Part one: What is it and why it matters
What is conversion rate optimisation?
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of improving your website (or specific pages) to influence your website visitors and increase the likelihood of taking actions that are beneficial to your organisation. Most commonly, CRO relates to increasing the number of sales or leads.
Why CRO matters?
Conversion rate optimisation is becoming are important for any website that has a final goal.Most businesses focus a lot of attention on acquiring visitors to their website. However, this is often hugely costly. As the effects of COVID fall away, the cost of digital activities is expected to reload to their trend increases over 10% a year.
So, when they arrive on your website, you need to maximise the number of conversions from their visitors.
Conversion rate optimisation is the process of making changes to your website to improve the financial returns from your website and using data-led insights to measure the results and make further improvements.
Key elements of CRO
In the remainder of this article, we will look at the main elements of conversion rate optimisation. For CRO to be effective, it needs to be a long term and continuous process of improvements. It is also a creative process that uses data to develop a hypothesis about improvements. Part Two of this article will look at the actions and processes for an effective CRO campaign.
There are several key elements in creating an optimised website.
Site structure
Creating a site structure is important for successful conversion rate optimisation.
Three questions
- What information needs to be on the site?
- What information is an essential part of the customers’ journey?
- What additional pages are needed for campaigns to bring people to the site that do not disrupt the main journey?
Ideally, should be as few clicks as possible. Key customer journey information should be no more than two clicks from the home page.
Site Navigation
Your navigation is the main signpost on your website. As mentioned above, it needs to identify the key journeys for your potential customers.
One of the main mistakes in site navigation is trying to shoe-horn too many items into the top navigation. On the basis that “she/he who praises everybody, praises nobody”, putting too many items in the top navigation makes it difficult for visitors to understand what is important on your site and how to journey through it.
This is often the product of poor site strategy. An overloaded menu often indicates that the website strategy is confused. As a result, visitors don’t bother to stay and try and figure out that what they need.
Use your footer
Your footer is a great place for “hygiene” pages that need to be available on the site but are not part of your primary purpose of your website. This includes policies etc. but can include items like “work for us” or “referral schemes” and contact information for eCommerce and SaaS businesses.
Web page Design
A well-structured web page is a cornerstone of turning website traffic into potential customers. And this is based on providing engaging content, which is relevant and is well laid out.
Page Layout
When thinking about your page design there are many factors to consider.
Ensure that you have a distinctive and consistent palette of colours. Typically, there will be informed by your company branding. In any case, consistency across the site helps the user to identify important elements on the page such as calls to action, buy now etc.
This is especially valuable when you have repeat visitors will help them navigate your site more quickly and efficiently will improve UX.
Alongside your colour palette a logical and attractive design that will help them to navigate around the content.
Effective use of white space can ensure that the page is not too confusing. And imagery can be used to break up blocks of text.
Headlines
Your headlines are the most important way in which your content is organised across the website.
There are several ways that headlines can be structured. Asking a question in an effective approach. The content needs to answer that question. Another approach is to see your headlines as a concise summary of the message of the page.
Keep your headlines short. Headlines are also a potential SEO ranking factor (while not directly relevant to CRO), a well-structured and tagged headlines can help with organic site visibility.
Body Content
Body content should be concise and relevant to the visitors’ needs. Your navigation and headlines make a promise to the user that your content should make good on.
Well-structured body content needs to be:
- Detailed enough to cover what users need and no more. Don’t go into too much detail on your main sales pages. If some visitors are looking for further reassurance, then you should create a page and link to it.
- Break up the text into manageable sections. If possible, keep each section/paragraph to a single idea/topic.
- Keep the language as simple as you can. Most audiences (unless you are talking about an especially technical subject) appreciate clarity over precision.
- Look at your page critically. When a visitor lands on the page does the opening text should reassure them that they are on the right page. If not, they will probably leave and go elsewhere.
Style
The style needs to be appropriate to your audience.
It should address the needs of the visitor. If your content doesn’t serve that read be brave enough to remove it.
Remember that your text is there to serve a purpose which is to move the visitor closer to becoming a customer.
Calls to action
A lot of time and effort is spent on CRO to optimising calls to action on the page.
This is natural as they are how the visitor moves to the next step in the customer journey.
Making sure that your calls to action are clear and easy to find is important (see the comments on colours in the page design section).
A visitor will only engage with a CTA if they have been convinced to do so by everything they have viewed and read. They aren’t be taken in isolation.
Forms
Forms are a typical destination for where a call to action is often directed.
Many good marketing funnels have been tripped up by poor quality or defective forms.
Keep them as simple as possible. The simplest is just an email address – often used for newsletter signups. Make sure you only ask for the minimum amount of detail you need to take the next action. More fields equally fewer completions.
For logged-in users, prepopulating forms especially stuff like addresses and phone number can make the form much easier to complete. This is useful for repeat purchases of your products. And like many of you, I have failed to complete a purchase on a site owing to the difficulty of completing a form.
Page Speed
This is often overlooked by website managers. Poor site speed has long been a major factor in whether visitor chooses to land or the site and be willing to stay on your site.
Next Article
In the next article, we will look in more details about how you are can optimise your website to obtain more conversions.