Want to turn more website visitors into paying customers?
Converting visitors into customers is the holy grail of digital marketing. Who doesn’t want higher conversion rates? And yet, most businesses are at a complete loss when it comes to knowing where to even start.
Here’s the thing…
CRO strategies that are data-driven can be implemented for free, they’re incredibly easy to test, and the results can start impacting sales almost immediately.
The easiest way to learn about improving conversion rates is to talk to conversion rate optimization experts.
In this article you will learn:
- What Is Data-Driven CRO?
- Why CRO Strategies Matter For Businesses
- 5 Data-Driven CRO Techniques That Actually Work
- Testing Your Way To Higher Conversions
What Is Data-Driven CRO?
Data-driven CRO is a process of using hard data and user behavior to make informed decisions that increase your website’s conversion rate.
Instead of blindly guessing what might or might not work, you take a more scientific approach to solving your website’s problems.
Here’s how: Collect data from the visitors that come to your website. Then analyze that data to gain valuable insight into the customer experience. Armed with that information, you make informed decisions that boost conversions.
Data-driven CRO helps businesses to:
- Spot the exact places in the conversion funnel where visitors are dropping off
- Remove friction points and eliminate pain in the customer journey
- Prove that a change will help using A/B tests
- Focus on implementing only the changes that will improve ROI
Why CRO Strategies Matter For Businesses
Traffic doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t turn into conversions.
A study from Invesp showed that, on average, companies spent $1 on CRO for every $92 they were spending on customer acquisition. It’s a massive disparity between simply getting people to a website, and actually getting them to take action.
If you double your conversion rate, then the budget for traffic acquisition can be cut in half while keeping the revenue the same. Conversions are an incredibly powerful way to increase profits, and understanding how to increase conversion rates is one of the simplest ways to do that.
It’s a simple truth:
The average conversion rate of websites in the United States is 2.9% when we look across all industries.
This means, in simple terms, out of every 100 visitors only 2.9 of them are doing the conversion action on that particular website.
Worse still…
On average only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates. A measly 22% are actually happy with what they are getting. It means 78% are failing and leaving money on the table every day.
5 Data-Driven CRO Techniques That Actually Work
Before we start, one more thing.
We are using the term CRO techniques to describe actions that you can take to increase your conversion rates. They can be changes to the website, an email campaign, a new marketing message, a new landing page, or a host of other creative ways to bring data into play.
Ready for the main event?
These are the 5 data-driven CRO techniques that are tried and tested across multiple industries. Simple tweaks and tactics that you can use to turn around the conversion rate of your website.
1. Heat Mapping And User Recording
If you want to know how people are interacting with your website, then you need to see it for yourself.
Heat mapping tools will provide the data that you need to visualize and analyze where your website visitors are clicking, scrolling, and spending their time. User recordings give you the chance to look through real user sessions and see the parts of your site that are giving your visitors friction.
Data gathered from these sources will tell you:
- Which buttons visitors are clicking, and which ones they are ignoring
- How far down the page your visitors are scrolling
- Which parts of the website are causing confusion and driving people away
This information can be used to make data-informed changes to your website.
2. A/B Testing Everything
A/B testing is the cornerstone of data-driven CRO.
The process is simple, take two variants of a page element. You show version A to a portion of the visitors, and version B to the rest. After that, you measure which variant is better at converting people into customers.
Variants to A/B test include:
- Headlines and copy
- Button colors and placement
- Images and videos
- Form length and fields
- And much much more
The companies that have the biggest gains in conversion rates, are the ones that run 50% more A/B tests than their competitors.
It is a simple equation, the more tests you run the more likely you are to succeed.
3. Page Speed Optimisation
Speed is often a crucial factor that most people overlook.
Research by Invesp shows that if the page load time is slowed down by even 1 second it will drop the conversion rate by 7%. That’s a significant loss of revenue that simply goes away because a page is too slow.
The good news is there are some quick wins:
- Compress your images
- Enable browser caching
- Reduce code bloat
- Use a CDN
Optimizing speed is one of the most surefire ways to increase conversions. Fast pages are good pages.
4. Personalised User Experiences
Generic websites will only yield generic results.
Personalization is the process of using data from visitors to show them the content, products, and offers that they actually care about. This will help make your website feel much more personalized for each user.
Studies show that personalized product recommendations increase conversion rates by 26%. That’s a serious uptick just by showing people what they want to see.
Personalization can be as simple as the following:
- Location-based offers
- Browsing history recommendations
- Dynamically serving content based on traffic source
- Returning visitor recognition
5. Mobile Optimisation
Don’t get caught out here…
Mobile devices are now responsible for the majority of website traffic. Yet mobile conversion rates are averaging a meager 1.6% across websites compared to 3% for desktop visitors.
It is a gap that just screams “opportunity”.
Mobile optimisation can be:
- Simplifying navigation for thumb-friendly browsing
- Improving mobile page load times
- Streamlining the checkout process
- Using bigger buttons, fonts, and larger touch targets
It’s easy to fix and could unlock a new stream of conversion.
Testing Your Way To Higher Conversions
Data-driven CRO is not a one-time effort. It is an ongoing practice of testing, measuring, and optimizing.
The framework that works:
- Gather data and identify problems using analytics.
- Form a hypothesis of what might fix the issue.
- Run an A/B test for the change vs. the control.
- Analyze test results and figure out whether the change was successful.
- Roll out the change to everyone, or iterate and try something new.
The winners in conversion rate optimization do not stop at a single change, they never stop testing and they know there is never a perfect solution.
Instead, they double down on the high-impact areas:
- Landing pages
- The checkout process
- Product pages
- Call-to-action buttons
This is where most of the wins are to be had.
Conclusion
Data-driven conversion rate optimization techniques are here to take the guessing out of conversions. Instead of hoping and praying that a change will work, CRO professionals can prove what changes will work using cold hard data.
To quickly recap:
- Understand user behavior with heat maps and user recordings
- Test, Test, Test with A/B testing
- Speed up those page load times
- Personalize the experience for users
- Never forget about mobile optimisation
Businesses that choose to invest in CRO techniques, know that the effort will be returned to them tenfold. Those who choose to ignore the benefits of CRO are continuing to throw money away at useless traffic that will not convert.
The answer is crystal clear. Start testing your changes today and start watching those conversion rates rise.
