If you run a business, you must have heard a buzzword – conversion rate optimization. And if you are not much into digital marketing, it sure becomes jargon. But whether you know it or not, it is something you can not ignore. So, let’s discuss why conversion rate optimization is important to grow your business.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a process that improves the percentage of accomplishing desired goals on a website or mobile app. However, it may not be as simple in practical implementation as it sounds. So, you can take CRO as an ongoing process involving user research, data analytics, tests, and trials.

But you might still be wondering what conversion rate optimization is. For that, let’s begin by understanding the conversion rate of an ad campaign. Simply put, it is the percentage of total conversions to total interactions. Let’s understand it with an example.

Suppose you start an ad campaign on Facebook or Google, and 1000 people interact with your ads. Now, all of the people who interacted with your ads may not be interested in making the final purchase. Let’s consider that 50 out of those 1000 interested people ultimately purchased your offerings. So, the conversion rate comes out to be 5% (50/1000 * 100).

So, conversion rate optimization helps you increase the conversion rate by persuading interested people to take the action you want on a landing page, website, or ad campaign.

Why Conversion Rate Optimization is important

The most valuable benefit of conversion rate optimization is the cost. CRO helps a business lower the cost of acquiring customers and getting more value from existing users. 

For instance, suppose you are running an ad campaign that leads users to a landing page, and it has a total of 2000 interactions with a conversion rate of 10%. In that case, you will get 200 conversions per month. However, if you can improve your ad campaign and landing page elements, you might score a conversion rate of 15%. So, you will get 300 conversions per month at a similar marketing cost.

The best marketing teams can always find room for improvement to increase conversions. So, they constantly iterate and improve their strategies, landing pages, websites, and apps to create a better user experience. Let’s look at the ten reasons why conversion rate optimization is important:

1. It saves you money!

The online advertising cost is regularly hiking with the increasing competition, especially when it comes to pay-per-click (PPC). And you never want someone to click on your ad but not convert it into sales. In such times, when PPC costs are increasing while conversions are going down, CRO helps you increase engagement and conversions without increasing its marketing effort.

There’s no need to spend a single cent just to increase conversions. However, you might think about how spending money to optimize your website can save more money. But you will find that soon enough when you realize less spending on acquiring each customer. So, in reality, you will be making more money.

2. Increase website traffic

Besides lowering your customer acquisition cost, CRO also helps increase your website’s traffic. It allows you to run more relevant ads to outgrow your competitors and have more profits.

More traffic also allows you to apply new strategies based on your target audience. For example, it generally becomes more beneficial for e-commerce stores to beat the competition. And if CRO has resulted in more traffic to your website, it means the number of purchases will automatically increase.

3. Know your target audience

Optimizing your conversion rate helps you to know more about your target audience and customers. In addition, it leads to refining the customer persona you have created and channelizing your marketing efforts toward a more suited audience.

With CRO, you can precisely find what your customers are looking for with your solution, what are their reasons for visiting your website, and how they navigate through it. These factors form the basis of your CRO strategy and help personalize the user experience.

4. Upselling

With CRO, you have a regular stream of website visitors and higher conversion rates. However, some growth hacking tools can leverage the current website traffic for further growth.

Tools like Google Analytics give you detailed information about your customers and visitors. You get to know user demographics, devices, pageviews, durations, and several other things that help optimize your online presence and offer more products and services.

5. Improve SERP ranking

Search engine result page rankings improve with SEO practices. For any business, appearing on top of the SERP is crucial to get more business as most of your customers tend to search you online. If your business stays hidden online, it is hard to grow your sales and revenue.

CRO plays a significant role in improving your SERP ranks also. When you optimize your website elements with primary keywords, people are more likely to find them online.

6. Data-driven approach

Letting your marketing campaign run merely on guesswork and chances is never advisable. Nothing will work in your favor unless you have calculated the feasibility backed by data-based evidence. Not only does data help you create better reach, but it also helps in reducing the risk involved with your money.

CRO helps you to collect data and ensures every decision you make is backed by numbers relating to your target audience. These decisions may be about changing some design elements on your website, writing new content copies on your ad campaign, or enhancing app performance based on user feedback. 

7. More relevant leads

Insights from different sources help you optimize your website and marketing campaigns. The result is suitability! The more you optimize your website and ads for conversion rates, the more the chances of reaching the actual target audience.

If your campaigns and efforts are targeted to a suitable audience, you will get more leads that will convert into clients. It all happens with an abundance of information about your ideal customers. And encouraging such leads to become customers is not a difficult thing

8. Building Trust

People don’t buy from you until they trust you. So, building trust with your offerings is of paramount importance, especially when it comes to acquiring new customers. CRO is crucial in building confidence as it helps you reach your target audience when and where it is vital. 

On top of that, it lets you optimize the UI/UX of your website to make it convenient for users to find things they need. It becomes imperative in current times as several psychological studies have proven that the current generation has short attention spans. If you can capture the attention of your target audience, you can quickly gain their trust.

9. Outgrow your competition

More and more retailers have come online and are fighting neck-to-neck to acquire your customers. The giants like Amazon have changed the equation, especially for smaller retailers. You can’t compete with them unless you make your website visitors feel comfortable.

CRO helps you make your website easy to use for your visitors, encouraging them to take the given call-to-action and fall into your sales funnel.

10. Make your website efficient

Although CRO is a continuous process that needs time-to-time updates, it also produces quick results, unlike SEO. As soon as you alter your website, ad campaign, or landing page, you see higher interactions and conversions in a short time.

However, don’t settle for the results you see the first time. CRO should be constant. With more testing and iteration, you can consistently score better conversion rates.

Best practices for CRO

Since you know CRO’s importance, you must also know the best practices to start it. But before we discuss the techniques, ensure the credibility, trust, and safety of your website and visitors as prerequisites. If you are ready to start, here are the best practices for CRO:

• Social proof is a catalyst when it comes to converting leads into customers. Always offer social proof on your website or any other platform through client testimonials, awards, media exposure, certifications, and industry expert reviews to build trust and credibility
• Improve UI/UX, loading speed, and device compatibility of your website, to create a better user experience & higher SERP rankings and ensure that your website looks professional
• Develop customer personas that help to create content and communication lines relevant to the needs of your customers
• Write clear and active calls to action
• Study the heatmaps to analyze visitor behaviors on your website
• Run continuous testing and improve your pages until they are optimal
• Analyze different stages of the buyer journey to identify pages that are crucial in the conversion

Starting your website’s CRO

Now that you know why conversion rate optimization is important, it’s time to start optimizing your website & ad campaigns to get more customers. We have also shared some best practices you can opt for to improve your conversion rates.

With a little effort, you can start working yourself to improve your conversion rate. Of course, at the end of the day, sales numbers are all that matter. However, if you want an expert team consultation or an increased website conversion rate, contact us and let HeliosHub help you. We work to help businesses like yours acquire your dream clients.