CRO Benefits: How a Better Conversion Rate Can Help Your Business

There are a lot of things that go into building a successful website and online business. A healthy conversion rate can put you considerably ahead of your competition. In this article, we will talk more about the benefits of CRO and how a better conversion rate can help your business.

There are five main CRO benefits:

1. Increases ROI
2. Enhances User Experience
3. It Can Save You Money
4. Lowers PPC Costs
5. It Helps With SEO

We are going to take a deeper look at these CRO benefits below. But let’s learn more about conversions and their importance first.

What Represents a Conversion?

A conversion basically happens when one of your website’s visitors completes a desired action, such as making a purchase. Based on the goals of your business, there are two types of conversions, macro-conversions, and micro-conversions.

Micro-conversions focus on the smaller actions a user can take. Everything from clicking on an article, dropping a comment, subscribing to your newsletter, or replying to an email can fall under this category. They gradually make a user familiar with your brand, building up for a macro-conversion.

Macro-conversions focus on bringing you revenue. The most important conversion a user can make is a purchase.

What Is The Conversion Rate?

The Conversion Rate (CVR) is one of the most important metrics when judging the success of your marketing efforts. The average order value and size of your audience are also important but CVR usually reflects how well your brand or marketing strategy relates to your audience. The higher it is, the more you will profit.

Think about it this way. Let’s say 100 people visited your site in one day, and two of them actually bought a product. It means that two percent of all the visitors you got in that day generated revenue. That means you have a 2% conversion rate. In short, the conversion rate equals the number of conversions divided by the total number of unique visits.

The average conversion rate of a website is around 2%. The top 10% of all sites have a CVR of 5.3%. Many sites have a conversion rate of 0.3-0.5%. However, CVR depends a lot on your industry and the product you’re selling. Whilst 3% is pretty good for e-commerce, it would be a below-average rate for professional or financial services.

These rates can always be increased through Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?

In basic terms, CRO is the process of tweaking and improving your site to increase your conversion rate, and this comes with a lot of benefits. The key term here is “process” because it takes time and there’s no way you around that. You need to constantly experiment and AB test your site to see what changes affect your conversions positively.

A single point increase in your CVR can be worth thousands of dollars in future sales. If you extrapolate that into the future, each percentage point is crucially important, making any investment in CRO well worth it.

CRO Benefits For Your Business

It’s not just about the direct money a higher CVR can generate in sales every month. But, a good conversion rate can spill into other domains, helping your marketing reach considerably in the long term. Here are five highly important CRO benefits.

1. Increases ROI

If you’re doing paid advertising or PPC there’s an actual direct cost to bringing new visitors to your site. The same applies to SEO and content creation but that cost is harder to track directly. The higher your CVR is, the more effective your customer acquisition efforts will be since you can generate more revenue from each visitor.
 
This will increase your ROI on ad spend. If you spend $1000 to generate $2000 in sales with a 2% CVR, that’s an 100% ROI. A 1% increase in CVR will get you $3000 in revenue, thus doubling your ROI on ad spend and considerably increasing your profit margin. This will give you more leeway, allowing you to take more risks and be more experimental in your campaigns.

2. Enhances User Experience

Investing money into CRO will directly improve your website and the user experience. That experience will furthermore benefit your conversions since satisfied users are more likely to buy. CRO and UX are somewhat intertwined making such an investment benefit both your business but also your customers.

3. It Can Save You Money

If you can generate more sales out of your existing traffic you can either have a higher ROI on ad spend or a lower acquisition cost. A 50% increase in conversions means that you can halve your ad spend and still generate the same amount of sales you had before the CRO process. Whilst most business owners decide to double down on ad spend after a successful conversion increase, in the situation of a crisis you can always save some money by lowering your ad spend without your revenue getting a hit.

4. Lowers PPC Costs

Your website’s quality score (QS) is one of the most important things in determining your PPC costs. The faster, better, and more valuable your website is, the better the user experience and QS will be. A high CVR directly communicates value to Google. If a high percentage of your visitors are willing to purchase something, it means that your website provides them a lot of value, and Google likes that.

