What is CRO, And Why Does It Matter?
Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, essentially refers to how many customers actually convert to your products or services once they come down the “sales funnel”. There are three primary stages in the sales funnel: awareness, investigation, and conversion. Each of those categories has multiple sub-categories. Here we won’t explore those.
More important than sales funnel subcategories is the final step of the process: where the customer decides to buy your products or services. CRO helps expand how many people actually convert to the products or services your business supplies. The better the optimization, the greater the rate of conversion.
It’s worth noting that there is always room for improvement here. It doesn’t matter how large or small your business is, there are always ways to increase conversions. However, there is a law of diminishing returns, where resources spent expanding conversion are higher than profit. So you want to find that balance. Following we’ll explore this concept in detail.
Understanding CRO
Just because you have the data doesn’t mean you’re going to see optimization. If you’re going to see an expansion in sales, you’ve got to apply associated best practices. You’ve got to use the data to initiate expansion. What this tends to involve, generally, is changing how you conduct business to match the needs of your customers.
Often customers have concerns you may not have anticipated which may or may not inhibit their decision to convert. Maybe the issue involves price, it could involve proximity, it could involve customer service.
In order to achieve results, you’ve got to figure out where there are “bumps” in the “road” to conversion. You can follow this link for more CRO marketing details. You’re looking to find details that reveal hidden, collateral trends that induce or inhibit conversion.
You want to lean into those which induce conversion, and away from those which inhibit conversion. There do tend to be a high number of factors that may not seem immediately apparent. Color schemes, slogans, ingredients, and price points; all may play a part in the overall decision of customers. Marketing data is key to finding trends.
Applying CRO Best Practices
In order to get started, first you want to find data solutions as outlined in the previous section. Second, you want to establish relevant KPIs. A KPI is a Key Performance Indicator. A KPI might be the level of traffic you have on your website. This is just an example for illustration, but perhaps with every 1,000 views, you get ten conversions; or about 1%.
If you’re regularly seeing 1% conversions, you can explore alternative outreach and optimization to get those numbers up. If you’re doing it properly, you should see that 1% increase. So maybe you do a promotion on your site, and see 20 conversions for 1,000 visitors. You’ve facilitated a successful CRO.
Basically, CRO represents the final indicator of a successful outreach optimization campaign or other alteration of traditional business practices. Maybe an internal change facilitates more conversions, maybe a price bracket adjustment does the trick. There are many ways you can initiate CRO, but whatever methods you explore, it’s integral to have statistics available.
Proper software indicating success in outreach or internal optimization helps direct your footsteps in a profitable way. There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns,as the saying goes. The last category is what’s important here: you don’t know what you don’t know, but proper CRO software helps you fill that knowledge gap.
Exploring CRO Alternatives
It’s important to identify effective means of increasing rates of conversion. CRO software is very helpful to that end, but it’s only one piece of a larger puzzle. In order to see true gains, you’ve got to explore multiple means of bettering your company.
Sometimes the issue you’re dealing with is one of visibility. Sometimes the issue is internal. There are also collateral issues that can only be determined through careful collection and examination of relevant data.
In some situations, you’ve got product defects that not only reduce rates of conversion but also do so in a systematic way that is ongoing. So one month you get 10 out of 1,000 visitors to convert, and the next month you get 5 out of 1,000. Whatever is going on, you’ve got to identify the problem and correct it.
When you get the balance right, you’re going to see more conversions. As that happens, it’s important to identify whatever change you made that had a positive outcome, and continue doing that. Ultimately, you want to find the right CRO software, then start experimenting with operational methods which expand conversion rates as shown by that software.
