Conversion Rate optimization strategy

Things Everyone Should Know Before Running a Conversion Rate Optimisation Strategy

CRO is one of the most useful and powerful marketing tools that businesses and marketers alike have access to these days. Not only is it proven to directly influence profit acquisition and lead generation, but a good conversion rate optimisation strategy can also improve rankings within search engines, assist in building a brand, help project future directions for the company, and more.

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CRO is a massively powerful tool but resources are useless if you don’t know how to use them. To this end, we at Traffic Radius decided to put together this blog designed to show people the main things that experts find wrong with dodgy CRO strategies.

What NOT to do.

Before we get into what a good conversion rate optimisation strategy looks like, it’s a good idea to establish some hard and fast things to avoid doing in your CRO. Doing any of the following items will result in a non-optimised campaign and therefore a short countdown to failure. The following items are the out of bounds of CRO marketing.

No Call to Action above the Fold

If you did a double-take when you read “the fold” in relation to digital media, don’t be alarmed, you’re not alone. The concept of the “fold” goes back to traditional marketing and media. You know how in old-timey movies there’s a bunch of businessmen on a bus or train and they’re all sitting in a line reading the same paper, for the sake of ease of handling, they’ve got it folded up in half? Well in web design, the “fold” is everything that’s on your desktop before you need to scroll, just like those businessmen would have to unfold or flip their paper around to continue reading their article.

In the simplest terms, the fold refers to the point at which you have to start scrolling.

The fold is an incredibly important concept in web design, as everything above the fold presents the all-important first impression of your business and brand. It’s proven that if your above-the-fold content and copy doesn’t impress customers, then it’s highly unlikely that they’ll continue to deal with you for very long, even more unlikely that they’ll convert.

Putting a call to action on your above the fold content is extremely important and yet too few companies are doing it. If there is no CTA (Call to Action) on your above the fold content, your conversion rate optimisation strategy will suffer because of it.

Not Optimising for Page Speed

There is no such thing as too fast when it comes to the internet. In fact, speed and ease of communication was the basis for the invention of the internet way back when. One of the primary resources of the internet is speed, and slow websites suffer both in terms of usability and conversions.

Just like with the stone, bronze, and iron ages, the main resource of our time is information, hence the term “information age.” People are getting better at monitoring, absorbing, and retaining information at faster speeds  and if your website’s load times can’t keep up with our brain’s need for stimulation then you will be left in the lurch. Part of everyone’s conversion rate optimisation strategy should be to invest in speed improvements on their site. It’s time consuming and costly, but it’s a worthy spend.

Not Optimising for Mobile First

Yes, that’s right, first. The information age is not only determined by the availability of information but also its accessibility, and the advent of smartphones and other internet hand-held devices have made information all the more accessible than ever before. Everyone is connected to the internet, all the time. In fact, roughly 61% of Google traffic and searches comes from mobile.

To their credit, companies do typically use mobile responsiveness coding, but mobile optimisation is entirely different. Mobile responsiveness merely packs your desktop content into a column. For mobile users, this just isn’t enough.

Mobile users may have different questions or needs or different time constraints than desktop users. This means that if you’re not optimising your website for mobile, and merely using mobile responsiveness, your CRO will suffer. The first consideration in web design always needs to be the mobile user, because the truth is that these days the most frequently used computer is the one we carry in our pockets.

Not Optimising Metadata

Conversion doesn’t begin at your website’s homepage, and neither should your conversion rate optimisation strategy. Too often marketers are seeing metadata that appears in the results pages of search engines, packed with keywords aimed at raising rankings, but not at optimising conversions.

The fact is it doesn’t matter how many customers you have if you’re not converting enough to generate an income. Focus your metadata on getting good conversions rather than increasing your audience and you will be rewarded for your efforts.

