What is CRO Marketing and Why You Shouldn’t Ignore It

What CRO Tools Will I Need To Get Started?

How To Create A CRO Marketing Strategy.

Many online brands are already doing what it takes to drive website traffic. 

They have PPC ad campaigns set up, Facebook ads running, and they’ve also engaged influencers on Tik-Tok and Instagram to drive traffic to their website. Let’s not forget the good old Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that brings in that organic traffic.

But, despite these efforts to bring traffic to their sites, most still struggle to turn visitors into buyers. A study released by Episerver showed that 92% of e-commerce visitors don’t buy right away on their first visit to a website. 

That shows that most e-commerce websites do not have a traffic problem but a conversion problem.  

This is where conversion rate optimization marketing comes in.

With CRO marketing, you don’t need to bring in more traffic to your site to increase conversions – this whole concept aims to maximize conversions from the existing traffic.

CRO marketing helps you understand how visitors interact on your website, make hypotheses, run A/B test experiments to validate your hypothesis, and make changes if the variations perform better.

In this article, we’ll be looking at CRO marketing, how to get started in CRO marketing, some tools you’ll need to get started, why CRO marketing is essential, how to set CRO goals, and what is a CRO marketing strategy. 

Ready to get started? Let’s dive in.

CRO Marketing (Definition).

Conversion rate optimization, or CRO marketing, increases the percentage of your existing traffic taking the desired action on your website.

According to Wikipedia: 

“online conversion optimization was born out of the need of e-commerce marketers to improve their website performance in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble.”

As many websites were born, the competition became intense, and marketers wanted to stand out because they saw how much they invested in generating leads, but the conversions were low.

This led to the development of tools in 2004 that helped marketers experiment with website design, content variations, layouts, etc.

In 2007, conversion optimization as a type of marketing had a significant boost with the release of Google’s free web optimizer.

Fifteen years later, many brands still drive traffic to their website and landing pages. However, most are still struggling to convert more visitors into paying customers. 

Why Is CRO Marketing Important?

Conversion optimization is essential to every business because it helps you better understand and serve your customers. And nowadays, customers remain loyal to businesses they feel understand them. 

So, just by helping you understand your customers, CRO marketing gives you a competitive advantage that you can use to deliver positive experiences throughout your business. 

The CRO marketing process involves qualitative and quantitative research and many other components such as hypothesis design, A/B testing, etc. 

The data you gather from doing conversion research is used to create your hypothesis, then validated/invalidated using A/B experiments. 

Another advantage of CRO marketing is that it helps you reduce the acquisition cost of new leads. Not to say that the top-of-the-funnel acquisition is wrong, but you only get much more from the traffic you’re generating when your website is optimized and you’re constantly running A/B tests to improve your numbers.

Other benefits of CRO marketing

• Grow brand affinity.
• Improve your customer experience.
• It leads to highly qualified leads.
• Earn more conversions that lead to an increase in revenue.

What Are CRO Goals And How To Set Them?

Conversion rate optimization does not work in a vacuum. It would be best to have defined goals to measure whether or not your experimentation program is working successfully. 

Before setting up your CRO goals, you need to have well-defined business goals with which the conversion experts will align the CRO program for success. 

Failure to do this will only lead the CRO marketing team to work on experiments that don’t directly impact the business’s quarterly goals. This can lead to frustration for the conversion experts and the business owners; we don’t want that.

See the highlighted article to learn more about aligning your business goals with CRO. 

Moving on, in CRO marketing, we have two types of goals. The macro goal (this is the primary conversion that every business cares about), and we also have micro-goals (they seem like distractions and unnecessary). Still, every mature experimenter knows you must consistently hit your micro-goals to achieve your macro goals. 

Here’s an example of a micro goal that impacts the direct conversion: for an eCommerce website, the primary conversion is a purchase; that’s what they want, that’s what they’re looking for. 

A micro conversion that looks insignificant but is a significant stepping stone to this macro goal is to recover more abandoned carts, and this will work through setting up an abandoned cart flow in their email service provider, which allows them to reach out to users who paused their purchase process and recover some sales.

