Conversion Rate Optimisation: A Review

Average Conversion rate of an e-commerce website is 2.86% -  Invespcro

This means, if an e-commerce site has 1,00,000 monthly visitors ,only 2,860 visitors covert into  customers. This figure can be scary and because of not being focused on the conversion rate many companies lose on opportunities to grow.

So the question is, how will conversion rate optimization help in growing the business? Let’s suppose an e-commerce website hires CXL, the best CRO agency in the world and they increased the conversion rate from an average of 2.86% to 10%.What will happen with a 10% conversion rate, it’s still low, but let’s get things into perspective. Earlier the business had a conversion rate of 2.86% and if we  assume that the average cart size of a customer is $200 so for every 1,00,000 visitors in a month, the company earns a revenue of 2,860 x 200 i.e. $5,72,000 per month. After optimization by CXL the conversion rate is 10% and it translates into 10,000 customers per month which is 10,000 x 200 = $20,00,000.

So from $5,72,000 to $20,00,000, that is 349.65% increase in revenue with just 7.14% increase in conversion rate.

Conversion rate optimization can work wonders for companies. It’s crucial in today’s competitive world that websites convert their visitors because they work hard in bringing visitors to their websites. All means such as SEO,  Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing and many more are some of the ways to drive traffic on the website.

But after all those efforts if they are not able to convert those visitors into customers  then they are wasting their time  and resources. That’s why conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the key to success.

How to approach CRO?

Now that you know the importance of CRO,  the question is how to approach? The first answer that comes to the mind is, google the best CRO improvement tactics, then implement those hacks and HURRAY!!!

Next thing that comes into mind is see who is the best in the industry and just imitate what they do. If you have an e-commerce website, implement the technique used by the biggest e-commerce website Amazon which has  a conversion rate of 74%( which they are doing for their  prime customers) and you will have the same results as they do.

If these are the ways to increase conversion rates then there would have been tons of companies like amazon.

So clearly it doesn’t work this way. We need to understand that websites are highly contextual. You sell candies to kids with no money and I sell yachts to millionaires. Even if both the companies are in the same industry, suppose you are a local grocery store and I am BigBasket. Even when the industry, demographics and audiences are  the same, there is still a huge  difference, for example, relationship with the customers, customer support and many other areas can differ between competitors. It's never apple to apple.

We have to understand that each website is unique in its own ways. On the internet there are generic answers to generic problems but your website has specific problems and you need a specific solution for that.

What to Do?

You understood how to approach CRO but the next question is, where to start and how to start.

CRO is a process of systematically finding opportunities of growth and then testing ideas to grab those opportunities.

We have to understand our customers in order to increase conversions. Being User Centric is very important for conversion  optimization. We have to know what are users' pain points and how our product or service solves it, we should use messages that resonate with our users.

If we don’t know anything about them, then how will we sell them anything successfully.

To understand users and their problems we have to research. We know research requires data but then again not any data will work. We need to have data that answers our questions. CRO process begins with a list of questions Some of which are-

• What problems are we solving?
• What does the user need?
• How are they making decisions?
• Where is the site leaking money?
• What leads more people to leave the website?

There are many more questions but you get what I am saying.

To answer these questions, we need relevant data.

Often times research is overlooked and optimizers start doing random experiments which they assume can solve the problem and this is where we need to understand the importance of research

CRO is 80% research and 20% implementation. It's crucial to research everything related to the website and its users. Is the design compelling? Which pages are loading slowly? Which pages help convert more and which pages convert less? There are tons of questions to be asked but we need a proper framework to conduct our research.

The most reliable framework for conversion optimization is ResearchXL framework developed by Peep Laja and his team at CXL. This framework covers every aspect which is required for conversion research.

ResearchXL covers has 6 pillars which are:

1. Technical analysis
2. Heuristic analysis
3. Web Analytics Analysis
4. Mouse Tracking analysis
5.  Qualitative survey
6. User testing

CXL’s blog is the best blog on optimization and you should definitely check it out for more details on ResearchXL framework. 

Once you are done with research you will have a list of things to improve. You will find many loopholes, for some you have to design and test and for some you just have to fix the bug and you are good to go. 

But when you have a list of 100-150 issues which one should you solve and focus first? You have to priorities what you want to test and what you want to fix because if you work on things with high impact first and show some results as clients l like to see early wins.

But we need a framework to priorities issues. We should have a system which tells us what to work on first and so on. The best framework is called PXL. It's made by CXL institute and helps optimisers to priorities their A/B tests.

Once you priorities  you can design tests for issues , perform them and analyse the results and this process will goon and on. 

Optimization is continuous. The principle behind it is that  you can always do better and for that reason optimization never stops.

Conclusion

We will discuss more on CRO and its little detail so if you like what you just read stay tuned and if this thing really clicks with you, you can explore CXL’s  blog  and and if you want to learn what you read check out CXL’s minidegree, it's an ocean of knowledge which you will not find anywhere else on the internet.

 I will be posting insights from the world of  growth marketing so if you like what you read. Stay tuned.