8 Ways to Get Started with a CRO Strategy

A good marketer is focused on driving traffic to a website. But the best marketers go beyond this and look for the number that matters most: how many of these visits translate into sales. This is the conversion rate—a clear indicator of how effective each campaign and overall digital marketing strategy are.

What kind of marketer are you? It’s time you became one of the best.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is what separates great marketers and successful digital marketing strategies. It’s not enough to simply drive traffic to your site. You need a follow-through plan—a strategy for getting the most value out of every lead and every customer purchase.

The question is, do you have a CRO strategy? Without one, you’re missing a crucial piece in your digital marketing strategy. More than getting traffic, it’s the best way to generate qualified leads, convert more leads to customers, and drive sustainable, cost-effective growth. Let’s find out how to get started on a CRO strategy.

What is a CRO strategy for marketing?

The simplest way to think of CRO is what comes after digital marketing: the work that goes into maintaining the momentum from high traffic in order to realize actual revenue. It’s what makes every sale possible—the difference between a click and completing checkout and even repeat purchases.

Essentially, CRO is a strategy for getting your digital marketing strategy through to the finish line and making sure it works. It’s all about removing barriers from the conversion funnel so that potential customers move along the sales pipeline. CRO allows you to create an optimal shopping experience so that they move from click to browsing, and getting a quote or completing checkout with ease. 

With a CRO strategy, you can convert more possible views to qualified leads, sales, and repeat purchases, giving you more ROI for every marketing dollar. The result is a higher conversion rate and increased revenue, all thanks to small but impactful changes to your website.

Where to Implement CRO Marketing

CRO is a fulsome strategy for elevating your website’s conversion rate. But to increase the rate, it comes down to specific locations where conversions may take place—and why they’re currently not working. These include:

• Homepage: this is where most visitors land, so it’s crucial to make the best first impression, invite customers to keep exploring product pages, and ensure they complete a conversion action.
• Pricing page: this is where most shopping decisions are made—if customers add an item to their carts and make the purchase. First of all, you need a clear pricing page. But more importantly, one CRO strategy you can implement is adding pricing intervals along with product features, complete with a get a quote form.
• Landing pages: these pages are central to CRO and every campaign. Designed to promote a single offer, landing pages supplement expertly curated content on your website. Landing pages can streamline the conversion pathway, ensuring they reach ready-to-buy demographics intent on completing a purchase before they leave the page.
• Blogs: a primary vehicle of content marketing, blogs are highly effective in nurturing leads and intent to buy with helpful, value-added information.

Steps for Implementing a CRO Strategy

Now that you know all about CRO, it’s time to implement and strengthen conversion pathways. Here’s how to get started:

1. Analyze your conversion funnel

How do customers navigate your website and complete conversion actions? What pathways do they take? Where are the leads stalled?

The first step to optimizing your conversion rate is analyzing how they move along the conversion funnel. From traffic patterns, you’ll need to see how many of these visitors progress to conversion actions, such as browsing a product and adding it to their cart. On the flip side, it’s also worth finding out where they bounce out of your site and the page elements that contribute to this. With this information, you can make data-driven decisions on your CRO.

2. Set clear conversion goals

Beyond industry averages and benchmarks, effective CRO is backed by unique conversion goals. Rather than arbitrary targets, you need to set clear goals that fulfill the most crucial KPIs, such as customer acquisition, target leads, and increased revenue. Most importantly, don’t box these metrics in by themselves. Think of conversion goals this way: for every x number of page views, there should be x number of conversions and x dollars worth of revenue.

3. Support analytics with qualitative data

Numbers may not lie, but they also don’t tell the entire story. When developing a CRO strategy, make sure to include qualitative feedback from surveys, user testing, and other customer feedback sources. It’s not enough to find out how many customers bounced out your site right before they could add an item to their carts. You need to know what pain points they experienced that disrupted their shopping experience.

4. Craft high-converting CTAs

Call-to-actions are perhaps the number one conversion tool. It doesn’t matter how smart your content or how engaging a visual is. Without a CTA that prompts action, you could easily lose leads who just don’t know where to go from there.

Most marketers already know the basic locations of CTAs, such as the homepage and product pages. But did you know that CTAs can also boost blog performance? 

Blogs are central to lead nurturing. This is where you nurture a customer’s intent to buy with a thoughtful content marketing strategy. As you continuously provide value-added information, make sure to close the deal with a clear conversion pathway with a get a quote form, email signup button, or popup offer, and more.

5. Add messaging features on high-converting pages and across your website

Customer service has greatly evolved in the digital age. Now, it’s no longer having someone on the other end of a customer service hotline or email. You need to interact with customers in real-time to provide a clear, straight pathway to their shopping needs.

A chatbot does exactly that. You can provide customer support in real-time, such as helpful links to products they’re searching for. As a result, you’re able to close more leads and increase your conversion rate.

While it’s a good practice to enable chat support across your site, make sure to prioritize key conversion locations, such as the homepage, product, and pricing pages in order to generate leads in real-time.

6. Use retargeting to stay in front of leads

Retargeting is one of the most vital tools for staying in front of customers and nurturing their intent to buy and optimizing your conversion rate. The reality is, no matter how qualified a lead is, they may not be inclined to complete the purchase right away. So, how do you finally close the deal?

One of the best ways to do that is through retargeting. Even if customers have left your site, you can “track” them across the web and display targeted ads to remind them of their pending shopping decision. Make sure to retarget visitors who browsed your highest-converting pages.

7. Implement marketing automation

CRO works best when you enable the teams behind every sale and their workflows. Since a major component of CRO is designing multiple, effective conversion pathways, it’s crucial to equip marketing and sales teams with the tools they need to continuously nurture leads and engage customers.

This is where marketing automation comes in. This allows sales teams to send automated emails (i.e., abandoned cart emails), get notified when leads complete high-intent actions, schedule sales calls, and more. By enabling productive workflows, sales teams are able to reduce stalled leads and move more leads along the sales funnel.

8. Run A/B testing on landing pages and other conversion pathways

And finally, don’t forget about A/B testing. If it isn’t already, make it a core part of your CRO strategy. Simply, you shouldn’t launch new CRO elements—whether it’s a landing page or a CTA button—without validating their effectiveness.

A/B testing allows you to test different versions of landing pages and other locations on your website that you’re optimizing for conversions. Based on the results, you can implement the best version that your target audience responds to. Ultimately, A/B testing enables data-driven CRO, resulting in higher conversion rates.

Let’s Develop Your CRO Strategy

Now that you have the basic formula for conversion rate optimization, it’s time to get started. Consultus Digital can help.

As a leading CRO agency, we provide a clear roadmap to increased qualified leads, conversions, and sales. From performing a complete audit of your website to essential CRO marketing strategies like SEO, content marketing, landing page development, marketing automation, and more, we offer a robust strategy development package that is anchored to CRO. Whether it’s the little things like adding CTAs or a complete overhaul of your website to define a clear conversion pathway, we provide everything you need to drive conversions and get the best value from every marketing dollar.

Struggling to convert your website traffic to revenue and meaningful customer relationships? Get started on a CRO strategy today with our experts at Consultus Digital.