In the modern marketing world, most teams are focused on driving website traffic. They then hope that said traffic converts into qualified leads that the sales team can subsequently close. But realistically that’s only a small skirmish in a greater marketing war.

If you’re really looking to shine as a marketer or marketing team, you’ll want to do some soul searching and think about if you’re really getting the most out of existing traffic and leads. Getting more out of your existing leads and traffic (versus entirely new traffic) is often one of the biggest launch factors for companies looking to reach long-term sustainable growth. Enter, Conversion Rate Optimization (or CRO). In this post, you’ll get a feel for how CRO can be a major lever for revenue, why should focus on conversion rate for your businesses best interests, and how to get the ball rolling.

What is a Conversion Rate? | How to Calculate Conversion Rate | Where to Implement CRO Strategy

CRO Formulas | Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies | How to Get Started with CRO | FAQs

Let’s start things off by simply talking about conversion rate. (If you already know what conversion rate is and are smarter than the rest of us, feel free to skip down to some more actionable sections).

So what really is a conversion rate?

A conversion rate, most simply, is the number of visitors on your site that complete a desired action (think completing a web form, signing up for a trial, or purchasing a product) expressed as a percentage.

Think of it this way, a high conversion rate means your site is well designed, effectively formatted, and speaks to your target audience. It’s like a smoothly running car. However, a low conversion rate is like a car with a transmission that’s wearing out. It lurches and lags when it hits a certain spot. Low conversion rates could be the result of a variety of factors related to your sites performance or design. Broken forms, slow loads times, or poor copy that doesn’t convey value are, more often than not, the usual suspects when it comes to poor conversion rates.

How do I know if my conversion rate is good?

A ‘good’ conversion rate can be pretty subjective. It depends on numerous things like your industry, goals, traffic channel, niche, and audience demographic, among other factors. To give an example, the average conversion rate of ecommerce sites globally was 2.17% in the third quarter of 2020. This was down from 2.37% in the previous year.

The average not only differs by year and country, but it also can differ by Niche. If we go back to thinking about ecommerce sites for a second, the average conversion rate of ecommerce sites in the food and beverage sector is 5.5% while the average in the hair care sector is only 3.5%. This shows just how important it is to make sure you’re comparing properly when deciding if you like where your conversion rate is at.

If you find that your conversion rate is less than ideal – it could be under industry average, lower than top competitors, or just not up to your personal standards – then it’s probably high time to optimize.

Conversions can take place all over your website: on the home page, a pricing page, your blog, landing pages, or a multitude of other places. In order to get the most out of your site, and turn your visitors into paying customers, you should optimize as many of these locations as you can. But before we talk about the benefits of Cro, let’s talk about how to properly calculate your site’s conversion rate. This way you get a better understanding of the potential time and resources you might want to invest in your Cro strategy.

How to Calculate Conversion Rate

The process to calculate your conversion rate is relatively simple. Just divide the number of conversions by the number of visitors and then multiply that number by 100 in order to turn it into a percentage.

(NUMBER OF CONVERSIONS ÷ NUMBER OF VISITORS) X 100 = Conversion Rate

To give an example, let’s say you’re starting a newsletter for your business, and you’d like to see what your conversion rate. You define a conversion as a newsletter opt-in and you have an opt-in form on every page of your website.  In this example, you’d want to divide the total number of newsletter opt-ins by the total number of site visitors, and then multiply it by 100. To put some numbers to it, if you had 250 submissions and 10,000 visitors last quarter, then your conversion rate would be 2.5%

This is a process that you can repeat for every conversion opportunity on your site. The only caveat here is that you want to make sure you only count the number of visitors on the webpages where the offer is available. To give an example of this again, and drive home the calculation, if you want to calculate the number of case study downloads then you’d divide the total number of downloads by the number of people who visited pages where the case study download is available.

If you were interested in finding your websites overall conversion rate, you would divide the total number of conversions for every opportunity of conversion on your site by the total number of visitors on your site.

Now with all of this being said, where do we implement CRO Strategy?

Where to Implement a CRO Strategy

When it comes to implementing CRO strategy, there are four main areas of your site that have the potential to bring you the largest benefit.

1. Homepage

Your homepage is a prime candidate for CRO. On top of making the first impression on visitors, you should also think of your homepage as an opportunity to retain those visitors and guide them further into your website. To make this happen, you should be emphasizing links to product info, offering a button for free signup, or (if you’re feeling extra dangerous) adding a chatbot that can interact with visitors and massage questions out of them at any point during their site exploration.

