Why Should You Care About CRO?

At FABRIC8, we really care about CRO. However, we get the feeling that some marketers need convincing.

That’s OK, we get that not everyone will be up-to-speed or willing to give it a try. However, we do think it’s important you know exactly what CRO is (and what its benefits are) before making your mind up about it.

That’s why we’ve written this blog. It will help you understand the potential power CRO has, as well as explain how it can improve engagement, click-through-rates and even revenue!

Hopefully, by the end of this article you’ll care about CRO just as much as we do. Fingers crossed!

What is CRO?

You might know most of this already, but for those late to the game we’ll give you a quick recap:

  • Conversion – The action you want your visitors to take. Could be anything from an email signup, click through to another page, a content download or a product purchase.
  • Conversion rate – How often the action is taken. Essentially a ratio of how often visitors convert, usually expressed as a percentage.
  • Conversion rate optimization – Improving the path to conversion, to encourage as many people as possible to take your desired action.

Sounds pretty simple, right? CRO works by using a range of techniques grounded in user analytics and lots of testing.

For it to be effective, you’ll need to come up with a structured and systematic approach to improving website performance. This should be unique to your website’s needs and objectives, so you shouldn’t copy anyone!

Remember, it’s an ongoing process as there’s always room for improvement. You have to work hard at it, but you should really start to care about CRO because the benefits are huge!

What makes it so great?

As it stands, only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates. Our bet is you’re probably one of the unhappy 88%, but good news; CRO can help you!

CRO offers a tangible, effective and proven way to improve those conversion rates. In turn, this increases visitor retention, customer loyalty and overall revenue. How could you say no to that?

So, just in case that’s not enough to make you care about CRO, we’ve got some stats to back it up!

CRO tools have a huge ROI

Did you know that CRO tools have an average ROI of 223%? So, (for those of you that don’t like maths) if you spend £100 on CRO tools you’ll get £223 back! Now, most CRO tools are a little pricier than that, but that also means their ROI is much higher!

Not only do these tools save you time, increase accuracy and improve conversion rates, they also make you money!

CRO is becoming more popular

60% of marketers plan to improve their conversion rate through customer journey analysis – a key part of CRO strategies. There have also been more Google searches for ‘conversion rate optimisation’ than ever before! This shows just how popular CRO is becoming.

Now, it sounds like we’re telling you to blindly follow the pack … and I suppose we are in a way, but we have good reasons.

Imagine 60% of your competitors improve conversion rates and boost their revenue. They’ll start to out-rank you and steal your share of potential customers. You need to get in on the CRO act to level the playing field.

SEO is usually the priority, but CRO is more effective

Marketers have overlooked CRO because their core aim is to get people to their site. However, it’s no good funnelling people to your site if they’re going to bounce straight off it. This means you need to work hard at encouraging conversions.

Econsultancy found that for every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them. That just doesn't stack up!

Marketers should be trying to make the most of the traffic already coming to their site before investing extortionate amounts of money for PPC, ads and SEO stuff.

CRO is much more cost-effective than finding new visitors through SEO, as it brings in more qualified leads and delivers them to the point of purchase. It doesn’t let them drop out of the conversion funnel after you've spent a load of money getting them to your landing page.

A higher conversion rate also means a higher return on investment, which in turn means maximising your profits. It also lowers your customer acquisition costs, so it’s a win-win situation!

CRO helps you understand customer behaviour and preferences

The data gathered through CRO practices gives you great insight into your customers that’s actionable, relevant and reliable.

This is perhaps the most important reason you should care about CRO. It tells you all you need to know to deliver a top-notch customer experience by allowing you to:

  • Tailor your content strategy
  • Discover optimum delivery times
  • Change formatting based on preference
  • Find the right kind of customers – ones who will convert and have a genuine interest in your business

A whopping seven out of 10 marketers use results from their website CRO to inform other marketing initiatives, such as their content strategy or email campaigns. Just imagine what you could do with all that data!

If you care about CRO, start using it!

So, by now you should be starting to care about CRO, even if it’s only a little crush.

CRO is all about getting the right visitors to your site at the right time, and giving them the right content to nudge them down the conversion funnel.

There are many ways you can get started with this, but we’d suggest setting yourself up with an analytics platform like Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Amplitude, Google Analytics or Omniture. They’ll give you a great idea of where you stand, and provide advice on what to do next.

Some of them include testing software alongside their tracking tech, so that's a real bonus. All you have to do is set a goal, create a hypothesis and test it – simple!

However, even if you’re using a tool, you must be sure you understand what CRO is, how you’re collecting the data and what you’re trying to test before you start. If not, you’re bound to get skewed results and problems will pop up along the way.

Once you’ve got the basics covered, you can dive right in. To give you an idea of where to begin, we’ve done a little digging into marketers’ CRO habits:

So, have we persuaded you? Have we got you to care about CRO? It’s such a beneficial digital marketing technique, we’d be surprised if you’re not at least a little interested. Do some research of your own to find out more about CRO, then decide if it’s right for your business.