An Easy To Learn Guide To Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Online traffic is highly inconsistent. If you’re unable to get visitors to enter your conversion funnel in the first go, the chances of them coming back and performing the desired action are quite low. This is nothing but an opportunity lost for your business. The best way to improve your chances and get more conversions is by running an effective conversion rate optimization campaign.

Traffic acquisition is only half the marketing equation. In addition to bringing visitors to your website, you need to keep them there. Not only that, you need to transform them from interested prospects into customers. Your website needs to move the relationship forward(and seal the deal). And once they complete their first transactions? You need to convert your first-time visitors into repeat buyers.

A good conversion rate optimization campaign not only means saving high on your time, money, and efforts but also exploring new growth strategies that were unknown in the past. In other words, conversion rate optimization helps you in understanding your website’s usability better while giving customer behavior insights and tips on how to make your UX better to meet your goals.

Conversion rate optimization(CRO) provides a significant opportunity for businesses of any size. It takes a scientific approach to optimizing websites and enables businesses(and organizations)to convert more visitors into subscribers or customers.

This guide to conversion rate optimization is to help anyone interested in conversion rate optimization learn how to get started and how to get the best possible results with their testing program. This guide is for entrepreneurs, founders, marketers, bloggers, and anyone else who would like to improve conversion rates on their website. You’ll find the guide useful for many different types of organizations, including eCommerce stores, SaaS businesses, non-profit organizations, political campaigns, and more.

Conversion optimization isn’t rocket science. In many ways, it’s common sense. But you need to actively think about what you’re doing andknow the best practices. To fully understand the essence of conversion rate optimization, let’s start by first understanding what exactly it is!

Understanding What Conversion Rate Optimization is:

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action — be that filling out a form, becoming customers, or otherwise. The CRO process involves understanding how users move through your site, what actions they take, and what’s stopping them from completing your goals.

It is the process of optimizing your site or landing page experience based on website visitor behavior to help improve desired actions (conversions) on the said page. At a strategic level, CRO is an ongoing process of learning and optimizing. Unfortunately, the “ongoing” aspect often gets ignored while discussing conversion rate optimization.

It is the process of enabling people to take an action when they visit a website. By designing and modifying certain elements of a webpage, a business can increase the chances that site visitors will “convert” into a lead or customer before they leave.

When it comes to internet marketing, you can generate more revenue in one of two ways. You can drive additional traffic to your site in order to increase sales, or you can improve the effectiveness of your site to boost sales with the same amount of traffic you’re currently receiving. Conversion rate optimization(CRO)focuses on the latter.

With conversion rate optimization, you evaluate your website’s sales funnel to identify ways you can improve your site in order to get a higher percentage of people to sign up for your product or service. Next, you come up with a hypothesis to test, and then you create a new version of a web page or landing page to test against your current version to see which one is more effective at getting visitors to sign up or buy. In the end, you implement the variation that convinces the highest percentage of people to buy what you’re selling.

What may come as a surprise is that both small and big changes to copy, layout, and design can have a big impact on the number of people who sign up for your service or buy your product. Switch Video, for example, found that changing a single word in a call-to-action button copy increased qualified leads generated from their homepage by 221%. In another test, Performable, a company acquired by Hubspot in 2011, was able to increase click-throughs 21% by using a red button instead of a green one.

Performable was able to increase click-throughs 21% by using a red call-to-action button instead of a green one

Results like this make it obvious why conversion rate optimization optimization is so valuable to companies. Even small changes can have a significant impact on the bottom line.

However, testing is the key factor when it comes to CRO. Without testing, you’re left relying on your gut instinct to determine what will be more effective, but once you test, you know right away whether a change leads to an increase or decrease in conversions. It takes the guesswork out of knowing what you should say and how you should design a new web page.

The number of tests you can eventually run are endless. You can test different headlines, new value propositions, varying button colors, different call-to-action copy, and much more. Each change has the opportunity to impact conversions, and small wins add up over time.

Primary Elements of Conversion Rate Optimization

CRO is a comprehensive process that sprawls across a multitude of stages. A successful CRO campaign is the one that uses in-depth data to analyze results, runs multiple tests, tweaks content to make it more relevant to the visitors, and draws necessary conclusions. Throughout the journey of a CRO process, a marketer will encounter six primary elements that can be optimized.

1. Landing Page Design

Landing page design is the first and foremost element that defines the usability and success of a website. The more aesthetically designed a site is, the more traction it will get! Landing pages areinherentlydesigned for people to take an action. An event landing page, for example, can be optimized with a video of last-year’s event to encourage visitors to register for this year’s. A landing page for a free resource can be optimized with preview content from that resource to encourage users to download it.

Let’s understand this using an example most of us may be familiar with. Assuming that most customers landing on any of Amazon’s product pages come with the pure intention of buying its product(s), understanding the importance of design in driving conversions (how it can make or break a deal for the eCommerce giant), is important. The giant has strategically designed each of its product pages so as to make even the minutest of details prominently visible to its customers. For instance, when on a product page, customers can instantly add the product to their cart by conveniently clicking on the “Add to Cart” button (in a color that’s prominently visible – Orange) placed right next to product information column.

How does this help? Orange is an intense color that complements the website’s white background making it easy for the visitors to identify and take the necessary action instantly.

Furthermore, the effective use of the white space to highlight the product’s features and smart use of large images on the left side of the page instills trust and quickly captures the attention of the visitors.

2. Website Copy

Let’s start by saying that every website has its homepage. Homepages are prime candidates for CRO. In addition to making a first impression on visitors, the homepage is also an opportunity to retain those visitors and guide them further into your website. You can do this by emphasizing links to product information, offering a free signup button, or even incorporating a chatbot that solicits questions from visitors at any point during their browsing experience.

While a well-designed and aesthetically pleasing website can get more website traffic flowing on your site, words can verbally hook your visitors and convert them into potential leads. Writing relevant and engaging content that emphasizes the product’s persuasiveness can make the difference between visitors staying on your website and taking the necessary actions and visitors leaving your site without taking any action. Website copy can be further divided into two subsections:

Section 1: Headline

Headlines are the first and foremost thing a visitor sees on your landing page. It typically defines their first impression of your business. If they do not like it, they’ll not scroll down and check the rest of your page. To ensure you’re on the right track, focus on the following things:

A. Formatting: Typically focusing on the font type, font size, and color to ensure it captures your visitors’ attention and is easily readable.

B. Writing Style: Keep the following things in mind:

1. Ask a question – e.g. Do you know email marketing can add 30% more revenue to your business?, How to find the products of your choice? etc.
2. Split your content into two parts – e.g. Internet marketing: what lies in store?
3. Address directly – e.g. Can you rely on content marketing?
4. Focus on the numbers – e.g. 10 ways to ensure email marketing adds to your conversions!

