Why Is Conversion Rate Optimisation So Important?

As an online retailer or service provider, you surely have some strategies in place to attract new customers, keep the ones you have and, ultimately, increase your revenue. There’s no need to explain why investing in digital marketing is so useful for your business, but maybe we can get into an important indicator that can maximise that budget if monitored and controlled properly.

We are talking here about conversions. If the people that visit your landing page take the desired action, such as subscribing, adding to cart or downloading a file, then that’s a very good indicator that your marketing strategy is working. By calculating your website conversion rate you can tell with somehow great accuracy how effective your methods are at converting website visitors into customers.

You might’ve already heard about and actually used the variables above, but do you invest enough time monitoring your CRO?

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What Is CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation)?

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is, as its name suggests, a process through which you increase the conversion rate of your website. There are several ways to do that, at a micro and macro level, and it involves testing different variants until you find the perfect mix of esthetics, functionality and promotion that works for your target audience.

In this article, we will discuss CRO and increasing conversions, emphasising why it’s so important to have this little variable in mind when planning your approach to digital marketing.

Why Is CRO Important?

While some online marketing indicators are more abstract and take some specialised knowledge to explain in depth, CRO is actually a very simple principle. If your conversion rate is currently 10%, for example, and you get an average of 1000 visitors per month, you have 10 conversions a month.

If making some changes – some small, some big – to your website, app, blog or online store can increase that CRO to 20%, you have doubled your conversions. The changes you make don’t even have to cost more, but it takes a reasonable amount of time and effort to focus your resources on increasing CRO and growing your business.

How to Define Your Conversions

The first step you need to take before you can consider making changes for CRO is to make sure that you correctly define and monitor your conversions.

Conversions can mean a lot of things:

• A certain amount of time spent on your website
• Subscribing to your newsletter
• Filling in an online form
• Downloading an e-book or document from your website
• Adding products to the shopping cart
• Making a purchase
• Calling your business
• And so on

As you can see, there are many actions that you can define as conversions, as long as they are part of your business growth plan and benefit it somehow. You can monitor several of these conversions at the same time, as visitors perform different actions on your website.

Being aware of what happens on your website is crucial for remarketing and measuring the success you have with paid ads, SEO, web design, and so on. Remarketing only works when you have information on the history of a visitor with your website and you approach that visitor in a customised manner, aiming at the next step on the sales journey.

For example, knowing that a visitor has been to your website and has put products or services in the shopping cart, but didn’t get through with the purchase allows you to contact them with an attractive invitation to complete it. You could, for example, offer them a discount or add a sense of urgency by letting them know that some products are selling very fast.

There are many ways to increase the conversion rate on your website, so let’s go through some of them.

How to Optimise Your Conversion Rate

CRO strategies involve having a good view of how your web pages perform in terms of conversion rates and traffic, and starting to see patterns in order to identify your strong and your weak points.

More precisely, you have to see which landing page on your website has a large number of visitors and how you can concentrate your CRO on that, or which pages would have a high value for conversions, but underperform when it comes to CR.

There are several measures you can take to increase your conversion rate, but that discussion is for another post. Let’s move on to what your business can get from a greater focus on CRO.

Why You Should Invest in CRO

When it comes to marketing budgeting, many owners view their investment as a series of services and tools that are performing on a regular basis, bringing a steady flow of conversions (sales, leads, and so on)

By making more decisions based on CRO and CR boosting strategies, your business has room to grow and you can see impressive long-term results from your digital marketing efforts.

Here is why CRO is important:

Importance of CRO

1. Making the Most Out of Your Paid Advertising

With paid advertising on Google, for example, your performance history as an advertiser will directly contribute to the price you pay for those ads. Making your paid ads better and increasing your conversion rate is important, because it shows that you’re an advertiser who should be ranked higher. And a higher rank can help increase your conversion rate.

2. Your Competition Is Right Behind You

If you think you are the only one struggling with online marketing and all these efforts to please an audience you can’t see or interact face-to-face, think of all your competition. They are doing the same thing and it takes constant effort to stay ahead of your competition and show that you can offer more.

3. Your Audience Wants More

Internet users have gotten used to a certain way of browsing, a certain type of ads, and so on. The online experience has to be engaging, interesting and follow certain guidelines while still being original enough.

4. Your Visitors Have a Short Attention-Span

No matter how good your landing page is, how much time or effort you have invested in good copy, design or campaigns, if you aren’t maximising the chance of your visitors taking action, you will lose potential conversions. Pay attention to the existing traffic and focus your efforts on the most valuable product pages, channels or topics you have.

5. It Makes Your Business More Reputable

CRO means improving your website as much as you can so that you get more conversions. And since conversions happen when visitors are convinced by your brand, a high CR translates into a strong, trustworthy brand. Your conversion goals are directly related to how ambitious you are for your own brand and success.

6. Your Marketing Budget Is Well-Spent

If your marketing budget is already established, then it’s easy to make cuts when you don’t see the results you were expecting. When it comes to your business resources, only an approach focused on CRO can truly justify a bigger investment in marketing and a forward-thinking approach.

7. Your Website Will Look and Perform Better

Getting enough website traffic but not seeing the conversions you want means that you should work more on how your website looks and feels to your target audience.

By putting efforts into CRO, you’re improving your website’s performance, which leads to better Google ranking, amongst others. You’re also contributing to your brand’s reputation by having a pleasing, modern design.

There are lots of pieces working together in digital marketing, and your website’s quality is an important factor in making everything better.

Need Help With Your CRO?

As important as CRO is, it takes time, knowledge, and a bit of finesse to observe the strategies that are working for you, implement them properly, and optimise them as needed.

Australian Internet Advertising has a team of expert digital marketers who specialise in advanced digital marketing strategies, monitoring and reporting. We like to focus on the big picture and create a well-connected marketing machine where elements work together: SEO, social media, content, web design, email marketing and paid ads.

We know how to increase your conversion rates and we can audit your website to establish CRO strategies. Contact us and let’s improve your results starting now.