3 Tips in Developing a CRO Workflow to Maximize Conversions
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is key to any marketers hoping to improve their website’s performance and marketing campaigns. Improvement of a website’s user experience and accessibility are effective ways to bring in more traffic and to keep those on your website engaged. CRO emphasizes tracking, testing and constantly improving your website with the goal of increasing the percentage of website visitors that take a specific action such as submitting a web form, making a purchase, signing up for a trial and more. Through these actions, businesses are able to generate more leads or sales without having to invest more money, resulting in an increase in the marketing return on investment and the overall profitability.
Optimizing your workflow can be done through a variety of different actions. Through a UX audit, you can get a better understanding of your page and how other viewers of your page might interpret it. How your website is viewed and the location of tabs or menu items can all have an effect on whether viewers continue to stay on the website and perform the desired action or if they close the tab and never want to come back. With usability testing, you can determine not only if your website is accessible to clients that may have a disability, but even if the average user can locate everything they are looking for. This and the additional improvement tips listed below, will all be key to developing your CRO workflow to maximize conversions.
Navigation and Site Structure
As mentioned above, users may come to your site, become flustered by its layout and immediately click out because they feel frustrated or confused. Your website needs to be accessible to all who might visit, and through a usability test or testing, you can determine what the average user expects the journey through your website’s navigation to be. Usability testing can be done through an array of different ways, but one particular and easy way is through a card sort. The card sort is exactly what it sounds like;you take index cards and you write on each one a different page, tab, category or subcategory. From there, you hand the shuffled cards to your tester, who could be anyone and does not need to be a professional. You ask your tester to organize and group the cards based on how they believe each one would relate to the other.
The typical hierarchy of your website will be in order of the front page, to other tabs or pages, to sub-pages, to posts. The way you believe these each connect to one another, may not be the same way your users believe they should connect. It’s important to test out your site on multiple people to determine what the average user expects from your navigation. Sites that are unstructured or not to the users liking will leave them frustrated and probably leaving your site and never coming back. This is obviously going to be detrimental to your leads and will prevent most from taking the desired action you would hope for.
Another form of usability testing, aside from the card sort, would be scenario testing which consists of making a list of desired actions that you want your tester to take. This allows you to view the tester’s thought process as they navigate the site and try to find exactly what you want them to. This can quickly show where you have made errors in the formation of the website navigation and fix the site to better fit the needs of your clients while also putting your desired actions at the forefront. In addition to navigation, having your tester give their opinions on the readability and the colors of your website will also help you determine how accessible it is. Using the wrong coloring could affect how well users can read the information you put on the website.
At the conclusion of testing, follow up with your tester with post-test questions. This will help give you and your team a better understanding of where the website needs improvement. The post test does not need to be long and can survey the tester on about 4–5 questions based on their experience on your website. This will also help in getting recommendations as you move forward on fixing your website.
Website Copy
The average person may not understand the value of wording and design on websites, but the second that they are on an unattractive website, they will likely click away. Websites that appear unprofessional, regardless of how professional a company is, will end up making users feel like it is untrustworthy or, in extreme cases, a scam. How many times do you come across a website that is visually unappealing and find yourself exiting out or hitting the back button as quickly as possible? Even worse, a website that seems extremely outdated is going to have the same effect. Your website needs to be well-designed and aesthetically pleasing if you’re hoping to generate any leads at all.
The formatting on your website can have a huge impact on generating leads as well. Focus on the font type, size and color to ensure that visitors to your site can easily follow along. Cutting content into relevant paragraphs, use of subheadings to easily follow along, and bulleted or numbered lists are all beneficial to formatting. Creating explainer videos using a good video editing software and adding them to your brands types of content, will add even more value to your posts. Additionally, the writing style needs to be appropriate for your audience. It’s highly important to assess who is the primary audience to your website and how they want to be communicated to. The copy on your website should also be clear and concise while portraying your brand identity or persona. This all helps to make your business appear as professional as possible while being a trustworthy option for your audience. Stick to the specific tone to appear dependable.
Call-To-Action
The most obvious and the easiest way to get your customers to make a desired action, is to create a call-to-action (CTA). This call or request could be anything from making a purchase, submitting a form, subscribing to your newsletter and more. A strong and convincing CTA is going to generate more leads and will directly tell your customers what the desired action is. Your CTA can be in a blog post or directly on the homepage of your site. An issue with CTA on your website is that many people have developed “banner blindness” that subconsciously tells them to ignore anything that appears like an advertisement.
Ultimately, it is much more beneficial for your CTA to be nonchalant and not appear as a flashy distraction. This is where making your CTA text-based will generate more leads. Even the wording of your call-to-action button could have an effect on the leads generated. For example, ADT, a Tyco International company, boosted its conversion rate by 60% through changing the text on their CTA button from “Book a Free Survey” to “Get a Free Quote.” By making the wording more appealing to customers and making it seem like less work on their part, they will be more likely to take your CTA. If the CTA seems demanding or appears that they have to put in the work, they are not going to want to take that action.
Benefits
These CRO tips are all highly beneficial to optimize the functionality and understanding of your website. Companies that fail to experiment with their information and websites will also fail to generate leads that take the desired actions. It can really be as simple as having your own employees go through the website and give their input on improvements that can be made. Just because your website was professionally created, does not mean that it translates well to your customers or clients.
By generating more leads through a well designed website, your company will save money and get an improved marketing ROI. This means better revenue while still receiving the same traffic as before. Additionally, if users enjoy your site or find it easy to use, they are more likely to recommend it to a friend. By focusing on accessibility and usability, users that you may not have originally attracted, will also enjoy using your website thus increasing the amount of leads generated.
