What is CRO and Why Should I Care?

April 3, 2016

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In the realm of digital marketing, quality always outweighs quantity. Although web presence and increasing traffic is essential, it’s even more important to ensure these visitors are converting. In other words, are users following through and taking the action you need them to take? This could be joining your mailing list, signing up for an account or purchasing goods online.


Whatever it may be, it’s important to continually monitor this performance in order to highlight potential issues and overcome them. This method is known as Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). It may sound complex but it’s really simple and surprisingly valuable.


While many choose to guestimate their performance based on hunches, a CRO approach uses factual information for reliable insights. There are plenty of analytics metrics to consider from bounce and exit rates to average time on site and user feedback.


Technicalities aside, CRO should be at the forefront of your online marketing strategy. For those not convinced, here are 5 reasons why you shouldn’t avoid this method.


Low cost, high reward


CRO requires very little outlay as you won’t be investing in new strategies to attract visitors to your site. Instead, you’re maximising the potential of existing visitors. As you convert a higher number of these, your return on investments should increase as well as your profit.


Avoid paid advertising


In a fiercely competitive market, paid advertising continues to become more costly and less effective. Avoid these external measures in favour of fixing and improving what you already have. CRO should enable minor tweaks to your conversion funnel, improving performance in a short space of time.


More money to invest


Now you’ve saved money and increased profits, you’ll have more resources to invest in attracting new users. A thorough CRO should have also highlighted those funnels which are bringing in the best visitors in terms of quality. This information can be used to only spend money on additional acquisition that is right for your business.


Attract the right customers


Optimizing your website can have far bigger implications than increased profit. By converting more of those customers which enjoy your product or service, you can expect much better brand awareness. More people will spread the word to family and friends, giving you better web presence and free marketing.


Beat the competition


The philosophy of ‘slight edge’ or ‘the winner takes all’ couldn’t be more apt for web based marketing. You only need a very slight advantage to keep visitors coming back and choose your site over the competition. Even if CRO can improve your website by a fraction – making it slightly faster or a little more user-friendly – it could be all that’s needed to beat your rivals.


Never stop improving


Whether you’re a weekend blogger, small business or multi-million pound ecommerce platform, there’s always room for improvement. Without monitoring performance and implementing tweaks, you’ll never reach the website’s full potential. With changes in the industry, it’s always important to make the conversion from visitor to user as streamlined as possible.

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