In either case, one should keep the headline short and to the point ensuring it talks exactly about what the product or service is about in a clear, concise manner.

Section 2: Body Content

A well-written body content is essential for a website. It must answer the basic question – “what’s in store for me?” It must also be clear, concise, to-the-point, and portray your brand’s persona in the most efficient manner.

To draft good body content, consider the following:

A. Formatting:

• Cut content into relevant paragraphs for easy readability
• Use necessary subheadings to break down the content into glance-able chunks
• Bullet points or numbered lists wherever necessary
• Font type, size, and color which matches the overall design guidelines of the brand

B. Writing Style:

• Right tonality as per the target audience (fun, professional, casual, etc.)
• Stylistic elements such as metaphor, adjectives, etc. to highlight certain points
• Address directly to the end-user and what they are here for, answering their questions
• Add key phrases to improve the overall usability and easy takeaways

As an example, Slack, a modern collaboration hub space that allows teams to stay connected and work together, has a strong landing page headline followed by subsequent content that focuses on its USPs.

A catchy headline accompanied by content that’s concise and answers all the necessary questions makes any page look attractive, and does the desired work – getting customers onboard.

3. Call-To-Action

A call-to-action (CTA) is exactly what it sounds – a request or call for customers to take the desired action. This action could be anything – from subscribing to a newsletter to booking a slot in a webinar, making a purchase, availing a service, and so on. The stronger and crispier the CTA, the more leads it can generate.

But, is it this simple? Take a look at some of the industry’s best CTA strategies and you’ll see that they all make use of basic psychology to define their CTAs.

Quoting an example here, ADT, a Tyco International company, was able to increase its conversion rate by 60% by simply changing the primary text of its CTA button – from “Book a Free Survey” to “Get a Free Quote.”

4. Navigation and Site Structure

Your site’s structure must focus on building an experience that’s easy to navigate. Site structure, at its core, is typically a graph of how different pages of your site interact with each other.

Although every site is different and has different navigations, this hierarchy style is a standard example.

You typically start navigating from the homepage, then explore its series of categories and subcategories until you’ve found what you were actually looking for. If this entire process is fluid, as explained in the graph above, then your users will not have an issue navigating through your site. But, if it’s unstructured, they’ll be lost in the process; ultimately abandoning your site.

To accomplish this, one must ensure users are easily and quickly able to move between important sections of the website and are able to find whatever they need to accomplish their goals in the fewest clicks possible.

In other words, creating a fluid, easy-to-navigate website is the key to increasing conversions as well as your brand’s reputation.

5. Forms

Forms are crucial to most companies, especially if they’re a part of their sales funnel. Optimizing these important customer touchpoints can extensively help in improving conversions. While many theories follow on how to build an effective form for your website, these may or may not equally work for all companies. In many cases, having a comprehensive form has worked wonders for some organizations, while the shorter form has worked with many others. It is always a balancing act between lead quality and volume of leads that gets the best ROI.

Yet, four basic optimization tips to take your form from okay to outstanding are as follows:

1. The fewer the fields, the better it is. True in most cases but not always, especially when you want your sales team to focus on only the most serious leads or in cases where it is paramount to get additional lead information like the industry or the city if you have lead workflows dependent on this additional fields.
2. Good looking forms often equate to nice user experience. Good forms constitute no flashing text, clear and consistent styling and tooltips and validation build at the right places. Good forms typically also have the most important fields are the top followed by less important fields. One can also experiment with progressive forms in order to improve their conversion rates without compromising on the depth of user information.
3. Easy password creation makes the entire form-filling process an easy breeze. The password is one of the fields which takes up the most time to fill. Needless to say, guiding users on creating strong yet easy to remember passwords are the key to make this process more fulfilling for both the user as well as the business.
4. Having one-click form submits using Facebook or Google SSO can also work wonders for your conversion process. Most times users are already logged into one of these sites and this helps them convert much more easily. It also alleviates the pain of creating and remembering new passwords. This, however, may not work in all cases, especially B2B contexts, where businesses work with business email IDs of their prospects.

6. Page Speed

Page speed or page load time has a huge impact on the overall performance of your site. In fact, it directly affects the experience of a user, conversion rate of the site, and its ranking on search engine. As per blog published by Semrush, if a site loads in 1.7 seconds, it’s comparatively faster than 75% of the web. While, on the other hand, if it loads in 0.8 seconds, it’s faster than nearly 94% of the web.

Load time delay of even one second can reduce your conversions by 7%. For instance, if your site is generating a revenue of $100,000 a day, then even a second’s delay in its load can cost you about $7,000 per day or even more.

The same one second delay also means that you’re prone to losing about 11% of your potential customers as they’ll simply close your page or back out without even thinking twice.

7. Pricing Page

A website’s pricing page can be the make-or-break point for many website visitors. CRO can help a pricing page convert visitors into customers by modifying the pricing intervals (e.g. price per year vs. price per month), describing the product features associated with each price, and including a phone number for visitors to call for a price quote.

8. Blog

The blog is a massive conversion opportunity for a business’s website. In addition to publishing thoughtful and helpful content about your industry, a blog can use CRO to convert readers into leads. This process often includes adding calls-to-action (CTA) throughout an article, inviting readers to learn more about a topic by submitting their email address in exchange for a ebook or industry report.

Why Conversion Rate Optimization Is So Important

As you can probably imagine, conversion rate optimization is valuable because it generates more sales for the same amount of traffic you’re currently receiving. Instead of sinking additional money into PPC ads or other digital marketing methods to drive more traffic, you’re more efficiently convert your current traffic into leads or sales. And if you do decide to drive more traffic, your CRO improvements mean you’ll get more out of your increased marketing efforts.

CRO enables you to optimize your website’s functionality, while helping you understand the whys and hows of visitor behavior. The fact is, your site never reaches its maximum potential until it’s rigorously experimented.

Consider a hypothetical scenario where you’re the owner of a software-as-a-service(SaaS)business. Before optimizing your site, you convince 5% of people to sign up for your service which costs $50 per month. That works out to 50 new customers per every 1,000 visitors and $2,500 in monthly revenue. Now, suppose you optimize your site and raise your conversion rate from 5% to 7.5%. At this rate, 1,000 visitors turns into 75 customers and $3,750 in monthly sales.

Do you see what happened?You didn’t change anything else about your business, but after making your conversion funnel more effective, sales increased by $1250 for the same number of visitors and with the same pricing as before. Your sales funnel is more effective, and you make more money as a result.

