Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is like a scientific discipline. It’s essentially about making the most of your existing web traffic. While many services that we offer are inbound marketing techniques to bring more new users to your website or social channels, CRO involves improving the user journey for the visitors who are already onsite or engaging with you.

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Why is CRO so Important?

Imagine this scenario - you have 5,000 monthly visitors to your website - an enviable figure. But when it comes to making a conversion such as a purchase, or enquiry form fill, those visitors are only converting at 0.5%, so 25 sales, leads or enquiries. However, if you work to up your conversion rate to an industry standard 2%, through making changes to page layout, call to actions etc., that suddenly becomes 100 conversions.

To put that another way - at a conversion rate of 2%, you’d only need to get 1250 visitors per month to hit the same target of enquiries. That could mean big savings on your marketing budget, through work that has long lasting benefits and long-term results.

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What should my Conversion Rate be?

Bench marking your conversion rate is crucial and each industry will have a different conversion rate. If someone’s on a food delivery website like Just Eat the conversion rate is very high - around 20%.That’s not surprising as you have a market with appetite! But for more traditional forms of eCommerce shopping such as retail, that figure is much lower at around 1.7%.

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What are the causes of a poor Conversion Rate?

If you’re getting the traffic, but not the results, there can be a few reasons for that. It may mean you’re not making it very easy for your web users to complete an action, or it could be that some other factor such as price or availability is putting them off. The best thing to do is to put yourself in the shoes of the customer. In the same way that a good hotelier should try sleeping in the rooms that they’re charging customers for -it’s important to carry out user testing of your site. This can be done by your internal team with some guidance (it usually involves being given tasks to complete and making observations on the problems you face, or timing how long a task takes). It’s also possible to put together a focus group who can test the site with fully objective eyes.

Here are some of the most common causes of a low conversion rate:

• Poor Navigation. Are users aware how to navigate the site?
• Poor Site Structure. Are important pages hidden too deep?
• Distractions. Do you give visitors reasons to bail out of the buying process with unnecessary distractions such as content pop-ups?
• Poor mobile experience. Mobile is increasingly popular, but smaller screens mean the UX has to be better than for a desktop.
• Poor Communication. Do people actually understand what your product is and how it will benefit them?
• Sub-par imagery. The first visual impression that you make is so important.
• Lack of proper Call to Actions (CTAs) / vague messaging
• Inconsistencies in the user journey. Do the titles and CTAs match the messaging on the ads or channels which lead them there?
• Sub-standard copy. Poorly written copy that doesn’t read well or has errors in it will not engender the trust necessary to push through a conversion.
• Too many form fields. Don’t make your visitors/customers work any harder than they absolutely need to in order to complete a conversion.
• Lack of optimisation. One of the key features of SEO is maximising a website’s Click Through Rate in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). That essentially increases your conversion rate by making a user likelier to click on your search result than that of competitors.
• You need more engaging content. If your content is too dry then you’re not providing that push factor to conversion. Be sure to add good multi-media such as video, but beware that a bad video could have the opposite effect.
• You’re not tracking conversions properly. You can only know what your conversion rate is through well implemented tracking. Any incorrect implementation will skew results.
• Trust signals are increasingly important.The lack of an SSL safety certificate or positive third-party reviews could be the difference between converting a customer or not. They will also evaluate the overall professionalism of your branding and website.

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How we can help

At SONDR® we have a proven track record in CRO. We regularly partner with our development eCommerce agency, Iconography, to provide clients with front and back-end design and development solutions that result in the very best User Experience. We also run projects to measure and improve user experience through A/B testing, heat mapping and other tactics.

To find out more about our CRO services, contact us today.