2. Pricing Page

The pricing page on your site can often be a make-or-break point for visitors. The beauty of CRO, is that CRO can help a pricing page convert visitors into customers by things like modifying price intervals (an example of this could be price-per-year vs price-per-month), describing the product features that are associated with different packages and prices, including contact information (like a phone number) for visitors to get in touch for a price quote, or just adding a simple popup form.

If you need some convincing of this, Hotjar has an amazing case study where it added an email opt-in popup form on its pricing page and got over 400 users in three weeks!

3. Blog

A Blog, like the one you’re reading right now, is another MASSIVE opportunity for a website. While a blog is great for publishing content about your industry that is both thoughtful and helpful, you can also use CRO to convert readers into leads!

This process often includes calls-to-actions (CTAs) throughout the article or by inviting readers (like yourself) to learn more about the topic in question by submitting their email in order to download a case study, industry report, or ebook!

4. Landing Pages

Now you might read that point above and think, “Well aren’t landing pages inherently designed for visitors to take action?” and you’d be right! On average, landing pages have the highest average conversion rate of all signup forms at 24%. However, this doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. A landing page could, for example, be optimized with video for the opening home game of a sports team from the previous season in order to try and sell tickets and build hype around this season’s home opener! You could also optimize a landing page that’s offering a resource to show some preview content from said resource, in order to encourage visitors to download it.

So now that we’ve covered some places on your site that could benefit from some CRO, let’s get more into the formulas you need to know in order to get the most out of this.

CRO Formulas

So why does this matter? The short answer: CRO is important for any business with an online presence. No matter how established or large your company is, you want to convert your website visitors into qualified leads, customers, and advocates for your brand – and you want to do this in a way that is the most effective, impactful, and reliable.

By utilizing conversion rate optimization, you’ll be able to get more out of your existing website traffic while making sure that you’re targeting leads properly.

While the concept is relatively straightforward, setting a goal for your conversion rate isn’t as easy as deciding “X page is converting 50 people a month, so next month we want it to convert 100 people.”

50 more conversions on the page is great, but what you really want is 50 additional conversions for every X amount of people who visit the page. (This is your conversion rate – the percentage of people who convert on your website based on how many people have touched it).

In order to get a better understanding of where your conversion rate is at in any point in time, here are three commonly used formulas to help you and your business understand, analyze and improve.

CRO Calculation 1: Conversion Rate

Like we mentioned earlier, in order to calculate your conversion rate, you need to divide your number of conversions (or leads generated) by the number of visitors (or web traffic), and then multiply that number by 100 in order to convert to a percentage

(Leads Generated ÷ Website Traffic) X 100 + Conversion Rate %

CRO Calculation 2: Number of Net New Customers

In order to calculate the number of net new customers, you should divide your net revenue goal by your average sales price.

New Revenue Goal ÷ Average Sales Price = Number of Net New Customers

CRO Calculation 3: Lead Goal

And finally, in order to calculate your lead goal to attain that number of net new customers, take your number of net new customers and divide by your lead-to-customer close rate percentage (this is the total number of leads divided by the total number of customers).

Number of New Customers ÷ lead-to-customer close rate % = Lead Goal

Now that we’ve defined these formulas, let’s take a look at them in action:

Say your website is getting 20,000 visitors per month and of those 20,000 converting 200 into leads – and then subsequently, 20 customers per month – then the website lead-to-conversion would be 1%.

But what if you wanted to generate 40 customers a month?

You could attempt to get 40,000 visitors a month, that number of visitors can be daunting to say the least, and hope that your traffic doesn’t decrease. Instead, you could gather more leads from your existing traffic by optimizing your conversion rate. The second option here is far less risky, more attainable, and more likely to produce better results.

For example, if you increase your conversion rate from 1% to 2%, you’d double your leads, as well as your customers. If you need more proof, or are a visual person, we’ve dropped in a table below to illustrate the impact that extrapolates from increasing your conversion rate:

COMPANY	A	B	C
Monthly Site Traffic	20,000	20,000	20,000
Conversion Rate	1%	2%	3%
Leads Generated	200	400	600
New Customers	20	40	60

When you see it laid out, the increase in number of leads and net new customers generated from a boost in conversion rate can be drastic!

