The Basic Four Steps to A Successful CRO Strategy [Part 2 of 4]
| October 11, 2017 | Posted in Lead Generation
SEO may bring visitors to your site, but a solid CRO strategy will keep them there and encourage them through your sales funnels. Successful conversion rate optimization relies heavily on quantitative and qualitative data, your ability to test one small change at a time, and your dedication to continuing testing until you’ve found the right answer. These are the basic four steps of a successful CRO strategy. Use them to try out your first CRO test!
1. Gather relevant data.
Testing website changes based on hunches is not recommended. You should have a clear picture of the items that are relevant to your CRO strategy. Gather data from these sources before brainstorming how to improve your conversions.
The company
What are the primary goals of your company? Do you have any unique selling points that competitors don’t? Start your research by understanding your own business.
The customers
What are the most common objections your customers have? What’s stopping them from completing the sale? Consider talking to actual customers through focus groups or surveys to get honest opinions.
Your website
Investigate the back-end of your website with a tool like Google Analytics. This application enables Google to show you all of the important statistics you need measure website success. Keep an eye out for pages that show unusually high bounce rates, which pages most new visitors land on, and where most traffic flows. Monitor these statistics for at least a month to gather enough data to make a hypothesis.
2. Make a testable hypothesis.
Using the above data, create a hypothesis to test. Merriam Webster defines a hypothesis as “a tentative assumption made in order to draw out and test its logical or empirical consequences.” List as many Ws as you can in this statement, including who, what, and where.
For example
Let’s say your website traffic shows that many visitors leave once they get to your contact page. A customer survey says that your contact page is confusing. You decide to test this hypothesis.
The number of contact forms submitted will increase when we remove the sidebar ads from the contact page because the form will be the only call to action on the page.
3. Design and test your hypothesis.
Now that you’ve researched and created a hypothesis, it’s time to see how it fares with actual website visitors. Make sure you have the appropriate tracking codes set up on the contact page so you can measure its success. Based on the above hypothesis, redesign the page to remove all other calls-to-action, like the sidebar ads, so that the contact form is the only CTA on the page.
Once designed, the minor change can go live on the website. Depending on how much average website traffic you get, you will need to let the test run longer or shorter to get the appropriate statistical data. Once the data collection is complete, it’s time to see if your hypothesis was correct.
4. Review results to measure effectiveness.
Now it’s time to revisit your analytics tool to see the change between the old contact page and the new one. If the bounce rate decreased on the new page and the number of forms submitted increased, it can be considered an effective CRO test. You can then continue making small changes to keep improving the page and/or move on to test hypotheses for other sections of the website.
If the numbers have plateaued or decreased, then your hypothesis could be incorrect. It would then be time to go back to your data and test out a different hypothesis for the contact page. You can keep testing small changes to see what works in the long run. We’ve all heard Thomas Edison’s famous words –
“I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
Your CRO strategy should be an on-going process your team uses to make sure your website is always delivering exactly what the customer needs to fulfill the buying cycle.
Next Week – Popular CRO Changes Anyone Can Test
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