Conversion Rate Optimization examples & how to rapidly improve your website
Drew Eastmead
September 16, 2020
Your company’s website could — and should — be continuously improving. If it’s not, you’re leaving money on the table. This is where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes into play.
CRO is an online marketing strategy that involves running website tests. Why? Because every website has hidden money in it — sales or leads who abandon your site due to poor user experience (UX), flawed design, or messaging that misses the mark.
As an example of a CRO test, we could show some of your website visitors variation A of your home page, and show others variation B, like so:
Why do we do this?
We want to see if — when we make tweaks to your existing web pages — we can convert more of your website visitors into customers.
CRO pays for itself — here’s the math
Imagine you’re running a scuba diving tour company in Hawaii (not that I want to do that or anything — this is purely hypothetical). Currently, your website home page gets 10,000 visitors per month:
Currently, 2% of your website visitors are converting into customers. If you want more than 200 customers per month from your website, how can you raise that number? Two ways:
- Increase your website visitors per month (currently 10,000). You could invest in online advertising to drive more website traffic.
- Increase the percentage of visitors who convert (currently 2%). This is CRO — the fastest way to improve performance from website traffic you're already getting.
Let's focus on #2, CRO. We're going to consistently run website tests by making tweaks to your existing web pages, and see which changes convert more of your website visitors into customers.
With CRO, we pit two different versions of a web page against each other.
Let’s take that hypothetical home page and split its website traffic this month (10,000 users) between version A and version B below. Our hypothesis is that version B will perform better.
Because version B (3% conversion rate) performed better than version A (2% conversion rate), we'll set version B as your new website home page. In other words, moving forward, we'll send 100% of your website traffic to that variation of your home page. And now, the results...
So even increasing your conversion rate by a seemingly small margin can lead to huge business wins. Through our CRO testing, we improved our old 2% conversion rate to 3%, and that is now leading to 100 additional customers per month (a 50% increase).
What website tests should we run?
The sky’s the limit! CRO is heavily data-driven, but it can also be creative. Based on user experience best practices and your website’s analytics, we develop hypotheses as to how a specific web page could be improved.
Typical CRO test scenarios include experimenting with competing:
- Page layouts (adding, removing, or rearranging elements)
- Headlines & language
- Colors or sizes of elements
- Calls-to-action
- Experiences on mobile devices
Some tests “win” while others don’t. But for every CRO test we run, we learn more about your users.
"If you want a great website, you’ve got to test. After you’ve worked on a site for even a few weeks, you can’t see it freshly anymore. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to test it.”
– Steve Krug, UX expert & author of Don’t Make Me Think
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is my favorite digital marketing tactic because:
CRO is fast
Instead of redesigning your entire website — a project that could take months — you can start doing CRO experiments on your website today.
CRO is low-risk, high-reward
It’s low-risk because we make small tweaks to your existing website pages — typically ones that are underperforming. Website testing and experimentation is a great way to dip your toes in the water for almost any online idea you have that could improve the customer experience.
CRO is ROI-friendly
As shown above, CRO is completely data-driven. When you invest $X toward improving your website through these tests, it’s easy to measure the results. We can see that the tweaks we made to your website this month resulted in X more leads, calls, or online sales.
CRO is affordable
When executed effectively, CRO provides your website visitors with a better user experience, which drives more sales/leads/phone calls. This approach can be far more effective and affordable than investing heavily in advertising or other online marketing tactics to simply get more people to come to your website. Depending on your goals and the complexity of your website, my rates for CRO range from $1-6k/month.
Start driving more revenue from your website today
As people become ever more reliant on the web to live, shop, and work, your organization’s website should be a living, breathing project that is constantly being optimized — so your users have a better experience and you can drive better results.