One key formula to remember is this:

If you double conversion rates, then you cut your cost per acquisition in half.

This means if you currently spend $5.00 to acquire each new customer, after you optimize your site and double conversions, your cost per acquisition goes down to $2.50. At that point, you can afford to invest in more advertising or simply benefit from the increased profit.

As you can see, if you want to increase your sales and boost your bottom line, CRO is the way to go.

Case Study: The 2008 Obama Presidential Campaign

The 2008 Obama Presidential Campaign has become a famous example of how conversion rate optimization can help businesses, organizations, and even political candidates accomplish their goals.

During the campaign, Dan Siroker, the founder and CEO of Optimizely, was serving as the Director of Analytics for the Obama Campaign. He proposed that different headline and image/video combinations should be tested to see which one was the most effective at getting people to sign up for the President’s e-mail newsletter. The campaign team knew that a large percentage of people who sign up would end up supporting the President financially, but the trick was getting the most people possible to sign up for the campaign newsletter.

Dan’s team ended up putting together 24 different variations with four button options, three images, and three videos. Interestingly, most people on the team assumed the videos would be the most effective at getting people to sign up.

This is a screenshot of the winning variation from Barack Obama’s 2008 successful presidential campaign.

So what was the result?After testing with 310,382 visitors with each variation seen by around 13,000 people, the version with a picture of Barack Obama’s family and a“Learn More”call-to-action button led to a conversion rate of 11.6% for the winning variation, a 40.6% increase over the original conversion rate which as 8.26%.

Even more impressive than the increase in conversions from the winning variation is the fact that the new version let to approximately 2,880,000 additional sign ups, 288,000 more volunteers, and an additional $60 million in donations over the course of the campaign.

Broadly the Benefits of a CRO Program can be Categorized into Three:

1. Improving Marketing

ROI A well-structured and well-thought-out CRO program based on strong analysis can go a long way in improving return on almost all your marketing activities by:

A. Improving the quality/speed of experiments run on your website:CRO allows you to analyze the performance of your site by running tests and look for the best possible variations which promise conversions. By experimenting with different elements on your landing pages, you can not only check the areas which are giving the best results but also use the gathered data as a fundamental benchmark for your next round of tests/experimentations.

B. Better revenue with the same traffic/incremental business returns:One of the prime benefits of running a CRO campaign is that every change you implement on your site, which eventually increases your conversions, is an incremental win for your business.

For instance, an online eCommerce company planning to enhance its customer experience in a way that it makes purchasing products easy and convenient for its customers can immensely benefit from CRO.

How? By running an A/B test, if it’s able to enhance its conversion rate even by 3%, it means that it’s getting 3% extra revenue day in and day out. Meanwhile, if it has a high volume of sales, 3% improvement can effectively translate its sales into hundreds and thousands of extra dollars for its business.

Australian based eCommerce company ShowPo saw a 6.09% increase in its revenue by running a series of A/B tests and introducing new improved variants on its product pages!

2. Enhancing UX

Benefits of a CRO program spread well across just marketing ROI to give an improved user experience across all lifecycle stages of a visitor whether they’re a first time visitor or they’re a customer through:

A. Personalizing Experience for Your Site Visitors: In today’s time, visitors are too impatient. Unless you’re offering them a site that’s easy to navigate with fewer clicks and make the entire process an easy breeze, they won’t stick around and will eventually look for alternative options. By helping personalize sections of your site based on the visitors’ geography, device, local time or past browsing history, you can make the website that much more relevant to them.

B. Better Insights Into Your Visitor Behavior: CRO process begins with understanding customer behavior through tools like heatmaps and click maps which tell us which sections of the site, people spend more time on. Other tools that help us understand the user experience in a qualitative fashion as user session recording and session replay which help us understand the exact journey a user took in order to accomplish a goal on the site. By looking at enough of such sessions of users who didn’t complete the goal on the site, one can get to understand the pitfalls in their user experience. Other tools which can be used to improve UX can be form analysis and website surveys which can help us optimize our form filling experience and help us understand the exact answers to crucial questions (eg. were you able to accomplish your goal on this website, was this website easy to navigate, would you recommend this site to a friend, etc.) respectively.

3. SEOs Benefits

While not necessarilydirectlyrelated to attracting organic website traffic or ranking on a search engine results page (SERP), conversion rate optimization has distinct benefits for SEO. Those include:

• Improved customer insights. Conversion rate optimization can help you better understand your key audience and find what language or messaging best speaks to their needs. Conversion rate optimization looks at finding therightcustomers for your business. Acquiring more people doesn’t do your business any good if they’re not the right kind of people!
• Better ROI: Higher conversion rate means making more of the resources you have. By studying how to get the most out of your acquisition efforts, you’ll get more conversions without having to bring in more potential customers.
• Better scalability: While your audience size may not scale as your business grows, CRO lets you grow without running out of resources and prospective customers. Audiences aren’t infinite. By turning more browsers into buyers, you’ll be able to grow your business without running out of potential customers.
• Better user experience: When users feel smart and sophisticated on your website, they tend to stick around. CRO studies what works on your site. By taking what works and expanding on it, you’ll make a better user experience. Users who feel empowered by your site will engage with it more — and some may even become evangelists for your brand.
• Enhanced trust: In order for a user to share their credit card, email, or any sort of personal information, they have to genuinely trust the site. Your website is your number-one sales person. Just like an internal sales team, your site needs to be professional, courteous, and ready to answer all of your customers’ questions.

When is conversation rate optimization (CRO) right for your business?

Conversion rate optimization benefits businesses of all sorts irrespective of their size and industry. Here are some common business use cases for better CRO understanding.

Once yoursales and marketing engineconsistently attracts website visitors — and at progressively high amounts — you should start thinking about CRO to convert those visitors into leads for your sales team.

Businesses typically have afinite demandfor products and services, so it’s imperative that you make the most out of your existing website traffic. Tools likeGoogle’s Global Market Findercan show you online search volume to give you an idea of your potential customer demand.

Once you determine the threshold of your customer demand, it’s time to nail down how to get more out of your existing website traffic. But setting a conversion goal isn’t as easy as, “this page converted 50 people this month, so we want 100 next month.”

To improve your business’s conversion potential, you need to look back at the term we defined at the beginning of this article: conversion rate optimization. You don’t just want 50 more conversions from a webpage — you want 50 more conversions for every X amount of people who visit it. This is your conversion rate — it’s thepercentageof people who convert on your website based on how many people have touched it.

How to Calculate Conversion

You can calculate your conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions a webpage generated by the number of people who visited that page.