Another example of a micro goal that leads to an uptick in purchases for this eCommerce website is the win-back flow to get previous subscribers/purchasers to buy again. The more previous purchasers buy again, the more orders are placed, directly impacting the macro purchase goal.

The difference between micro and macro goals and how they work together should be easy to understand now, yea?

Examples of macro CRO marketing goals you want to achieve could be;

• An increase in sales.
• To increase your email list.
• To see more conversions on your best-selling products.
• Signing up for an event.
• An increase in downloads of an application, guide, lead magnet, etc.

When Is The Right Time For A Brand To Get Started in CRO Marketing?

The right time for a brand to get started in CRO marketing is when they want to know their customers better and improve their user experience. 

Improving their customer’s online experience here could mean;

•  Making it easy for web visitors to navigate between different pages.
• Making it easy for web visitors to find the products they’re looking for.
• Improving the mobile checkout experience to get more sales, fewer abandoned carts, etc. 

There is no barrier to starting a CRO marketing program as a business, but let’s highlight the basics to do it well. 

• As a brand, you don’t just get started with CRO. The best way to go about this is to have company goals, then set up CRO goals that align with your brand goals, which could be more sign-ups, downloading a lead magnet, purchasing multiple products or a particular best-selling product, etc.

In this beginning phase of making CRO marketing goals that align with your brand’s overall vision, you also need to benchmark your current performance to accurately measure your performance and document your learnings when you begin the CRO marketing program.

 Also worth implementing at this stage is setting the right expectations. Conversion rate optimization experts don’t wave their hands, and you magically see improvements and more revenue. This is the picture many businesses have mentally. It’s good you let them know CRO marketing is a long-term goal and the processes you have in place to get the business their desired conversions.

• When these basics are in place, the next thing to do is look at your website analytics using tools like Google Analytics to see the pages related to your CRO goals and how users behave on such pages. Is there a high bounce rate? What’s the average spend time? What is the conversion rate contrast between devices, etc.?

• After quantitative research, which involves looking at Google Analytics data and analyzing user replay sessions using a tool like Figpii, you want to collect qualitative data that gives you insight into the ‘WHY’ of customers. 

Knowing why your customers behave the way they do on your website is critical to uncovering pain points that are stopping them from converting and what’s working you can amplify to increase conversions. 

There are different qualitative research methods, such as heuristic evaluations and focus groups. Still, the easiest ones to implement so you begin to gather customer feedback immediately are polls and surveys. 

To get more insights from your customers than polls and surveys can provide, you will want to conduct a JTBD interview. As a CRO agency, the JTBD interview is part of our qualitative research to uncover customer purchase intent, conversion blockers, and sweet spots. We conduct this interview with our client’s customers to better understand what influences their buying decisions. This interview could last an hour to two hours. 

With all the data you’ve gathered from quantitative and qualitative research, the next step is to prioritize the conversion issues you have uncovered in the user research step. 

• The prioritization aspect of CRO marketing is an essential step of the CRO process because you’ll work on conversion issues that don’t directly impact the business goals without it. 

 Prioritization allows you to unbiasedly look at all the conversion issues you have seen that need attention but work on the ones that directly impact the brand’s goals. Without prioritization, you could form a hypothesis for an issue you feel is essential but not relevant to the company’s quarterly goal. 

Now, when you’ve successfully prioritized the business goals, the next step is to form the hypothesis for the conversion issue you will test.

• The hypothesis is an assumption you’re making based on all the collected data (qualitative and quantitative research). You intend to A/B test it with your variant to see how your website visitors respond.

Note: A/B testing is not CRO marketing; it’s an essential process in CRO marketing and the perfect place for a brand to get started with conversion rate optimization. To know more about A/B testing, multivariate testing, the difference, and elements to test, check out this definitive guide. 

How To Create A CRO Marketing Strategy.

Wordstream says a CRO plan can boost conversions on your website by 50%. 

Just imagine with me what a 50% boost in the conversion of existing traffic means for your business. Every benefit of CRO we’ve mentioned in previous sections of this article comes to mind. 

