What Is CRO? (Hint: The Most Crucial Ecom Sales Driver)

Many of you believe you have a traffic problem. What if I told you, you actually have a conversion problem?

Take this example.

Green Road Flowers gets 1,000 visitors to their site each month and they receive 37 online orders.
Island Flowers gets 600 visitors to their site each month (40% less) but they get 88 online orders.

Common sense tells us Island Flowers and their 88 orders has a better business than Green Road Flowers and 1,000 website visitors.

This goes to show an increase in traffic doesn’t always mean an increase in profits. An increase in conversions always means higher profits.

To improve profits and return on ad spend, turn your focus to conversion rate optimization (CRO).

CRO will save you a million headaches by turning your traffic into a consistent flow of new leads and sales.

Growth is what it’s all about anyway, right?

What Is CRO?

Before we jump into conversion rate optimization, let’s define a conversion.

A conversion is when you get a user to take the action your business desires. Most often this desired outcome is getting them to purchase.

Conversions can be any one of these depending on the business and their objective:

Getting a sale
Receiving a phone call
Scheduling a consultation
Watching a webinar
Downloading a mobile app
Collecting an email address
Following a social media account

Now CRO — conversion rate optimization — happens when you analyze how to increase the conversions of your traffic from paid ads or SEO. This execution often involves improving the website pages, or a specific landing page, to boost conversions.

At a high level, the CRO process is about improving the website visitor’s experience on the website. We’ll get into how to do this. For now, know the better the user experience, the more likely you’re going to get them to take the action you desire.

Focusing on conversions is arguably the most direct — point A to point B — method to acquire more customers and fill up your lead pipeline.

Marketing Strategy

Now we’re about to get into tactics. But please remember this: Strategy first, tactics second.

While there are many different types of conversions you can go after, and we’d argue you should focus on one desired path for visitors per page, a conversion is only as good as the overall strategy.

You can rack up conversions left and right. But if they’re the wrong type of conversions for your business or audience, this is all for nothing.

Instead, start with an effective strategy to increase revenue, profits, or brand awareness, and have your core reasons for doing so. Then choose the one specific conversion — purchases, new customers, YouTube subscribers — to accomplish your goal.

This way your CRO is aligned with smart strategy. And you’re not a hedge fund who finds itself optimizing for TikTok followers instead of assets under management. (That’s a ridiculous example, but you get the point.)

Why Conversion Rate Optimization Wins

What if you could press a button that both generates more revenue and takes zero additional investment (or saves you money)? That’s the power of CRO.

After implementing these tweaks to your landing pages, you’re sure to generate a higher return on ad spend (ROAS).

Here’s why.

CRO Improves Revenue

We’ve touched on this before. The more conversions your website brings in, the more dollars you make.

This may turn into immediate revenue if you’re improving ecommerce marketing conversions by receiving more daily online purchases.

Or it could be a longer sales funnel that pays significant dividends. Say it’s a B2B professional services site where the end conversion goal is to capture an email and then send an invite for a sales call.

No matter how it’s done, revenue is the oxygen of any business. And CRO is a data figure that’s central focus is to improve revenue.

Plus, think about it. Anyone with an ounce of wisdom knows that a business can go without elite branding or hundreds of thousands of followers. But deprive it of sales, and it’s quickly a sinking ship trending toward bankruptcy.

If you could use more revenue growth, use conversion rate optimization.

Speaking of, we recently used principles in CRO to improve the conversions of an immigration law firm to the following:

617% increase in inbound leads
42% increase in conversion rate
48% decrease in cost per lead

Safe to say this law firm loves us and is going to send us a nice Christmas present this year!

Because we’ve done it for customers over and over again, I know how much of a difference maker it is.

CRO Maintains Or Lowers Ad Spend

More money? Great! But where’s the catch? There’s not one.

You’ll be able to generate more cash without having to spend more of your advertising budget. Oftentimes, you can spend less on ads once you fine tune your website conversion strategy because now you’re getting the absolute most out of every dollar spent.

Let’s say you’re a physical product ecommerce store. You used to spend $30,000 per month on Facebook ads to sell out. Now you’re selling out of your products after only spending $20,000 the month after implementing CRO.

That’s a savings of $10,000 per month.

You can reinvest this money into more inventory, customer service, new products, employees, and fulfillment. You can secure backlinks for better organic search results. Or you can pocket it.

