If you want to develop a CRO strategy for your online store, then check out how you can start at every budget.

Why Conversion Rate Optimization is a great investment for your ecommerce business (at every marketing budget)

The purpose of conversion rate optimization (CRO) is to increase the percentage of website visitors that turn into customers. For your ecommerce business, you’ll focus on the percentage of people who buy something from your online store. Whether you sell jewelry, beauty products, or furniture (or anything in between), you need to have a strategy to optimize your conversions and create a smooth customer experience.

If you want to develop a CRO strategy for your online store, keep reading to learn how you can start at every budget.

What benefits do ecommerce businesses get from CRO?

Let’s start with the benefits of CRO for your ecommerce business. CRO is data-driven. There’s no guesswork in CRO because you can hone in on the metrics that matter most to you. You can also measure your impact with a conversion rate optimization strategy.

When you decide to invest in CRO, you ultimately invest in a better shopping experience for your customers. If you’re strategic with your calls-to-action (CTA), checkout experience, and product pages, your customers will want to engage with your business. When customers want to engage with you, you’re more likely to increase sales. If you’re ready to increase conversions, then read on to learn why you should add CRO to your business strategy and the steps to start converting your website visitors.

Reason #1: CRO is based on metrics (rather than an “educated guess” or loudest voice)

Rather than guessing how to improve your website, consider investing in professionals who can help you with your CRO strategy. A CRO specialist ensures that you have access to expertise and increases your bandwidth to implement long-term solutions to boost revenue over time. Investing in a general marketing agency isn’t always a strategic move because they tend to suggest shorter-term solutions without addressing the root cause of your problems.

CRO specialists have the expertise needed to help you make data-driven decisions for your business. Their job is to increase your rate of investment and help you develop a sustainable business.

A CRO agency can hone in on the metrics that matter most to your ecommerce business. For example, a specialist can focus on the following areas:

1. Average order value (AOV)
2. Shopping cart abandonment rate
3. Checkout abandonment
4. Sale conversion rates

Reason #2: CRO helps you measure impact

The conversion rate is measured by calculating the percentage of website visitors that take said desirable action. That percentage measures your overall impact. If you have a high conversion rate, you most likely have a high impact. In this case, your main goal would be to increase your revenue, not just the conversion percentage. The quality of conversions also matters when it comes to understanding your level of impact.

It improves your odds of making an impact and potentially earning more revenue. Besides using conversion rates to measure your impact, you can also use your return on investment to measure your success.

To figure out your level of impact, pay attention to your CRO results from multiple perspectives. Focus on improving the value of conversion rates, not just the conversion rates alone. Offering a deal to visitors might raise your conversion rates, but it may not be profitable in the end.

Reason #3: CRO Results in a better, more valuable ecommerce experience

To provide the best website experience possible, CRO provides you with services that remove obstacles that prevent customers from completing a purchase. When customers can avoid roadblocks, they have a better experience on your website. In turn, these customers are more likely to make a purchase on your website.

You’ll find that CRO will keep customers returning to your website because it creates a seamless shopping experience. CRO can directly impact the lifetime value of your customers. It does, however, take time to use CRO effectively. Research and data go into a CRO strategy to ensure that your users have a good experience. Experts in CRO can work with complex metrics and analyze user feedback to recommend solutions grounded in data. The solution is then tested to make sure that it will work for your business and customer base.

Reason #4: CRO results in more sales

CRO is designed to help you boost sales over time. Once website visitors are satisfied with their shopping experience, the goal is to make sure that they spend more money on your website than before.

With CRO, you’ll gain more visitors, and in turn, your business will generate more revenue. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on advertising if you can increase the percentage of current visitors who spend money on your website. Rather than spending more money on ads, CRO helps you make more money from the same amount of traffic.

With a CRO strategy, you can stick to your current marketing budget and still experience sales growth. Your goal should be to spend less of your money on customer acquisition and increase the number of sales you get through CRO. CRO lives up to its name of optimizing your conversions by leading website visitors on a path to spend more money at your online store.

If you’re ready to boost sales with conversion rate optimization (CRO), we offer CRO services to help you grow your business.

Step 1: Gather your optimization tools

We rounded up our favorite ecommerce conversion tools and methods that help you understand your current website performance. You should have the following in your tool belt:

1. Click tracking and heat mapping analysis: If you want to see where visitors click the most on your online store and how far they scroll down the page, you should use click-tracking analysis. We like Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar as good entry point tools for capturing and analyzing this behavioral data.

2. Screen recordings: If you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall when people visit your online store, then you’ll want to capture screen recordings. Recordings can help you find where visitors experience obstacles with the purchase process. Both Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar also capture screen recordings for you.

3. Usability studies: A usability study can help you identify areas that cause users to abandon their shopping experience. Usability studies are a more in-depth research method that requires you to recruit participants who represent your target customers. Once you have research participants, you can ask them to complete browsing and purchasing tasks on your website, so that you’ll uncover any issues during the task. If you don’t want to invest the time it takes to conduct a usability study, then you should have a UX company with expertise in CRO conduct one for you.

4. Surveys: Use an online survey to gather information from a large group quickly and in a cost-effective manner. You can create a survey using Google or SurveyMonkey and send it to people on your email list. Consider segmenting people who have signed up for your newsletter and those who have bought a product from you. Determine what you want to learn from your survey and try to keep the survey as short as possible for respondents.

Step 2: Create your first A/B test

Once you’ve conducted initial research on your current website, you should run A/B tests for your website. An A/B test includes testing at least two versions of the same webpage or other digital assets, like a social media post, to see which version performs best.

One important thing to remember is to make sure there is a specific test hypothesis, so you know what change you expect to happen and how you’ll measure it. It’s important that you are testing only one or two differences between variants, so you know what caused the change. You might start by testing a new image or different copy on your website. The version that performs best can then determine which product image or copy you’ll use on the final version of your webpage.

Interested in a breakdown of A/B testing tools? We got you covered in our blog post devoted to The Best A/B Testing Tools for your Conversion Optimization Toolkit.

Step 3: Invest in CRO Today

It’s important to note that investing in CRO is accessible to businesses, small and large. It’s an affordable service that will help increase your rate of investment. If you own a small ecommerce business, this is a great option and is most likely within your budget. It’s not a secret that CRO can result in the highest rate of investment for businesses, especially when compared to alternatives like SEO, social media, and traffic generation.

Consider filling out the Conversion Report Card to start your CRO journey. This report card will give you three actionable and personalized insights to improve your website’s conversion rate.

Start getting a higher ROI on your advertising program and increase overall revenue with strategic CRO services by Experiment Zone today.