It also becomes abundantly clear that generating more web traffic isn’t necessarily the right approach when trying to improve your conversion rate. On the contrary, the chart above demonstrates that you can create substantial growth without increasing traffic at all – which is a way easier lift from a business and resource perspective.

Finding that hard to believe? The leaky bucket analogy is a great way to think about it. If you’re unfamiliar with the leaky bucket analogy, it’s this: say you have a bucket with a hole in it. If you continually pour water into the bucket instead of plugging the hole (or addressing the root problem) you’ll end up with a large amount of water that’s wasted (in this case web traffic). By addressing the root of the problem and making the hole smaller (or plugging it), you’ll end up wasting significantly less water (i.e. traffic).

Now we get to the fun part, strategies that you can start implementing and experimenting with to begin CRO!

Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies

There’s a lot of different wats you can go about conversion rate optimization. We’ve taken the liberty of laying out 8 of our favorites below!

1. Create Text-based CTAs Within Blogs

I think we can all agree that a CTA is a common best practice. However, they often fail to entice visitors into taking action. The question then is why?

Have you ever heard of something called “Banner Blindness”? Banner blindness is when we as consumers become so used to seeing them, that we ignore banner-like ads and information on websites. If you take this lack of attention into account and pair it with visitors bad browsing habits (i.e. not reading all the way to the bottom), we can agree that action needs to be taken.

This is where a text-based CTA shines through. HubSpot ran a test with text-based CTA – what they described as a standalone line of text linked to a landing page and styled as H3 or H4 – because they were curious if they could convert more traffic into leads that way vs regular CTAs located at the bottom of a page.

In their test of 10 different blog posts, HubSpot said that regular end-of-banner CTAs contributed an average of 6% of leads that their blogs generated, while up to 93% of the blog leads came from the anchor-text CTA alone

2. Add Lead Flows to Your Blog

Lead flows are another conversion rate optimization element that you should think about introducing to your site. If you’ve never heard of a lead flow, they are high-converting popups that are designed to attract attention and offer some type of value.

There are several lead flows that you can implement, but he most common are a slide-in box, a drop-down banner, or a popup box depending on your offer. In 2016, HubSpot experimented with a slide in box on their blog. The results were staggering. By utilizing the slide-in box lead flow, HubSpot achieved a 192% higher clickthrough rate and 27% more submissions than a regular CTA at the bottom of a blog post.

3. Run Tests on Your Landing Pages

Another standard tool in the marketer’s toolbox is landing pages and, as we mentioned earlier, are vital to conversion rate optimization.

Landing pages are essential because that’s where website visitors become leads or existing leads engage more deeply with your company and brand. In order to fully optimize a landing page, you’ll need to run A/B tests to identify.

For example, by utilizing A/B testing you can quickly and easily test things like website copy, images, form questions, content offers, and full web pages to determine what your target audience and leads respond to in a meaning full way.

China Expat Health has a great story around A/B testing. Through A/B testing they were able to increase their lead conversion rate by 79%. By swapping out the headline “Health Insurance for China” for “Save Up to 32% on Your health Insurance in China” immediately conveyed the value proposition to visitors. They then supported this with customer testimonials to drive things home.

4. Help Leads Immediately Become Marketing Qualified

Occasionally, you’ll get some visitors that want to cut right to the chase and talk business.

For those leads that are high intent, there are a handful of specific actions that they should complete in order to become a marketing qualified lead, or MQL. They can take actions through specifically designed web pages, solid and engaging copy, as well as smart CTAs.

5. Build Workflows to Enable Your Team

Automated workflows and emails are some of the most under rated and under-utilized tools in the business toolbox. By implementing these workflows, you can empower your team and business to generate o keep some revenue.

To give an example, in ecommerce a standard practice is to send an abandoned cart email (or it should be a standard practice). Moosend did some research, and according to their findings the abandoned cart emails can be pretty darn effective! Moosend found that on average they have an incredibly high open rate of 45%. Of those that are opened, 21% of them are clicked and of those that click, half make a purchase. That’s some pretty powerful stuff and some serious revenue!

6. Add Messages to High Converting Web Pages

Live chat is not a new concept; however, it can be surprising how often it isn’t used. Live chat gives you the ability to offer real-time support and guidance to customers. You can increase conversions by adding live chat to your highest performing web pages like your pricing and products page, so that visitors and leads can get information in real time.