Name another activity that increases your revenue and decreases your expenses? That’s why we’re extremely bullish about this process.

Effective CRO Tests & Experiments

If you’re new to this, maybe you don’t know how many page views you get per month. Maybe you have Google Analytics set up, though you can’t make out the traffic information. Or maybe you know everything about your traffic and where it comes from, you’re just stuck on conversions.

In any case, the first step is to run a conversion test on your current website traffic. Then you can make positive changes to improve conversions.

Like David Ogilvy said, “Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”

A/B Tests

An A/B test, or a split test, is the process of sending traffic to a landing page where one variable is isolated and different from the other test.

For example, on landing page A the contact form is above the fold and on landing page B the form is below the fold.

By sending the same amount of traffic to each landing page where everything else is the same — besides the form placement — you’ll see what form produces more submissions. That will be the winner of the A/B test.

The “A” in the A/B test.

The “B” in the A/B test.

Then, if you’re smart, you’ll go onto test how the headline is worded while keeping everything else the same. And then test the button wording, and then button color, on and on.

You can then take the winning result of each A/B test and go on to test another variable. Do a few split tests and put all the winning combinations together. The idea is your landing page will be significantly improved for conversions.

(Word of warning: don’t go insane and overdo it. Once you have a well performing page, leave it. There’s the temptation to test forever but you’ll hit the law of diminishing returns.)

Different Tests To Run

The number of A/B tests you can run is ridiculous. Look out for a blog post dedicated to that in depth.

For starters, go for the tried and true conversion tests in this list below for your landing page:

Number of columns – 1 column versus 2 versus 3
Hero and background images – for example, does an individual smiling or straight faced perform best?
Number of contact form fields – do shorter forms or longer forms convert better?
Text copywriting – word choice is huge in winning over new customers
Positioning of forms and call to actions – can your form be at the top of the page or do you need to build trust and share the benefits before asking for the purchase?
Video versus image – run the test to know what’s best for your landing page
Colors in your button, font, and website
Pricing – does a high price with a discount convert better than a standard price?
Payment options – what does adding a monthly plan to your annual plan do?
Checkout process steps – can shortening the checkout process improve sales?
Bonuses – how does adding a money-back guarantee, free shipping, or an additional item convert?
Trust factors – do customer testimonials, reviews, or customer logos help or hurt the page?

Multi-Variable Tests

A/B testing is running an experiment that isolates one individual element of a landing page, say the ‘Add to cart’ button color.

Now multi-variable testing is analyzing the performance of two landing pages when they have more than one element different about them. For example, the headline text, the copy, the form placement, the image, and the button colors are different between the two pages tested.

If it helps, think of multi-variable tests as multiple A/B tests at once.

Now I’m personally not as big of a fan about these tests. For one, it’s difficult to determine why one landing page performed better than the other when many elements are different. And two, it can drive you mad, plus waste serious time, trying to determine what caused the better performance.

Though it’s better than not testing at all. Multi-variable tests can provide helpful information. I’d say they’re most valuable when you’re in a time crunch and don’t have time for all the different A/B tests.

However, if you have the extra time to run multiple A/B tests, then that’s my recommendation to get clear data.

Live Tests

This third option is difficult to scale, though extremely effective.

By doing what I call live tests (in person, on the phone, or screen watching), you can collect raw feedback on the spot.

Start by asking customers to go through a landing page and then ask them questions like:

What’s this page communicating primarily?
Who is the target audience? What benefits do they receive?
If you were going to buy, is it clear where to click to buy?
What additional questions did you have that were not answered on that page?
Did you feel friction at any moment during your experience?

If you want a more passive route, there’s screen recording software like Hotjar (paid tool) that allows website owners to watch the exact replay of how users interact with their pages. This can be insanely informative if you’re running tests, users aren’t converting, and you’re still unsure why.

I know hundred million dollar companies that spend time watching how people interact with their website. If they think it’s an important factor to improve their CRO, odds are you should too.

Conclusion

The big idea is this: if you’re struggling to convert traffic, don’t spend another penny on PPC ads or SEO until you fix your conversion rate optimization (CRO) problem.

There’s no reason to throw good money after bad. And that’s exactly what you’re doing to get traffic to your site that doesn’t convert to a lead or paying customer.

Invest in conversion optimization to make the most money out of your current site traffic. It will change your business forever.

Once this problem is solved, you can pay for new traffic with absolute confidence you’re making a solid ROI. Then the race to scale is on!