In today’s highly competitive digital landscape, it’s not enough to simply drive traffic to your website. It’s just as important (if not more important) to ensure that people who visit your site convert into customers. This is where Conversion Rate Optimization – CRO Marketing – comes in.
In this article, we’ll explain what CRO Marketing is, take a closer look at its benefits, and some strategies for success!
CRO Marketing is the practice of optimizing your website to improve its ability to convert visitors into customers.
Unlike other marketing tactics, which focus on driving more traffic to a website, CRO Marketing focuses on increasing the percentage of visitors who take a desired action – i.e., a conversion.
A conversion isn’t only a direct sale, but it can also include subscribing to a newsletter, filling out a contact form, or reading a related article. It’s important that you have clear what’s the desired action you want your users to take before starting with conversion rate optimization.
Conversion rate represents the percentage of visitors to a website who complete a desired action or “convert.”
Calculating the conversion rate is relatively straightforward. You simply divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors, then multiply the result by 100 to obtain the percentage. The formula is:
Conversion Rate = (Number of Conversions / Total Number of Visitors) ×100
For example, if your website receives 1,000 visitors in a month, and 50 of them make a purchase, your conversion rate would be 5%.
As we mentioned above, examples of CRO marketing include: making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter, filling out a contact form, or reading a related article.
Now let’s take a look at a more practical example of how you can use CRO marketing to increase your ROI.
Hubspot’s team run a test with in-text CTAs: instead of adding just one CTA banner at the bottom, they also added a CTA within the text of the blog post. At the end of the test, they analyzed the blog posts and noticed that the regular CTAs contributed an average of 6% of leads, while more than 93% of a post’s leads came from the anchor-text CTA alone.
This is just one way of doing CRO marketing: you can find more in the paragraph below!
CRO is crucial in digital marketing, because, by making it easier for visitors to convert, you can generate more revenue from your existing traffic and marketing efforts.
In particular, Conversion Rate Optimization marketing is so important because:
Now, you may be wondering: but isn’t SEO optimization more or less the same thing?
Actually, no. CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are two vital practices in digital marketing, but they serve different purposes:
While CRO is about maximizing conversions from existing traffic, SEO is about increasing the overall traffic from search engines. Both practices complement each other and often work best when implemented together.
Our Advertising 101 can help you get started with the right foot!
To start your Conversion Rate Optimization journey you need a successful strategy. Here are a few key steps:
If you’re just starting out, CRO Marketing could seem a bit overwhelming. There are many different things to consider, and optimization options are everywhere.
However, there are some basic strategies that you can start testing, and see if they drive results:
Blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your website, but it’s also a good spot for CRO marketing. Start adding CTAs to your blog post and consider adding them also within the text, and not just at the end.
One key element of optimization is A/B testing. Landing pages are designed to convert, so it’s important that you know which elements are working and which aren’t. With A/B testing, you can show different versions of your landing page of a specific segment of users and see what improves your conversion rate. This could involve testing different calls to action, images, or layouts.
if you have pages that performing particularly well, you could use them to drive up conversion. For example, you could add a banner inviting them to subscribe to a newsletter or to book a call with you.
Retargeting refers to the process of showing ads to people who have already interacted with your business in some way. You could consider using retargeting to encourage people who already visited your website to take action.
These are just a few examples, but they’ve often proved to work for many different businesses!
As a marketer, you need to be careful. Some popular marketing strategies maybe be unethical, or even unlawful, depending on who you target or where you’re based!
This can leave you open to fines, lawsuits and reputational damage.
Use this guide to learn how you can still make big profits, without the risk 👉 5 ethical marketing hacks!
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