Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO): Turning Visitors into Customers

When it comes to business, driving traffic to your website is only half the battle. You need your potential customers to take meaningful action - whether it's making a purchase, subscribing to a free trial, or scheduling a demo.

This is what we call conversion in marketing. When visitors complete a specific action, it means that your marketing efforts are effective. You can also use this metric to see which area in your sales funnel needs improvement.

However, how can you increase your conversions and turn more visitors into customers? As an innovative digital marketing agency in Scotland, we're here to provide you tips and strategies on how you can boost your conversion rates.

Read on and let's start maximising your business potential!
 

Introduction to CRO

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of improving your website or marketing funnel to increase the percentage of users who complete a desired action. Essentially, CRO is about making the most out of your existing traffic.

But what does a good conversion rate look like? Although it depends on industry, 2% to 5% is the average conversion rate across all industries.
 

 

Importance of conversion optimisation

Conversion optimisation is crucial for turning your site visitors into customers. By implementing this strategy, your business can benefit from the many advantages it can offer.

Here are reasons why CRO is important for your business:

1. Understand your customers better: CRO helps you gain insights into what motivates your visitors, which allows you to tailor your strategies to their needs and preferences.

2. Minimise acquisition costs: Improving your conversion rate means you get more value from your existing traffic. This means you're reducing the need for expensive acquisition campaigns.

3. Improve your SEO rankings: A well-optimised website with a strong user experience often leads to better SEO performance since search engines reward sites that engage visitors.

4. Make data-driven decisions: CRO relies on analytics and data to ensure your decisions are backed by facts rather than guesswork.

5. Increase your sales and revenue: Ultimately, the goal of CRO is to boost your bottom line by turning more visitors into paying customers.

Overview of conversion rate optimisation process

A successful conversion rate optimisation involves a systematic approach to make sure that you're maximising your website traffic for conversions. Let's check out the sneak peak of this process before discussing each step in detail later on.

• Understanding user behaviour and journey: The first step in CRO is analysing who your audience is and how they interact with your website. This can help you identify the obstacles they face and how you can improve them.

• A/B testing and experimentation: Once you understood the user behaviour and journey, it's time to test out your strategies. A/B testing involves comparing two versions of a content to see which one works well with your users. By doing this iterative process, you will be able to find the best and most effective strategy for your business.

• Optimising landing pages and CTAs: Your landing pages and CTAs are key touchpoints in the conversion process. Make sure that they are clear, compelling, and user-friendly to encourage users to take action.
   

Understanding user behaviour and journey

The first crucial step for effective coversion rate optimisation is understanding user beahviour and journey.

User behaviour is the actions and decisions your visitors make on your website like where they click or how long they stay. On the other hand, user journey is the path your user takes to reach their final goal on your website - whether it's making a purchase or signing up for a demo.

This section will explore everything about user behaviour and user journey to see how they can impact the performance of your conversions.
 

 

Analysing user interactions

To optimise your conversion rates, it's important to know how user interact with your website. Studying these interactions helps you understand what motivates your customers, which areas they engage the most, and where they might leave.

Here's how you can effectively analyse your user interaction:

• Understand your customer motivations and drivers: Identify what compels your visitors to take action. Are they looking for solutions, detailed information, or something else?

• Track user behaviour using analytics: Make use of tools like Google Analytics to monitor clicks, scroll depth, and time spent on pages. This data will show how users navigate your site.

• Use data to identify patterns and trends: Look for recurring behaviour which might indicate where improvements are needed or where your users usually spend a lot of time engaging.

• Utilise insights to improve web design and user experience: Aside from patterns, you can also use these insights to enhance your web design and user experience. This way, you can ensure it aligns with user expectations and drives conversions.

Heat maps and session recordings

When it comes to visualising the behaviour of your users on your website, heat maps and session recordings are the powerful tools to use.

So, what are heat maps and session recordings?

Heat maps provide a visual representation of where users are clicking, scrolling, and hovering on a page. Using different colours to represent each element, they help identify the most and least engaging parts of your site.

Here are the various types of heatmaps:

• Feature click heat maps: This heat map offers insights on how long and how frequent the user clicks on your website features.

• Scroll heat maps: This heat map shows how far web visitors scroll down your page. It indicates how effective your site elements are.

• Mouse tracking/hover heat maps: This heat map tracks the mouse movement of your users, which suggests where their attention is focused.

• Eye-tracking heat maps: This heat map displays how effective your web layout is and which part gets the users confused. By using this, you can see which parts of your website needs refinement to improve engagement.