If a user can convert each time they visit the site:

Imagine we own an ecommerce site — Roger’s Robotics. A user could make a new purchase each session. We want to optimize so they make as many purchases as possible. If a user visited the site three times, that would be three sessions — and three opportunities to convert.

Let’s closer at our user’s three sessions and how they behaved:

• Session 1:No conversion — user was familiarizing themselves with the site and poking around.
• Session 2:User bought a shiny new antenna. This is a conversion!
• Session 3:User came back and bought a new set of gears and a blinking light — another conversion! Even though they bought two items, this is a single unique order and thus counts as a single conversion.

To figure out our conversion rate, we would take the number of unique purchase orders and divide it by the total number of sessions.

For our imaginary user, they converted two out of three times they came to the site:

To find out the conversion rate for your site, you’ll look at all unique orders divided the total number of sessions.

Calculating Conversion Rate by Sessions:

If a user can only convert once

Now imagine we owned a second site — Roger’s Monthly Gear Box. Our site sells a subscription for a monthly delivery of robot parts. A user could come back multiple times, but once they purchase a subscription, they won’t convert again.

Let’s look at an example user’s behavior:

• Session 1:User came to the site for the first time to explore the service. No conversion.
• Session 2:User subscribed to our monthly GearBox service– this is our conversion!
• Session 3:User came back to read blog articles and poke around.

Our user here can’t convert each time they visit the site. So instead of looking at the number of sessions, we need to measure conversion success by the number of visitors:

To figure out our website’s conversion rate, we would take the number of unique orders and divide it by the number of unique users.

Calculating Conversion Rate by Unique Users:

 

The key point here? Trying to generate more website traffic isn’t necessarily the right approach. Think of it like a leaky bucket. Pouring more water into a leaky bucket won’t fix the root cause — you’ll just end up with a lot of waste. Conversion rate optimization is about getting more from what you get and making it work even better for you.

Conversion Rate Optimization Steps: Understanding the Process

Multiple conversion rate optimization frameworks exist which can effectively help conversion rate optimizers plan and execute optimization campaigns. At the simplest, the CRO process can be divided into 5 steps.

Stage 1: Research Phase – Identifying the areas of improvement

Only one in every seven A/B tests gives a winning result. Why? Research! As a general practice, most marketers tend to copy CRO strategies that yielded results for other firms thinking the same would work for them. But, they fail because every orange button cannot convert and every long form page cannot falter.

Understanding What Users Do/Quantitative

The first and the foremost thing to do is get familiarized with the basics. 1. Analyze what are your visitors doing? Analytics allows you to make decisions based on facts and figures rather than pure instincts. In the CRO process, there are multiple ways to derive data to understand your results. For instance, you can fetch relevant information from your web analytics tools such as real-time data tracking, bounce rate, incoming website traffic sources, audience, demography, site behavior, and much. Google Analytics is one of the best tools to obtain in-depth quantitative data on what people are doing on your site.

2. How page features shape user behavior?

By using visitor behavior analysis tools such as heatmaps, session recordings, interview feedbacks, customer surveys, analytics, net promoter score, and so forth, see how different features on a page are influencing user behavior. For instance, you might find that the search tool placed on your landing page is getting you more conversions than the showcased product categories. Getting such insights can significantly help you eliminate unwanted features and focus more on the ones that convert users better.

Understanding User Behavior/Qualitative

Customer psychology typically lays down the fundamental ground rules for CRO elements to follow.

Two essential elements that aid in understanding customer psychology are:

1. Principles of Persuasion: Human beings are highly susceptible to suggestions and cognitive biases. To quote an example here, knowing that an item is popular amid the masses becomes even more popular no matter it’s actual worth. At the same time, the rarer and more exclusive an item is, the more valuable it becomes. Understanding such human psychology is essential to effectively define your goals and draft a CRO plan that adds to your company’s profits.

Furthermore, adding social proofs in the form of reviews and testimonials on your landing page or wherever relevant can add to your efforts. As most case studies published over the internet report, social proofing aids in more conversions!

2. Customer Behavior: A research carried out by NN Group states that most people browsing through the internet don’t read; they merely skim through the posts. Another study reveals that younger people are more interested in browsing through flat designs as they are more “trustworthy” than their older counterparts.

Studying the behavior of your target audience gives an insight into “why they do what they do” over the internet, and how you can use this information to build a better-converting website.

There are two primary ways to study the behavior of your target audience:

• Conducting tests and taking in-person interviews: Conducting tests and taking in-person interviews: Closely watching your customers interact with your website in real-time can give you significant data and insights on a plethora of things. These can include, the pages they most visit, the amount of time they spend on your website, the areas where they’re facing maximum problems such as finding difficulty in filling a form, unable to generate passwords, payment drop-off, and much more.
• Reading case studies and following guidelines on user behavior: Many existing pieces of research and case studies can vastly aid in understanding the collective psyche of your customers, which can, in turn, serve as an excellent source for improving your website’s overall look and feel and increase conversions.

Combining the two together, these can collectively give you a much better fundamental understanding of how your customers are behaving on your website.

Understanding the Data Gathered

Data and customer psychology study can help you accurately pinpoint the actual reasons why users do what they do on your site.

Use the gathered information as a benchmark study and decide the improvements which could benefit your business in the long run. It is also important to arrive at a quantified expected conversion rate as it gives your testing efforts a direction. Else, you might end up improving the conversion rate on a page by 1% and sit cozily without realizing its actual potential.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative Data

While quantitative data offers a good insight into your business’s performance, it doesn’t paint the entire picture. For this reason, gathering qualitative data is utmost important. Qualitative answers offer better insights on how your customers perceive your brand, why they are or aren’t buying your product(s) and/or service(s), and other breakthrough information.

Data Gathering Methods

Some of the best methods of gather data are as follows:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an integratedgit tool that offers numerical data about your website’s overall performance, reports on visitor activities, engagement, traffic inflow sources, content performance, and ecommerce sales.

Customer Surveys

Customer surveys reveal information about the actual psychological thinking of customers – what convinced them to buy a product, what drew them away from the site, and so forth. It’s one of the best ways to learn strategies for effective site optimization.

Usability Tests

Usability testing is a smart way to evaluate the ease of using a website from a customer’s point of view, their engagement rate on a particular page, stumble spots and similar fall-off. It’s a powerful weapon that only aids in crafting a better user experience but increasing conversions.

User Interviews

Interviews provide deep insights about your site, respective pages, and target audience. They’re more about gathering qualitative data than its quantitative data. Interviews can effectively lead to drafting campaign-changing test hypotheses.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net promoter score (NPS) measures satisfaction in terms of customer loyalty. It classifies customers into three categories known as the promoters, passives, and detractors. While promoters are the ones who are most likely to turn into loyal customers, detractors do the opposite. Passives fall in the middle – they’re still in the evaluation phase (in terms of site likability).

