Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a very important concept in the marketing world. Finding ways to make people come across your website and landing pages is an important task for every marketer. 

The strategy called CRO is relevant in this sense because it shows if users are performing actions on your platforms. In this sense, thinking about the user experience is the only way to make your conversions grow, making email marketing effective.

But making people interact with you may be a complex task. Bearing this in mind, we prepared this article to explain to you what is CRO and introduce some of the best practices to increase engagement on your site and landing pages. This way, you will see your conversion grow as well.

What is CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)?

The Conversion Rate is all about interactions. For this reason, it is considered one of the most relevant KPIs in marketing. Every time someone performs a desired action on your website or landing page, the rate increases. The kind of interactions that you can find are:

• purchasing a product or hiring a service from your website or landing page;
• adding items to a cart;
• signing up for newsletters;
• downloading an exclusive material, such as an e-book or spreadsheet;
• joining a webinar or event;
• ordering or requesting products and services;
• filling out your registration forms on landing pages;
• requesting a demo or a free trial;
• clicking on a link on a message sent by email.

Every type of interaction counts. You might know how to employ some hacks and tricks to generate engagement with the audience. But they won’t make you go very far. 

The best way to reach a healthy Conversion Rate is to really understand your audience and know exactly what they need and expect from you. This is why the CRO practice is focused on user experience (UX).

Besides knowing your visitors, customers, and users, there is another aspect that you should be aware of. The Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a constant testing process, implementing actions to improve Conversion Rate performance.  

Keep reading to know what is CRO and why it is important to marketing.

Why is CRO important?

Speaking with nobody is not ideal when you plan different types of email marketing strategies, dealing with them carefully. The CRO is important because it proves you are reaching real people. It means you are being heard and that your marketing and sales strategies are working.

That registration form in which you spent many days writing, people are finding it online and answering it! No effort and time went to waste. The CRO is primordial to have insights like this example. 

You can also identify specific drivers that bring people to your channels (so you can highlight them), specific obstacles that make visitors leave without performing any action (and remove them), as well as specific hooks that persuade them to convert (and invest on them, boosting your ROI). Using CRO is vital to the survival of your business.

How to calculate the conversion rate?

To calculate the Conversion Rate (CVR), you have to obtain the number of people who concluded the desired action on your channels of communication and divide this amount by the total visits to that page. When you got the result, multiply it by one hundred:

Let’s imagine you had 1000 visitors on a landing page, which offered an exclusive e-book, and 30 of them filled out the registration form to download the material. You got a Conversion Rate of 3%.

But if you don’t know if this is good or bad, keep reading and learn what is CRO and how to read and interpret it.

What is a good conversion rate?

This question doesn’t have an exact answer. The Conversion Rate depends on many factors, such as:

• monthly web traffic;
• the industry you are in;
• the products that you are selling;
• the content you are offering;
• the audience you want to reach;
• and so on.

The point here is to observe a constant growth in the Conversion Rate, that is, reaching more engagement little by little through optimization. Instead of focusing on reaching a certain goal, you should work on always improving this KPI.

In order to give you a starting point, a Conversion Rate of 5% to 10% is pretty achievable. After reaching this benchmark, you can start setting up your own goals and numbers, as long as you challenge yourself to always do better.

In light of this idea, we are going to give you some ideas on how to optimize your conversion rate, so you can experience constant growth in your marketing campaigns. 

What to do to improve conversions?

Optimizing your conversion rate is a never-ending job. After all, you want to make your company present constant growth.

One of the first things you have to do to improve conversions is to clean email lists. You must have your messages delivered if you want to advertise and sell items and offer services. Following, you can check out other points of attention to improve your results.

You should often run A/B tests

Making A/B tests can truly be effective for CRO. Tests work whenever you make a change on your homepage or any other channel of communication. We are talking about full transformations of little adjustments.

A/B testing is a multivariate method, based on comparisons of performances. Let’s suppose a new landing page is elaborated by your marketing team, and different setups are designed, the versions A and B. As you want to validate the hypothesis, you will split your traffic between the different versions, analyzing which one does better, that is, have more conversions.

The A/B tests are going to show what steps you should take to achieve better results. They are simple and functional and really able to help you to optimize and improve Conversion Rates. 

Analyze data and KPI to improve performance

Every marketer has to manage data all the time, which is an important part of the job. That ‘s happen because numbers don’t lie and they show the truth. For example, a high number of bounced messages can show you the importance of checking email address validity.  

Ignoring data is a fatal mistake. Running A/B tests will result in a mountain of data to be interpreted in the form of KPI. Every indicator and number must be taken into account.

Hypothesis, ideas, and theories must be based on available data. Can you imagine a marketer without these three things? Every time you come up with a new idea or theory, you elaborate on different hypotheses with pieces of information.

This hypothesis, in turn, will be verified by tests. After testing, more data to analyze, in order to make adjustments and improvements. It’s an endless cycle, a process that works like this:

• data gathering: learn from the data you already have, using the correct marketing tools to analyze them and establish the goals you want to achieve;
• hypothesis formation: organize your ideas and relate them to your audience and approaches, trying to find out what works best in that specific moment;
• A/B testing: to validate your ideas, you must test them over and over, getting better in each version;
• analyze data: your tests must be interpreted according to their performance, separating the successful strategies from the ones that need improvement;
• repeat.

