CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION
Introduction to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and how can it do wonders for you?
A quick article on the basics of CRO, explaining what it can do for your business and how to help you gain the support of your organization for applying CRO.
Conversion Rate Optimization!
These are the words that describe a way of approaching your website. In this, you collect data to understand how changes to your website are going to impact your visitors and thus their willingness to sign up, subscribe, or buy from you.
Conversion Rate Optimization is a lot more than just A/B testing, and in this blog, I would try to make the difference a bit more clear. I would also touch upon how CRO can help you do wonders in your marketing campaigns.
Why CRO?
Let us start with an exciting story. I read about this incident while studying a case study at CXL Institute.
There is a shoe company called Finish Line, and this is how their website looked on 18th November 2012.
The very next day, 19th November, this is what their website looked like.
It completely changed! They rebranded their website and had stylistic images. They had minimalistic category pages, high-quality photography, they brought in stuff from the blog, sponsored by celebrities. They did everything that could have been done as per the good traditional marketing playbook mentions. It was going to be a vast, fantastic success. Even you can feel the excitement of the agency and the executives would have been going through.
But here’s the big ol’ BUT! The things didn’t entirely fall off correctly. Within just a few weeks, the business and this website had lost 3 million dollars.
So how does this happen? How do a well-funded agency and a knowledgeable executive team get all the way to launch without realizing they were about to shoot themselves in the foot.
This is what CRO prevents you from going through. You may not be doing things on the scale of Finish Line but, every day you’re launching campaigns, website redesigns, new websites, micro-sites, ad campaigns or funnels. All of these things have the potential to do well for you or surprise you with a negative impact. Our goal here is to make sure that you’re launching those things and knowing that they’re going to be successful.
Conversion Rate Optimization uses science for serving your visitors and customers.
This brings us to our next topic.
Why Science?
One of the main reasons that something like Finish Line can happen or get through the launch of one of your campaigns and be surprised when it doesn’t work is because of the biases that develop in our brain. This is the main reason that Finish Line got to the end and did not realize that they’re about to make a mistake.
You can see right here, here’s just a list of the most common biases, they are numerous. We would be going through two of them.
- Confirmation Bias: This bias says, you’re only going to pay attention to things that you agree with, or that you think are good.
- Novelty Bias: This bias tells the cool brain things. They tend to grab our attention and make us think that they’re going to work. Often they don’t. Data and science get the things that we want to get out of the way. It helps us make sure that we’re not making decisions based on what we believe, but on what our clients, what our customers, and what our prospects want.
Benefits of CRM
A lot of websites will tell you that the significant benefits of CRO are, you’re going to have more growth, you’re going to have more subscribers, you’re going to sell more products, you’re going to have more of whatever you want from your digital presence, but the importance of CRO goes much more profound and is much more important than that, and we are going to discuss a few of them:-
- It prevents the loss of time:
When we have a marketing accident, we lose several things. But the most critical thing we lose after money is time. We lose time, and we then find ourselves in the middle of the year, way behind on our marketing goal, because we’ve had a couple of losses along the way.
CRO helps us prevent that. It helps us launch more stuff that’s going to work and make the stuff we’ve got better.
- It prevents Helicoptering from Senior Executives:
So when we have a loss, or a couple of losses, campaigns that don’t perform, then our bosses and other people start to helicopter and think there’s something wrong. They feel the need to add their opinions, and this adds more bias to the soup. So this is usually not a good thing. When we launch successfully, and when we have the data to back up our decisions, we can help this go away.
- Saves us from Stealing Bad Ideas:
If there are some speed bumps down the road, we tend to steal ideas and end up taking something we want and then start hoping that it works for your website as well, but we don’t know whether they worked or not. We’re not in their business. We can’t see their data. And so, unfortunately, we end up stealing a lot of ideas without even knowing what impact they have.
- We start playing it safe:
We stop taking risks, and we just put words in our campaigns and images that seem safe like stock photos, very corporate speaking language, and basic layouts. This is a killer of any creative endeavor and marketing, to me is a creative process. The obvious downside of this, fewer leads, fewer sales, higher cost of acquisition, because your ads aren’t performing as well, lower growth, these are the cost of the misses.
A quick recap of what we went through in this blog:
- What is CRO?
- Why CRO?
- How science affects CRO?
- Benefits of CRO
Thank you so much for going through this blog.
Let’s connect if you want to know more about Conversion Rate Optimization or Growth Marketing. You can reach out to me at LinkedIn at Shreyansh Goel or email me at shreyanshgoel16@gmail.com.
