In today’s competitive world, rates and numbers are everything. One such essential metric for e-commerce sellers to watch out for is conversion rate. In this article, we will look into conversion rate optimisation, its benefits, elements, and strategies. Keep reading to learn more!
What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, refers to the process of optimising a website or its landing page to help increase the probability of visitors executing a particular action on that page. This successful execution of a desired action is known as conversion. On most websites, conversion can mean purchasing any product, signing up for monthly newsletters, or getting a subscription.
A high conversion rate indicates that a business is doing well. However, in most cases, online traffic remains inconsistent. Hence, it becomes difficult for businesses to maintain a steady conversion rate. This is why CRO is employed to ensure businesses can put their best foot forward and create the right first impression.
Conversion Rate: How to Calculate It
Before we dive further into conversion rate optimisation specifications, let us take a look at the formula used to calculate conversion rate:
Conversion Rate= Total number of conversions / Total number of visitors x 100
Usually, conversion rates are calculated for an extended period of time to check for fluctuations. For instance, if your website had 20,000 visitors in the month of March and only 500 purchased your product, your conversion rate would be 2.5.
While a good conversion rate varies from industry to industry, average e-commerce sellers should aim for a rate of 2.5 to 3. For those with conversion rates below these numbers, now might be the right time to put a conversion rate optimisation plan in place.
Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimisation
Let us now take a look into the benefits of implementing a conversion rate optimisation strategy:
- Increased Revenue: The most obvious benefit of CRO for any seller is increased revenue. With the right strategy in place, for example, a user-friendly landing page or an easy checkout option, companies can convert their visitors into buying customers. Thus, this gives a huge boost to revenues.
- Better User Experience: By re-designing your website to make it more attractive to your visitors, you can expect to provide a better user experience. Not only does this translate to more sales, but it also ensures brand loyalty. It also increases your customer’s lifetime value.
- Reliable Insights: Once you start managing your CRO, you will be able to run tests and analyse your website’s performance in various regards. Hence, you will be able to collect reliable data that can be used to further boost the growth of your company. Furthermore, by using the right tools, you can also gain insights into user behaviour and usage patterns.
Elements of Conversion Rate Optimization
Broadly speaking, there are four elements that benefit from CRO. These elements are discussed here:
- Landing Page: The page that a user lands on after clicking on any link or advertisement is known as the landing page. Naturally, this is the page that tends to draw the most attention and conversion rates. Hence, any e-commerce seller’s landing page should have the most optimised design to ensure visitors can easily proceed to buy items of their choice.
- Home Page: Apart from landing pages, home pages are also important in ensuring visitors get a good first impression. Therefore, an ideal homepage should have aesthetic colours, designs, hard-to-miss sign-up options, chatbots, and so on.
- Blog: Blogs can be utilised very strategically to carry out conversion rate optimisation. In addition to containing valuable information about a company’s products or services, blogs can also include calls to action or CTAs that motivate readers to sign up for newsletters, updates, and much more. These can ultimately lead to more sales.
- Page Speed: Needless to say, no one likes to wait around for a website to load. Hence, businesses must take special care to ensure their websites load all media and information quickly to avoid losing customers and improving conversion rates.
Strategies for Conversion Rate Optimization
The following strategies can be implied for conversion rate optimisation to get the best results:
- Include Text-Based CTAs: Most people tend to ignore banner-like advertisements. This is referred to as banner blindness. To bypass this, your best option would be to include long CTAs naturally within a blog post or the main content of a website. Such CTAs have higher chances of being interacted with, leading to more conversion and higher sales.
- Test and Develop Your Landing Page: You already know the importance of landing pages. Therefore, you should constantly test and develop your landing page in order to boost your conversion rates. This can be done through A/B testing, wherein you run two versions of your page to analyse which one is performing better.
- Add Leads: Lead flows are essentially pop-up or drop-down boxes that appear on web pages offering some deal or discount. These are a great way to catch people’s attention and make them buy or sign up for something, thus optimising your conversion rates.
- Improve Connectivity: If you are unable to have a live chat feature or automated chatbot on all your web pages, you should at least deploy these tools on your high-performing pages to ensure no queries of your customers go ignored. This can positively impact your rates and improve customer experience.
- Use CRO Tools: CRO tools can help you accurately monitor how well your pages are performing and provide reliable data as well. You can use these tools to set metrics and judge your website against those metrics to find bottlenecks in your online store. Hence, this is a great option to improve CRO.
Conclusion
To conclude, businesses need online visitors to convert to actual leads to generate sales, profit, and growth. Therefore, conversion rate optimisation is an integral part of any e-commerce store’s potential success. Whether you are a seller yourself or want to make a career in this, CRO is essential to learn.
So, why not sign up for Eduonix’s course on Landing Pages and how they can be optimised and designed to get the most conversion rates? By the end of this course, you will surely be an expert in CRO!