Session recording is a tool that allows you to observe individual user sessions for detailed insights on how users navigate your site. Using these recordings, you can understand where users encounter difficulties, which areas they engage the more, and where they start to drop off.

By utilising these powerful tools, you will be aware of how your users behave on your site to help you either refine your web design or improve customer experience to increase your conversion rates.

User flow analysis

User flow analysis outlines the steps a user takes to complete a task on your website. This task can be creating a new account, signing up for an email, or renewing a subscription. Leveraging this process can help you identify obstacles, optimise the user journey, and improve conversion rate.

Here are some simple steps on how you can conduct a user flow analysis:

1. Decide on the goal and success metrics: Define what you want users to achieve and how you'll measure success.

2. Map the current process: Visualise the steps users currently take.

3. Data analysis: Use tools to gather data on user interactions.

4. Streamline user flow: Identify and remove bottlenecks.

5. Prioritise areas for improvement: Focus on the most impactful changes.

6. Continuously iterate user flow analysis: Regularly review and refine the user journey.

Identifying conversion barriers

Increasing your conversion rates often comes with challenges. This is what we call conversion barriers. These are obstacles that prevent users from completing their desired actions on your website. Identifying and addressing these issues is crucial part of conversion rate optimisation.

Let's check out some common barriers that you may encounter:

• Complex navigation: If users struggle to find what they need, they’ll likely leave. Based on a survey, 94% of online users stated that easy navigation is the most important feature of a website. That's why businesses should aim to simplify their site’s structure, so their website visitors will be able to easily navigate their site.

• Unclear CTA: A confusing or poorly placed call to action can prevent users to take the next step. Make sure your CTAs are clear, concise, and compelling to encourage visitors to act.

• Slow loading times: Every second counts, and users expect websites to load within 3 seconds. A slow website makes visitors frustrated, which can result to increase in your bounce rates. Keep them engaged by optimising your site's page load speed.

• Not optimised for mobile: Did you know that there 's an estimated 7 billion smartphone mobile network subscriptions worldwide? With this staggering data, a non-responsive design can alienate a large portion of your audience, so ensure your site is mobile-friendly.

• Unclear offerings: Being clear about what you offer makes all the difference. If users don’t understand what you’re products or services are and how it benefits them, they won’t convert. Clearly communicate your products or services to avoid confusion.

Techniques to overcome barriers

Overcoming conversion barriers is essential to turning visitors into customers. Here’s how you can tackle common obstacles:

• Optimise user experience: Make your website's design intuitive and user-friendly. Providing a seamless user experience to your website visitors will keep them engaged.

• Create strong and clear CTAs: Ensure your calls to action are prominent, direct, and easy to understand, guiding users towards conversions.

• Create a responsive web design: Your site should adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes to offer a consistent experience across devices.

• Write compelling content: Use persuasive, engaging copy that resonates with your audience and clearly communicates the value of your offerings.
   

A/B testing and experimentation

After understanding user behaviour and journey, let's now move on to the next step of the conversion rate optimisation process: A/B testing. This technique involves comparing two versions of any web element - Version A vs Version B - to see which one performs better in achieving a specific goal, which is increasing conversions.

By isolating and testing specific features like headlines, images, or CTAs, you can make data-driven decisions that can help improve your website's performance.

Setting up A/B tests

Setting up an A/B test is more than just creating two versions of an element. It involves a careful process to guarantee that the result are reliable and actionable.

Let's see how you can set one up:

• Define your goals: Before starting your test, clearly state what you want to achieve. In this case, we're doing this process to increase the conversion rates.

• Choose the element to test: Once you have a goal, select a specific element that you want to test. It can be a headline, image button, or layout. It's best to focus on one element at a time for more accurate results.

• Choose the right tool: To help you manage and track your A/B tests effectively, utilise tools like Google Optimize, Optimizely, or VWO.

• Create variations: Now that you have the tool for testing, it's time to create two variations of the chosen element. Make sure that the change is distinct enough to see its impact on the user behaviour.

• Run the test: Since everything is finally in place, you can now launch your test and let it run for a specific period to collect reliable data.

• Collect data: When the timeline for the testing comes to an end, gather your data to see how each variation performs.

• Analyse the data: Review the results and determine which variation performed better in terms of conversion rates.

Choosing test elements

When performing A/B tests, it's critical to choose the right test elements to gain actionable insights and guarantee improvements on your conversion rate. Keep in mind that not every element is worth testing, so it's essential to focus on those who have impact on user experience and conversions.

Here are some tips to help you select the proper element to test:

1. Prioritise high-impact elements: Identify the key elements who directly influence user actions, such as headlines, CTAs, and product images. These components play a vital role in guiding users towards conversion goals.