Not Properly Tracking Conversion Opportunities

CRO is great because it allows for real-time analysis of customer behaviours and habits. This data is infinitely useful but too many companies aren’t using it to its fullest. While they may respond to what customers do by changing the order of certain pages or making the checkout process easier, it seems that there are many people completely unaware of the opportunities that CRO uncovers for its users.

Pay close attention to the implications of your customer’s user journey, take surveys, ask questions, and find the missing opportunities either in your website design, how you run your business, or how people use your website in order to properly turn over brilliant conversions.

What you CAN do.

Now that we’ve gotten problem areas out of the way, now we can work on some real positive methods to improve your conversion rate optimisation strategy.

Create Landing Pages and Put Them through A/B Tests

Landing Pages are the pages your customers land on during a targeted campaign. These pages are critical as they are centred on the desired action you want customers to take. For example, if you were basing a campaign around a specific product, your landing page would prominently feature that product, complete with a call to action to add it to the cart or make use of a promotion.

Create a few of these pages and run them through a series of A/B tests. Launch the one that provides the most positive results and you’ll soon see your conversion rate start climbing.

Test your Above-The-Fold Content

We told you the fold was important! Just to reiterate, the fold represents the point at which your customers have to start scrolling. Anything important should go here, including prominent CTAs and targeted content. Just like with Landing Pages it’s important to test the content that goes here and see if the projected results match your goals.

Run CRO Tests on High Traffic Pages

Your conversion rate optimisation strategy should focus on the pages that are pulling the most traffic. The purpose of a website is to draw people in, and the pages that are attracting more customers will contain the top two lessons you need for CRO:

-What do customers like about your website?

-What causes them to bounce?

Your highest traffic earning pages will provide the most accurate data on these two figures, and allow you to apply the gained knowledge to your other website pages.

Use PIE to Prioritise CRO Tests.

With all the testing that needs doing, it can be difficult to know which tests to run sooner rather than later. Fortunately, there’s a widely used acronym that can be used to accurately determine the order in which you run your tests. PIE:

Potential – How much potential is there for growth or improvement on a given subject?

Importance – How important is the subject to your business?

Ease – How easy is it to test that page?

Using PIE will allow you to run effective tests with effective results.

Hide CTAs in Content

We’re all familiar with Call-to-Action buttons. They’re prominent, often brightly coloured and some are even animated, but in long-form content, a customer’s mind may wonder from your intended purpose. That’s why it’s useful to work in calls-to-action in your top and middle-of-the-funnel content. If you want to speak to experts in doing this, get in touch with Traffic Radius.

Do you see what we did there?

Use Tools to Gather Accurate User Data

The heart of CRO is the users that come onto your site. With the plethora of tools on the internet for analysing user journey, behaviour, and analytics, there’s really no excuse to not be optimising to what they need. From KISSMetrics to CrazyEgg, there is a plethora of high-quality CRO analysis tools providing heatmaps, customer tracking, screen recordings, and more that will allow you to accurately gather as much data about your visitors as possible.

Trust Signals

The internet is a familiar and alltoo often scary place. With the rise of cyberspace has come a rise in cybercrime, identity theft, and fraud. With the vast increase of websites available on the internet, there’s come a rise in legitimate websites displaying all the things that people used to warn us about (bad spelling, low quality images, slow loading speeds, etc.) making them look like bad websites when they’re actually legitimate businesses too busy to maintain good website standards.

This is where prominently displaying icons known as “trust signals” comes into play. People will feel much better about your website if they can see the badges, certifications, and awards you’ve won for your website’s security and trustworthiness. Trust signals go a long way to ensuring that your customers trust you.

Traffic Radius, CRO Services You Can Trust

When it comes to conversion rate optimisation strategy there aren’t many who can match the expertise of Traffic Radius. We are a Melbourne-based marketing agency, offering a range of services to an impressive portfolio of over 400 clients. We love our work, and our uniquely results driven ethic, as well as our friendly attitude, dedicated service, and experienced personnel are guaranteed to get you the results you need. Simply contact us here, or call us on 1300 870 901.