If you work in digital marketing, chances are you’ve heard of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) software. You may even use some of it in your marketing technology stack, whether you realize it or not. CRO software can be used to create custom landing pages, test calls to action or even just better understand your visitor behavior.
These are all valuable services that fall under the Conversion Rate Optimization umbrella, but they’re also quite different from one another. CRO is an extremely broad category, with many competing and complementary services offering different solutions to the same underlying problem. What do heat maps have to do with landing pages, anyway?
It can all feel a bit overwhelming, but the underlying logic is quite simple. And once you wrap your head around the concept, it opens up a world of possibilities to improve your marketing funnel and increase the quantity and quality of your leads.
So let’s dive in, first with the “what” and then with the “why”.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
For all the complexity surrounding the topic, the actual definition of Conversion Rate Optimization is quite self explanatory. All businesses with a website have a “conversion rate” – the percentage of visitors that complete a “call to action” (most frequently a form submission). A higher conversion rate is desirable, since it means a business is getting more leads (and eventually customers) from the same number of visitors.
Conversion Rate Optimization is therefore the process of increasing that percentage, by way of making improvements to the website explicitly designed to help your visitors turn into leads.
There are many ways to do that, from lowering bounce rate to changing the look and feel of your pages, and we’ve outlined some of the most common options here. But today, let’s answer the most critical question of all:
Why Does it Matter?
Let’s say you have a goal to increase the number of leads your business gets this quarter. You already spend on all the right keywords, have a great social and organic strategy, and send frequent emails to a thriving subscriber list. What’s your strategy?
You have two main ways to go about that: bring in more visitors, or convert more of the ones you already have.
Bringing in new visitors is called “acquisition”, and is a perfectly viable and important part of any marketing strategy. But it’s also expensive, and frequently falls victim to the law of diminishing returns. You’ve already plucked the low hanging fruit (the best prospects are often the easiest to reach, since they’re actively looking for services like yours) so now you’re left searching for other prospective buyers.
So yes, of course you could throw money at the problem – a heavily increased advertising budget is sure to do the trick! But unfortunately for most of us in the real world, our budgets often don’t keep pace with our expected outcomes. In order to hit your quarterly lead goal, you’ll need to get more efficient.
That’s where CRO comes in. Instead of finding new prospects to bring in, CRO software allows marketing teams to better serve the ones they have.
Maybe you have 1,000 visitors from a paid campaign, and convert 1% of them. That gives you 10 new leads. Great! But what about the other 99%? They all clicked your advertisement – many of them browsed your site. Are you really ready to give up on them?
In almost all cases, it’s vastly more efficient to improve the experience for the 990 visitors who didn’t convert than it is to bring in a fresh batch of 1,000. Whether it’s creating a custom landing page, adding crisper and clearer CTAs, or incorporating Instant Remarketing, any investment in CRO affects every single prospect on the site. In the example above, a conversion rate increase of a single percentage point would effectively double that campaign’s expected revenue.
What’s more, the benefits of an improved sitewide conversion rate would be felt in all future campaigns, helping not just with a single campaign but across all channels and customer touchpoints.
So that’s a quick and dirty primer on Conversion Rate Optimization. We here at Navu take it extremely seriously, and are excited to add Instant Remarketing to the fold as an innovative new approach. If you’re interested in learning more, sign up for our waitlist today!
