Why You Should Be Optimizing for Conversions

By Madison Taylor
October 22, 2020
Close up of darts in bulls eye on dart board

Website owners love to brag about their visitor counts. Hundreds of thousands of people visit this site every day, so we’re doing well, right? If your website is a news site or blog whose revenue is powered by advertising, then high visitor counts translate directly to increased revenue.

For everyone else, a visitor is only the first step toward gaining a new customer. If you want to make any money, those visitors have to convert into customers, which is where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in.

CRO is all about turning passive visitors into leads and customers. To do that, you need to know what they want when they come to your website. You need to put the right offer or incentive in front of them at the right time to give them that nudge in the right direction.

The good news is that you’re not striking out into completely unknown territory. You’re already converting some of the visitors that come to your site; CRO is just about converting more of them and doing so more efficiently.

Why Conversion Rate Matters

Let’s say you get 10,000 visitors in a month and 100 of them turn into sales-qualified leads. You could put your efforts into CRO, doubling your conversion rate turning your next 10,000 visitors into 200 sales-qualified leads, or you could put your efforts into paid ads that bring in 20,000 visitors, 200 of whom turn into sales qualified leads.

Either way, you’re ending up with 200 leads. So why does it really matter which approach you take? Because one way or another, you’re paying for those 10,000 extra visitors. Maybe you’re paying directly for search ads or boosted social posts, maybe you’re paying indirectly by ramping up your content output, but either way, increasing traffic doesn’t come for free.

You also have to remember that there’s a point of diminishing returns when it comes to attracting new traffic. They’re only so many people out there who are interested in your product or industry, so you can’t always just bring in more people — you’ll have to start converting the visitors you already have.

Why You Need CRO

The main benefit of CRO is obvious — more visitors become leads, those leads become customers, and those customers keep the lights on for your company. But CRO carries some secondary benefits you might not have been aware of.

Better Return on Your Marketing Investment

If you can turn more of your visitors into leads and customers, you’ll increase the ROI on every digital marketing campaign and channel that’s bringing in visitors. Whether it’s paid search advertising, SEO, earned or paid social media, email marketing, or whatever else you’re doing, you’ll get more bang for your buck if those visitors are converting once they reach the website. You might even be able to turn an unprofitable channel into a profitable one, simply by increasing the conversion rate of the people that channel brings in. Higher returns mean you can up your spending without wasting money.

Better Understanding of Your Customers

Actually implementing conversion rate optimization is not an easy process, but it’s well worth the effort. As you make these changes across your site, you’ll be forced to learn more about your customers. You’ll look into their basic demographic info, why people choose you over your competitors, what problems they’re trying to solve, what sorts of landing pages and CTAs attract their attention, and so on.

You can never know too much about your customers, and all of this extra information will come in handy when you’re creating campaigns in the future.

Keeping Up With Your Competition

If you’re not working on CRO yet, there’s a good chance your competition already is. There’s also a good chance that your site visitors are visiting your competitors’ sites, too — if they visit half a dozen sites and yours isn’t the most compelling one, you’re probably missing out on a sale. CRO isn’t innovative or unique anymore. It’s a necessity.

Setting CRO Up For Success

CRO isn’t a magic solution. It’s a great investment, but it needs to be built on a strong foundation. In order to maximize the impact of any CRO strategy, it’s important to address a few common issues before you get started.

  • Not enough visitors: if your site is brand new or caters to such a small niche of the internet that you don’t get enough traffic to analyze it, conversion optimization might not help you. It would take months for you to even get enough visitors to test your techniques. Sites with very low traffic numbers should instead focus on increasing their numbers through SEO and paid advertising.
  • Major website problems: if your site has long load times, bad navigation, or other customer experience issues, testing conversion optimization techniques won’t tell you anything useful. Make sure your site is in good working order before you start pursuing CRO.
  • Insufficient tracking analysis: there are a lot of steps between a visitor first landing on your site and finally making a purchase. In order to determine whether your CRO techniques are working, you need end-to-end tracking that can put a dollar value on your conversions.

No Time Like the Present

The best thing about conversion rate optimization is that, unlike other marketing strategies, it can start to show benefits almost immediately. You’ll be able to acquire more customers in a shorter amount of time and at a lower cost. If you want your business to keep growing, conversion rate optimization is the way to do it. Need help getting started? Contact Madison Taylor Marketing today!