If you are an eCommerce business owner, you should know how important Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is for your business. CRO is the process of converting visitors to your website into taking a certain desired action. These actions can be signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. A well optimized website will have a high conversion rate.
Lot of eCommerce businesses fail to realize the importance of CRO for their online store and it affects their bottom line. With optimization you can increase revenue, reduce customer acquisition cost and improve the overall ROI. In order to master the art of CRO, you will require a lot of research of data about consumer behavior, website design and analytical skill.
Once you have all the necessary optimization done, you will have an elevated user experience on your website, increased engagement and drive more conversions. The following tips will help you optimize your online storefront and maximize online presence. These tips can be followed by both established businesses and people who are trying to start a new eCommerce venture.
On the flip side, rather than tiring yourself by incorporating all these tips to your eCommerce store by yourself, you can use plenty of online tools that help with CRO. Some are paid for advanced data but most are free for basic insights. In this blog, we will look into how you can fix all the CRO related issues on your online store by yourself. What to look for and tricks to sort it out easily.
Analyzing Your Website
The art of CRO starts with analyzing your website. Website analysis is the foundation for conversion rate optimization. Your website analysis will help you identify areas that need improvement and provide important insights of your website’s performance. The analysis of your website includes its design, content, usability and its functionality.
There are plenty of free and paid tools to run a website analysis. Some of the popular tools for this are Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. These tools provide valuable insights and data about your website’s performance. Website’s traffic, conversion rates, bounce rates, and other important metrics helps you identify which aspects of your website need improvement moving forward.
While conducting your website analysis, it is important that you start working on the part that requires the most improvements followed by lesser ones. These improvements could be huge like changing an entire landing page or smaller aspects like changing call to action buttons. Oftentimes, the checkout process would always need improvements. Checkout processes that tend to have more than three steps will see a drop in conversion rate.
Finding the areas that require improvements on your website and fixing them is a sure way to increase your conversion rate. Conversion rate optimization is all about ensuring that the visitors on your website take a desired action rather than bouncing away. With the assistance of the right tools and analytical data, CRO for your website will be a cake walk. Once the fundamental part of CRO is fixed you can move on to the next step.
Creating a Value Proposition
Customers need a reason to visit your store and providing the same is known as a value proposition. Value proposition is a statement that tells the customers what unique benefits the product or service will provide them. In order to master the art of CRO, you need to have a value proposition for your brand.
Value proposition is the first thing your visitors see when they visit your online store. Tell the customers why they need your product or service and they will answer it by purchasing from you. The compelling factor of a value proposition is what drives your customers to take action. In order for your business to come up with a compelling value proposition, you have to get a clear understanding of the needs and wants of your target audience.
Rather than overcrowding your website content with product/service features, try to include benefits that your product/service will provide the customers. While mentioning value propositions helps with higher conversion, overdoing with the proposition will make possible customers feel like you are trying too hard for business and might drive them away. Strike a balance between benefits and features of the product/service you have to offer.
Your business might be focused on a very specific target audience and the temptation to use technical jargons for your value proposition might feel like the right thing to include. But in reality, using words and content that reflect a broader sense of understanding in your value proposition will be the better idea. For example, Nike’s ‘Just do it’ and Apple’s ‘Think Different’ are some of the best value propositions out there.
Crafting a Call to Action
Art of CRA sometimes doesn’t mean you have to do a major changeover in your whole website structure. It can be simple and significant like changing the wording or placement of your call to action buttons on your eCommerce store. A CTA worded and placement has been proven to increase conversion rate drastically for online businesses.
Focusing on the CTA is important because it tells and influences the viewers into taking a desired action. This could be signing up for a newsletter, requesting more information or even making a purchase. The absence of a good CTA will make viewers visit your website and bounce off without taking any actions.
Creating an effective CTA requires a good understanding of your target audience in order to make them take a desired action. A good CTA should be clear, concise and visually appealing using action words that sends urgency to the viewers to take action. Besides visual appeal and wordings, the placement of the button should be in a way so that the viewers can find them easily rather than search for them. Some of the most common places for CTA button placements on a website are above the fold or right after the content.