Heatmaps

Heatmaps, in simple words, are graphical representations of data that informs about where visitors values are most contained, in the form of colors, within a matrix. The areas that most attention is marked red while others are shaded in green. This is a classic way to understand what users are doing on a single page.

Click Maps

Similar to Heatmaps, click maps provide data about user interaction on a page by way of where they are clicking the most. Scroll Maps A type of heat map, scroll map analyzes how a visitor scroll through the website. It aids in examining their behavior on various website pages and analyzing areas of concern.

The next step is to carefully draft your hypothesis!

Stage 2: The Hypothesis Phase – Construct an Educated Hypothesis

Using the information gathered in the research phase, you can now draft your hypothesis. At its core, a hypothesis is a proposed explanation of your research that typically comprises of 3 parts.

A particular change: based on insights derived from quantitative and qualitative data

A particular effect: a goal, a conversion metric or a similar element, which needs improvement.

A particular reason: the thinking behind why a specific change can bring about the desired effect.

The best way to step forward is to run an actual test!

Form a Hypothesis

Here’s an example of a good hypothesis.

“I believe adding social proofs on product pages will result in 5% more add to carts because it instills confidence about my purchasing decision.”

Based on this hypothesis, you make the necessary changes on your product pages. These new pages are known as variations. The primary objective of the test will check whether or not the new variation would get better conversions.

A well-structured hypothesis also paves the way to more optimization efforts. Even if your path fails, you can use the case to understand what exactly went wrong and take corrective measures. Without a structured process, optimization efforts can go in vain and even lose purpose.

Here’s what an unstructured hypothesis looks like:

“Let’s just combine the sorting and filter tool together because it worked for companies A, B, and C.”

This is precisely the kind of hypothesis you should avoid building.

State Your Hypothesis

As a rule of thumb, always back your testing with a solid purpose and authentic proofs. Make sure you have enough quantitative and qualitative data to support your testing reason(s). State your hypothesis as comprehensively as possible and even make a note of all the necessary information. CRO is an ongoing process. The more useful data you have, the easier it is to form a hypothesis and run optimization campaigns in the future.

Decide How to Change Your Pages

Typically, there are two main ways to run a CRO test – test a completely different page or change one or a few page elements. Choose the one that’s’ most appropriate and take a leap.

• Test a Completely Different Page:If you’ve identified several areas which could be improved, consider starting from the very beginning. Identify the pages you think (based on statistical data) would best convert and showcase positive results. Remember, you may see similar or drastically different results. Use the information as ground rules and start fine-tuning.
• Change One or a Few Page Elements:This is where A/B testing and Multivariate Split testing serves handy. Identify one or a few problems on your page, which (based on statistical data) may be the main areas of pain. Find their best possible variations, and run a test. Note that a multivariate split test involves testing more than one element at once. This means that it will run for a longer duration and take time to showcase actual results.

Once you’ve uncovered your optimization opportunities, plan and prioritize the elements you want to test. In simple words, schedule your test strategy!

Stage 3: The Prioritization Phase – Choose an Order

Here, a number of frameworks can help you through the process. Of these, the P.I.E. framework formulated by Chris Goward at WiderFunnel is what we most recommend:

Each of these has its own importance attached which can effectively help in prioritizing your testing elements and take you in the right direction.

Stage 4: The Testing Phase — A/B, Split, or Multivariate?

Before running a test, understand the basics:

• What is statistical significance, and why is it critical?
• How long do you need to run a test?
• What should I use—A/B, Split, or Multivariate test?

What Is Statistical Significance and Why Is It Critical?

One of the primary reasons to run a test is to understand if a particular change on our site can help yield better conversions. For instance, you’ve decided to run a test on the first 100 visitors visiting your site. You see that 40 of the 100 visitors converted on the variation you’ve run against 20 on the original page.

That’s a 20% conversion rate as compared to a paltry 10% on the original page. But does this mean you’ll get a guaranteed 20% conversion rate, consistently? Probably not, because these 100 visitors may not be a good representation of the 10,000 visitors that pay a visit to your site every day. Here, statistical significance comes into play!

Considering another example, you’ve run a test whose results showcase that your implemented variation has outperformed the control (original version) with 93% statistical significance. This means that there are 7% chances that your variation outperformed purely by accident.

Concluding the example, the statistical significance of 93% states that it’s the right time to stop the test, provided you’ve run the experiment long enough to derive conclusions.

How Long Do You Need to Run an A/B Test for Dependable Results?

Before starting a test, define its run-time!

When you run a test on your site, visitors are constantly included in the test, and the numbers keep changing. This further means that your conversion rate would constantly rise, dip and even stagnate at different times throughout the testing phase. As statistical significance is displayed all-through the test, it can further showcase higher significance even before the test completes its intended duration. So, depending on when you decide to check the results of your test, its statistical significance could be high or low. This further paves the way to the problem of “peeking.”

Peeking error

As the name says, peeking error means looking at the test results even before it has completed it due course of action. The chances are that you’ll discover statistical significance which is higher or lower than expected, and you may decide to stop the test, basis the test has or hasn’t performed well. This can, in turn, result in deploying a version which negatively affects your conversions.

Therefore, it is utmost essential to define test duration and declare a winner/loser only after it has completed its run-time.

Note: A test’s duration majorly depends upon the number of visitors visiting your site along with the expected conversion rate you’re looking for. You can use VWO’s free test duration calculator to find an ideal period for which you must run a test.

Bayesian vs. Frequentist A/B Testing

Most conventional A/B testing engines make use of the Frequentist method to make statistical computation and declare a winner. The method states that it’s essential to define an A/B test duration based on sample size to draw the right test conclusions.

But the fact is, businesses looking to scale up rapidly do not have the time to get into such nitty-gritty. So, an A/B test engine that bypasses the problem of waiting until a test completes its due course while still enabling rational business decisions became a necessity.

This gave rise to the Bayesian method, which is the cornerstone of VWO A/B testing platform. Bayesian method not only emphasizes on statistically significant but provides actionable results almost 50% faster as compared to the older Frequentist method.

Bayesian method tells you “at any point, given that you have enough data at hand, what is the probability that variation B has a lower conversion rate than variation A or the control.” Neither does it have a defined time limit attached to it nor does it require you to have an in-depth knowledge of statistics.

What Should You Use—A/B, Split, or Multivariate?

There are three primary ways to run a test.

1. A/B Testing
2. Split Testing
3. Multivariate Testing

Businesses often get confused amid the three – which kind of testing method would best suit their needs and demands. To keep such confusion at bay, here are some points to note:

1. A/B, Split, and Multivariate are three different testing methods, each of which comes with its own set of pros and cons.

