Conversion Rate Optimization – What is it?

Conversion Rate Optimization – What is it?

Conversion rate optimization can be a tricky business sometimes. It can become difficult to narrow down what’s working and what isn’t. There are so many points on the path to a conversion that need to be addressed that you really need to think carefully about your conversion optimization strategy.

Are those ads you are putting up working? Are you putting the ads up in the right places? Are those ads targeting the right people? Are visitors finding their way to your products, and does your website make it as easy as possible for those visitors to make a purchase?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of using data to help optimize certain important aspects of your marketing and sales process like your website’s design, layout and performance, but there is more to it than that. What true CRO entails is the attempt to understand your customers and figure out why they make the decisions they make leading up to the sale. This way you can better optimize the entire path leading to the sale. As it turns out, however, working psychology into your conversion optimization strategy can be quite a challenge – as we’re thinking of both the marketer and customer.

Let’s first look at the marketing side of conversion rate optimization. There are plenty of areas of optimization to think about, and it can become hard to decide where to focus your energy on. Where do you place your ads? Are your landing pages easy to navigate? Is your overall site organization going to lead the customer effectively to the point of sale? How good is the copy writing? There are many more aspects to consider, but you get the idea.

When we look at the customer’s side, decisions are are also hard. There are often many products from many competitors in the marketplace. Which product is the best? Which type, size, color, or brand of product to buy? When you think about customer psychology in your conversion optimization efforts, you have to take all of this into account. How is your marketing message and your shopping experience making the customer’s decision easier?

What is a good Conversion Rate Optimization strategy?

Using your intuition can work, it’s a good starting point, but you risk making serious mistakes, perhaps missing obvious issues along the way. Experts in your marketplace often have great advice too, but every market is different and each business has separate needs. You can search online for a good general conversion rate optimization strategy, which can help too, but again you can run into the problem of not having a personalized approach for your own business.

Testing is perhaps the most important element of your conversion rate optimization strategy.

With testing, you monitor the whole marketing and conversion process. You gather as much data on your customers and the surrounding market as possible. If you have any intuitions about best practices, or want to try out some expert advice or conventional wisdom, its always best to devise a test around it. Don’t just rely on a hunch, it’s easy to be scientific about it. You can repeat a testing process for each aspect of your conversion rate optimization strategy, and decide which techniques are working and which aren’t. This way, you can tailor a strategy for your own business that is proven to work.

Another good approach is to hire a professional that will personally work with your business to look not just at your website and marketing, but look at your business as a whole – optimizing for conversions from end to end.