2. Understand user interaction: Analyse user beheaviour to identify elements that may be causing friction. Tools like heatmaps and session recordings can reveal where users are clicking, scrolling, or abandoning the page. Elements that users frequently engage with, or those that seem to confuse them, should be on top of your list.

3. Focus on hypotheses: Choose elements based on specific hypotheses you want to test. For example, if you believe that a more prominent CTA button will increase conversions, test the size, colour, or wording of the button. Each test should have a clear hypothesis that matches your business goals.

4. Consider the user journey: Elements that appear at critical points in the user journey, such as on landing pages, checkout processes, are prime candidates for A/B testing. Changes to these elements can have a considerable effect on your overall conversions.

5. Test one element at a time: To ensure that your results are clear and actionable, focus on testing one element at a time. Testing multiple elements simultaneously can muddy the results, making it difficult to determine which change led to an improvement.

Running and analysing tests

Running and analysing A/B tests is where the real insights come to life. This is the crucial step where you are going to execute your carefully planned experiments and interpret data to make informed decisions.

Running the test

1. Select the right audience: Choosing the right target audience for your experiment is essential for best results. Decide on the proper segment of users to see if there are impact and improvement on the changes you tested.

2. Set the test duration: Run the test for an ample amount of time to guarantee that you captured significant data. Testing it for a short period of time might not capture true user behaviour, while testing it for too long could be inefficient.

3. Ensure even traffic distribution: Make sure the traffic is equally distributed between the control and the variation to get reliable results.

4. Monitor in real-time: Keep an eye on the test while it runs with the help of A/B testing tools. Monitoring it will keep everything running smoothly.

Analysing the test

1. Statistical significance: Check if the results are statistically significant before drawing conclusions. Make sure that the data speaks for itself instead of drawing assumptions.

2. Compare the performance: Check which performed better. Is it the variation? If so, by how much? Look for key improvements in your key metrics.

3. Draw conclusions: Based on the results, decide whether to implement the variation or stick with the original. If the variation performed better, you may want to make it your new standard.

4. Consider external factors: Be aware of the external factors that might have influenced your results. It can seasonality, promotions, or changes in traffic sources. You should take these factors into account when analysing data.

5. Iterate and optimise: As with every marketing strategy, use these insights to run further tests. A/B testing is an ongoing process, and iteration and optimisation will be the key to success and effetivity.

Multivariate testing

Multivariate testing involves creating different versions of several elements on a webpage and testing all possible combinations to see which mix produces the best results. Unlike A/B testing, which compares two versions of a single element, MVT examines various combinations of different elements on a page.

How It works

• Testing multiple variables: Instead of testing one element at a time, MVT tests several elements at once. This allows you to see how each individual change affects performance and how these changes interact with one another.

• Combining elements: The key to MVT is its ability to test combinations. For example, you might test different headlines along with different images. MVT will help determine which combination of headline and image leads to the highest conversion rate.

• Detailed insights: MVT provides detailed insights into which specific combinations of elements work best together. This is particularly useful when the interaction between elements is significant to the user experience.

Implementation and analysis

Implementing the results of your tests and analysing its outcomes is the final step in your optimisation process. Here's how you can do it effectively for long-term impact:

Implementation:

• Apply the winning variation: Once a variation outperforms the original in your A/B test, you can now implement these changes on your website.

• Integrate with existing strategies: When you apply the new changes in your site, make sure it aligns with your overall marketing strategy and branding. Consistency across all platforms fosters familiarity and credibility to your users.

• Monitor post-implementation: After rolling out the changes, continue to monitor its performance to see the sustained improvements in conversion rates.

Ongoing analysis:

• Review long-term impact: After implementation, track the long-term impact of the changes. Are the conversion rates holding steady, improving, or declining? Analysing these results will help you understand the effectiveness of the changes.

• Document findings: Keep a record of all tests, results, and implemented changes. This documentation can be invaluable for future campaigns.
   

Optimising landing pages and call-to-actions

Landing pages and CTAs are crucial elements in conversion rate optimisation. They are often the first and most direct points of interaction between your audience and your offering.

A well-designed landing page can capture attention, convey value, and guide users seamlessly toward taking action. Similarly, a strong CTA can turn interest into action and drive conversions.

When you put an effort in refining these aspects, you make sure that every visitor has a clear, compelling path to becoming a customer, which can boost your business's bottom line.
 

 

Best Practices for Landing Pages

Landing page is where a user lands after clicking on a link. Its primary goal is to convert your site visitors into a lead or customer. Despite being the least popular type of signup form, landing pages boast the highest conversion rate at 23%, which highlights their effectiveness when done right.

