When we talk about increasing and enhancing your website conversion rate, you need to forget about quick hacks and best practices, as your best move revolves around understanding well your visitors, customers, and users and giving them what they require.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) refers to increasing the percentage of visitors or users who perform a desired action on a website. Such desired actions can include adding a product to the cart, buying a product, filling out a form, signing up for a service, clicking on a link, etc.
The definition we just wrote is a standard definition of CRO as it places the focus on benchmarks, averages, and percentages. The emphasis here is on the numerical approach that comes with a downside – the more you look at spreadsheets filled with conversion data points and actions, the less attention you pay to the individuals behind them. So, let us now go through a more holistic and user-centric definition of CRO. We can define it as the process of understanding what persuades and drives your users so that you provide them with the best user experience possible, which, in turn, is what makes them convert and eventually enhances your website conversion rate.
What is the reason why the second definition works better? Focusing on the final action, i.e., conversion is undoubtedly crucial; however, a lot happens before that, including:
- Certain drivers bring people to your website;
- Certain obstacles make them leave; and
- Certain aspects persuade them to convert.
There are times when you need to go beyond the data you have; you will, in other words, need to focus on your users first.
Irrespective of whether you own an e-commerce website or handle online marketing or Search Engine Optimization (SEO), CRO shall consistently be a top-of-mind topic to help your business grow.
Calculating Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is calculated by dividing the total number of conversions, i.e., the desired actions taken, by the total number of visitors and then multiplying the result with 100 to get a final percentage.
Conversion Rate = * 100
For instance, if your web page had 20 sales and 500 visitors last month, your conversion rate would be 20 divided by 500, i.e., 0.04, multiplied by 100 = 4%.
You can use this formula for every conversion opportunity on your website. Just ensure calculating the number of visitors only on those web pages where an offer is listed. For instance, if you want to calculate the conversion rate of your newsletter, then you require dividing the total number of downloads of the newsletter by the number of people who visited the web page where the newsletter offer is listed.
Understanding the Average Conversion Rate
As per what you read, the average conversion rate lies anywhere between one percent and four percent. But, let us all come out of it and state something significant – the figure is somewhat meaningless since:
- Conversion rates vary wildly depending on the conversion objective, like newsletter signups, checkout completions, ad clicks, etc.
- Every target audience, website, and web page is different.
- Most individuals, anyway, don’t share their conversion data publicly.
Calculating averages may be beneficial as a starting point for benchmarking; however, the vital question is, what do they have to do with your website?
Kindly note that there is no actual or ultimate figure in the industry that you can depend upon or compare your business against with a hundred percent confidence. Obsessing time and again over an average percentage figure and trying to squeeze the required number of conversions to stay in line with it is certainly not the best way to think about CRO. Hence, you need to have an in-depth understanding of what matters to your users and give them the same to make the conversions flow naturally.
Where to Implement a CRO Strategy?
We shall now be discussing four areas of your website holding the immense potential to benefit largely from CRO:
- Homepage – The homepage is a prime candidate for implementing a CRO strategy. Besides making the first impression on the visitors, the homepage also provides an opportunity to retain those visitors and guide them further into your website.
- Pricing Page– Implementing CRO on a pricing page can help convert visitors into customers by modifying the pricing intervals (for instance, price-per-year vs. price-per-month), explaining the product features associated with each price, including a contact number for visitors to call for a price quote, or adding a simple pop-up form.
- Blog – Other than publishing valuable and compelling content about your industry, the blog section can implement a CRO strategy to convert readers into leads by adding CTAs through a blog post or asking readers to provide their email addresses to have a better understanding of a particular topic.
- Landing Page– The prime objective of designing a landing page is to persuade people to take action; therefore, it makes sense when reports say that landing pages have the highest average conversion rate of all signup forms at 23%.
In our next blog post, we shall be explaining the CRO marketing strategies – so stay tuned!