15 Best Practices for Effective Conversion Rate Optimization
by Mike Khorev
With the widespread use of technology, many businesses now operate on digital platforms. Those looking to get the most out of those platforms turn to Conversion Rate Optimization as a strategy.
CRO refers to the process of increasing the percentage of visitors who do a desired action on your website. Some of the benefits of this include:
- Increased lead generation
- More sales
- Increased site traffic
- Better understanding of your visitors
And all this without having to first increase traffic to your site.
This article will explore what CRO is in detail before outlining 15 best practices for effective conversion rate optimization to help you unlock sustainable growth, maximize ROI, and create a better experience for your audience.
What is a Conversion Rate?
A conversion rate is the percentage of users who complete a desired action on a website, app, or digital platform. The “conversion” can vary depending on your business goals and what action you want users to take, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, filling out a contact form, or downloading a resource.
A high conversion rate indicates that your content is well formatted and well designed and is generally serving its purpose and justifying its existence. A low conversion rate, on the other hand, might be symptomatic of issues with your website’s design or performance that need to be addressed.
Factors such as slow loading times, poorly formatted content, unclear calls to action, and faulty contact forms can all contribute to lower-than-desired conversion rates.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of enhancing your website, app, or digital platform to increase the percentage of users who complete a desired action. It can form a vital part of the efforts toward wider business transformation, helping to enhance your organization’s performance and adapt it to new challenges, opportunities, or customer expectations.
CRO combines data analysis, user behavior insights, and testing to identify opportunities for improvement, consequently implementing changes that encourage user actions.
Calculating Your Conversion Rate
Before you can get really stuck in with conversion rate optimization for your company, you need to establish what your current conversion rate is.
To do this, first, you need to establish what kind of “conversions” you’re trying to measure. This could be how many visitors to your website have filled in a sign-up form, requested a brochure, or made a purchase.
Then you divide the total number of conversions by the total number of users who interacted with your website, webpage, or piece of content within a pre-established period of time. Then you can multiply the result by 100 to generate a percentage.
Let’s work through the formula with an example.
Imagine you made 100 sales through your ecommerce website last quarter but received 4,000 visitors in total. The sales conversion rate for your store would be 100 divided by 4,000 (.025), multiplied by 100. This would make your conversion rate 2.5%.
What’s a Good Conversion Rate?
To assess how well you’re performing when it comes to your conversion rates, it’s useful to know the benchmark conversion rates for your industry. This will give you a glimpse into how you’re performing compared to your direct competitors.
It’s worth remembering that average conversion rates can vary based on a number of different factors, including:
- The industry you’re operating within
- Whether you focus on ecommerce or B2B sales
- The time of year
- Whether you’re looking at users browsing on desktop or mobile
- The region you’re operating in
The graph below highlights some general baseline conversion rates for ecommerce websites worldwide over the 12 months leading up to November 2024.
15 Best Practices for Effective Conversion Rate Optimization
With so many factors affecting conversion rates, it can be difficult to know exactly which areas to focus on improving. To help you get started on the right foot, we’ve put together this list of top tips for conversion rate optimization.
1. Set Goals
The first step on your CRO journey is to lay out clear, measurable objectives. Define the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to track your progress, ensuring they align with your business strategy.
Use SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) to create a focused optimization plan.
Some examples of goals could include:
- Increasing sales by 10% by introducing bulk discounts
- Improving email sign-ups by 15% by offering incentives
- Reduce cart abandonment rate by 15% by simplifying checkout processes
Make sure you’re setting realistic and achievable goals by analyzing historical data from within your business. Tools such as OneStream’s financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform are incredibly helpful for accessing and analyzing financial data so you can make well-informed, data-driven decisions when setting your targets.
2. Establish Your Current Position
Benchmarking your current performance allows you to measure progress, and establishing your current position is, therefore, a key business capability example. Only by knowing where you started will you be able to see how far you’ve come and how effective your conversion rate optimization efforts have been.
3. Improve Calls to Action
Improving calls to action (CTAs) is one of the most effective strategies for boosting conversions. A CTA is the critical element that tells users what action you want them to take.
Despite being small elements of a web page or app, CTAs hold significant weight in guiding user behavior.
Effective CTAs focus on three primary areas: design, language, and context:
- Design: The button or link should stand out from the rest of the page but remain consistent with your brand identity. Use contrasting colors that complement the surrounding design but ensure the button catches the user’s eye.
- Language: The wording of your CTA should be clear, concise, and action-oriented. Use phrases that highlight the benefit of taking action, such as “Get Your Free Trial,” over generic phrases that add little incentive.
- Context: A CTA’s effectiveness is tied to its placement and relevance within the overall content. Users are more likely to click when the CTA aligns with the information or offer they’re exploring.
For example, a “Buy Now” button should be close to product details or pricing information.
4. Analyze Customer Journeys
Mapping out the customer journey helps identify areas where users may encounter obstacles or drop out of your sales funnel. Tools like heatmaps, funnel analysis, and user recordings provide actionable insights into user behavior.
It involves understanding how users interact with your digital platform from their first touchpoint to the point of conversion. By identifying user behaviors, preferences, and pain points at each stage, you can optimize your website or app to create seamless and engaging experiences that drive conversions.
5. Take Control of Your Content
A strong content strategy plays a pivotal role in CRO by creating meaningful, engaging, and actionable experiences for users. Content is the backbone of any digital platform, influencing how users perceive value, make decisions, and interact with your brand.
Good and effective content should appeal to your users’ needs in such a way that it drives conversions. So, try to create content that is engaging and informative, as well as persuasive. What’s more, it should also be tailored to your audience. When done well, this kind of content will help your site visitors along their journey and encourage them to take desired actions.
