CRO, like SEO, SEM, PPC and the countless other marketing acronyms, is extremely important to anything and everything in marketing. CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. This refers to the increasing percentage of users who do a specific action when engaging with your content. This act is typically purchasing items or adding items to their carts, but it can really refer to anything. To learn more about the importance of CRO and why you should care about it as a marketer, read further.
Another way to understand CRO is to think of it as finding the driving force behind what motivates consumers to commit to doing something. As the above paragraph stated, this “commitment” could be as simple as clicking a link and staying on your site. CRO in marketing, at its core, involves trying to create the best possible user experience in order to gain the highest percentage of those “commitments.”
So how does a marketer do this?
There are three main points to consider when figuring out what drives these actions that businesses so desperately need consumers to do. Every business has its marketing plan that they are following to achieve its goal. The first one, and most obvious, is figuring out the obstacles.
Obstacles
When it comes to online engagement and consumer activity, the easiest obstacle to overcome is the website and social media inadequacies. If your website still looks like it is from 1999, that’s where you need to start.
Consumers need the freshest, cleanest, and most professional-looking online pages. This is so they consider clicking on your link or staying on your page for more than three seconds. Cleaning up and redesigning your interface is time-consuming, but it is not hard. It simply involves making sure you have easy-to-find navigational buttons and very minimal copywriting. This is so that consumers aren’t frustrated by confusing text and too overwhelmed to stay on your page. Make sure your website or social media pages are aesthetically pleasing. This is an incredibly easy fix that can increase your CRO immensely.
The harder obstacle to overcome when it comes to your website is fixing the bugs. Especially if you are trying to make your site an e-commerce site, it cannot have any issues. If customers are trying to make purchases and a bug is preventing them from doing so easily, they are not going to stick around to call customer service. They are going to leave immediately. This step is where, if you are not a technical or coding expert, you will likely have to seek outside expertise to help.
Features
The second area on which you must focus for increasing your CRO is figuring out the features that pull customers in. This may seem straightforward, and it can be, but it also involves some critical thinking. These hooks that pull consumers in are extremely effective if done correctly.
Hooks can be as simple or complex as you want; it really just depends on what works best for what you’re selling and your audience. Hooks are, as mentioned, anything that pulls people to engage with your content and do those desired actions, like making a purchase. They could be the videos you post, the sounds you use on those videos, hashtags, blog posts on your websites, newsletters–anything.
The hard part is then going back to do the research and find which hooks actually worked. This can be done quite simply, through analytics websites such as Instagram analytics or CISION data websites. These sites will take your accounts and individual posts and tell you which ones had the highest engagement. They’ll also tell you where the most people and followers came from (a hashtag, URL, sound edit, etc.).
Once you have this data, you simply need to apply the results to your strategy in a thought-out, organized way. Then, once you alter and change your content based on the analytics data, you can measure the new results against the old ones. Hopefully, you see eventual CRO increases.
Calculate
Lastly, you need to know how to calculate your actual conversion rate. The formula to do so is simple. You simply divide the number of conversions (commitments/actions taken by your customers) by the total number of visitors to your site. Then multiply by 100 to get the CRO percentage.
Parting Thoughts
Overall, once you figure out what your obstacles and hooks are, as well as know how to overcome or capitalize on those two points, you are on the road to increasing your marketing CRO in no time.