CRO Marketing: A Essential Guide for Beginners

In the world of digital marketing, conversions mean everything to your bottom line. This is where CRO marketing can come into play and help improve your conversions.

It is reported that the average return on investment (ROI) from CRO marketing efforts is about 223% and more than 50% of companies believe that CRO marketing is vital to their overall digital marketing strategy.

Conversions are never guaranteed, of course, but with the right optimization efforts, there is a higher chance of generating quality leads and potentially conversions. 

This can lead to more sustainable and long-term growth for companies.

So, let’s take a look at what CRO marketing is, why it is so important, the difference between CRO and SEO, and how you can develop your own CRO marketing strategy.

What is CRO Marketing?

Conversion rate optimization marketing, also referred to as just CRO marketing, is the process by which the percentage of visitors to your website taking a particular action is increased. 

In other words, CRO marketing words to improve your conversions.

Regardless, if your goal is to increase sales, then you will want to work on increasing your conversions. More often than not, conversions lead to sales.

Of course, conversions can also mean something different, depending on what action it is you are wanting your visitors to take. 

These actions may be subscribing to an email list, downloading an eBook, or spending a certain amount of time on your website.

Why is CRO Important?

If your business is online — fully or in part — then CRO marketing efforts are crucial to the overall success of your company. 

CRO marketing has the potential to bring in numerous benefits without costing a fortune, as it capitalizes on your existing traffic rather than paying for more.

Here is a look at the few things that CRO marketing can do for your business.

Generate More Revenue

Whether a conversion is the registration of personal data or a content download, it helps to improve engagement. Together, this helps generate more revenue for your bottom line.

Offer More Value to Current Customers

From redesigning the entire layout on your website or taking a new approach to your marketing efforts, the user experience is enhanced. 

It is far more lucrative to take these types of steps to improve the user experience for current visitors as opposed to shelling out money to attract brand-new web visitors.

Enhance the User Experience

The higher your conversion rate, the better the chances are you will have happy customers who are willing to spend their money with your brand. 

More often than not, simple changes to your website can help improve the user experience and increase conversions.

When visitors are able to maneuver through your website and find the information they’re looking for easily, more customers will be captured and potentially retained.

Some examples include a more eye-appealing layout, a more readable font, non-contrasting colors, or a larger CTA button. 

When you have happy customers, you have loyal customers, so take the steps necessary to make their experience on your website the best possible.

Improve Brand Awareness and Affinity

The more customers are engaged with your website and brand overall, the more they will recognize your brand when they’re not directly interacting with it and the stronger emotional connection there is between your brand and your customers.

So, when customers are considering a purchase related to your brand, the chances are higher that they will think of your brand to do business with. 

The same is true when it comes to spreading the word about your brand to family, friends, colleagues, etc.

In the end, CRO marketing is important because it is designed to improve the efficiency of your marketing efforts.

CRO vs SEO: What Is the Difference in Digital Marketing?

Some people often confuse CRO and SEO with one another. Some even assume that the two work against one another.

The truth of the matter is when it comes to CRO vs SEO in digital marketing, they both play very important roles in a solid marketing strategy. In fact, they can complement one another.

CRO marketing consists of making several changes to SEO-related strategies, such as on-page improvements. 

These improvements will help to increase engagement, the amount of time visitors spend on your website, conversions, and revenue.

When you make changes to your website design (headings, font, content, keywords, etc.), you are not only creating a more straightforward path for your customers (which is one of the goals of CRO marketing), but you are also implementing SEO-friendly tactics that will directly and positively impact your search engine rankings.

Some examples of how the two work together for your website include improved site page loading speed, user-friendly and skimmable pages, regular content and design updates, and clear and relevant headings.

How to Develop a CRO Marketing Strategy

Implementing a CRO marketing plan will vary from one company to the next, as all business needs and goals are different. 

However, there are some basic steps that most businesses follow.

1. Define Your Conversion

Conversions can take shape in many forms. A conversion may mean one thing to one business and something completely different for yours. 

Conversions may be clicking on a link, completing a form, downloading a white paper, subscribing to an email list, or completing a purchase.

Therefore, in order to accurately measure your CRO, you need to determine what conversion means to you, thereby determining the KPI to measure. 

This will pave the way for the rest of the CRO marketing process.

2. Map Out the Customer Journey

Once you have determined the KPI you’d like to measure based on what type of desired action you want potential customers to take in order to convert, you need to take a closer look at how your customers are moving through your funnel.

This is the customer’s journey or buyer’s journey. It refers to when the customer first discovers your brand to their conversion. 

All of this plays a significant role in CRO marketing, since you need to identify the areas of the funnel that are weakest and improve upon them.

You should start by analyzing data about your customers, which will help you identify the ones who are more likely to convert. 

Some data to analyze include demographics, geographics, psychographics, occupations, interests, and behaviors.

This data can then be used to create fictional buyer personas, which are fake customer profiles based on real data from customers. 

This information will allow you to get a bigger picture of your audience and how you can target them.

You can break all of this into segments and even sub-segments. Rank these segments based on conversion likelihood. 

This ensures that you are putting forth your time and effort marketing to customers who are most likely to convert.

3. Analyze Current Conversion Process

Once you’ve completed the above two steps, it is time to take a closer look at your current conversion process. You must identify why your current website visitors are not converting.

Some possible reasons your visitors aren’t converting include poor layout, slow-loading pages, hard-to-read fonts, significantly contrasting colors, images failing to load, headline/content disconnection, poorly designed CTA button.

Ideally, you should take a better look at pages that have a lot of traffic but few conversions. 

By analyzing the conversion process, you can determine which elements on a page may be causing problems and leading to visitors leaving your site. More often than not, some A/B testing will be required.

4. Perform A/B Testing

Now that you have identified areas on your website that need improvement to help with conversions, you need to do some testing. 

This is an important part of CRO marketing. After all, you won’t know if your changes are working unless you put them to the test.

The good news is that this doesn’t have to be a manual process. There are numerous tools out there that can help with this. 

These tools are designed to perform the tests for you and then compile the test results for easy understanding.

So, let’s say that you want to change the color of your CTA button. A/B testing would require you to use the original button and your new CTA button. Half of the traffic that comes to your site will see the original button, and the other half will be presented with the new button.

Make sure that you are only testing a single element at any given time so you can easily identify the element that will drive the best results for your website.

To determine which web pages you should test first, consider the pages that have more traffic or conversions than your other web pages. 

Ultimately, you want to work on improving the web pages that have high amounts of traffic yet low conversion rates.

Wrap Up

CRO marketing is a strategy that you use to ensure you’re working smarter instead of harder. 

Don’t chase new customers when you have plenty of them right at your fingertips that just need a little nudge to convert. Focus on optimizing your website to best serve your current customers as well as you can. 

Want more insight into optimizing your conversion rates? Check out our post that features the top 10 conversion rate optimization tools.