Blog / Progress, not perfection: the incremental magic of CRO

Conversion rate optimization is not what you think. It’s not just testing the colours of buttons to drive more clicks, or seeing if a banner placed at the top of a screen instead of the side of a screen will drive more conversions. It is not, in fact, even about testing changes on the home page.

“Good CRO is about converting those potential customers wavering on the edge of purchasing,” says Michael McCann, Head of CRO at Somebody Digital. “This means more than just A/B testing different elements on the site, it’s about understanding customer motivations and concerns, and addressing those clearly and consistently whenever a potential lead interacts with you.”

Building a plan for success

Most businesses have limited resources when it comes to running CRO tests across their site. “We consider three things when we create a CRO roadmap for clients,” notes Michael. These are:

1. What brings people to your site?

2. What barriers are there to them converting?

3. What motivates them to convert?

By answering these questions through customer questionnaires, talking to sales representatives, and utilising AI tools, CRO teams are able to construct an impactful plan that will ultimately, incrementally, drive conversions on the site.

“Once we understand a customer’s motivation, we can start making small changes to a site that drives a big impact,” says Michael. “If customers consistently raise concerns about shipping or returns policy, and we create a solution that answers this concern, we can almost immediately start to see an improvement in conversions.”

Small numbers result in big shifts.

According to Michael, the numbers add up impressively in CRO. “What seems like a small shift to your conversion rate, say by 5%, adds up to quite a lot in revenue. The hardest part is looking at an overall conversion rate, which ebbs and flows due to daily fluctuations.”

These small shifts result in consistent customer conversions and ultimately revenue growth for the client.

It’s not always about the home page.

“Often people immediately want to optimize the home page, because they assume that’s the first place potential customers come to, but it isn’t,” says Michael. There are numerous entry points on any given site, especially given that a potential customer may have found you by searching for a specific service or product on the internet.

“A large part of our process is breaking down site architecture that can be tested for impact, such as product category pages, cart pages, and checkout pages. We then map the number of users who move through each of these areas.”

Michael adds that it’s important to benchmark the potential impact a test has on a particular page. This can allow a CRO team to see what a hypothetical 5% increase in conversions can result in and allows you to know where you can get the best result.

He notes that once you’ve set up an optimisation framework by defining key areas to optimise, and the value it could generate, it allows you to focus on the biggest impact areas from the start of your testing program.

CRO: small changes for big impact

Ultimately, making small, consistent changes across your site in areas of high impact is what moves your CRO efforts from good to great. “It’s more than A/B testing,” adds Michael, “There’s no guesswork in what we do, and we’re not just implementing best practice. We’re using a research-based process to understand what drives your customer, and that’s what fuels change and increases your conversion rate and revenue growth in the long run.”

Talk to Somebody Digital today about how we can improve your CRO efforts