What conversion rate optimization is and how to multiply your conversions
Every successful business owner knows that focusing on conversion rate optimization is essential to a business’s success. Let’s start with some easy numbers.
If you have a webpage where you offer an ebook to be downloaded, and you get one download for every 100 visitors, then your conversion rate is 1%.
But what if you could increase those numbers? What if you could get 7 downloads for every 100 visitors increasing your revenue by 7X? Then you’d be thinking in terms of conversion rate optimization.
You can double or triple your revenues by doubling your conversion rate, but before we get into that let’s chat define what a conversion is.
In today’s blog post we are going to go through:
Let’s get started.
What is conversion rate optimization?
If a conversion is when a user takes an action (clicks an ad, fills out a contact form, downloads a guide, purchases a product), then conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the method you use to increase conversions through testing.
Your conversion rate is simply the number of people who convert divided by the number of people who see an ad or visit your webpage.
There are many different ways to increase your conversions. Below are a few that our partners do test regularly:
- Change the copy on your webpage and forms
- Testing different pictures and call to actions
- Test your form in different parts of your website
- Reduce the number of fields in a form
- Remove sections of your website to declutter
- Removing unnecessary buttons and distractions
But before you start changing copy or images, you need to back up a little bit and think about your customers.
You need to create a customer persona.
Creating a Customer Persona
What most people do when they’re trying to up their conversion rate is to just start changing things on their website or ad. They do this basically at random. They don’t think about why they’re doing what they’re doing or how this is going to better attract clicks, downloads, or form fills.
Sure, if they follow conversion rate best practices, they might have some success, but they would be better off getting deep into the why — why would customers react differently to a change in copy or a change to a button?
That’s why you need to put together a customer persona, which is a document that describes who your business’s ideal customer or customers are, so that you can more accurately understand what they want and why they want it.
A customer persona includes information like demographics (income, number of children, job title, married/single/divorced) and psychographics (loves to fish, is liberal, loves to drink Coke, loves Facebook, has a short attention span).
You’ll also want to include what they want and how it relates to your product, especially if you sell online and want to increase your ecommerce conversion rate. For example, let’s say your ideal customer is looking for a fire pit. They’re not sure what type of fire pit they’re going to buy, so they’re comparing models of a few different brands. What are some things you can do?
Design Content Targeting That Persona
Now that you have an idea of what’s going to interest that person and what type of content you should create to attract them. Let’s say you decide to create an ebook comparing the top fire pit brands.
Your goal with that ebook is to grow your email list, so you have a landing page that pushes them to download the ebook. A conversion in this case is a download, and you’re comparing conversions to the number of visitors the landing page gets.
Now you can think about how best to reach that customer. Since you know they love to spend time on Facebook, you decide the best way to reach them is through Facebook ads. You know that they have a short attention span, so you decide to do an image ad instead of a video to quickly catch their attention.
So you have an ad, a landing page, and a form to download an ebook. It’s time to think about what you can do to optimize your conversions. You have two types of conversions — clicks on the ad and downloads of the ebook — so you’ll want to employ tactics that optimize both of these.
Employ Conversion Rate Optimization Tactics
A/B Testing
A/B testing is simply using software to randomly present one of two different versions of your ad or your landing page to your target customer. Some customers see one form of your ad, some see the other.
You can then compare conversion rates, see which performs best, and then make more changes to your ad or landing page to see if you can increase conversion rates even higher.
Because there are so many different aspects of an ad and a landing page that you can change, you need to zero in on a single change and then see if that single change makes a difference.
Here are a few things you can change to see if they increase or decrease your conversion rates.
The Facebook Ad
A Facebook ad has a number of aspects to it. In this example, you’re doing a simple image ad, so you can change the:
- Primary text
- Headline
- Description
- Image
- Button
You might be tempted to have two very different ads, but the smart way to A/B test here is to change something small. For example, you might have a picture of two fire pits side by side. You might try changing just one of the fire pits to see if that changes the conversion rate.
If one of those pictures performs better, you might then try changing the ad copy, headline, or the button on the ad.
Whatever the case, just make one change at a time. See which version of the ad performs better, and then make another small change. As you do this, you will find out which changes allow your ads to perform the best.
Once you’ve got your ad optimized, you can move on to the ebook landing page.
The Ebook Landing Page
Here you’re following the same A/B testing principles. Making one small change at a time like the download button on your form, reducing the number of fields on the form or changing different headlines.
You can even change the design of the landing page and see how different design layouts help increase your conversions. There are tools like HotJar you can use to gather data on your website and where people pay the most attention too. Then using data you can make educated changes.
After doing this for a while, you’ll see your conversion rates go up until, eventually, they’re as high as you can get them for your landing page. Then you apply what you learned to other pages of your website.
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Follow Best Practices for CRO Wins
You can use these same tactics for just about any type of marketing — digital or otherwise. Small changes can sometimes have big results.
You just have to be patient, give the changes time to give you some useful data, and never stop optimizing.
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