PPC works on a bidding system. Whilst having the highest bid can get you to the top of the sponsored section, QS also plays an important role. Often the algorithm will give you a higher position if you have a better quality score, even if your bid is lower than your competitor’s. This will directly lower your PPC costs, enabling you to further scale your business without breaking the bank.

5. It Helps With SEO

There are a lot of things that you can improve in the CRO process that will also help your SEO efforts. Website speed, mobile responsiveness, and user experience will improve both your conversion rates but also your presence in SERP.

When figuring out the SERPs, positive engagement metrics play a crucial role in the algorithm’s decision process. The bounce rate, page views per visitor, time-on-page, and your site’s conversion rate will play an incremental role in your SEO strategy. All of them communicate tremendous value to Google, especially your CVR. This will give you a big boost as Google wants to provide the most value possible to users.

Algorithms gather data on user behavior to understand what they are searching for. Websites that do a good job at fulfilling the user needs have better engagement metrics and a better chance of ranking higher in the SERPS. Thus, investing in CRO will also help your organic presence in search.

How Do I Optimize My Conversion Rate?

1. Keep it simple

By that, I mean your landing page - its design more specifically. With a cluttered design, your visitors will get overwhelmed by the amount of information that’s suddenly thrown their way. This can make some of your visitors leave or get confused by what you’re selling.

The more minimalist your design is, the better. This will help your users focus on the written content and products better, therefore increasing the chances of converting. Keep in mind to use high-quality, large images when displaying your products. Also, emphasize your CTA (call to action) buttons through bold, capitalized text and an eye-catching colored background, if that fits your design brief.

2. Copy Structure

Just as with design, the text needs to be simple and easy to read. Most people don’t take time to read the whole product page so keep it as clean as possible.

Keep your sentences short and comprehensive, highlighting the benefits of your product. Include bullet points and make the copy easy to follow by using simple words. And don’t forget to make your headlines catchy and persuasive.

3. The Two and a Half Seconds Rule

Studies have shown that users typically leave a website within 2,5 seconds if they can’t find what they looking for. This is highly important to understand since you need to capture a user’s attention within that time frame.

In 2,5 seconds you need to make it clear who you are, what you’re doing, and how the user can benefit from your website and product. If they are trying to find your product page but can’t, you have failed. If your expertise is not clearly communicated, you have failed. If the flow is confusing and the checkout takes too long, you have failed.

To bypass the 2,5 seconds rule, you need to make the purchase process highly straightforward. You can ask your friends, colleagues, or family for some feedback. Have them take a quick look at your website and see if they can easily find essential pages. If they are confused by the flow, you might want to take a second stab at it.

4. People Need To Trust You

If visitors do not trust your business, they will definitely not convert into buyers. That’s why you have to focus on building trust. There are plenty of ways to do this.

Let your customers post reviews of your products/services. Be active on social media, let them know that you are willing to openly communicate with them. Also, don’t forget to mention a bit about your past. Let them know how long your business has been running for, and don’t forget to highlight some of your awards or achievements.

5. Focus on Mobile

You might have spent countless hours working on your site and it finally looks great on desktop. But, a lot of business owners forget about the mobile experience. Considering that about 50% of all web traffic comes from mobile, this step is highly important. A poor mobile website will cause you to lose a lot of potential clients.

Smartphones are the gateway to the internet when we’re away from home. That’s why we need to ensure that the site is responsive and looks good on mobile. Also, keep in mind that your call to action buttons need to be visible to mobile users. If they are too small, mobile visitors might have issues clicking them, thus hindering your CVR. 

6. Place Important Elements Above the Fold

You should always place the most important, money-bringing elements above the fold. If you have an e-commerce website, include a CTA to the product page above the fold. If you sell a service or have a blog, include a form to your lead magnet in the top part of your site. This will increase your conversion rates considerably.

Conclusion

Conversion Rate Optimization is something you should really consider when planning your marketing strategy. Many business are starting to realize the potential benefits of CRO and are already hiring people or agencies to improve their website. If you don’t know where to start, you can check out our CRO page. We have a handful of services that can directly improve your conversion rate. If you’re looking for something more custom, you can also contact us.