CRO: What it is and how to apply it to your marketing strategy

CRO or Conversion Rate Optimisation is a digital marketing strategy that serves to optimise the conversion rate of a business. It encompasses different methodologies to improve the performance of a brand. These techniques seek to increase user interaction with the website. Therefore, they are also beneficial for other actions such as generating more web traffic or consolidating the customer-company relationship. Its operation is based on defining a CRO strategy and developing tactics focused on testing, data analysis and customisation. Subsequently, new procedures are reviewed, reworked and implemented to obtain the best results.

The conversion rate is the indicator that determines the effectiveness of your website. It reveals the percentage of users who have come to perform an action. This can be from completing a purchase process to downloading an ebook. In other words, the strategy focuses on getting visitors to perform an action, not on generating more traffic. To develop this technique you must understand the behaviour of users with the website; tools like Google Analytics facilitate its measurement. SEO and CRO are complementary strategies since the first aims to position the website in the top search engine results and the second ensures that the traffic generated is translated into potential customers.

Benefits of optimising CRO

• Improve ROI.
• Increase sales.
• Generate new customers.
• Lower cost of customer acquisition.
• Know your target audience.
• Optimise web traffic.
• Decrease investment in advertising.

what elements are involved in CRO?

User experience

The user is the key for a marketing strategy to work. Therefore, it is important to have an optimised web design to facilitate navigation, adapt the site to any device with mobile first designand reduce loading time. Likewise, the page must be intuitive and well structured.

Call to action

CTAs should be eye-catching and catch the user's attention. They should clearly express the action to be performed by the visitor with imperative verbs such as "Register" or "Download". The colours, vocabulary and design should be adapted to the target audience and differentiate the site from the competition to gain greater brand recognition.

Offer

The services offered by the brand must stand out to attract the user. Including audiovisual elements such as images or test videos will increase trust in the company. Showing promotions, reviews or discounts serves as a strategy to increase sales among visitors.

Content

The information that the user obtains is decisive for their conversion. The content must be of value and clear. Providing confidence and guarantee of performance in the products offered will improve the visitor's relationship with the brand. The main objective is to encourage them to take an action.Tips to improve your CRO

• Include positive testimonials from other customers.
• Offer valuable free resources.
• Update your corporate blog.
• Have a presence on social networks.
• Add audiovisual content.
• Have a responsive design.
• Show exclusive promotions.

4 steps to implement a CRO strategy

1. Analyse the behaviour of users with the website

To start designing a CRO strategy, you must define the KPIs you want to achieve. After knowing them, you must calculate the current conversion rate of the website and collect information about its content. Google Analytics provides this type of information and reveals at what stage of conversion users leave the page.

Similarly, heatmaps help to understand what actions visitors perform on the website and represent them visually with a range of colours. Hotjar is an essential tool for creating heatmaps.

The information can be complemented with qualitative data by conducting questionnaires or user interviews.

2. Designing the ideal user journey

By obtaining information about the user's journey through the website, you can begin to design the ideal user journey to achieve a conversion. You should define the stages of the sales funnel and focus on those that will benefit your business the most.

3. Optimise the website

Depending on the pre-designed ideal journey, a series of elements are placed to facilitate the user's conversion. These can redo, delete or add content, images, videos, information or improve the UX. In digital marketing, calls to action are essential to achieve conversion. Adding floating or static notification bars serves to obtain emails, show irresistible offers or inform the visitor about something new. Banners can fulfil the same function as the bars. Pop-ups or pop-up windows interfere with the content of the site to impact the user.

4. Analysing data

Monitoring website activity will help to check the effectiveness of CRO, comparing the initial data with the data obtained after implementation.

8 tools to optimise CRO

VWO

This platform can be used to carry out A/B tests. Its main feature is the possibility of contrasting different variables at the same time. Furthermore, it is simple to use and does not require previous programming knowledge.

InstaPage

This tool focuses on the generation of landing pages. Its functions include the creation of A/B tests and the integration of other applications such as Google Analytics or Instagram to offer a complete perspective of the marketing campaign.

Google Optimize

This is a tool integrated into Google Analytics that is used to carry out A/B tests. Among its benefits is the possibility of managing and reviewing the actions of a website in order to increase user feedback.

Hotjar

This is one of the benchmarks for optimising CRO. The user experience is key for this platform. It uses heat maps to show how visitors interact with the site. Its peculiarity is that it offers real-time recordings of the user's journey through the website. It also integrates a series of surveys to find out the visitor's opinion.

CrazyEgg

It is a tool focused on heat maps. Its peculiarity is that it is aimed at digital marketing professionals. It offers maps with attention to the detail of clicks that the website receives. It also shows a report with detailed information about the behaviour of users with the page. It segments the information individually, by geographic location, operating system or origin.

UserZoom

This is a complete software that allows the performance of different metrics. It is a paid platform, but it offers the possibility of making videos of user sessions, heat maps, reports and obtaining qualitative data.

Taw

This tool is used to find out the accessibility of a website. It focuses on the design and development of pages with the aim of improving the UX.

HubSpot

The CRM software offers a tool for A/B testing. It establishes a series of samples based on the data obtained during the strategy. It allows you to select the criteria for testing. This can be the click-through rate, number of conversions or opening rate of email marketing actions.