Let's go over the best practices for creating a high-converting landing page:

Design and layout

The visuals of your landing page should be enticing enough to capture the attention of your audience. Here's how you can effectively design it:

• Make your layout simple: A clean, uncluttered layout help visitors focus on your message. Always remember that less is often more - stop overwhelming your users with too many options or distractions.

• Use high-quality images/videos: Visual content can captivate your audience and make your landing page more engaging. Use images or videos with high-resolution and are relevant to your offer. Never use low-quality and unrelated media to avoid confusion.

• Choose the right colour: Colour evoke emotions and influence user behaviour. Select a colour scheme that aligns with your brand and create the desired response. For example, you can use contrasting colours to make your CTA stand out.

• Ensure responsive design: With the different screen sizes people use to browse online, it's important that your landing page looks great and functions smoothly across these devices.

Content and messaging

Aside from visuals, you're content should capture the attention of the visitors right away. Here are some ways to do it:

• Write an eye-catching headline: Your headline is the first thing visitors see, so you have to make it count. It should be strong, attention-grabbing, and immediately convey the value of your offering. Keep you heading around 44 characters long and add "you" or "you're" to add personal touch to the visitors. Also include numbers in the title since 36% of readers will most likely read headlines with numbers.

• Only include relevant content: Keep the content of your landing page around 250-300 words. Avoid unnecessary information and focus on providing solutions to their pain points. Stay concise to increase readability.

• Leverage social proof: Trust is key in conversions. After all, online reviews increase sales conversions by 270%. Incorporate testimonials, reviews, or case studies that demonstrate the credibility of your product or service to persuade new visitors to take action.
   

Effective CTAs

Your CTA is the final nudge that guides your visitors towards taking the desired action. Think of it as the handshake that seals the deal. It has a massive impact in driving conversions and achieving your marketing goals.

Let's look into some strategies on how you can create a CTA that truly converts:
 

 

Design tips

CTAs should be carefully designed to enhance the conversion rates. Here are some design tips to consider:

• Choose the best shape: The shape of your CTA button matters. Make use of A/B testing to see which shape works well for you.

• Make sure the text is easy to read: Your text should be legible at a glance - not too small and not too big. Use bold, clear fonts that contrast well with the background.

• Use bright colours and contrast: Bright, contrasting colours can make your CTA stand out on the page and draw user's attention. According to study, red consistently outperforms green buttons. However, you should still consider your brand before immediately using red on all your CTAs.

• Take note of the visual hierarchy: Your CTA should be visually prominent, guiding the user's eye naturally towards it. Don't make all elements big or small so you won't swamp the users all at once.

• The shorter the better: Keep your CTA text concise. Use few words to create urgency instead of writing a long one that could possibly confuse or bore the visitor.

Placement strategies

Where you place your CTA impacts its effectivity. Ideally, it should be places above the fold, which means it's visible without the user scrolling down. This guarantees that your visitors see the CTA immediately upon landing on your page. Strategic placement in high-visibility areas can significantly boost conversion rates.

Remember, your CTA should be impossible to miss, but never intrusive.
 

CRO tools and techniques

Having the right tools and techniques at your disposal is vital to the success of your CRO strategy. Whether it's A/B testing, heatmaps, or analytics, each tool play a unique role in enhancing the user experience and boosting conversions.

Let's explore some of the most effective CRO tools and techniques that will help turn your visitors into customers.

Essential CRO tools

Having the perfect set of tools in your arsenal means effectively optimising conversion rates. These tools help you understand your visitors better, test diffeerent strategies, and make data-driven decisions that lead to higher conversions.

By using the right tools, no more guessing games - you just know what truly works. Here are the top testing platforms and analytics tools that can elevate your CRO efforts:

Testing platforms

Testing platforms are the backbone of any CRO strategy. These tools allow you to experiment with different elements on your website to see what resonates best with your audience. Some of the leading testing platforms you should consider are:

• Unbounce: This is a user-friendly platform that can help you build and test your landing pages. With its drag-and-drop landing page builder, you can quickly create multiple landing page with ease. Unbounce also offers A/B testing capabilities, so you can compare different designs and messages to see which performs better.

• Omniconvert: This is a comprehensive CRO tool that combines A/B testing, surveys, and analytics features. It’s ideal for retail businesses looking to gain deeper insights into user behaviour and tailor their website experience accordingly.

• VMO: This is a comprehensive experimentation platform that optimisers digital user journeys through data-driven strategies. With this tool, you can perform A/B testing, analyse user behaviours, and personalise user experiences.