Nevertheless, all this work is rewarded in the form of achieved goals. Without the data-analyzing process, you can’t have projects. Analyze data carefully to have a complete CRO policy in your company.  

Watch out for the usability of your platforms

When the topic is conversions and engagement, the usability of your platforms is an important player, but the user’s journey can’t be forgotten.

Are you aware of the ways someone feels when they access your website or landing pages? Can people understand your Call to Action phrases? Are the offered products and services useful to them? Are they having a good experience?

User experience is key in CRO. You have to understand the feelings and behaviors of your users when they use your platforms. So, to have this experience you can: 

• visit your homepage;
• order a service that you offer;
• subscribe to a weekly newsletter;
• talk to customer support;
• fill out your registration forms;
• access your landing pages. 

When you do all that, think about what went smoothly and what went wrong. What surprised or disappointed you? What felt odd? Identify these obstacles and improve the customer experience. This way, you can reach the expected conversions.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): best practices

If you want to have more conversions and improve your CRO, check some useful tips that might help you. They are all based on the CRO basic principles, that is:

• having a powerful purpose of value on services and products,
• incentivizing users to take action;
• eliminating obstacles to conversion;
• making users feel secure and comfortable on your platforms.

Work to increase your organic traffic

Organic traffic is about being found by the users. It is also about making them use your platforms by themselves. When people can easily navigate your site and landing pages, of course, you can have more conversions.

A great number of converting users might even attract more people to your site and take actions that will be good for your organic traffic, such as:

• buy products;
• hire services;
• leave positive reviews;
• share your content;
• recommend it to family and friends;
• interact with you.

Optimizing the Conversion Rate is about keeping users on your site. So that when the user converts, page rejection is avoided, improving organic traffic. 

Test and customize your website and content

People will convert if they can relate to your content. That’s why you should test and customize your website. You should check if your platforms has a hierarchy and if is:

• functional;
• accessible;
• usable;
• intuitive;
• persuasive.

In this way you can increase your conversions. Also, understanding your audience is an important step to having more conversions. For instance, the first aspect to be taken into account is to bear in mind that every audience is plural.

The users might have some common characteristics, but they are different from each other. They have distinct tastes and preferences. Testing strategies with all of them can bring interesting results.

This fact proves the necessity of strong email list management. When you organize your mail listings into groups, you can target your subscribers with more assertive campaigns, making your conversions increase. It’s an effective CRO approach. 

Understand the customers’ behaviors

Knowing the behavior of your customers will help you elaborate better CTA sentences, not to mention its contribution to the development of your products and services.

When your CTAs have more responses, that is, engagement, the Conversion Rate will escalate. Before that, you might want to adapt your platforms according to your users’ behavior.

Customer-centric measures are essential to get many conversions. They must appear on your website, landing pages, products, and everything else. Predicting the actions and behaviors of your audience will make you reach a higher CRO.

Improve the user experience

It’s impossible to separate conversions from the user experience. If people can’t find your products on your website, can’t understand your CTAs, and can’t perform actions on your landing pages, they won’t convert.

You must think about user experience all the time. For instance, setting the best time to send email marketing messages can have better results than sending them at random periods.

From the initial steps of an idea or product to its outcome, users’ feedback must guide the creation process. Some of the aspects that might impact the user experience are:

• unreasonable pricing that doesn’t contribute to user experience;
• loading speed of your website and landing pages must be fast;
• forced registrations are hurtful to the newcomers;
• hard-to-find information is fatal to the users journey;
• confusing description of services and products are terrible;
• only text pages, without any images or videos, is also bad.

When you focus on the users, you can:

• perform the improvements that your website needs;
• find the correct words to write powerful CTAs;
• make sure your prospective users have a nice experience (hopefully one that can convert them);
• please your regular customers;
• so on.

If this content helped you to understand what is CRO and you want to understand more about track and optimize email marketing metrics and KPIs check our content!

Conversion Rate Optimization: FAQs

What does CRO mean?

It means Conversion Rate Optimization. It can be defined as a set of practices that can make you gradually increase the percentage of users who perform interactions on your platforms, including websites, emails, landing pages, and more.

Usually, the set of practices related to the CRO is centered on the users and their experience when exploring your channel of communications. CRO is about making their journey more positive, pleasant, and simple, making the number of conversions grow. 

Why do you need to use the CRO?

When you think of adopting techniques related to CRO, you are interested in registering more conversions. To do that, you must improve the user experience, hence, resolve the issues on your website, and other platforms.

This way, in the journey of achieving more conversions, you are adopting better marketing strategies to find your target audience, and developing high-level content and products.

How can you improve your conversion rate?

To improve your Conversion Rate, you can adopt some positive approaches, such as making your website and landing pages user-friendly and easy to navigate. You can also create products and services that have adherence to your target audience.

How do you measure conversion rate?

To calculate the Conversion Rate (CVR), you have to use the following math formula:
Conversion Rate (%) = (Concluded Desired Actions / Total Visits) * 100