Increasing Profits with Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

There are many ways to increase profits and as you know, one of the most common strategies is to increase traffic to your website. Another quite often underutilised method is CRO (conversion rate optimisation), where you focus on converting more of your existing traffic, as opposed to continually trying to draw in new leads.

WHY IS CRO SO VALUABLE TO YOUR BOTTOM LINE?

As a business owner you work to a limited budget and are most probably already paying to get traffic to your website. So why not increase the return on your investment (ROI), by converting a higher percentage of your visitors - rather than spending more money on traffic?

This is why CRO is so valuable to business owners, because it is a way to make the most out of a limited budget without spending any more money.

HOW DOES CRO WORK?

The goal of CRO is to increase the time your visitors spend on your website and to encourage them to return again, time after time. If you can achieve these two outcomes, then you should see a gradual uptick in profits.

Your strategy is to have a website that is worthy of spending time on, so it must be interactive in some way and give your visitors an enjoyable experience, one which they want to repeat. Your second strategy is to encourage visitors to return to your website, so it needs to be user friendly, easy to navigate, have a clear menu system and provide information on a frequency that encourages your visitors to return and check for new updates.

HOW TO GET STARTED WITH CRO

CRO is all about finding what works for your website, because not all techniques will work for all websites. This is not a quick fix (although you might see fast results), but it is a process which you must continually work through, rinse and repeat.

In general, there are 9 steps to CRO, which need to be taken in order:

1. Identify your target audience: If you don’t know the demographics of your target audience, you won’t be able to give them a positive experience on your website. This is crucial to increasing your conversions and you must spend time understanding your audience.
2. Set up Google Analytics: This is a great way to find out more about the demographics of your visitors and their purchasing behaviour. You must use an analytics package to measure your visitors and conversions over time, so that you know what does and doesn’t work.
3. Is your website user friendly? You must ensure that visitors can find their way easily around your website and identify anything that might be making them leave quickly (increasing your bounce rate) or not converting. In other words, what are the barriers which prevent visitors from transitioning through your sales funnel - from a user experience point of view?
4. Is your website functional? Do you provide your visitors with all of the information they need to convert? To do this, you need to know what information they actually need that will persuade them to buy, subscribe or donate.
5. Are you selling your products or services effectively? You might think that because your product has six different uses that this is why customers love it. In reality, it might be because your product is easier to hold in one hand, than your competitors products. So you need to ensure that you are promoting the benefits of your products, not just the features.
6. Check out the competition: If another brand has twice the number of sales, then you need to check out their website and see what they are doing differently.
7. Put it all together: Use what you have learnt so far in the previous 6 steps and decide what is working and what is not working on your website.
8. Start making changes: Depending on your findings in step 7, you want to initiate some of these changes. The important point here is that you need to test these changes (A/B testing), so you know which changes increase your conversions best.
9. Rinse and repeat: As you find different elements that work better than others, keep these and then move on to the next change. You need to keep up to date with what your audience wants and expects from your website, so you need to keep testing and interacting with your audience.

The CRO process helps to not only increase conversions and profits on your website, but it also creates a user friendly, functional website that encourages your visitors to return. However, whilst CRO gives you a strategic competitive edge, if you are not using it, you can be pretty sure that your competitors are already invested in CRO.

This means that you need to catch up and initiate CRO on your website ASAP. For more information on how we can help your business increase conversions, contact us on 1300 MEMEDIA, email us on studio@memedia.com.au or complete our online enquiry form.