Conversion rate optimization, unlike what you might think, has nothing to do with your traffic. You can easily get a hundred thousand unique visitors per month but not convert them to loyal customers. That’s exactly one of the biggest mistakes that lots of marketers, entrepreneurs, and online businesses make; they focus on increasing traffic.

The main focus should be on building your brand or getting more exposure to it, positioning your business as an industry leader, and optimizing your website for higher conversion.
Let’s examine a few real-world scenarios to understand how to design an efficient conversion rate optimization strategy.

Source: https://qeryz.com/blog/building-conversion-plan/

First Scenario: CRO strategy to increase sales, and revenue

The most important part of conversion rate optimization planning is to set a clear goal. You have to set a clear baseline and understand your status quo. Once you know more about your current situation, you should set your goals.

Here are a few questions you need to be answering before setting revenue related CRO goals:

  • Do you want to increase your overall revenue, or revenue per product?
  • How much time are you going to spend on this CRO experiment?
  • What outcome do you expect? Do you intend to increase revenue by specific percentage, or you rather earn certain amount of money more than your current revenue?
  • Are you looking for long term plan, or a just a quick fix and focusing on low hanging fruits?

Second Scenario: CRO strategy to acquire more leads

When it comes to lead generation, having a sold CRO experiment can significantly improve our business. The first step towards optimizing your business for higher conversion is to understand your customers, and have a clear picture about their persona.

Knowing your customer’s persona, help you to define an intriguing lead magnet for each customer segment. This way you can track your conversion rate base on the number of people who have visited your page and have opted in for your lead magnet, versus the total number of visitors.

You should address these questions before optimizing your offer or landing pages:

  • How much do you know about your visitors, and customers? Do you know their pains, gains, incomplete jobs, desires, and needs?
  • Is your lead magnet able to address their pain?
  • Is your content engaging enough, and adds value to your reader’s business?
  • What lead magnet do your leading competitors offer to their visitors? Does it increase your opt-in rate if you focus on reverse engineering, or you should take an innovative approach?
  • What do your visitors love to see on your website?

Third Scenario: CRO strategy for better brand exposure

Unlike the other two scenarios that produce very tangible results, optimizing your website for brand awareness is a tricky growth hacking strategy , because you won’t be able to measure results in a short period of time.

Instead of testing your website to find what background color works better, or what call-to-action button get more clicks, you need to invest time on customer journey optimization, and user experience.

You may address these questions:

  • Is my website user friendly? (Don’t guess, Ask your visitors)
  • Is my value proposition clearly defined?
  • What do people say about my brand?
  • What do my brand represent? Is it low price, or high quality, is it cheap or premium?
  • Have I designed a clear path for different customer segments to navigate through my website?

Don’t forget to test your CRO?

Since Conversion optimization strategy is an ongoing experiment, you should collect data for at least a month, and then validate them.

You should also try to understand the data, and learn how to interpret them correctly. The data you have collected during your CRO helps you to either prove your hypothesis, or make the necessary adjustment to your strategy.

You may use different techniques such as split testing, heat map, user tracking, etc. to test different version of landing pages. Once you have defined the winner, you may drive your traffic to the one that performs better.

Here are a few CRO tools that you can use for your CRO experiments.

  • Qualaroo
  • Google Analytics (free)
  • KISSMetrics
  • Mixpanel
  • Segment.io

All in all, the point of CRO is to keep optimizing your online business based on genuine interaction with your visitors. Remember, running an online business is not about having a stunning website, it’s about how many happy customers do you get and how successful are you in increasing that number on a daily basis.

Read more: