How to Create an Effective Landing Page CRO Strategy?

Cracking a landing page CRO strategy is not an easy task. It’s not about choosing the right colors or size of the CTA button. This strategy holds a more important place in your overall marketing plan. Let’s explore some of the significant things you should remember:

Phase 0: For Businesses Getting Started

Phase zero is for marketers and small businesses looking forward to a landing page campaign launch soon and want to ensure they make the most of it.

- What Do You Want to Achieve?

You can find many successful landing page CRO case studies on the internet. Though you can take inspiration from them, they might not truly align with your brand and marketing goals.

So, before building a full-fledged CRO strategy, it’s pertinent to identify what your target audience wants. Your landing page optimization should align with your business goals and buyer personas.

For example, let’s compare two B2C landing pages:

Despite being from the same business vertical, the above landing pages target different audiences, which is clearly visible through their landing page elements. Such clarity helps execute amazing landing page CRO strategies.

- Making The Perfect Landing Page

The method for the above sadly doesn’t exist. But you can start early with your landing page CRO and ensure that you’re in tune with the wants and needs of your target prospects from the first click to your page.

- Trust The Data

We sometimes get carried away with our landing page designs’ amazingness, but the truth can be too far from it. Here, trusting the data is crucial. Instead of relying on gut feeling about whether the landing page should be long or short, A/B testing the idea is a better idea.

Phase 1: Landing Page CRO Strategy Development

This phase will discuss three crucial pillars that help develop practical landing page CRO strategies.

- What Are The Visitors Doing? (Quantitative Data)

Understanding your visitors’ activities is essential before identifying anything. Track the performance of your landing page’s other metrics, not just conversions.

For how long are users on the page? How many people partially filled out the form? Where is the traffic coming from? All of these questions are critical to optimizing your PPC landing page and its budget.

Here are some landing page KPIs you should keep in mind: bounce rate, incoming traffic sources, page speed, etc. You can quickly check all of this via Google Analytics and other tools.

Quantitative data helps you understand general visitor sentiment for your landing pages. Though it doesn’t point out any specific element to be fixed, it captures many visitors’ data into a simple numerical format that you can easily benchmark for optimization and future campaigns.

- How Are Your Users Behaving When They Visit? (Qualitative Data)

It’s essential to track visitors when they visit the website. It helps to identify if any page elements are not letting them proceed with their search, etc.

You can analyze visitor behavior through heatmaps, session recordings, interview feedback, customer surveys, and net promoter scores.

What’s the Difference between Quantitative and Qualitative Data?

Qualitative and quantitative hold equal importance while deep-diving into the analytics and identifying the right CRO Strategy. Here are the key differences between them:

- Understand Customer Psychology

Two pertinent elements help contemplate customer psychology:

Principles of Persuasion

At the end of the day, your visitors are looking for something that can make them a perfect part of this society. The human brain runs according to market demand. To build a CRO Strategy, it’s crucial to understand human psychology and Robert Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion.

1. Reciprocity: Sharing valuable information through videos, images, and interactive tools like quote calculators increases the likelihood of visitors doing business with you.
2. Scarcity: Ensure to highlight limited offers and discounts on your landing page to highlight scarcity.
3. Authority: Share about your team and the talent pool you have. This will increase the credibility of your products and services.
4. Consistency: Build the whole start of your landing page funnel with small conversions, then follow up with larger requests.
5. Liking: Build rapport with your audience by sharing personal stories and showcasing the humans behind the brand.
6. Consensus: Leverage social proof throughout your landing pages in testimonials, trust badges, videos, etc. formats.

Customer Behaviour

Understanding customer behavior and identifying how they recognize an ad or information on their screen is essential. For example, millennials prefer to read information via a post with minimal designs instead of reading things in detail. These things can help you improve your CRO Strategy.

How can we understand the behavior of the target audience?

Customer behavior can be understood by analyzing how previous leads turned into customers.

By following their buying cycle, we can learn a lot about the various ways in which a user can convert. Many tools on the market help us understand user behaviors in real time, making things easier.

