CRO
Top 15 Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices in 2024
Ankur Goyal
Introduction
A marketer who does not leverage conversion rate optimization (CRO) techniques is living on borrowed time.
It sounds harsh, but unfortunately, it's the very bitter truth.
Why?
Because even the ones that might be doing everything to optimize their conversion rates struggle to meet the industry benchmarks, let alone surpass them.
For the former set, we say buck up and get on with your CRO efforts. For the latter- we have some good news. Your woes are those of yesteryear because you’ve finally reached the place that solves all your problems.
Here, we discuss the Top 15 CRO best practices and bust some of the common myths surrounding CRO recommendations to ensure you’re working with only the most reliable facts. Our suggestion- get out your notepad and keep your pen ready!
Key Principles of Effective CRO
The key principles of effective CRO include highlighting your value proposition, offering visitors incentives, removing conversion barriers, and establishing a safe environment for them. Here’s a detailed look at them.
1. Highlight Your Value Proposition
We’ll go out on a limb and say you’re not the only one in your industry. What you’re offering is also offered by your competitors. Customers are well aware of this. But what they don’t know is what sets you apart.
That’s what you need to double down on highlighting. Position your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) front and center and in bold. For instance, in the screenshot above, Warby Parker positions its USP of offering customers a trial of five frames at home for free.
Don’t wait for your visitor to do the heavy lifting and specify why they should choose you over your competition clearly. Once they know what you bring to the table, they’ll convert more easily.
2. Offer Your Visitors Incentives
Nudge your visitors to take action. While ’30-day free trial’, ‘Free goodies on purchase of $$’ and 50% off sales can often incentivize your visitors, other techniques such as ‘no questions asked, money-backed guarantee’ and customer testimonials can also do the trick.
Further, an ‘About Us’ page, FAQ section, and resource section with eBooks, articles, and more can also help visitors learn more about you and encourage them to check out your offerings.
3. Alleviate Conversion Barriers
Identify and remove anything that comes in the way of your conversions. You could have the best incentives, but if your customers hit a slow-down or an obstacle that compromises their user experience, you best believe they’re out.
Some of the barriers to look out for include:
High page loading time
Unclear product descriptions
Zero product images
Use of overly complex language
Unclear pricing models
Requiring visitors to register
Remove these, and your visitor will be more willing to perform your desired action.
4. Foster a Safe Environment for Your Visitor
You could offer stellar incentives such as 90% off and free shipping, but if your platform triggers their antennas, you’ve lost them before being able to pitch to them. A number of things could make your visitor feel uncomfortable such as:
The payment gateway
The font
The color of your website design
For instance, if your website bombards visitors with pop-ups the second they land, you’ll likely lose them before you can say ‘welcome’.
The solution: Know thy customers, run tests, and never compromise customer trust for a quick conversion.
Top Best Practices for Conversion Rate Optimization
Identifying funnel leaks, setting precise goals, ensuring your test runs its entire duration, double checking your experiment, highlighting your offering’s functionality, and integrating new buyer personas, are some conversion rate optimization best practices. Let’s discuss these in detail.
1. Understand Your Visitors to Recognize Funnel Leaks
To convince your visitors to take action, you need to know them first. For this, analyze your visitors to understand what makes them tick, their priorities, preferences, pain points, etc. Gaining insight into this will help you create a CRO strategy that actually works.
After all, you could be selling the juiciest apple. But if your customer is a lion looking for a steak, your selling skills won’t help. So how do you go about getting into the mind of your customer? Here’s how:
Leverage Behavior Analysis Tools: Tools such as session recordings, heatmaps, and click maps help you understand where your visitors hesitate and where they engage the most. Analyzing this helps you uncover usability issues that might go unnoticed but are nonetheless jeopardizing your conversion rate.
Offer Entry and Exit Feedback Forms: Conducting surveys on your landing page helps you understand what’s working with your visitors and what’s not. For instance, you could ask your visitors to share the reason they’re leaving in an exit survey to help highlight what’s pushing them away. The culprits could be slow page loading time, high pricing, etc.
Let’s take an example. For instance, you employ a heat map and find out that your offerings are popular, and visitors even go to your pricing page afterward. But that’s the last you hear from them. After that, they’re out. Now, add an exit survey, too, and you get insight into what didn’t work for your visitor- were the prices too high? or were the features of your pricing model the problem?