Don’t have the bandwidth for live chat? Then maybe thinking about adding in a chat bot instead! You can make your chat bot messaging action based, meaning that – say someone spends more than three minutes on a page – you can have the bot pop up and automatically help to answer questions they might have.

7. Optimize High Performing Blog Posts

We’ve already mentioned it, so why not say it one more time, but publishing blog articles opens the door to big opportunity for conversions. Where things can get really interesting though, is when you already have existing content on your site. These posts have started gaining authority and attracting visitors and are prime for collecting leads.

To get rolling on optimizing your blog content you should identify post with high levels of traffic but low conversion rates. See how you can tweak your CTAs or content offers to collect more leads.

You should also look at your posts with high conversion rates. You’ll want to drive more qualified web traffic to those posts. You can accomplish this by optimizing the content for the search engine results page (SERP) or updating it as needed to ensure it’s still relevant.

8. Leverage Retargeting to Re-engage Website Visitors

One unfortunate reality of doing business with people is that we can rarely guarantee that we can get them to take the specific action we want them to every time. Sometimes, it takes a few attempts and few times of getting in front of them to accomplish the goal. This is where retargeting comes into play. By leveraging retargeting on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms, you can re-engage and get in front of those people that haven’t taken that action yet.

The way retargeting works is by tracking visitors to your site and then serving them ads as they visit other sites around the web. This becomes incredibly impactful when you begin to target those that have spent time on your highest converting webpages but are not customers.

Now it should be noted here that the best practices of marketing, particularly the inbound methodology still apply. You need to have enticing copy, engaging visuals, and an offer that is compelling for retargeting to be effective.

United Airlines has a great example of an effective retargeting campaign. Using insights from their previous marketing efforts, United focused on reaching people who had viewed some ads and might already be considering booking a vacation but needed the extra push. To speak to this audience, they decided to promote a 15 second video ending with a CTA.

When viewers saw the ad, and if they were inspired enough to book their vacation, all they had to do as click on the CTA and they got whisked away to United’s website. The campaign proved to be a massive success. In one month, 52% of conversions that United attributed to YouTube were click-through conversions directly from the ad.

Now that we’ve covered all of that, let’s talk about how you can get started implementing CRO at your company.

How to Get Started with Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Now that we’ve covered 8 different actionable ways you can work on your CRO, you may be thinking to yourself “well how do I get started?”. This is where you should turn to PIE (not the delicious dessert, although if that helps you think then who are we to judge!).

The PIE Framework is as follows: Potential, Importance, and Ease. You can prioritize your CRO efforts by ranking each element on those building blocks.

You should use the PIE framework to answer the following questions for every strategy that we listed out in the above sections. After that, assign a score to each strategy on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest).

PIE Framework Questions:

• How much total improvement can this project offer us?
• How valuable will the improvement be once it happens?
• How complicated or difficult will the improvement be to implement?

After assigning scores to each strategy, add up the numbers and then divide by three (this gives a score that shows which projects will have the greatest impact). From there, work on the projects with the highest scores first.

While not perfect, the PIE framework is easy to understand and offers a starting point for collaboration and communication amongst colleagues surrounding CRO.

To round things out, we’ve answered some frequently asked questions below!

FAQs

What is a CRO Strategy

A CRO strategy is designed to convert more of your visitors into paying customers. While each CRO strategy will vary by company, the general steps will not. You have to identify key metrics and your target audience. Then you have to collect user feedback and other data to decide what you’re going to test. Finally, you’ll run A/B tests to improve different pages and parts of your site for conversion.

Are there tools to help me with CRO?

There are numerous tools designed to simplify or automate the process of conversion rate optimization. Some help with lead capture, research, and analytics. Others help with mouse tracking, heat maps, feedback, and running experiment.

What is a CRO Test?

A CRO test involved adding, re-arranging, and redesigning elements on your website in order to maximize your conversions. Different CRO tests might focus on optimizing the copy, the design, or placement of your CTAs, or the length of your headlines, among other elements.

How do I begin using CRO?

There are many best practices out there when it comes to CRO but, ultimately, you need to find out what your customers respond to, and what drives results for your business.

Keep these three follow-up actions in mind when getting started with CRO today:

1. Use the three formulas to start the CRO conversation.
2. Experiment with CRO strategies to discover what works for your business.
3. Leverage the PIE framework to help prioritize your strategy.