2. The decision to use one of these three methods should purely depend upon the task at hand.

3. For reasons of simplicity, A/B testing seems best fit. It is majorly used in cases when design changes aren’t complex.

4. Split testing, or otherwise known as split URL testing is used when:

• Design requires heavy modifications against its original version that creating a new, separate page with an altogether different URL is easier.
• Back-end changes are needed, such as testing a pricing page which is linked to multiple tables at the back end.
• To test pages which already exist on different URLs.

5. Multivariate testing is used when there are multiple changes suggested on a page, and you want to separately test each combination.

Stage 5: The Learning Phase – How to Analyze A/B Test Results

While this is the phase where you draw final conclusions about your tests, close the loop for conversion rate optimization, and take a note of all the new information gathered for future testing. Unfortunately most optimizers only look at the test results to see whether a variation was a winning one or if it has failed, they’d go back to creating more hypothese. However, as an optimizer, it is important to dig deeper.

Considering a testing scenario. There are two possible outcomes of a test you’ve recently run.

When Your Variation has Won the Test Your efforts have paid off well. But, what next? It’s time to see answers to the following questions.

• What is the cost of deploying the change(s) in terms of engineering hours, design hours and so forth.
• Is the expected increase in the revenue doing justice to the actual cost involved?

When Your Variation has Lost the Test

In such a case, make sure you:

• Analyze your research, check your hypothesis and look for loopholes.
• Study your test data. Segregate it further to examine the insights.
• Validate your research data with all the data gathering tools used.
• Go through all the relevant case studies. They could help you come across new perspectives which you’d missed before.
• Reconstruct your hypothesis by accommodating new insights which you’d missed in your initial research.
• Go back and test again.

Understand, CRO isn’t a once and done process. It is rather an ongoing process which demands constant analysis. There’s always some room for improvement no matter how tests you’ve run. Having a well-planned, well-designed CRO process effectively helps in identifying areas of improvements and implement optimization efforts to get better conversions, further drive more revenue.

Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices

These are the Conversion Rate Optimization marketing strategies you should try:

1. Create text-based CTAs within blog posts.

While it’s good practice to include a call-to-action (CTA) in your blog post, these sometimes fail to entice people to take the desired course of action.Banner blindnessis a very real phenomenon as people become accustomed to ignoring banner-like information on websites. This lack of attention, coupled with the fact that website visitors don’t always read to the bottom of a blog post as they“snack” on content, means a new approach is required.

That’s where the text-based CTA comes in handy. Here at HubSpot, we ran a test with text-based CTAs — a standalone line of text linked to a landing page and styled as an H3 or an H4 — to see if they would convert more traffic into leads than regular CTAs at the bottom of a web page. Here’s one of ours below:

In HubSpot’s limited test of 10 blog posts, regular end-of-post banner CTAs contributed an average of just 6% of leads that the blog posts generated, whereas up to 93% of a post’s leads came from the anchor text CTA alone.

2. Include lead flows on your blog.

Another test you should consider is including lead flows on your blog. Essentially, these are high-converting pop-ups designed to attract attention and offer value. You can select from a slide-in box, drop-down banner or pop-up box, depending on your offer. We experimented with the slide-in box on the HubSpot blog, and it achieved a 192% higher clickthrough rate, and 27% more submissions than a regular CTA at the bottom of a blog post.

Head over to the HubSpot Academy tolearn how to add lead flows to your blog posts. They can dramatically increase conversions on your website.

3. Run tests on your landing pages.

Landing pages are an important part of the modern marketer’s toolkit. A landing page is where a website visitor becomes a lead, or an existing lead engages more deeply with your brand. These pages play an important role on your website, so you should run A/B tests to get the most from them.

But what should you A/B test? We know that a high performing landing page can have a tremendous impact on a business, so at HubSpot, we make it easy to test variants and eke out more conversions. You can quickly and easily test website copy, content offer, image, form questions, and page design. Check out these tips foreffective A/B testingand ourA/B testing calculator.

4. Help leads to immediately become a marketing-qualified lead (MQL).

Sometimes, your website visitors want to get straight down to business and speak with a sales rep, rather than be nurtured by marketing offers. You can make it easy for them to take this action (and immediately become amarketing qualified lead) with a combination of thoughtful design andsmart CTAs.

Compelling, clear copy has the ability to drive action and increase conversions for your business. But which actions do you want to encourage so visitors can become MQLs?

Here at HubSpot, we discovered that visitors who sign up for product demos convert at higher rates than visitors who sign up for free product trials, so we optimized our website andconversion pathsfor people booking a demo or a meeting with a sales rep. Admittedly, this depends on your product and sales process, but our best advice is to run a series of tests to find out what generates the most customers. Then, optimize for that process.

The key takeaway is to look for ways to remove friction from the sales process. That being said, if you make it easy for people tobook a meetingwith sales reps, we do recommend further qualification before the call takes place, so the sales rep can tailor the conversation.

5. Build workflows to enable your sales team.

There are a number of automated workflows you can create that your colleagues in sales will thank you for. For instance, did you know it’s possible to send emails on behalf of sales reps, so leads canbook a meeting with them at the click of a button? Or that sales reps can receive an email notification when a lead takes a high intent action, such as viewing the pricing page on your website? And if you work in ecommerce, you can send an email to people who abandon their shopping cart.

All of this is possible with marketing automation. Want to learn more? Master marketing automation with ourhelpful guide.

6. Add messages to high-converting web pages.

With HubSpot’smessages tool, it’s now possible to chat with website visitors in real-time. To increase conversions, you should add messaging capabilities to high-performing web pages, such as pricing or product pages, so leads convert rather than leave.

You can also make chatting action-based. For example, if someone has spent more than a minute on the page, you may want to automatically offer to help and answer any questions they may have (HubSpot’slive chat tool, now available, makes this easy).

7. Optimize high-performing blog posts.

If you’ve been blogging for more than a year, it’s likely you’ll have some blog posts that outperform others.

The same is true at HubSpot — in fact, the majority of our monthly blog views and leads come from posts published more than a month ago. Blog posts are a big opportunity forconversion rate optimization.

To get started, identify the blog posts with high levels of web traffic, but low conversion rates. It may be that the content offer you’re promoting isn’t aligned with the blog post’s content, or your CTA could be unclear.

In one instance, we added a press release contentofferto a blog post about press releases and saw conversions for that post increase by 240%.

Additionally, you should look at blog posts with high conversion rates. You want to drive more qualified website traffic to those posts, and you can do that by optimizing the content for search engines or updating the content to ensure that it’s fresh and relevant. If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can drive traffic to these pages from LinkedIn and Facebook using theads add-on.