2. Specify Your Goals and Hypotheses
The next conversion optimization best practice is to have a clear goal and hypotheses for every test and experiment you run. And these must be backed by qualitative and quantitative data. Don’t indulge in shoot-from-the-hip guesswork that might be based on ‘obvious’ assumptions.
A well-defined theory of hypothesis is crucial to the success of your CRO process because it lays down what you’re testing, why you’re testing it, and how you’ll interpret the results. If these are themselves flawed or based on unsteady assumptions, they can have a domino effect and bring everything crashing down.
3. Don’t Ignore Your Micro Conversions
When it comes to conversions, you have to keep an eye on your main goals and your intermediate metrics. The former are your primary goals that directly impact your business’s profitability, while the latter are metrics such as your Click-Through Rate (CTR), number of newsletter sign-ups, etc.
The latter are known as micro conversions and contribute to the main (or macro) conversion goal at each stage of the conversion funnel, so it is important to measure them.
For instance, in the image above, ‘page visit’, ‘add to cart’ and ‘choose shipping’ are all micro conversions for the final goal of ‘complete purchase’. Now, if you track your micro conversions, you’ll be able to find out why your main conversion isn’t taking place and make necessary tweaks.
For instance, you could find that visitors are adding offerings to the cart, reaching the shipping page but then leaving. This could prompt you to analyze your shipping page to make necessary changes.
4. Don’t Disturb Your Tests Midway
It can be tempting to adjust tests based on preliminary data to save time and get accurate results quickly. That said, it's not the greatest idea.
It's best to keep your tests running at least till they reach a statistical significance of 95%. This helps ensure you don’t make any premature changes or adjustments to your potentially efficient experiment. Consider leveraging online tools to calculate test duration and the significance of test results to gain a well-rounded idea of your experiments.
5. Always Double Check Your Experiment
The results of your experiments will form the foundation of key business decisions. Therefore, it's important to be sure of the integrity of the experiment before you run it.
Conduct quality checks for all experiments and tests before you launch them to ensure your goals are well-defined and you’re tracking the right metrics.
Further, be sure to confirm that your test is being accurately rendered for your audience across devices, browsers, etc. Don’t ignore your website’s mobile user experience- 85% of consumers believe a company’s website on mobile should be better than its desktop version.
6. Focus On Your Offerings’ Functionality with Clarity
Don’t fall down the rabbit hole of discussing everything about your offering. Instead, keep the spotlight on your offering’s primary functionality. A good example of this is the Stanley hammer.
You see, a Stanley hammer’s core functionality is hammering nails. You can showcase all the different types of nails it can hammer. But if you go into optimizing its aesthetic aspects at the cost of highlighting its functional value, you’ve gone too far- perhaps lost the attention of a user that matches your Ideal Customer Profile’s (ICP) altogether.
Keep your offering’s functionality the DNA of your landing page design. Optimize elements on your site, keeping your offerings and your target audience in mind. Additionally, be clear about their value and the action you want the visitor to take.
If you already have a well-optimized landing page and want to beautify it nonetheless. There is no harm as long as your designs align with your brand style and resonate with your audience. But our advice would be to keep your landing page simple and your CTA above the fold.
7. Keep an Eye Out for New Buyer Personas
Typically speaking, creating buyer personas is a step for the early stages of your marketing strategies. So, why are we discussing this for conversions, you ask?
Well, because it is not a one-time action but an ongoing process. You see, as your brand grows, it attracts a variety of customers that might not fit your initial customer personas. For instance, you might find new personas trickling to your website from a marketing channel you didn’t expect had eyes for your offerings.
But not knowing them means not optimizing the customer journey for them. This results in losing customers who might very well have converted with just the right CTAs, landing pages, messaging, etc. Research finds that buyer persona-based content drives customer engagement six times when targeting cold leads. In other words, you need to stay on top of your buyer personas always, not just at the beginning of your CRO strategy.
To facilitate this, explore your user base periodically to recognize ways to target audiences and convert them into leads. Circulate surveys and ask visitors for feedback on how they reached your landing page, whether they use your product, etc.
Simply put, ask them anything that could help you define your customer personas and explore new ones. Once you have a new customer persona, you can use it to plan your marketing, targeting, and content strategies.
8. Leverage Customer Testimonials and Product Reviews
Online shopping has changed the game, there’s no doubt. But it has come with its own set of challenges. Most notably, customers can no longer assess products before buying them. This has made recommendations and customer reviews more important than ever.
In fact, over 99.9% of customers read product reviews while shopping online, with 98% saying it's an essential consideration for purchase decisions. Further, 79% of consumers seek out websites with product views.
