What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation? 7 Essential Factors!

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of your website to increase the number of prospective customers that take the desired action such as making a purchase. It is crucial for more sales.

Highly optimised websites with stunning user interfaces aren’t just for the giant organisations with an abundance of money. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) make up 99% of the business population in the UK so they have a huge effect on the economy. Simply having a website is no longer enough.

Gone are the days when you could set up your business and leave your website sat online gathering digital dust. To stay competitive in the digital age you need to optimise your web design to stand out from the crowd, bring more potential customers in, and convert those potential customers to loyal customers.

Conversion rate optimisation is all about continually tweaking your website in response to analysis of your conversion rates. Are fewer customers converting now you’ve changed your homepage? Have more converted since you’ve added a call to action? Do other pages need a call to action?

7 Factors for Conversion Rate Optimisation

1) UI Design

User interface (UI) design is vital for creating easy to use and satisfying websites. UI design focuses on a website’s style or simply how it looks.

All visual components of a website such as buttons, text fields, checkboxes, list boxes, breadcrumbs, sliders, pagination, icons, progress bars, notifications, message boxes, accordions are created with UI design.

Conversion focused design can increase conversion rates as well as customer acquisition and retention rates.

2) UX Design

UX design is the process of improving user satisfaction by providing better usability, efficiency, and accessibility on a business website. As a result conversion rate is correlated with the UX design of a website. With proper implementation of UX design, a business can increase conversion rates and sales.

UX design is more about how the website feels than how it looks. Therefore factors such as website performance or page loading-speed are taken into consideration as well.

3) Content Optimisation

This includes landing page optimisation as well. The content of your website copy and how it is displayed will have a major effect on conversion rates.

We know that users are less likely to read content if it is displayed in one huge block of text, so instead, you should use smaller and more concise paragraphs. Clear headings and subheadings also help break up the content and allow users to scan for what’s important to them.

High-quality and appropriate photos or illustrations are indispensable as well.

4) Call To Action (CTA)

Ideally, we’d all like a customer to land on our homepage and immediately take action to buy our product or service. In reality, most customers need a little push, and that’s exactly what a CTA is.

Some simple examples of successful CTAs are buttons or statements like “Sign Up”, “Subscribe”, and “Download.” Verbs like “Learn”, “Start”, “Read”, and “Request” are also popular, with 94% of software as a service (SaaS) sites using these terms.

5) Checkout Process

Shopping cart abandonment is a major issue for all businesses. In fact, across all sectors, the cart abandonment rate is 79.17%. Although some level of cart abandonment is inevitable, there are some steps you can take to reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts.

Your checkout process must be as smooth as possible. 26% of customers abandon shopping carts because the process was too long or complex.

6) A/B Testing

A/B testing is a scientific approach to finding the best design for your website. You essentially split your users into groups and show each group a different page, ad, and so on.

You can then monitor the success of the design elements on each group to determine which is the most successful.

7) Customer Journey Analysis

Customer journey analysis is the process of analysing where in the process your users drop off your website.

For example, if users overwhelmingly click off your website when they get to a certain page, you know that page needs some work. You can analyse customer journey with Google Analytics or another analytics tool.

Conclusion

The goal of conversion rate optimisation is to create a website that fosters a great user experience. If your customers have a positive experience with your website, due to visually stunning design and a smooth process, you’ll see it in your conversion rates and your profit.