8. Leverage retargeting to re-engage website visitors.

It doesn’t matter what your key conversion metric is: The cold, hard truth is that most people on your website don’t take the action you want them to. By leveraging retargeting (sometimes known as remarketing), you can re-engage people who’ve left your website.

Retargeting works by tracking visitors to your website and serving them online ads as they visit other sites around the web. This is particularly impactful when you retarget people who visit high-converting web pages.

The normal inbound rules still apply — you need well-crafted copy, an engaging image and a compelling offer for retargeting to work. If you’re a HubSpot customer, you should take a look at how theAdRoll integrationcan improve your conversion efforts.

Mistakes to Avoid When Running a Conversion rate Optimization (CRO) Campaign

Indeed, CRO is one of the best practices to optimize your site and increase conversions. Most individuals/companies jumping into the pool are unaware of CRO’s lengths and breadths and end up wasting a lot of time, money and efforts in the process. Drafting a fool-proof strategy and effectively following it is the key to CRO.

Here are the top four mistakes every CRO beginner must avoid:

Mistake #1: Making Changes Based on Opinion Than Statistical Data

Just because your site’s design looks cleaner, modish, and features better content than its previous version doesn’t mean it will churn out better results. At the same time, getting inspired from other businesses who ran a similar A/B test as yours on their websites and saw an uplift in their conversions, doesn’t really mean that you’ll see the same results on your site as well. This is because there’s no one-size-fits-all conversion optimization strategy. What may work for one business will not necessarily work for the other as well.

Resist the urge. Be patient. If you do intend to make changes or get inspired by A/B tests run other businesses, make sure it’s backed by a reasonable hypothesis that assures that your experiment will perform better. A successful marketer isn’t the one who predicts which test will win basis opinion or inspiration, instead the one who doesn’t let biasness win over statistical data.

Mistake #2: Writing Copy That Doesn’t Match Your Business Goals

Carefully drafted and SEO optimized content can do wonders. But, if it’s distorted and doesn’t match your business’s goals, it becomes useless. Build unique content that adds value to your site.

1. Focus on your brand’s USP.
2. Use simple language. Let it be crisp, precise, and to-the-point.
3. Write for scanners, not for readers.
4. Bullet points and ordered lists work better.
5. Write catchy headlines.
6. Add keywords that rank better.

Mistake #3: Going for Small Tests Before

Big Ones When it comes to CRO, most people believe that running small tests is better than big ones. The fact is, small tests will only have a minor impact on conversion rate. Bigger tests with significant chances, wherein more than two elements are optimized will leave a lasting, noticeable impact off the table. These changes may include:

1. Redesigning the page above the fold
2. Redesigning the entire home page
3. Redesigning the navigation menu
4. Moving important elements to improve visibility
5. Changing headlines, which is catchier and more impactful than before.

Psychographic segmentation is a crucial element here. It can significantly help to understand the needs and demands of your potential clients and make necessary changes to lure them to enter your conversion funnel.

Mistake #4: Running Too Many Tests and Pop-Ups at the Same Time on the Same Page

Running multiple tests at the same time can significantly affect the analysis accuracy of each test. Every new element experimented may influence the test results others. Furthermore, running numerous pop-ups and site designs in the same user session disrupts their overall experience. In fact, it’s quite possible that such pop-ups may annoy and confuse users, making them abandon the site, and never come back.

Running multiple tests with altered variable, known as the multivariate test, usually works for high-traffic sites. Yet, not necessarily promising excellent results. Go step by step. Analyze your results; make the necessary changes; observe; then run another test.

Mistake #5: Not Paying Much Attention to Basic Design Elements

A. Giving More Importance to Automatic Image Sliders

For most marketers, adding automatic image sliders on their homepage may be one of the best ways to showcase what’s new and / or upcoming on your website, but almost all conversion experts suggest that these sliders can significantly reduce your conversion rate.

Image carousels do not allow users to explore the site at their own pace. Instead, they hinder with a visitor’s experience and create banner blindness. Popular conversion experts, like Peep Laja strongly recommend that businesses must give a deep thought to adding automatic image sliders. Here are some reasons to back this theory:

1. The human eye strongly reacts to movements. If images scroll faster than the human eye can see or read, it will definitely miss out on the important stuff.
2. Too many messages means no message at all. Instead, focusing on adding on the primary message on your banner images and the required action is always more effective.

Therefore, it is always recommended to replace automatic sliders either with touch carousels or static ones to get more engagement and conversions. However, it’s always recommended to run an A/B test here to see what works best for your business. For a reason that what did not work for a company may work wonders for your business.

B. Using Cheesy Stock Photos

Practically, there’s nothing right about using them on your website except their quality. They may give your web page a good, heavy look, but they significantly reduce the credibility of your brand. Remember that the purpose of a website is not to look pretty, but to achieve certain objectives. And, of course, people like to deal with humans, not websites. A case study by Market Experiments also demonstrates the same. A financial investment consultation service providing company improved their signups by 35% simply by replacing a cheesy stock photo on their homepage with a picture of their Founder.

C. Not Giving Much Weightage to Videos

Show your product in action. Make instructional videos if you offer something complicated. Believe it or not, but adding videos pays off well. And, there are a plethora of businesses that have actually benefited a lot from this very addition.

Dr.Muscle is one such example to quote here. The website integrated a video on their sales page, which significantly increased the number of visitors who clicked to their price/guarantee page, by 46.15%.

Incorporating videos on your website and other connected platforms can help you convince your users better, and, hence, boost conversions. Furthermore, video marketing also helps you educate your visitors about your product(s) or service(s), without forcing them to go through tons of text.

However, as a marketer, you must ensure that your videos contain a clear call-to-action (CTA). With an absence of CTA, your visitors won’t know what step to take next. In fact, when your visitors are already enjoying your video, they’ll be happy to follow your CTA, and possibly convert into a customer.

Mistake #6: Undermining the Importance of Call-to-Action Buttons

As stated above, call-to-action buttons make for one of the most important page elements which persuade your website visitors take a desired action and start the conversion process. But often marketers do not give weightage to CTAs and lose out on a lot of potential conversions. Below mentioned are some mistakes which you, as a marketer or website designer, must avoid.

A. Using the wrong color combinations

The internet is flooded with case studies which suggest that one particular color, for instance red, converts better than another, say green and so on. But this doesn’t stand true in all cases. Rather, it’s all about which color pops up better on the background of your banner or web page. RIPT Apparel, a Chicago based online retail shop, increased their conversion rate by 6.3% simply by changing their CTA color from black to green. In addition to this, many optimizers also suggest that using a CTA color that hasn’t been used anywhere on your web page can also help draw the necessary attention.