CTA buttons placed in tandem with your value proposition have a higher chance of getting interactions from the viewers. Statements like ‘enjoy free trial’, ‘discount code’ and ‘limited offer’ work well with value proposition statements. This provides the visitors with a clear message that when you click the CTA, it will provide you the benefits underlined in the value proposition.
A/B Testing
Art of CRO is never complete unless you do an A/B testing on your website. In simple terms A/B testing is the process of testing two versions of a website/app in order to find which one gets better conversion. With this test business owners can play around with various combinations of design elements like colors, fonts, images, and copy in order to find the best version.
Once you implement the data that gets generated from A/B testing, it will help you increase conversion rates, boost revenue and enhance the overall user experience. There are certain things you should keep in mind before you jump into an A/B testing.
- You have to make sure to clearly mention the goals and hypothesis on why the test is being conducted.
- Cherry pick your target audience so that when you do run the tests you will have relevant data.
- A/B testing are often done with small groups of target audiences. While selecting the group, ensure that you have a good number of people in order to get solid results.
- There are plenty of free and paid A/B testing tools available on the market. Research about the software before you choose them. Some of the common A/B testing software are Optimize, VWO, or Google Optimize.
- You can conduct multiple A/B tests for the same website. Each round of testing will provide more data to fine tune your website.
A/B testing is a time consuming process. But at the end of the day you will have a website with a high conversion rate. The ROI for A/B testing will never go to a waste.
Improve User Experience
The art of CRO has always been about the user who visits your website. CRO helps the users navigate their way through your website and take desired action. User experience plays an important part in the success of your online store. A visually appealing website that is easy to navigate and provides relevant information for the viewer will have a higher conversion rate.
Websites should focus on enhancing the user experience by creating a seamless user interface for the customers. A crowded website will dive away potential customers from taking any desired actions. Some of these improvements don’t take a lot of time to implement. Changes like simplifying page navigation, reducing load times by compressing graphic elements, and optimizing mobile phone viewing is a good place to start.
An aptly placed CTA button alongside relevant content will drive more people to take the desired action and select the CTA. Create multiple versions of the CTA while doing an A/B testing to find the best suited CTA for your website. User experiences on websites keep changing with the trends in web technology. The yesteryears of a website design might look bad for the current generation of user experience.
You should always stay abreast with industry trends and competitors’ websites so that you can learn from them. This outlook will help you make necessary changes on your website for a better user experience. Once you make any changes, test your website in multiple devices with different orientations to see if they are easily readable across all of them.
Analyzing Data
You can never master the art of CRO unless you have thoroughly analyzed all the available data for your website. Without data, optimizing your website is like throwing a dart in a dark room. You will never know if it hits the target or just bounced off the wall. Analyzing data is the only way you can understand what is lacking on your website and improve them.
Collecting data is not a very likable job but you have to do it if you want to increase your conversion rate for your online store. Google Analytics is a good place to start to get a glimpse on your website’s performance. With Google Analytics, the dashboard is very user-friendly and it won’t take you long to understand the bells and whistles of using it. And the best part is that it is completely free to use. Once you have familiarized yourself with Google Analytics, you can move on more complex analytical tools to collect data.
Make a list of the data that you wish to collect so that you don’t end up getting overwhelmed with too much data pouring in all together. Collect only the data that is relevant to your business and target audiences. Take your time to analyze these data and draw insights from them. With these insights your business can craft a better website or create marketing material for advertising your product/service.
It is a wise idea to revisit these data when you feel like your conversion rates are slowing down so that you can improve elements on your website that are causing the hiccup.
Conclusion
Mastering the art of CRO is an important aspect of growing your online business. With tips mentioned on the blog, you can optimize your website to garner a higher conversion rate. By knowing your target audience, conducting thorough research and continually testing and optimizing your website, you will start gaining more profits.
Keep an eye out for CTA buttons and user experience, which are often missed out in most of the cases. Improve your business by improving your website conversion rate based on data driven decision making. Implement CRO best practices for your website at the earliest and improve your company’s bottom line.
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