If people have been spending lots of time on your website but very little money, the answer lies in three little letters: CRO. Work on your CRO strategy and you’ll finally start seeing returns on all your marketing investments, including the time you spend making your website attractive to visitors in the first place.
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What is CRO?
CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization, and it’s the science of getting people to take the steps you want them to take when they land on your website. For eCommerce websites, this usually means getting people to make a purchase.
Your conversion rate is the rate at which you convert casual visitors into paying customers. Conversion Rate Optimization is everything you do with your marketing and website layout to increase conversions. This includes things like snappy product descriptions, conspicuous ‘Buy Now!’ buttons, and a dazzling website layout. It also includes things like getting the right web hosting to keep your web pages loading quickly.
What’s the difference between CRO and SEO?
CRO and SEO are two of the most frequently confused terms in digital marketing, but they have different aims.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s a strategy for attracting more visitors to your website by exploiting what we know about how search engines work, and what makes them decide to lead visitors to your site.
CRO is a strategy for getting visitors to spend their money once they’ve already landed on your website. The perfect marketing strategy involves using an SEO tool to lead more visitors to your website and then beefing up your CRO strategy to get those visitors to open up their wallets once they get there.
There are seven important reasons you should be focusing on your CRO strategy if you want to create a profitable online business.
7 reasons CRO is important
1. More revenue
Even a tiny improvement in your conversion rate can lead to a massive improvement in your revenue. That’s because CRO produces profits that go right to you. If you can get the people who already visit your website to start spending money (and to keep spending it!), you’ll naturally start seeing more money flowing into your website and less flowing out to marketing campaigns.
This brings us to the next way CRO helps your bottom line:
2. Less money wasted on ineffective marketing
Every year, businesses spend far too much money trying to attract customers who will never spend a single cent on their products. At the heart of CRO is the principle that the best way to make money is to understand your customers and give them what they want. If your customers are more likely to buy when your ‘Buy Now!’ button is pink rather than blue, you make the button pink, even if it’s your least favorite color. If your research suggests that your customers are more likely to buy bracelets when the model’s hand is in the thumbs-up position, guess which pose your bracelet models are all going to use?
When you have a good CRO strategy, you don’t waste time or money on doomed marketing campaigns, because you’re intimately aware of who your customers are and what gets them to spend money.
3. Makes your business more competitive
When your store actively invests in CRO, you immediately start to edge out the competition.
Every little bit helps. If you sell the same products as another website, but your website is just a little faster, a little easier to use, and a little friendlier, you can outsell the competition every single time, without ever changing anything about your products.
4. Improves ROI for marketing campaigns
A marketing campaign that gets you millions of new visitors who never spend money on your website is less successful than a marketing campaign that gets you five thousand new visitors who all spend money on your site. Good CRO strategy improves the returns on your marketing investments, because once you get more visitors from your marketing campaign, you automatically get more money – not just more eyes on your website.
5. Makes your business more legitimate
Good CRO strategy improves your brand perception. Online shoppers will feel more comfortable spending money on your website if they can see that other people have already spent money without suffering any ill effects. The more money your business makes, the more money it stands to make in the future. (Strange, but true.)
6. Helps you make better layout decisions for your website
When you design your website, you’re not just doing it for fun. You’re doing it to make your visitors feel more comfortable. At a minimum, your website should be attractive and easy to navigate. When you start implementing CRO strategy into your website design, you’re no longer flying blind. You can choose button sizes, fonts, and colors based on which ones are more likely to get people to spend money on your website.
And the best part is that CRO produces results almost immediately, so you can see which of your layout decisions are a hit with your customers.
7. Makes the most of your current web traffic
The best thing about improving your CRO strategy is that it doesn’t involve embarking on expensive marketing endeavors to attract new customers. It helps you make the most of the visitors you already have. This makes it one of the most cost-effective ways to increase your profits.
The takeaway
If you want to increase profits from your online sales, you can’t focus exclusively on your SEO strategy. For best results, you need to combine a good SEO strategy (or a good SEO tool) with a great CRO plan, so you can attract lots of visitors to your website and get those visitors to spend their money!
