5 Truths Senior Marketers Need To Know About Conversion Rate Optimisation

Content Rate Optimisation (CRO) has become a hugely popular buzzword in the digital marketing world. It offers a promise that seems to good to be true, more money without more website traffic.

The fact of the matter is, done right, that is exactly what CRO will deliver, but doing it right requires both patience, preparation and strategy.

If you’re a chief marketing officer looking to start a successful CRO project, here are the five things we think will help you be prepared for success.

1. Optimising your conversions isn’t ALL about testing.

Anyone can test multiple variations, but without the right thinking how will you know what to test? Or when you’ve got the best possible results?
Good CRO will always involve an element of A/B testing, but not all A/B testing is CRO.

Done right, a conversion optimisation campaign will start with a comprehensive understanding of the user behaviour on the website. This will allow your CRO team to understand the problems they are trying to fix.
Once the team know the problems they are addressing, they can develop the right solutions to offer a better user experience, leading to more conversions.

2. ROI is more valuable than conversions

It’s confusing, I know, but the most important part of conversion optimisation is not conversions at all. The best result for any business is increased revenue overall. That means making the right conversions, at the right time to build ongoing success.

Just like the cheapest lead is the one you already have, the most profitable customer is the one who is coming back. A good CRO campaign should look beyond short term conversions to improve overall revenue.

3. CRO requires a full digital team

An analyst can identify a digital problem but probably won’t know the best solution. A UX expert will know the best solution, but won’t always be able to deliver the best designs, and none of them will be able to the most compelling copy.

To truly deliver an effective CRO campaign you need a robust team of digital specialists working together. Their combined expertise helps make every part of your website work together to deliver more sales.

4. Allow your tests the time they deserve

You’ve invested time, money and resources into a CRO campaign. You’ve agreed upon the strategy and it’s all based on real data. Most of the hard work is done, don’t risk hindering the performance of the campaign with impatient ad hoc tinkering. Allow your tests to reach a statistically significant conclusion, analyse the data and develop a plan to do it better.

5. Build a holistic digital strategy

Optimising a landing page is good, optimising an entire user journey is better. The more digital data you can funnel into your CRO campaign, the better it will perform. On the flip side, the more data your digital team have the better placed they will be to direct the right traffic to your website through PPC and paid social. A optimised digital funnel will always lead to more sales than a single optimised page.

A successful CRO campaign can make chief marketing officers look like superstars. It is proven to have a large, tangible and ongoing impact on sales and revenue. That’s why it is so important to get it right and to do that you need the right team, allowed to focus on an overall strategy, with time to ensure they are getting statistically significant results.