What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and Why Is It Important?

If you’re planning an event, you don’t spend all of your time building the guest list, because getting the right people to show up is only half the battle. The guests you worked so hard to get through the door will exit as quickly as they entered if your event offers a lackluster experience.

Your website is no different.

So much of digital marketing is focused on optimizing the traffic to your website. Why not put the same time and effort into what they experience once they get there? Put simply, you’re leaving money on the table if you’re not investing in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

According to a report from Unbounce that calculates average conversion rates by industry, 90% of visitors to a website won’t complete the desired action. With the odds already stacked against you, CRO offers a means of understanding what drives, blocks, and persuades users to take action. You dig into the data, form a hypothesis, and then test that hypothesis by allowing real users to tell you whether that hypothesis was accurate or not.

By implementing and testing data-driven optimizations, you can improve the overall user experience, which in turn increases the chances of a user converting on your website.

CRO can help grow your business in a number of ways:

Better Understand Your Users

At its core, CRO is the process of understanding your users and what motivates them. The learnings derived from CRO don’t have to be limited to your website. They can be applied across your business, enabling you to create more personalized experiences and invest your marketing efforts into areas that are going to allow you to best engage your target audience.

Make Data-Driven Decisions

Let’s be honest: You can’t always trust your gut. Know what you can trust? Data. When you make decisions backed by data, you know what you’re doing is going to drive results. Eliminating guesswork and letting data be your guide also aids in marketing efficiency and improved UX.

Mitigate Risk

No matter the aspect of your website, everyone is going to have an opinion, from the use of a particular color to the choice of a specific image. So many decisions are made based on intuition and “best practices,” when feelings can set you up for failure more often than not. Testing removes feelings from the equation, helping you make smarter and more efficient choices.

How CRO Generates Big Gains from Small Changes

Changes driven by CRO can amount to small tweaks on your website, from the size, color, or position of a Call-To-Action button to the messaging at the top of a page or the number of fields populating a submission form. But don’t let the size of the changes fool you. In fact, the same goes for the growth in your conversion rate.

Improving your conversion rate from 5% to 5.5%, for example, is nothing to scoff at.

If your website receives 100,000 visitors on average each month, with a 5% conversion rate, that amounts to 5,000 monthly conversions. If the average value of each conversion is $250, your monthly website revenue amounts to approximately $1,250,000.

Increasing that 5% conversion rate up to 5.5% means 5,500 monthly conversions and a new monthly revenue of $1,375,000. You’ve increased your website revenue by $125,000 with what may appear to be a marginal increase in conversion rate to the casual observer.

Don’t Leave That Money on the Table

CRO often isn’t about making wholesale changes to your website. You can start small by optimizing landing pages and work your way up from there. But we must offer a fair warning: Once you start seeing the results from testing, you’re not going to want to stop.

Trust us, we’re speaking from experience. Contact Spinutech today if you’re ready to start experimenting with CRO and putting hypotheses about your users to the test.