In other words, the Statistical Gods have spoken—including customer testimonials and product reviews is a must today if you want to see your conversion rates soar.
9. Offer ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Add to Cart’
Everybody likes options. No more than your customers. And this statement rings true across products, services, and processes. The more choices you give your customers, the better their customer experience and your conversion rate.
For this reason, be sure to offer both ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Add to Cart’ options directly on your product page. The ‘Buy now’ option allows your visitors to make quick purchases without filling out forms and checking boxes.
The ‘Add to Cart’ option allows users to continue browsing and confirm the order once they’ve decided on their purchases. So your visitor has the option for a quick checkout or a leisurely shopping experience- whatever they want that day.
10. Specify Return and Exchange Policies Clearly
Visitors will look for an exit strategy when they engage with a new brand. It's only right, considering they’re taking a chance on you. To live up to their expectations and foster a relationship of trust, ensure your return and exchange policies aren’t ambiguous, evasive, or unreasonable.
Remember, you might be convinced your product will have no complaints, but your prospect isn’t. So, it's important you assure them that should they wish to backtrack, they have the choice to do so. Further, place these policies on every product page for easy accessibility.
11. Consider Live Chat Support
Consider integrating a 24/7 live chat solution on your website. This will ensure your visitors have a helping hand should they need it. It can help them clear doubts and gain targeted information about your offerings, reducing the deliberation time and driving conversions.
ICMI finds that live chats result in a 48% increase in revenue per chat hour and a 40% rise in conversion rate. Immediate assistance and real-time interaction through live chat facilitate an improved customer experience, promote trust, and encourage conversions.
You can either have the live chat always available on your site or have it triggered when a visitor has spent more than a minute on your site to prompt them to take action.
12. A/B Test CTAs
A/B testing or Split testing involves comparing different versions of the same landing page, ad, or content to learn which one performs the best. It is an iterative technique that must be used periodically to understand whether your digital assets are performing optimally.
Further, it is the 2nd most popular CRO technique for customer journey analysis, with 77% of businesses using it to test their websites, 60% their landing pages, 59% their emails, and 58% their paid search efforts.
Further, CTAs have also become a popular element for testing too. Consider applying A/B tests to CTAs for your conversion rates because of their pivotal role in CRO. Conduct A/B tests for varying versions of the same CTA to understand which one brings the most traffic or converts the most visitors.
13. Record your Learnings
Meticulous reporting and documentation of your CRO process are essential to its success. Jotting down your learnings, changes, and the effects of your adjustments helps ensure you don’t waste time repeating errors.
What’s more, this becomes an invaluable resource for you, whether it’s to help improve how you conduct tests or gain insight into your top strategies that could benefit marketing channels, segments, and strategies, etc. You can also share your findings with relevant stakeholders to gain new perspectives and foster a culture of experimentation.
14. Retarget Your Visitors
Imagine your visitor goes through your offerings, engages with them substantially, and even adds products to the cart but then suddenly disappears. It hurts, doesn’t it? It's almost like hearing your lottery ticket number on the television, ready to cash in, and then suddenly—the last digit is different.
Chances are you’ve felt this more than once and have learned to put on a bandage and move on. But that’s not the solution. Instead prepare to retarget such visitors on other platforms to remind them they have unfinished business on your site. 77% of marketers use retargeting on Instagram and Facebook to win back potential customers, and 26% of users actually come back thanks to retargeting efforts.
Leverage anonymous cookies to launch customized ads that your visitor can see on Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn. Retargeting them will help bring them back to complete the action that they were already so close to performing.
15. Integrate The Right CRO Tool
The last conversion optimization best practice that we have for you is to integrate the right CRO tool. Optimizing your website is a behemoth task and prone to fateful errors if you decide to do it manually. Instead, delegate the task to a dedicated CRO tool and watch your conversion rate soar.
One of the leading names in the space is Fibr AI, which helps you optimize your landing page to drive conversions. Supported by the power of AI, this personalization tool helps you customize your visitor’s post-click experience according to the ad, email, or keyword that brought them to you. All it takes is 30 minutes, and your tailor-made landing pages are ready to convert your visitors.
Common Myths About CRO Best Practices
Some common myths about CRO best practices include copying your competitors’ strategies blindly, assuming best practices will automatically help you improve CRO, and expecting testing will confirm opinions.
Half-truths, myths, and general misinformation are rampant in every industry. But in the case of digital marketing, which suffers from its fair share of ambiguity, myths are more common than usual, especially in the case of conversion rate optimization ideas.