• Optimizely: This is one of the most popular tools that powers the entire marketing lifecycle through A/B testing, digital otpimisation, and content creation. Optimizely is suitable for businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises, looking for a scalable solution to optimise their websites.

• Varify.io: This versatile testing platform allows A/B testing without limit. They allow personalisation, targeting, and tracking options to help you effectively optimise and monitor the performance of your tests.

Analytics tools

To understand how users interact with your website, you need analytics tools in your hand. This is necessary to identify areas for improvement and measuring the success of your CRO efforts. Let's review some of the top analytics tools available:
 

Google Analytics	Comprehensive website tracking, real-time data, custom reports, integration with Google Ads	All businesses looking for a free, powerful analytics tool	Free
Hotjar	Heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and feedback polls	Understanding user behaviour visually	Basic: £0  Plus: £24/month  Business: £60/month  Scale: £130/month
Crazy Egg	Heatmaps, scroll maps, A/B testing, user recordings	Visualising user interactions	Plus: £75/month  Pro: £188/month  Enterprise: £340/month
KissMetrics	Behavioural analytics, customer segmentation, cohort analysis	Instant key metrics and tracking across different sites	For small teams: £226/month  For medium-sized teams: £378/month  For large teams: Custom/month
Heap	Data insights, data analysis, data management	Businesses needing detailed user journey insights

Techniques for continuous improvement

Staying still is not an option in conversion rate optimisation. Continuous improvement is key to maintaining and enhancing your website conversion rates. This involves regularly refining your website and marketing strategies to keep pace with changing customer behaviours and market trends.

Incremental changes

Incremental changes involve making small, systematic adjustments to your website or marketing strategy rather than overhauling everything at once. Think of it as fine-tuning a car—minor tweaks here and there to improve performance. The beauty of this approach is that it allows you to test and measure the impact of each change without risking significant disruptions.

• Benefits: By making gradual improvements, you can track which changes are effective and which aren’t, allowing you to optimise with precision.

• Application: Start by identifying areas that need improvement, such as a low-converting landing page or a weak call-to-action. Implement small changes like tweaking the headline, adjusting the button colour, or altering the layout. Monitor the results to see what works best.

Using feedback loops

Feedback loops are a powerful tool for continuous improvement because they provide real-time insights into how users interact with your website. By collecting and analysing feedback, you can identify pain points, understand user needs, and implement changes that directly address these issues.

• Benefits: Feedback loops allow you to stay connected with your audience and respond quickly to their needs, leading to higher satisfaction and conversion rates.

• Application: Use tools like surveys, user recordings, and heatmaps to gather feedback from your audience. Regularly review this data to spot trends and areas for improvement. Implement changes based on this feedback, and then measure the impact of those changes, creating a continuous cycle of improvement.
   

Case study: Optimising Tool's Bazaar website

Tools Bazaar is a leading UK-based e-commerce retailer specialising in high-quality antique woodworking tools and equipment. Despite offering an extensive product range, the company faced challenges in converting website traffic into sales.
 

 

How Inspire helped Tools Bazaar boost online sales

Tools Bazaar is a leading UK-based e-commerce retailer specialising in high-quality tools and equipment. Despite offering an extensive product range, the company faced challenges in converting website traffic into sales.

The challenge

Tools Bazaar's website lacked the optimisation needed to turn visitors into buyers. They needed a strategic overhaul to improve user experience, streamline navigation, and enhance overall site performance.

Our approach

Inspire Digital partnered with Tools Bazaar to implement a comprehensive CRO strategy. We started with an in-depth analysis of their existing website, identifying key areas that required optimisation. Our focus was on refining their product pages, enhancing the checkout process, and improving site speed.

Key actions

1. Optimised product pages: We revamped the design and content of product pages to highlight the unique selling points of each item, making it easier for customers to make informed decisions.

2. Streamlined checkout process: By simplifying and securing checkout process, we minimised cart abandonment rates, resulting in higher conversion rates.

3. Improved site speed: We conducted technical audits to enhance site speed, ensuring that users had a seamless browsing experience.

After implementing these changes, Tools Bazaar saw a significant increase in conversion rates. Their online sales grew and customer engagement metrics, such as time spent on site and bounce rate, also improved substantially.
 

 

How Inspire can help

At Inspire Digital, we’re passionate about helping businesses like yours turn insights into actionable results. Whether you’re looking to enhance your landing pages, perfect your CTAs, or implement sophisticated CRO tools, we’re here to guide you every step of the way.

Ready to elevate your conversions? Get in touch with us today, and let’s discuss how we can transform your visitors into loyal customers. Your next big success is just a conversation away!