What Is CRO Marketing? Your Guide to Driving More Conversions

What is CRO marketing?

CRO marketing, or conversion rate optimization marketing, is the process of improving a website’s performance to increase the percentage of visitors who take desired actions, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.

CRO marketing allows you to use the assets you already have on your site to pull in more conversions, and when you use it in conjunction with traffic-generating marketing methods, you’ll be astounded by how much your lead generation improves. Read on to discover what CRO marketing is and why it’s important!

What is CRO marketing?

CRO stands for conversion rate optimization, which involves optimizing your website to earn more conversions. With CRO marketing, you create a strategy that revolves around optimizing your website and conversion process to get more people to take your desired action.

Watch our common CRO questions video and then keep reading to learn more.

Related: Common CRO Questions

Conversions include:

• Sales
• Calling your business
• Subscribing to an email list
• Signing up for an event
• Downloading a guide or ebook
• And more

Businesses create a CRO marketing strategy that uses a variety of strategies to improve their conversion rate consistently. For example, a company may use A/B testing on their website to see if changes improve their site’s conversion rate.

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What is conversion rate, and how to calculate it?

Conversion rate is the number of people who convert on your site divided by the number of people who viewed your site.

To calculate the conversion rate, follow this formula:

(Total number of conversions/Total number of site visitors) x 100 = Conversion Rate

FREE conversion rate calculator

Why is CRO marketing important?

Many digital marketing strategies focus on generating more traffic to your site. Let’s say that’s the case with your business. You have a great traffic-generating digital marketing strategy in place.

Your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts are paying off, and you’re pulling in valuable traffic. You might have many people headed to your site, but if people don’t complete your desired action, it’s a problem.

While you could generate more traffic, which would lead to more conversions, it’s better to improve the conversion process for the people on your site.

That’s what CRO marketing does. By improving what’s already on your site, you’ll capitalize on the traffic you already have on your page, so you earn more conversions.

CRO marketing benefits your business because it allows you to:

• Build on and optimize what you have rather than generate something new
• Earn more conversions and more revenue
• Reduce the cost to obtain more conversions
• Improve your customer experience
• Grow brand affinity

CRO is essential because it costs to generating traffic, whether time or money. If your site doesn’t have what it takes to convert customers, then all your efforts to earn traffic go to waste. With a CRO plan in place, you’ll improve the percentage of traffic that converts on your site.

You’ll be getting more value from your visitors, earn more revenue, and grow your business when you include CRO into your marketing strategy.

How do you do CRO marketing?

Now that you have an idea of why CRO marketing is essential, we can start talking about what you need to do to see improvements with your key performance indicators (KPIs).

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1. Identify your conversion type

When creating a CRO marketing strategy, you need to determine what you qualify as a conversion. How you want your visitor to convert can change amongst campaigns, but you should always know which actions are most important to each campaign. Again, some common types of conversion are:

• Sales
• Calls
• Subscribes to an email list
• Completed forms
• Likes or follows on social media
• App downloads
• Clicking on a link

When you identify your conversion type, you can focus on developing a conversion path that leads to success.

2. Map your customer’s journey to improve conversions

Next, you need to analyze how customers move through your conversion funnel.

Your customer’s journey, from first discovering your brand to converting, plays a critical role in CRO marketing. You’ll need to start mapping out their journey to identify the points where you can optimize to improve conversions.

First, spend some time gathering data on your customers so you can understand who is likely to convert. Look at information such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Occupation
• Income range
• Location
• Interests
• Behavior
• Priorities

You can use this information to form marketing personas, which are fictional people based on real customer data. These personas will make it easier for you to understand your audience and how to target them. Once you establish personas, you can use that information to determine the stages your customers will go through in the conversion process.

Common stages include:

• Discovery: Users become aware of your brand through interaction with ads, organic search, or social, even word-of-mouth.
• Research: Users start looking into how your products can solve the problem they have.
• Consideration: Users compare your product’s unique selling points with other products, comparing which product meets their needs better.
• Purchase/conversion: User makes their decision and follows through with an action such as purchasing or calling.
• Delivery and reception: Your product ships through your delivery method and the user receives the product. In terms of services, the reception stage may be a more extended period.
• After-purchase interactions: User evaluates the process and may choose to interact with your brand again through customer service, another purchase, reviewing online, or advocating your brand.

Keep in mind that your buyers’ journey will likely not be a linear progression (especially for sales-type conversions). Customers often jump between stages and move between research and consideration to narrow their choices before ultimately deciding to convert.

3. Analyze your current conversion process

The next step involves analyzing your business’s ongoing conversion process. You need to analyze your operation to identify where your customers typically drop off and stop interacting with your business.

Analyzing your process will allow you to identify hiccups in the conversion path.

There are several reasons why people drop off, including:

• Your headline may not match your page’s content
• Your font size and color choice may make it difficult to read
• Your images don’t load
• Your call to action (CTA) message is hard to find or unappealing
• Your CTA types are intrusive and take away from their experience
• Your CTA button color blends in or doesn’t stand out enough to recognize it as a button
• Your page organization is messy, so information is hard to find

When you find bumps in your conversion process, you can analyze different elements to see what might cause problems for your audience. You may need to test these elements, leading us to the next point.

4. Perform A/B or multivariate testing (MTV)

After you’ve identified the points on your website that you would like to optimize, then you need to start testing. Testing is crucial for CRO marketing. The only way to know that your changes are effective is by testing them.

Luckily, you don’t have to test them manually. You can use testing tools, like WebFX’s proprietary software MarketingCloudFX, which will conduct the tests and compile the results for you. Testing works by creating two versions of your content and delivering those pages to a ratio of your audience.

For example, you might change the color of your CTA button and show the original CTA to half of the traffic to your page and the new CTA to the other half. There are two different testing methods for conversion rate optimization:

• A/B testing: A/B testing involves testing two versions of whatever you’re optimizing, but only changing one variable (like the color of the CTA button we discussed earlier). A/B testing is beneficial to conversion rate optimization because it allows you to know which elements help or hinder conversions. By testing one element at a time, you pinpoint which elements need improvement.
• Multivariate testing (MVT): MVT, on the other hand, lets you test multiple variables for different versions of one piece of your content. You can think of it as multiple A/B tests run at the same time on the same thing (such as your landing page).

So, how do you identify which pages to test? When looking for pages to optimize to improve conversion rate, you might notice that some pages bring in more traffic or conversions than others. Look for pages that have high traffic and low conversion rates.

You can conduct A/B testing or MVT to see if, for example, changing the CTA would impact the page’s performance. Before you perform testing, ask yourself questions like:

• Would it be better to use a full-page “Wait, before you go” pop-up, or would a less intrusive CTA reminder in the bottom right-hand corner of the page convert more?
• Do banner CTAs better catch your customer’s attention or do text-based CTAs?
• Does the messaging match the context of the page?
• Is my CTA clear and descriptive?
• Does my CTA stand out on the page and appear visually appealing?

By asking these questions, you could narrow down your focus for testing your CTA. If you want to drive success with CRO marketing, you must consistently test elements on your site to ensure they’re driving the best results for your company.

Skyrocket your conversions with WebFX!

Ready to start building your CRO marketing strategy? When you partner with a CRO agency like WebFX, we’ll help you create the best CRO marketing strategy for your business.

We’ll help you create a unique CRO marketing strategy that helps you earn more desired actions. Our team will deliver custom reports tailored to the conversions that matter most, so you can watch your conversion rate improve and grow. View our CRO pricing and plans and then contact us online or call us at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our CRO marketing services!