B. Not Using Power Words in Call-to-action Button Text

Instead of saying something like, ‘Submit’ or ‘Sign-up,’ use power words to grab the attention of your users. Some popular CTA text copies are as follows:

• Save Your Seat. Book Now!
• Are You In? Let’s Get Started! Yes!
• Let’s Start My Free Trial. Grab Your Free Copy!
• Insights Delivered Daily to your Inbox!
• Where Should We Send Your Free Copy?
• Add this Summer Dress to Your Wardrobe!

ADT, a Tyco International company which provides safety solutions for commercial and properties corrected its CTA copy – from ‘Book a Free Survey’ to ‘Get a Free Quote’ – and saw a 60% increase in their conversion rate.

C. Placement of CTA Buttons

Besides color and text, the placement of your CTA button also plays an important role in getting more conversions. While some marketers emphasize on placing your CTA buttons in the first fold of your web page to make them prominently visible, many others argue that placing the same below the fold can yield equally good results. The reason being, it all depends upon how motivated your prospect is to click on your CTA button. How desirable do they find your offering that they’re compelled to click on your CTA wherever it’s placed. The more exclusive your offerings are, the more the chances of your prospect clicking on your CTA button irrespective of your placement on the web page.

D. A CTA Text Link or a CTA Button?

Which One’s better Text links are often lost amid the rest of the text, making them difficult to spot on the web page. Meanwhile, button CTAs are more prominently visible to the eyes and increase the changes of more clicks. Here’s an example to showcase the difference.

Mistake #7: Not Creating a Sense of Urgency

Not many marketers realize that creating a sense of urgency can actually increase conversions manifold. When you offer your visitors a limited-time incentive and give them a good reason to believe why they should bother to take the desired action now rather than later, they will convert. And, a plethora of companies have actually benefited from this – adopting the very ‘Principles of Persuasion.’

Here are some examples to back this claim:

Zappos creates a sense of urgency on its product pages by showing how many items are left in a particular size and color combination for visitors to purchase before they go out of stock.

Amazon uses the phenomenon as well. It showcases the exact number of hours/minutes within which a visitor must complete their purchase process to get the order delivered at their doorstep the very next day.

The eCommerce giant also dramatically uses a running countdown on its homepage to show how long a particular sale will last.

Mistake #8: Not Establishing Business Trustworthiness Upfront

No matter how persuasive your call to action is or how simple your website is, if you do not give the impression of trustworthiness to your visitors or give them confidence in your website, you are not very likely to improve your website’s conversion rate. Your visitors need to know that you are not a fly-by-night operation and you are here to remain. There are a plethora of ways to increase visitor confidence in your website and products. These are as follows:

• Assure your visitors that you value their privacy and that you have a secured site. Add HackerSafe (or similar) badges that showcase that your business takes website security seriously.
• Add client testimonials. For these aren’t just pieces of content praising your business offerings, they’re, in fact, an ideal means to establish your brand’s credibility amid website visitors. They can also do much selling for you.
• Display your privacy policy wherever you ask personal information from the visitor.

Mistake #9: Complicating Conversion Funnels

The conversion funnel is a set of pages (like the checkout process or registration form) that leads to your conversion goal (like a product purchase or subscription). Most web analytics tools (including some free ones) can be configured to allow you to visualize where your visitors are leaking from your conversion funnel. You may be surprised to know that most visitors abandon at Step 2 of your conversion funnel because your entire process is too complicated for them to complete. A complicated conversion funnel must be simplified in order to push the traffic through to the final conversion page.

Below mentioned are some tips and tricks to simplify your funnel and increase conversions:

• Remove all extraneous links from pages within the conversion funnel
• Remove all unnecessary steps from the conversion funnel
• Don’t put too much focus on up-selling other offers
• Only ask for information that is completely necessary in completing the conversion process. Visitors are hesitant to reveal their information if it unjustified
• In the case of shopping carts, clearly let the visitor know about postage and packaging costs, taxes and your returns policy as early in the process as possible
• And make sure that you remind your visitors what they’ve added to their cart by placing a link back to the product/service

Even though most marketers believe that using conventional conversion rate optimization strategies still work wonders for their businesses, adopting new and enhanced techniques such as website personalization is the need of the hour. And, a report published by Exact Target also mentions that only 29% of marketers are investing in website personalization.

Whether you have an eCommerce store, a SaaS website, or just a blog, offering personalized content to your visitors will improve the user experience and, hence, the conversions. Businesses offering website personalization report a 14% uplift in their sales.

In order to offer website personalization effectively, you must be aware of all the types of users that visit your website. For instance, the Hubspot Blog offers content specifically catered to three major segments of its visitors: marketers, sales professionals, and agencies.

The Sales Benchmark Index Blog takes website personalization a step further. It asks its visitors to choose a persona that suits them the best and then displays relevant content to them.

Similarly, you can offer personalized content to your visitors based on the industries they belong to, or where they lie in your conversion funnel.

Website personalization is especially effective for eCommerce websites, and Amazon is one of the best examples of quote here. The company has inculcated the very essence of personalization in a manner that its visitors are beguiled by its offering every time they pay a visit to their website.

Conclusion

From mapping the importance of website optimization to strategizing the means and ways to improve site performance, conducting A/B tests and using the results to boost marketing efforts, conversion rate optimization has become a mainstream effort. It not only enables companies to understand how customers think, use, and perceive their brand and it’s offerings, but also exposes to an incredible range of data to shape their future business strategies. CRO is not just another tool to enhance your brand’s online performance, its ‘the’ tool to make you stand out!

You can Use Below Tools To Put your skills to work

Analytics tools:

• Google Analytics:Web analytics service offered by Google.
• Moz Pro: Take the legwork out of identifying top landing pages by connecting this powerful tool to your Google Analytics profile to create custom reports. It only makes sense to focus your optimization efforts on the places that see the most traffic. Plus, we’ll show you recommendations for on-page optimization

Surveys:

• Google Consumer Surveys: You create the survey, Google recruits the participants and provides results and analysis.
• Qualaroo: Poll your visitors while they are on your site with a popup window.

Usability tests:

• Usertesting.com: Usertesting recruits users to test your site in as little as 1 hour.
• Inspeclet: Watch recorded sessions of actual users visiting your site. Includes heat maps.

A/B tests

• Optimizely: Perform A/B and multivariate tests on existing pages.
• Unbounce: Create and test new pages.
• Google Content Experiments: Perform A/B tests (but not multivariate) against your Google Analytics conversion goals.