• A reduction in acquisition cost.
• An increase in revenue.
• Leads to more customer retention.

So, what’s a CRO strategy?

A CRO marketing strategy is the plan or structured roadmap to understand your website visitors and improve their online experience over time. 

This section will be insightful for the brands that don’t have a CRO strategy and want to begin their conversion optimization journey.

The first step in your CRO strategy process is to;

• Find what brings people to your website:

 Present-day brands don’t have a traffic issue. Specific to your brand is how you generate traffic. It could be through SEO, influencer marketing, or PPC ads. When you’ve identified this, thoroughly audit your process and what your audience responds to. This leads to more qualified leads coming down your pipeline.

• Conduct a deep dive to find the reason behind low conversions on your website:

This is the logical next step after discovering what brings customers to your website.

A conversion blocker deep dive is quickly done by looking at your user behavior analytics tool to see how visitors interact and behave on your website. Once you get the insights that cause your customers to leave your website without converting, the next phase in your conversion marketing strategy is to look for the sweet spots on your website that improve your conversion.

• Uncover sweet spots that make your web visitors convert: 

This is the final step in your CRO marketing strategy. 

Now, you know what brings the traffic, and you have plans to optimize it; you have discovered FUDs that affect conversions on your website; now, you need to discover what experience has made previous shoppers convert and what will make the undecided website visitor convert. 

You can conduct interviews with previous shoppers to know what converted them, interviews with the undecided to find out why they’re yet to convert and use pop-ups on your website to reach out to the web visitors you can’t have an interview with.

 The details you gather are essential because you’ll use them to form your hypothesis and run an A/B test experiment to learn what works.

You document your learnings, apply the winner (control or variant), and see your conversion figure increase.

Easy right? 

CRO Tools You’ll Need To Get Started

Every niche, industry, and profession has specific tools that help them perform. The same can be said of CRO marketing.

Depending on where you’re on your CRO journey (beginner or mature experimentation program), you’ll need three categories of CRO tools to understand customer behavior, what’s working or not, and how to test your hypothesis. 

These three categories have several tools, but I’ll be highlighting just some tools. Also, note that some tools have multi-category functions.

That being said, these are the three major categories.

1. Web analytics: the tools here help you understand what’s going on on your website. The tools in this category provide quantitative numerical data that can be measured.
2. User behavior tools: As the name implies, user behavior tools let you see how users interact on your website. This is very important in identifying conversion blockers for A/B testing.
3. AB testing platforms: the tools in this category help you measure your variations against the control and see if your hypothesis works. Without these tools, you can’t tell if your hypothesis is valid.

Also, note before going forward that the tools mentioned in these categories are GDPR compliant since you’re working with people’s information, have a friendly user interface, are secure, and integrate easily with other tools in the CRO ecosystem.

• Google Analytics (web analytics): 

Google Analytics is one of the best website analytics tools for web analytics to know how users are behaving on your website. You can use Google Analytics to research how users act on particular pages on your website. It shows you session per duration and bounce rates and offers additional services such as traffic sources, user demographics, etc. The pricing for Google Analytics is free.

• Heap Analytics (web analytics): 

This is another tool you can use for qualitative and quantitative research. 

• It captures how users interact with your website, product, and app. 
• It tells you who uses your product and how they use it.
• It lets you segment users to personalize their interactions.
• It identifies moments of friction in your product (conversion blockers) and helps you diagnose them.
• It helps you identify the marketing channels and behaviors that convert the most. 

The Heap analytics dashboard is clean and easy to use. 

They have four pricing plans; free, growth, pro, and premier.

• Figpii (user behavior and AB testing platform): this CRO marketing tool from Invesp is a dream come true. This tool falls into user behavior tools and AB testing platforms.

Figpii is an aggregate of several tools in one.

•  You can use Figpii heatmaps to understand how users interact with your site. Do they scroll down past the fold? Are they clicking on a word, thinking it’s a link or button? Etc. 
• Figpii also has session recording. It lets you know how your website visitors move on your website, the pages they visit, etc. 
• You can also run quick polls on your website from Figpii for qualitative research. 
• Lastly, you can launch A/B tests to test your hypothesis and see how your variation performs against the control.

