Why you need to become a conversion rate optimization wizard

Why you need to become a Conversion Rate Optimization Wizard

 

I know you’re thinking what does wizardry and conversion rate optimization have in common? If you’ve ever developed a landing page that has exceeded your conversion rate predictions, then you know it feels like you’ve just performed magic.

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What is it & why should you care?

Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO is a method of using data and analytics to assess the performance of your web pages of turning visitors into customers. It is used to help determine how well your website is performing, usually it determines this through the number of subscribers, downloads or new customers your website develops (hence conversion rate). Obviously the higher the conversion rate the better, so it’s all about making it as easy as possible to turn a website visitor into something more.

 

CRO is important because it helps you gather more leads/sales from the same amount of website traffic. Now if you’re spending your hard earned money on attracting traffic to your website either through SEO services or Google Adwords, then this should be a big deal for you. If you are able to increase the number of your conversions from 15% to 25% just by altering your landing page, wouldn’t that be worth it? With the proper CRO you will be receiving a greater Return on Investment (ROI) than you were before which translates to more money in your pocket. Wouldn’t it be better to convert more of the same number of visitors rather than trying to just attract a larger number of visitors?

So how do I do it?

While I was studying, I began managing a friend’s website, something on the side. At the time, I was just a marketing student trying to get my skills up and he was trying to be the next big thing in online fashion (unique, right). Anyway, what he needed my help for was to boost the number of subscribers to his weekly fashion blog (sound familiar?). He was growing, but at an extraordinarily slow rate, an average of 3 new subscribers per week over 3 months! So, he and all of his 36 subscribers came to me to help figure out what was going wrong.

He had great fashion content and a great idea but something wasn’t clicking, (something most entrepreneurs/businesses can relate to). So I began looking into how to help boost those numbers. I decided to focus on helping him in 3 phases: segmentation, design & content.

He had an online store linked to his fashion blog and my first step was to make sure the people that wanted to shop, didn’t end up on the blog. We separated the two sides of the website and created a little form that popped up encouraging to subscribe after a visitor had made a purchase. Then we went to work on testing different blog page layouts and making it easier for visitors to subscribe.

We worked on testing different page layouts for his blog. We developed another pop-up form that would appear when a visitor was just finishing a blog post. Next, we changed the colours of his buttons and changed the fonts of his forms. Then we waited……

Then we waited……

and waited…….

The first week it went up by 1 whole subscriber (quite a big deal). The 2nd week he had 8 new subscribers, 3 months after the changes were implemented his subscribers jumped from 3 per week to over 15 per week (that’s a 400% jump)! Since then he continuously worked on improving his CRO anyway he could, he has now become the biggest CRO fanatic I know.

Where do you start?

While there is no wizardry school of conversion rate optimization with an Dumbledore-esque headmaster, you have already started your education without even knowing it.

Become your website’s harshest critic.

Assess how hard it is to become a customer/subscriber, and get your friends to offer honest feedback on your web pages.

Begin using an A/B testing platform so you can gather personalised feedback on which landing pages actually work for your product/services. Don’t copy results from other websites because you don’t have the exact same website visitors.

Never assume you have all the right answers, not all website visitors want exactly what you think, so give them what they want. It will help your CRO and in the long-run will make your pockets grow as if you were a wizard, for real.

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