Published on January 3rd, 2020 | by Ashwini Dave

Why Conversion Rate Optimization Is Important for Online Businesses

How would you like to spend time on a website that doesn’t fulfill your objective?

Not at all, right?

Online selling as an art has grown to be more than just selling and buying. Each and every action made by customers today constitutes the data needed to understand their behavior, something that’s commonly referred to as conversions.

These conversions are actions made by customers on your website, and the frequency of the achieved conversions out of the total number of visitors is called the conversion rate.

Conversion rate is an important measurement parameter for online businesses, and it helps them study their sales effectiveness based on the visitors they receive. However, CRO isn’t being given the importance it deserves. Not surprisingly enough, only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates as a result.

This where the necessity of optimizing conversions comes into the picture. It aids businesses in achieving their website’s primary goal, leads.

Conversion Rate Optimization in Online Businesses

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The importance of CRO as a means to get the most out of your marketing efforts cannot be overstated. CRO gets you results. There is no other way around it. The Weather Channel will account for that fact after they increased their conversions by 225% by making their homepage simpler. And so will The Olympic Store who boosted conversions by 7.74% after simplifying their site navigation.

When it comes to increasing the conversion rate of your website, there is always some room for improvement. The best companies constantly remodel their landing pages to provide users with a better experience and grow conversions. In fact, 48% of marketers build a new landing page for each marketing campaign.

Among these, the businesses that have been successful in carrying out landing page optimization have noticed a 55% increase in the total number of leads generated. They constantly try innovative strategies to attract customers from landing page itself. The most amazing results are coming out of integrating chatbot on the landing page. When a customer is presented with an option to chat, they are 6 times more likely to convert.

The importance of conversion optimization cannot be understated for online retailers, especially today. However, despite knowing of its obvious benefits, marketers usually tend to leave CRO by the sidelines. This is because as many as 52% of businesses believe their page is as good as it gets, and reuse them as a result.

But that’s rarely the case. Any business that wants to make it today should look to conversion optimization as the catalyst for success. For those still unsure about CRO, here are seven reasons why it is important for your online business today.

7 Reasons Why Conversion Optimization Is Important for Your Online Business

Some people think that conversion optimization is not required for their business because the customers that have arrived at their site already know what they want their product. Unfortunately, this is not the case. If your website is not informative to the customer and doesn’t provide any relevant products, they are going to move on.

In addition to this, there are other bases why conversion optimization carries more weight than ever today. Here, we discuss ten of these factors that CRO helps businesses with.

1. Managing Increased Competition and Reduced Attention Span of Customers

The average attention span of today’s customer is shorter than a goldfish’s. This translates to lower patience on their part while searching for what to buy. Couple that bigger businesses moving towards online marketplaces, and the level of competition for smaller businesses to deal with is too high.

CRO can help businesses adapt to shifting consumer behavior. One way to do this is by building an advantage by reducing the number of form questions to be filled while going to complete purchases.

For example, FlyingScot, an airport parking service provider, was having trouble with conversions because customers kept bouncing the sight of their unduly long checkout form which looked like this.

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They then came up with a variation of the page with slightly fewer questions.

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With this simple act, they saw an increase of 45.45% of visitors moving on to the subsequent step in the process and a 35% improvement in form conversions.

2. Soaring PPC costs

The usage of PPC ads has placed a huge toll on online businesses. The days when businesses could utilize PPC ads to enhance their SEO are long gone now. The increased demand for PPC has inflated prices beyond what most budgets can afford.

This is where CRO comes in. It can help you balance the rewards and risks and of PPC ads by making sure that clicks paid for convert to sales.

3. Enhanced Website Efficiency

To enjoy the advantages of CRO, you need to try to gain as much traffic as you can. You can do this by making changes to the look and feel of your website by A/B testing and modification of your already hosted website. This gives you higher chances of conversion as a direct result of improved site performance.

This much-desired end result lets you drive your sales in a shorter time frame. It also enhances the efficiency of other marketing techniques applied by you for increasing sales.

4. Streamlining of Business to Produce Higher Profits

One huge advantage of CRO is that any change made to your site that leads to higher conversions is an incremental achievement.

These site changes can be brought about by running successful A/B tests. Even if the result is a 1% increase in revenue, a high sales volume of sales can potentially equate to greater dollars earned.

And this is only assuming a modest CRO increment. For the e-commerce business, WallMonkeys, the A/B testing of a new variant of their homepage saw them register a 550% increase in conversions!

5. Increased Generation of Qualified Leads

CRO has paved the way for negative optimization, which means focusing more on quality instead of quantity.

The goal of this is to focus on decreasing net marketing/sales metrics like revenue, leads, sales, etc. and utilize the resources saved behind customers that are genuinely interested in the product.

Marketo provides a good use case for this. Marketo restricted its lead flow by adding a form field for a job title. This ensured that only qualified leads came through for Marketo to spend its saved resources on strengthening the customer experience.

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6. Improved Effectiveness of Digital Marketing & SEO Efforts

Over the past years, the cost of digital marketing has steadily risen. With none of the other marketing mediums being as effective as digital marketing, businesses don’t have many options left to advertise them.

This is where CRO comes into the picture. With the importance of advertising remaining as important as ever, CRO is the best way to make sure that your site is valuable enough to rank high on Google’s SERPs.

This higher visibility helps in driving greater leads and maximizing results. The sales resulting from this improved conversion rate can help businesses sustain digital marketing costs and derive greater profits.

7. Better Brand Positioning

When your web elements like phrases, text, graphics, and images are on point, it instantly creates an impression in the minds of visitors and helps you position your brand better.

There’s nothing that says credibility like laying your visitors’ doubts to rest by promoting authenticity about your product and have it seamlessly guide to your objective. Take the example of Express Watches, an online watch retailer.

The biggest concern of the customers of Express Watches was the legitimacy of the products being sold. To allay their fears, Express Watches decided to test a seal of authenticity to see its effect on sales. This is how their page looked earlier.

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This is how the page looked after they introduced a seal of authenticity.

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Just this act of introducing a seal of authenticity and use of phrases like ‘Authorized Seller’ saw Express Watches register an increase in sales by a thumping 107%.

An offshoot of CRO is that pleased visitors start promoting you on social platforms, which increases leads that are more likely to become loyal customers to your site. Cool, right?

The Undying Role of Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization is more important to businesses than ever. It helps them prepare for the increasingly competitive marketplace and provides a quick way to upscale and enjoy persisting results. You can gain a higher number of customers in a shorter time span and decrease overall costs as a result.

The benefits of CRO are just too many, irrespective of your business size and industry. So, if you are still among those that haven’t optimized your funnel to boost sales, there isn’t a better time to begin to do so than today.

Tags: conversion rate, e-commerce, online, optimization

About the Author

Ashwini Dave Ashwini is passionate about Business, Entrepreneurship, E-commerce, and Digital Marketing. She is working with Acquire as a digital marketing expert. She is a free soul and adventurous scholar who spends her free time with herself, loved once, music, as well as watching & playing sports. She is ocean addicted and on roads being a thrill-seeking traveler to get new experiences as she looks at life as our very own works of art.