Convert Visitors into Customers

If you're already getting lots of good traffic but want more converting customers, you're in the right place. This page is all about how you can boost your ratio of customers to visitors.

A Crazy Little Thing Called "CRO"

The process of improving your goals conversion rate is known as Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). (It sounds similar to "search engine optimisation, or SEO, but rather than optimising your site for the search engines you will be focusing on optimising your site to improve your conversion rate - what is a "Conversion Rate"?)

Why CRO is the most important thing you've (probably) never heard of...

Here are some fairly bold statements, ready?... You can quite feasibly use CRO to double the revenue you generate from your website. You can use it to more than double your profits from online. And you can do both of these things without increasing your marketing spend by a single penny... and, we're not joking either... Most websites convert less than 2% of their visitors into customers (ie. people who do what you want them to do - buy a product, make an enquiry, call, click through several pages, download a doc, signup for newsletters, etc.) Looked at another way most websites allow 98% of their visitors to walk away from a visit empty handed (looked at yet another way, only 1 person out of every 50 decides "yes - this is for me"). This is pretty lame. Especially when you consider that most people who arrive at websites are actively looking (via the search engines) for the products or services that are on offer. If you think this might be your site then take some time to think about the impact an increase to say a 4% conversion rate (96% of visitors leaving empty handed) would have. Suddenly you're generating double your previous level of business with the same cost per acquisition. Think about what you could do with all that extra revenue! The impact on your bottom line is massive and this is exactly why you need to learn all about a crazy little thing called CRO.

"Could I really double my conversion rate?"

Yes you could. What's more you probably won't need to build a new website or completely overhaul your website design (in fact there are a number of high-profile examples where complete redesigns have actually damaged conversion rates). The great thing about CRO is that you can dip your toe in to see the impact it has. Once you get started you will see that doubling your conversion rate is more than achievable.

How to do it...

We're going to start with a really simple example designed to explain how you might go about increasing your 2% conversion rate to 4% on a single web page: We know headlines have a big impact on conversion rate so we'll devise our first CRO test using a catchy variant and we'll use Google Website Optimizer (more about this awesome tool later) to manage it... Conversion rate is better on the test page so we adopt this version permanently. What should we test next? Well, images also have a huge impact... Cool, more conversion rate gains (in a real-life project we would have probably undertaken a few experiments that didn't result in conversion rate gains too - in those cases we wouldn't have adopted the unsuccessful test pages permanently). Note how we started from the increased conversion rate of 2.52%. What else can we test? Big red shiny buttons have a funny habit of grabbing people's attention... Awesome and convenient at the same time! The 26% improvement results in an overall increase to a 4% conversion rate. We've now doubled it from the original 2%!

Campaign review

The goal of our mini CRO campaign was to double the conversion rate of our 'Free Robot Butler' page from 2% to 4%. We used a series of A/B split test experiments to make incremental improvements. We achieved our goal in the following steps:
There are big gains to be made if you adopt an approach of continual improvement. The compound effect of any gains makes doubling conversion rate even easier!

Hang on! My website already looks more like the final page in your example than the original. I guess CRO is not for me?

Okay, our 'Free Robot Butler' example was purposefully oversimplified. But the principles are clear; lots of incremental site improvements add up to massive effect and there are always improvements that can be made if you are willing to experiment. If you have a site that is converting well, it's probaby making you quite a lot of money. In this case, even small improvements will be very valuable. And remember, CRO improvements are not an ongoing expense - they last forever. Falling into the trap of believing your site is the finished article is one of the biggest mistakes you can make! If you can definitively tell us which of these pages will result in a higher conversion rate we'll happily accept that you do not need CRO: Difficult isn't it? Don't worry we're all human... The fact is only CRO experimenting (which results in statistically significant evidence) will be able to accurately tell you the answer to this. Until you get 100% of your visitors to do exactly what you want them to do 100% of the time (forever) CRO will always benefit you. Remember: there are always conversion rate gains to be made! There you go, it's all pretty simple really. Now you need to look at your own website and, starting with the most important pages, optimise your conversion rates!
[cb title="Need CRO?" body="To talk to us about increasing the customers you get through your site"] Find out more about: A/B Split Testing Multivariate Testing Google Website Optimizer