Understanding customer behavior and identifying how they recognize an ad or information on their screen is essential. For example, millennials prefer to read information via a post with minimal designs instead of reading things in detail. These things can help you improve your CRO Strategy.

How can we understand the behavior of the target audience?

Customer behavior can be understood by analyzing how previous leads turned into customers.

By following their buying cycle, we can learn a lot about the various ways in which a user can convert. Many tools on the market help us understand user behaviors in real time, making things easier.

Phase 2: Know Your Tools

Having the right tools in place can help you feel confident in executing your landing page CRO strategy. There are many tools for landing page analysis, so you need to assemble your landing page CRO tools according to what best serves your marketing goals.

- Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps record data consistently. For example, you can identify every page view, bounce rate, engagement rate, total pages visited, demographics, etc. This is basically the tool from which you can assemble quantitative data.

All of this data can help you identify several things and help you build an effective CRO strategy-

1. Can you direct me to where you should run more ads- Blogs/Social Media, etc?
2. Can you help identify landing pages that lead to the highest drop-off rates?
3. Identify the demographic structure of your website.
4. Determine the products that lead to the highest conversion rate.

- User Experience Optimization Tools

Google Analytics can help you identify numbers. However, with UX optimization tools, you can identify the reasons behind those numbers. In short, such tools give context to what Google Analytics offers and answer behavioral questions about visitors.

It can help you identify:

• Where does a visitor get stuck, and why is s/he struggling before dropping off
• How does a visitor interact with certain page elements
• What do they like the most and least on the landing page?

All UX optimization tools come with certain features that are useful for collecting qualitative data.

a) Heatmaps

Heatmaps showcase how people interact with your landing pages by highlighting ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ engaging spots. By color-coding, they make it easier to identify the page sections that caught visitors’ attention the most.

b) Session Recordings

Session recordings feature videos of how users interact with your page in real-time. They help you reconstruct the users’ journey throughout the landing page. One can observe how the user moves around, what they prefer to click on, and what they like to ignore. This helps in designing a better landing page format overall.

c) Surveys

Such tools are filled with different surveying methods so that you can share the option of providing feedback to visitors. It will help you identify what they think about the products/brand or page experience.

The above are just some of the traits that UX optimization tools deliver, but there are many more to uncover. Hotjar, Crazy Egg, and Kissmetrics are some of the UX optimization tools worth checking out.

Phase 3: Utilizing The Data

Gathering data is not enough; you must also analyze it correctly. Phase three will discuss some ways to approach this.

- How to utilize the quantitative data?

Instead of considering analytics and heatmaps as opposites, identify them as complementary analytics tools to build a CRO Strategy.

Here are four combined uses of these tools:

1. You can quickly improve the conversion rate with the help of these two.
2. Identify the difference between before and after a website redesign.
3. It can help improve customer experience
4. It can help change your business into a successful digital one.

- How can we utilize the gathered data?

This data is ideal for analyzing and improving loopholes. Remember to give equal priority to quantitative and qualitative data. Combining both kinds of data can help you build an effective CRO Strategy.

It is crucial to build a solid hypothesis before testing. You can build various hypotheses for testing different landing page elements based on the quantitative and qualitative data.

Phase 4: Time To Make Change

It is time to test pages. There are three types of landing page CRO tests: A/B testing, split testing, and multivariate testing.

Wondering which one you should choose? Here are some points to help you out. All three types have different uses. Hence, it’s essential to first identify what you are looking for.

• A/B Testing is mainly used when design changes aren’t complicated.
• Split testing can be used when the design requires more modifications than the original version. This is crucial when making back-end changes, such as testing the pricing section is required.
• Multivariate testing is used when multiple changes are suggested on the same page, and one wants to test every combination separately.

Phase 5: Analyze A/B Testing Results

This stage is considered the final stage for your testing. It will help you close the loop for conversion rate optimization and build notes for the new information acquired for further testing.

Dig deep and identify what can be improved instead of only testing and deducing the test as pass or fail. Also, ensure that the final results might vary due to your experimenting platform. Some of the popular A/B testing platforms are Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer.

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Written by Irfan Khan