It’s easy to get caught up in driving more traffic to your website by focusing on search engine optimisation and other marketing, but more visitors does not automatically equate to more enquiries. If you are like most businesses with a website, you are probably neglecting the most important area in achieving a higher return on your investment: conversion.
Conversion is when you instigate engagement from the people that go to your web site—you must find a way to increase conversions (acts of reading, viewing, commenting, subscribing, purchasing, or making an enquiry) to achieve a better return on your investment.
This is where most businesses fall short. They will spend money to acquire traffic, but very little on ways to convert this traffic.
Conversion Rate Optimisation – or CRO
The practice of website conversion is represented by conversion rate optimisation or CRO. The main advantage of CRO is it enables you to secure additional revenue without expending considerably more investment. In fact, hooking and retaining extant customers from existing volumes of website traffic is five times less expensive than attracting new visitors.
So what can you do to make sure that more visitors that arrive at your site are converting?
It doesn’t require much work to improve your conversion rate: with a few small adjustments you can significantly increase the number of leads or enquiries generated from your website.
In an earlier blog article we outlined 7 ways to get more business from your landing pages, which looked at things like de-cluttering the content, and making the call to action clear and enticing. These suggestions are a great starting point for improving the effectiveness of your landing pages. Because every business is different, finding what works best for you will take some trial and error. To achieve good CRO you need a CRO Testing Strategy.
Creating a CRO Testing Strategy
Perhaps the most critical step in your CRO operations is this: test, test, and test. If you are not optimising and testing on your website, you should be. You may be missing out on a huge opportunity to increase your conversion rate.
Create a testing strategy which, when applied over a period of time, will enable your site to be refined to its optimum performance for both capturing and converting traffic. Here are some key methods to track whether your efforts are actually working.
Analytics
A good way of measuring the effectiveness of your landing pages is to apply analytic tools to your website. Google Analytics is a great starting point: it is free and easy to use, and provides detailed statistics on all the aspects of your site. Google Analytics allows you to track whether people click on your links, which pages they visit and how long they spend there. You can also set goals, and view a range of detailed reports on visitor activity.
Split Testing
A/B or Split Testing is a method of comparing results from a large sample group of visitors to determine what changes work to help give you the best conversion rate. You take two prototypes of your redesigned landing page (or run a test involving your old and your new landing page), and make them go live at the same time. After a predetermined amount of time or number of visitors, you compare the results, and see which one was more effective. This can be repeated as many times as necessary, with many variations, to settle on the most effective new page content and design.
What should you test as part of your CRO strategy?
In a nutshell, everything on your landing pages should be tested.
This may sound daunting, but sometimes a small change can make a big difference in the success of your site. The more things you improve, the better the chances of getting that one more click through.
To increase your homepage’s conversion rate by 25%, for example, you would have to make just a 2.27% improvement to ten aspects of your website.
So before you spend another dollar on a marketing campaign to drive more traffic to your website, consider starting with a Conversion Rate Optimisation strategy so that you can reap more from the visitors you get.
Web Tonic can help you create a Conversion Rate Optimisation Strategy to match your CRO goals. Contact us today.