Reinforcing Marketing Strategies With Conversion-Rate Optimization
UnboundB2B
Helping Tech companies with AI-driven marketing to deliver full-funnel, scalable solutions for sales and marketing.
Marketing practices and your audience/customer base evolves faster than your starter pokémon. Back in the early days of marketing, just selling your product outright worked for businesses. And as of today, your customers will laugh you out of the door if your ad says “Buy this amazing product”. Hence began the era of marketing practices that prioritize value-proposition in one way or more, to gain the trust of a user and try to convert them.?
Now that’s a criminal oversimplification of how marketing works in the modern era. But, I want to go a little more specific and focus on one of the most important aspects of marketing in 2023. That is, conversion rate optimization (CRO).?
CRO is About Perfecting Every Nook & Crook of Your Marketing Presence to Increase the Chances of Growth
Here’s a proper definition:?
Conversion rate optimization is the process of improving the effectiveness of a website or marketing campaign to convert visitors. And, you want those visitors to take desired actions or goals, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter. The goal of CRO is to increase the conversion rate, which is the percentage of visitors who take the desired action.
53% of companies spend less than 5% of their total marketing budget on activities related to optimization. But more money should be allotted for this to enjoy more conversions. That’s because, CRO when done correctly:
In combination, all of these benefits lead to a much higher ROI on your marketing strategies and campaigns.?
Speaking of:
Where Exactly Do You Use CRO? Specific Areas and Elements
The possibilities to use CRO are extensive and can vary depending on the specific needs and goals of your business. Let’s start with one of the most important places where you need to use CRO.
Website Landing Pages & Site Structure
Your website is the bridge where your business and your prospects meet. To let the customers through that bridge effortlessly, you need to do CRO. And, your website is full of elements that need optimization. Two of the most basic things are design and copy. Your design needs to show your brand’s vibe while being user-friendly. To complement that, your copy and messaging have to synonymously showcase your voice as a brand and compel the reader to take action. And speaking of action, your CTAs need to stand out and make the viewer want to click them. Lastly, your navigation and site structure needs to be on point to ensure that the user follows the path you want them to.
Contact & Signup Forms
Contact and signup forms are crucial elements that make or break your strategies. You need to make them very easy to find and submit. Keep your CTAs and copy on point and focus on minimizing distractions. Distractions will end up hurting your conversion rate more than you could imagine. One of the prime examples of distractions is unnecessary decisions that the user needs to make. So, use fewer fields on your forms and request information that you absolutely need.?
Blogs & Resources
Blogs and resources are at the center of your content marketing. If you want to invest heavily in organic inbound marketing, using CRO for blogs and resources is just a no-brainer. Your blogs and resources serve the purpose of attracting an audience and taking them through several resources and slowly taking them down the funnel. So, your CRO purpose for blogs and resources should be proper hierarchy and structure within the articles and in internal linking. You should also integrate resources and lead magnets within blogs for maximum success.?
Promotions & Checkout Process
CRO for promotions and checkout process eliminates the last hurdle that your potential customers need to climb. The biggest problems that cause friction at the bottom of the funnel is bad promotion or checkout process. To optimize your checkout process for better conversion rates, try to remove all customer objections. Some common objections are a lack of need, trust, urgency, and budget. If you look deeper, you can find more specific objections that your customers might have.
Customer Reviews and Social Proof
This goes hand-in-hand with the previous element. Customer reviews and social proof are by far the most effective tools to remove customer objections. They help you build trust and add credibility to your product. Using CRO for social proofing is all about adding genuine reviews that talk about specific ways you helped your clients. Avoid adding fake reviews because even a kid can spot them nowadays. And most importantly, add social proof at the right places where you think the user might need a bit of reassurance.?
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Different Marketing Campaigns
CRO is a core part of marketing and it can be used in a host of different strategies. Advertising, email campaigns, content marketing, lead generation, and mobile marketing. Discussing CRO specific to these strategies is a whole different ball game. But general themes include better and more accurate copy, design that makes sense, user-friendly and compelling CTAs, thoughtful linking, etc.?
5 Steps to Apply CRO Anywhere For Any Element
You can replicate this five-step process for all areas and elements we discussed right before this. The process includes research, hypothesis creation, prioritization, testing, and learning.
Step 1: Research
Gather insights about your target audience, their behavior, and your website's performance (or any activity you want to work on). The goal is to understand user needs, pain points, and the factors influencing their decision-making process.
Step 2: Hypothesis
Based on the research findings, you create hypotheses or educated guesses about potential improvements that can be made to your website or marketing campaigns. These hypotheses should be specific and testable, linking a proposed change to the expected impact on conversion rates or user behavior. For example, a hypothesis could be "By simplifying the checkout process, we expect to increase the conversion rate by reducing cart abandonment."
Step 3: Prioritization
With a list of hypotheses, you need to prioritize them based on their potential impact and feasibility. Consider factors such as the expected uplift in conversions, the effort required to implement the change, and any resource constraints. Prioritization helps you focus on the most promising areas for optimization and allocate your resources effectively.
Step 4: Testing
Testing involves running controlled experiments, such as A/B tests, where you create variations of a webpage or campaign and divide your audience into different groups to compare their performance. For example, you might test two different headlines, CTAs, or layouts to see which version leads to higher conversions.
Step 5: Learning
The final step is to analyze the test results and draw meaningful insights. Determine which variations performed better, whether the hypothesis was supported, and what you've learned from the process. If a test shows a significant uplift in conversions, you can implement the winning variation as the new standard. If a test doesn't yield the desired results, it's essential to learn from it, iterate, and generate new hypotheses for further testing.?
By following this research-based, hypothesis-driven, and data-backed approach, you can iteratively optimize your website, landing pages, and marketing campaigns, driving better conversion rates and overall business performance.
About The Orange Draft
Conversion rate optimization is something that all of us marketers need to master, to stay relevant in 2023. We hope you liked this edition of the Orange Draft and our mini-guide to CRO. We’ll be back with more content that helps you get marketing right and position yourself better in the industry.?
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