategy should be unique, there is a clear process to follow in order to garner the best results from your campaign. These five main steps involve:

1. CRO Audit: Our specialists will review your entire digital presence and the metrics associated with them. The more data we can gather, the better as it will make it easier to review trends and build insights to understand your current position.
2. Hypothesis: With our insights gathered from our audit stage, we begin to form theories as how to best capture the opportunities available through CRO in order to secure more conversions from audiences and website visitors.
3. Design: Now that we understand how to help improve your conversion rate, we progress to design our efforts. This can be something as simple as tweaking colour schemes and word choices, to completely redesigning the entire layout of your website.
4. Testing: This is the most crucial stage to assess the efficacy of our CRO efforts. It is not uncommon to conduct A/B testing to gain some clarity around how exactly the changes made an impact on conversation rates. The knowledge from this will be obtained through another audit, and the process is repeated as needed.

Search engines want to return those websites best suited to answer the queries of users. One of the ways they do that is through assessing the user experience of a website, dictated by metrics like time spent on page by visitors, and how many pages are visited within a session. Efforts to improve conversion rates through CRO rest largely with improving user experience of visitors on your website, as well as building insights into your audience. These improvements and insights can refine your SEO efforts and only have a positive improvement on keyword rankings.

The specialists at Clearwater only employ the very best CRO tools to get the most out of our services. These include Google Optimise, Hotjar, Google Analytics, Convert, Optimizely, and User Feel. Together, these deliver the key insights into what actions need to be taken, as well as offering the transparent reporting to allow you to determine return on investment.

No area within your website is off limits when looking for areas to optimise through CRO. As we have mentioned above, we are trying to build user experience and insights, and anything that can boost those will be targeted and modified in order to do so. This can be done through identifying the page with low conversion rates and analysing possible reasons why, as well as developing more engaging landing pages to hold (and convert) the attention of visitors.

The CRO specialists at Clearwater appreciate what it takes to improve the leads and sales for every business. By conducting a thorough, initial CRO audit, we can garner a true understanding of your existing digital position, identify the opportunities, and build a bespoke strategy to enable the best results in boosting conversion rates. Whether it is data analysis and tracking, content & media review, technical audit, or an assessment of your website usability, insights will be placed against precise scoring to highlight where the buyer journey is causing the most amount of friction and drop-offs. You will then receive tailored actions via a roadmap of stringent A/B testing with data-driven refinement to deliver the highest possible results into the future.