Pricing: starter $49.99, small $99.99, medium $199.99, large $339.99.

• Mixpanel (web and product analytics):

This tool helps you know who converts and why they convert. Mixpanel provides;

• Advanced web traffic source attribution capabilities.
• Unsampled and accurate user data is available for analysis in real time.
• Seamless cross-device tracking and reporting across multiple user sessions, from pre-login to post-login user interactions.
• It also helps you build funnels on the fly, breaking them down by any user attribute or behavior to identify which users convert best.
• You can also locate the funnel steps that cause friction to engage users better before they drop off. 

They have three pricing plans: free, growth, and enterprise.

Disclaimer: These are not all the tools available for these highlighted categories. These are just some of the tools we use for our clients. This section is not meant to be exhaustive; tons of tools exist. Carry out your research to check for other CRO marketing tools that better fit your budget and help your CRO program. 

Also, note that some tools can affect your website load time, so don’t have them running all the time on your website.

CRO marketing best practices to stay ahead

Best practices as a term have been abused and overused by marketers all over the internet, but it doesn’t mean they’re no reasonable best practices in experimentation. 

If you follow these three rules, your experimentation program will be fine. 

• Don’t make any adjustments to your website without being backed by data. Data should inform your decisions.
• Have an ICE; this helps you prioritize your hypothesis and determine which one to test first. 
• Document everything. It helps mature your CRO program faster and keeps information airtight.
• Don’t copy your competitors. You can borrow ideas from them, but A/B tests the concept as a variation to know if it fits your audience type.
• Don’t stop and edit a working experiment and then restart that same experiment. You’ll jeopardize your findings.
• Have a well-defined CRO marketing roadmap; we already talked about it in the strategy session. Without following a defined process, you’ll miss some critical steps in your experiments, which will skew your results.
• QA every experiment before running them. This is good CRO marketing hygiene. Ensure all your goals are tracked, and the variation is rendering correctly for the users.

CONCLUSION

CRO marketing is what you need as a business to edge out your competition. It’s simple: the exact visitors you’re getting on your website are the same visitors your competitors are getting on theirs. 

You make more of your traffic convert by optimization backed by data. If you don’t take CRO marketing seriously in your business, you’ll be driving traffic from different sources but not converting at your best numbers, and you don’t want that.

Find this article interesting. Leave a comment below, tell us how conversion rate optimization has helped your business, and share with a friend.

FAQ

What is CRO Marketing? 

CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. CRO marketing is a method that seeks to maximize the assets on your website. By that, I mean to increase the percentage of your website’s visitors who take the desired action on your website.

Conversions vary from website to website or page to page. Here are some examples

1. Subscribing to a newsletter. 
2. Downloading content like white papers and reports
3. Upgrading a service to a higher tier.
4. Bundling products ie increased AOV.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?       

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of website or app visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or signing up for a newsletter. CRO involves analyzing user behavior and website/app performance data to identify areas where the user experience can be improved, and then making changes to the website or app to increase the likelihood that visitors will convert. The goal of CRO is to maximize the effectiveness of a website or app in achieving its business objectives, such as generating revenue, increasing engagement, or driving leads.

Does CRO run Marketing?

Conversion rate optimization is a marketing approach that seeks to increase the percentage of your visitors taking action. Does conversion optimization run marketing campaigns? No, but it can be applied to other marketing activities like A/B testing ad creatives, A/B email designs and copy, etc.

What Problem does CRO Marketing solve?

The conversion problem. Many businesses are throwing money at customer acquisition, yet not getting enough returns, increasing their CAC numbers. CRO helps to increase the number of site visitors that convert.

What Are The Key Elements Of CRO Marketing?

There are several vital elements to CRO Marketing, including conversion research, hypothesis design, A/B testing, messaging, and personalization.

Kobiruo Otebele

Content marketing expert with experience in conversion rate optimization, A/B testing, jobs-to-be-done framework, etc.

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