A headless CMS (content management system) can help you streamline content management, allowing for increased scalability and seamless content delivery across multiple platforms.
6. Implement A/B Testing
A/B testing can have a huge impact on ecommerce sites, bringing a 50% increase in the average revenue per unique visitor. It allows you to optimize various aspects of your website by dividing your web traffic into two groups and giving them each a different experience. You can then determine which variant drives higher conversion rates.
Website elements commonly tested by ecommerce marketers include:
- Calls to action
- Layout
- Website copy
- Forms
- Landing pages
- Live chat features
7. Implement Automation
Automation tools can enhance personalization and user engagement on your website.
Chatbots can be used to answer common customer queries and facilitate self-service account management for customers, reducing the burden on customer service agents.
Dynamic recommendations can recommend products to customers based on their browsing history, ensuring they see more of the products they’re likely to buy and encouraging them to stick around on your website and increase their average basket spend.
Marketing emails can also be automated, allowing communications to be sent to website visitors when they perform a certain action. This can be used to provide additional information when customers view particular products or to encourage them to return and complete the checkout process if they’ve abandoned their shopping cart.
8. Improve User Navigation
A clutter-free, intuitive navigation system enhances the user experience on your website, helping to reduce drop-offs due to user frustration. Simplifying menus, including a search bar, and guiding users with breadcrumbs are all ways in which user navigation can be improved on your digital platforms.
For example, streamlining the category pages on your ecommerce site can improve product discoverability and ultimately increase sales.
9. Utilize Live Chat
Live chat builds trust with your audience by offering easily accessible, real-time support. Customers appreciate instant answers to their queries, improving customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
Customers who have their queries answered and their fears assuaged quickly are more likely to complete transactions on their initial visit.
The best modern small business phone systems include live chat functionality on their platform, making it easier and more affordable than ever to offer live chat alongside phone, messaging, and email support.
10. Optimize Your Marketing Campaigns
Optimizing your marketing campaigns is crucial for achieving CRO, as it ensures the traffic driven to your website is both relevant and high-intent.
Start by aligning ad copy, visuals, and CTAs with the content of your landing pages to provide a seamless user experience. You can also leverage audience segmentation to tailor your campaigns based on user behavior, demographics, and preferences and retarget any users who didn’t initially convert with personalized offers.
Use analytics to track campaign performance, identifying which channels drive the most conversions. Continuous A/B testing of ads, emails, and social media posts will help you to refine your messaging and design, maximizing audience engagement and conversion rates.
11. Examine Behavioral Analytics
Behavioral analytics delve into how users interact with your site, providing insights into friction points and engagement patterns. For example, if you notice that a lot of users are abandoning their carts during checkout, it could indicate that your checkout processes are too long or complicated.
12. Tackle Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment is a common challenge in ecommerce. There’s nothing more frustrating than having a user visit your landing page, browse your products, and add items to their basket, but then leave your website before completing their purchase.
Combat cart abandonment by simplifying the checkout processes on your website, ensuring your shipping costs are competitive, and sending reminder emails.
13. Invest in Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) drives organic, high-intent traffic to your site. By targeting relevant keywords, SEO ensures that users searching for solutions or products related to your offerings find your site.
These visitors are inherently more likely to convert, as they’ve already expressed an interest in the products or services you’re offering.
Another aspect to consider when it comes to SEO is website optimization to improve your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). There are various ways to do this, such as improving site speed and mobile-friendliness, as well as ensuring your content is structured well.
The end result? Happier users who enjoy a better experience on your site, leading to reduced bounce rates and increased time spent on the site.
14. Improve Your Mobile Accessibility
Improving your website’s mobile experience can greatly help your CRO efforts, as more users access the internet through smartphones than ever before. Many ecommerce businesses are even launching dedicated apps to more effectively target mobile browsers.
A mobile-friendly website enhances user experience by ensuring that navigation is intuitive, pages load quickly, and content is easily readable on smaller screens. Mobile optimization also involves streamlining forms, making buttons touch-friendly, and ensuring the checkout process is as simple as possible.
When users have a smooth, hassle-free experience on mobile devices, they’re more likely to complete conversions.
Improving mobile accessibility can form a key part of your enterprise architecture governance efforts. EA governance ensures that CRO initiatives are strategically aligned and technologically integrated with the wider goals of your business and that the resources are in place to effectively and efficiently optimize your digital platforms for mobile browsing.
15. Create a Sense of Urgency
Scarcity marketing is a powerful tool when it comes to boosting your conversion rates. Creating a sense of urgency motivates users to act quickly rather than delay their purchasing decisions.
When visitors feel they might miss out on a limited-time offer or a product that’s in short supply, they’re more likely to complete a purchase or take the desired action.
Techniques such as countdown timers, low-stock indicators, or phrases like “Offer Ends Today” tap into the psychological principle of scarcity, driving immediate action.
It’s worth remembering to use scarcity marketing authentically and sparingly, otherwise you risk coming off as manipulative and losing the trust of your customers.
Boost Your Profits With Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is key for businesses when it comes to boosting their digital platforms and driving meaningful results from data-informed decisions. For this strategy to work, however, the approach that you take must make the most of user insights and data analysis.
Meeting aims and objectives such as analyzing customer journeys, improving your CTAs and SEO, leveraging content, and addressing common issues like cart abandonment and mobile accessibility, will no doubt help you in creating a user experience that is both seamless and engaging.
Integrating tools like A/B testing, automation, and behavioral analytics ensures your efforts are data-driven and impactful. CRO isn’t a one-time task but an ongoing process of testing, learning, and refining. By prioritizing CRO, you can unlock sustainable growth, maximize ROI, and create a better experience for your audience.
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