To transform traffic into conversions, it’s necessary to focus on Conversion Rate Optimization techniques.
Conversion is not just the “final customer purchase, but the” objective established during the planning of the digital marketing strategy, what you need to achieve to scale your business.
Let’s see together what CRO is, why it’s so important and what are the 10 techniques we always apply to our clients’ e-commerce sites.
What is CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)
CRO is the acronym for Conversion Rate Optimization, literally optimization of the conversion rate.
Conversion is the data you have identified as the final objective of that specific campaign: purchase, subscription to a mailing list, click on a link, download of a freebie, website registrations, add to cart.
As we said in the introduction, conversion doesn’t always correspond to the purchase of your products and services. But if we’re talking about an e-commerce site, as in this article, purchase as a conversion parameter cannot be missing.
Conversion Rate Optimization, therefore, is that set of digital marketing techniques that allow you to optimize your conversions, your objectives, making your business scalable.
How to calculate the conversion rate and what are the optimal values
The conversion rate is the % of users who converted compared to the total number of visitors.
Example:
Yesterday your e-commerce had 160 visits and 15 purchases (the parameter you chose as conversion).
Conversion rate = (15 / 160) x 100 = 9.4%. This means that 9.4% of the people who visited the e-commerce site made a purchase.
Know that there is no absolute value that works for every business. The average CR for online is 1% to 5%, but this has no meaning if not contextualized.
It depends, for example, on the price of the product sold, the type of product, and your audience. What really matters is monitoring your conversion rate and aiming for its improvement.
Why is conversion rate optimization so important?
Having a goal will allow you to build an ad hoc strategy for your business, and all your strategies and marketing actions will be oriented towards that final objective.
However, to know that these strategies are working and are therefore leading you towards your goal, it will be necessary to analyze their performance to realize if they are going in the right direction or if it’s necessary to review the strategy to succeed in converting as many people as possible when they visit your e-commerce site.
For an e-commerce, the main conversion will be the purchase by the customer, and by increasing sales, your profits will increase.
Consequently, you will also improve your ROI, that is, the return on investment, and you can invest more and more budget to increase revenue in turn. This means creating a scalable business.
Our 10 Conversion Rate Optimization Techniques and Strategies
Our goal is to optimize the conversion rate, through the optimization of the site and e-commerce site pages, marketing campaigns or landing pages.
1 The Importance of User Experience
Today, due to the “high competitiveness among e-commerce sites, it’s necessary to ask what the behavior of the” user is in order to make them choose us and not another retailer.
Your e-commerce site must therefore be built on the tastes, skills, and needs of your buyer personas.
So if your potential customer feels represented by your site, has a good purchasing experience, and likes your product, there are all the prerequisites to say they are having a good experience.
User experience will not only help you optimize conversion, understood as purchase, but it will also help you build loyalty among your users, who will return to you without even considering the competition, and generate excellent reviews.
2 Design and navigability
Closely linked to “user experience, having an attractive and functional site design with good navigability will help you in” optimizing your conversion rate.
A beautiful site design, compatible with mobile devices, will attract customers and good navigability will keep them within it, thus increasing the likelihood of purchase.
Navigability refers to the ease of navigation, given by the structure of the pages we give to the site itself. Ask yourself: Is it easy to find the information the user is looking for? Is the cart checkout simple to execute? Are the products organized correctly?
3 Site speed
The site speed is also a fundamental factor for having a good user experience, good positioning in search engines and, consequently, will increase the likelihood of purchase.
This is because the slower your website pages are to load, the higher the probability that the user will leave and look for a faster one.
The loading speed of web pages is a parameter that needs to be measured and checked for mobile as well. Remember, more and more people are now making purchases right from their smartphones!
To calculate the speed of your website, there are various tools, but we recommend PageSpeed Insight which performs a complete diagnostic, both desktop and mobile, showing you the critical issues based on urgency, using yellow and red.
4 Optimize advertising campaigns
A good digital marketing strategy should include SEO optimization to increase organic traffic, but also a part of paid advertising campaigns.
Each advertising campaign has a different conversion goal and this must be monitored to check that the campaign is performing well.
Optimizing an advertising campaign therefore means improving it, by modifying the text of the ad, the creative part of the campaign (images and videos), the call to action. In short, it means eliminating bottlenecks
, i.e., those steps that prevent us from reaching our conversion goal.
5 Perform A/B tests as the best conversion rate optimization technique
To further optimize advertising campaigns, it is good practice to perform A/B tests.
Performing A/B tests means publishing different versions of the same advertising campaign, and therefore of the same objective, in order to analyze which version converts more.
For example, you could create two campaigns with the same images and videos but with different copy, or vice versa, or with different calls to action.
Once we understand which of the campaigns performs better, we will simply invest more budget in the best-performing campaign to optimize conversions.
6 The call to action
Literally “the call to ‘action’” is the invitation you make to the “user in order to make them perform an” action.
“Buy now”, “Contact us”, “Sign up” are all calls to action, which can be tested and optimized.
We can, for example, change the copy, the font, the color of the text, and even its position. All this in order to make it as visible and clickbait as possible.
The more people who perform the “action we want, which will be precisely our conversion goal, the greater the possibility that they will complete the conversion, such as the” purchase.
7 Copy
Copy refers to any text found on website pages, landing pages, and social media post descriptions.
A text created by a professional copywriter is written using precise techniques, such as persuasive writing, which definitely helps in your conversion rate optimization.
Indeed, every page of the website, including product descriptions, landing pages, and company presentation, must be written for the “target audience”.
Therefore, it’s necessary to know your audience perfectly, to include in the text everything the user expects, such as identifying and solving a problem, the advantages of our products and services, and more.
This is necessary to make the user understand that we are the best choice to meet their needs.
8 Urgency and Scarcity
Creating urgency and scarcity around a product means playing on the emotions of your users, who will hurry to complete the purchase.
This means that creating limited-time discounts, putting a limited edition on sale, letting people know that these are the last pieces, will increase sales in your ecommerce.
This is because people don’t want to miss out on the opportunity or risk running out of the product, precisely due to the principle of urgency and scarcity.
9 Lead Generation
Collecting contacts from your users and customers is an essential practice for effective digital marketing, because it allows you to stay in touch with them by sending newsletters, to increase company awareness, and do email marketing, with discounts and news about your ecommerce.
There are various techniques to encourage people to leave their contact, such as guaranteeing privacy, offering a discount in the first email they receive, creating simple lead collection popups.
10 Data Analysis and Related Corrections
No matter how you decide to approach your conversion rate optimization strategy, you can’t do without performance analysis.
Based on your objective, you will identify KPIs that, when analyzed periodically, will tell you if you are performing well, if you are going in the right direction, or if it’s necessary to review strategies to optimize conversions.
Conclusions
Creating a conversion rate optimization strategy is never a cost, but an investment:
- investing to improve the user experience, such as refining the design and improving the site speed, will allow you to ensure that users are more likely to purchase;
- with optimization of advertising campaigns and creation of A/B tests, you will be facilitated in reaching ROI;
- optimizing communication with your audience, such as copy and call to action, is essential to guide them towards purchase and loyalty;
- The use of strategies like urgency and scarcity will allow you to increase the number of sales;
- doing lead generation is of primary importance to stay in touch with your users and be able to create remarketing strategies;
- it’s not possible to optimize without analyzing performance data.
Do you want to know more and apply these conversion rate optimization techniques to your ecommerce site to increase sales?
