So What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
As digital marketers, we’re always looking for ways to drive more and higher quality site traffic, engagement, and/or conversions at a lower cost. While we are all familiar with the concept of sending more emails, increasing spend on marketing channels, or creating new marketing campaigns - we’re not always considering how to increase the efficiency of our digital experiences to more effectively convert the users we’re already driving to our sites. This is where Conversion Rate Optimization (lovingly referred to as CRO) comes in.
Let's define it – Conversion rate optimization is “the process of increasing the percentage of conversions from a website or mobile app. CRO typically involves generating ideas for elements on your site or app that can be improved and then validating those hypotheses through A/B testing and multivariate testing.” (via Optmizely).
As costs for digital marketing channels get increasingly expensive and crowded with competition, the need to more efficiently spend marketing dollars gets even more important.
CRO allows businesses to understand, in real time, what is and is not working with their audience. This allows businesses to test making changes to messaging, creative, and even offers to see what works with their audience without the risk of making sweeping changes and waiting to see how it works. CRO also takes the emotion and feelings out of business decisions. It allows us to gather data, make a hypothesis, and test new ideas in the real world, all with the end goal of more efficiently converting the users we’re already driving to a website or landing page.
At 5by5, our approach to testing is customer-experience centered. Our goal is to help gather data and explore ways we can improve the user experience around our client’s web presence. We start by ideating with our clients on ways to reduce distraction and anxiety, while increasing relevance and clarity for their users. From here, we prioritize the ideas, create hypotheses, and develop a roadmap for testing.
As data comes in, we are able to track how a new experience is driving key metrics compared to the current version, and we are ultimately able to make a confident decision that one works better for the audience than another.
Conversion Rate Optimization can seem daunting at first, but with the right direction and a proven process, it can be one of the most effective tools in the marketing tool belt for continuing to drive overall marketing campaign performance.
Interested in learning more? Let’s talk.