It’s not always easy to succeed in an online store because the most important thing is not just attracting potential customers to your website, but ensuring that they take the actions you desire. For this purpose, CRO can be of great help as it allows you to analyze the situation and make adjustments to improve your conversion rate performance.

What is CRO?

The management of an e-commerce involves, among other strategies, the application of marketing techniques that allow you to improve the performance of your website in relation to conversion rates (desired actions).

When it comes to conversion rates, CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is crucial, as it allows you to implement a series of adjustments aimed at improving the purchasing process and increasing sales in your e-commerce.

This means that visitors will turn into customers who are willing to pay for your products and actually do so, which has a positive impact on your e-commerce results.

However, as CRO is a marketing strategy, its impact goes far beyond sales. It affects the user experience and helps you acquire leads, as well as paving the way to obtain important data (email addresses) from visitors interested in your products.

If you’re striving for success in an online store, you must understand the pivotal role that CRO can play since it’s a marketing strategy that focuses on what you’re doing to attract visitors to your website but doesn’t allow you to improve performance in terms of conversion rates for some reason.

How to use CRO in your e-commerce?

Many online businesses manage to attract an audience and drive traffic to their website, but it seems like something is missing that prevents the purchasing action from being completed.

You might start by questioning the platform where you designed your online store and reviewing each of the services and features it offers, or you may question the marketing strategy you’ve implemented to promote your business on social media. However, the solution to your problem won’t be found through doubt and questioning.

The best solution is the implementation of CRO, as this marketing strategy will focus on your business and identify the variables that need to be adjusted to optimize the conversion rate.

This approach makes CRO a personalized strategy because it aims to improve your customers’ experience and enhance the variables that will lead them to take the desired action.

Implementing CRO requires a well-structured process because the goal is to make changes that impact the results of the online business.

The optimization process can be carried out through a series of phases:

Investigation and analysis

You won’t be able to make any changes if you don’t know what the problem is, what’s working well, and what’s not. In this case, you’ll need to focus on the basic variables that make up your business:

• Business and marketing objectives. 
• Unique value propositions that distinguish your business and make it stand out. Customer base. 
• The sales process (touchpoints, traffic, obstacles to reaching your website, when potential customers drop off, what doesn’t convince them, what happens to the contact information they leave, customer loyalty). 
• The website or e-commerce platform, as this is where almost all variables subject to modification during the optimization process are concentrated.
  • Navigation: navigation menus guide visitors and allow them to explore various categories and subcategories. The easier it is for them to move around and not get lost, the easier it will be for them to find what they’re looking for. 
  • Copy: this should be specifically oriented toward marketing and sales. Both the title and content should engage the reader, provide added value, and highlight your brand. You need to convince them that your product can meet their needs. 
  • Forms: getting a potential customer to fill out a form and leave their information is closely related to visual design, messaging, and the offer. The user must feel that they will receive something of value in return. This is one of the first steps a future lead can take. 
  • Call to action: this is one of the most important variables because the fact that a potential customer responds to your call means that the message has been received. However, everything will depend on how you have personalized it based on your offer. 
  • Landing pages: these are accessed through a call to action, but their goal is to communicate something of value that ultimately convinces the potential customer to make a conversion (purchase). It’s essential to take care of both the design and content; it should not confuse or overwhelm the user but rather convince them.

Action Plan

If the first phase has allowed you to identify the possible issues affecting your conversion rate’s performance, then what you need to do next is design an action plan.

It’s time to rethink specific objectives based on the variables you need to adjust and define the strategies you will implement to achieve them.

It’s necessary to prioritize based on ease of making adjustments, the short or long-term impact you can achieve, and the confidence that by adjusting these variables, users will take the actions you desire.

Take action, and according to priorities, make the necessary adjustments. Keep in mind that you are not only looking to optimize the conversion rate’s performance but also improve the user experience.

This entire adjustment process involves measurements, tests, or verifications because if you don’t consider them, it’s impossible to check whether the changes you’ve made are leading you towards the expected results

Measurements, tests and verifications

Without measurements, optimization is not guaranteed. So, once each adjustment is implemented, it will be necessary to carry out the corresponding test or verification. All of this will allow you to assess the impact of the change and confirm whether you are truly optimizing the conversion rate performance.

During this measurement process, it’s essential to ensure that tests are conducted with two or more variants, as this is the only way to determine which one is successful and truly generates the desired conversions or actions.

In this phase, it’s crucial to consider the recommendation of experts regarding the need to ensure solid data free from statistical bias. In this regard, they propose considering the following elements:

• Statistical significance: This holds significant weight in CRO, as it’s the way to demonstrate that the optimizations being implemented are the ones that truly impact the results.
• Types of conversion tests: CRO experts suggest A/B tests because, without the need for a lot of web traffic, they achieve very good statistical significance when measuring two variables on a page.
• Split URL testing: It’s very similar to A/B testing but is typically used when the changes to be implemented are substantial, and the two variables remain hosted on separate URLs.
• Multivariate testing: The goal is to obtain much more information regarding the content and design of the page, so multiple variables are measured simultaneously, requiring higher web traffic.

Final implementation

The results you now have in your hands are not necessarily final, as you may have made adjustments that truly showed a positive impact on the conversion rate performance, but others left you with doubts.

That’s what optimizing your e-commerce through the application of CRO is all about—taking step by step to identify, adjust, measure, and implement.

It’s now up to you to make decisions regarding the final changes you will implement on your website. For this, it’s essential to answer the following questions:

1. Which variables, after measurements, yielded positive results and significantly impacted the conversion rate?
2. Which variables did not show significant changes?
3. What other tests and measurements should I carry out from now on?

Now you have valuable information to execute the final changes and hope that together they can optimize the conversion rate and achieve success. But on the other hand, you can also continue experimenting and measuring with the variables that are yet to be adjusted.

In conclusion, this entire process provides you with so much data about your customers, your website, and the variables affecting your performance rate that you may feel empowered and capable of making significant changes that you hadn’t considered before.

Why implement CRO?

Here are some of the key reasons to implement this marketing strategy:

1. It focuses on optimizing your e-commerce conversion rate, which significantly impacts your brand and revenue goals.

2. It not only benefits your business but also enhances the customer experience.

3. It relies on a statistical measurement process, eliminating subjective comparisons or coincidences.

4. It equips you with tools to understand your business and identify variables that may be influencing your success or failure.

In summary, the experience of implementing CRO as a marketing strategy will not only transform your business and make it more profitable but also empower you to better understand the processes and tools for e-commerce success.

Do you need to improve your conversion rate? Contact us at our email address, and we will conduct a CRO audit for your website. We are delighted to advise you on achieving the greatest success with your online store.

info@reduncle.es