Here are some of the most common ones and the truth behind them:
1. ‘Simply Integrate the Best Practices, and You’ll Be Fine’
Key Takeaway: Instead of blindly adopting CRO best practices, customize your CRO strategy to your unique audience insights and real-time data to gain meaningful results.
We’re well aware that this is an absurd statement to make after having discussed the best practices for CRO. While the tips and tactics mentioned above will surely put you on the right track, they’re not a complete solution.
This is for the simple reason that every brand, its marketing campaign, its audience, and its goals are unique. They are akin to snowflakes- no two are completely identical. And so, it’s best to view each tip through your unique lens to see whether it furthers your specific conversion goals. If not, drop them!
2. ‘CRO Doesn’t Work’
Key Takeaway: CRO works but requires a substantial investment of time. The saying ‘Good things take time’ stands particularly true when it comes to CRO.
CRO works but needs time and precision. If you throw in the towel within weeks of not seeing any substantial results, you’re getting the shorter end of the stick. You see, CRO is a lengthy undertaking that takes time to show results.
You need to be prepared to stay in the bunker for a while before calling the time of death on your CRO process. Further, the success of your CRO process also depends on the aspects you choose to test. If you’re testing variables that aren’t affecting your conversion rates, you need to find the ones that are affecting them and test those, not cancel the whole endeavor.
3. ‘Copying Competitors Will Work’
Key Takeaway: Create your own personalized CRO strategy and make only those changes that you know to be backed by solid data.
On the face of it, this myth seems pretty believable. But it's wrong for two reasons. Firstly, your competitor might have set up the variable (landing page layout, checkout process, menu, etc.), but it may not necessarily be backed by data and analysis. It could very well have been random, something their website developer saw fit, and it just stuck on. Until and unless you can connect your competitor’s conversion rate directly to the variable you want to copy, imitating it is definitely a bad idea.
The second reason is that what works for your competitors will not necessarily work for you (even if your business model, audience, and messaging are similar). Even if what they do is based on strong statistics, you don’t have a complete understanding of the context to copy blindly.
4. ‘Your Tool Will Tell You When to Stop the Test’
Key Takeaway: Don’t rely completely on your CRO test. Analyze your sales cycle and set limits to your CRO tool as you see fit.
CRO tools are impressive (we would know). They’re intuitive, user-friendly, and quick. But as great as they are, they are still tools. Meaning they need to be wielded by a well-informed smith who knows when and how to use them.
You see, even with robust CRO tools, you still need to know basic statistics, which helps you sidestep Type 1 (false positives) and Type 2 (false negatives) errors while minimizing imaginary lifts. Here are some points to keep in mind while running tests:
Test across two business cycles
Determine a fixed goal and sample size before you run tests
Consider external factors such as holidays and compounding variables
It's not possible to ‘spot a trend’ before the test is complete. Wait for it to run its course before drawing any conclusions.
Apart from the above, it is also recommended that you run your tests over the span of two weeks. However, it is not free from its own caveats. You see, the benchmark of ‘two weeks’ started due to Tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. For these companies, two weeks of data is often measured in millions.
This is because, within the short span of two weeks, a single customer’s behavior would fluctuate as much as it ever could. In other words, a Google user’s behavior would be different between Monday and Friday and even Friday and Saturday, but not so much between the first Monday and the third one in the test period.
A significant reason for this is that users return to these sites frequently, which enables the easy modeling of behavior, making it predictable. We recommend you checkout your customer journey and ascertain for yourself whether two weeks is a decent duration for your test.
5. ‘Testing Will Confirm Opinions’
Key Takeaway: Coming in with preconceived notions about your CRO results can hamper the process. Instead, let the test results guide your opinions.
A significant part of CRO is reducing the effects of our cognitive biases in order to make fair, data-backed business decisions. Even then, optimization is often misunderstood as a way to confirm or validate our own biased notions.
The aim of any optimization process is to drive returns and improve efficiency. Focusing on confirming an opinion contradicts that aim. Further, it also prevents you from actually exploring or understanding how much you can optimize your CRO process beyond the limited scope you might be evaluating.
It's best to ensure you leave your hopes, opinions, and perspectives at the door when you begin your CRO process to ensure you gain the maximum intel from the tests. If later they do confirm your opinions, well then- awesome!
Implement Best Practices for Long Term Success
CRO is not a one-time undertaking but an ongoing exercise that requires you to constantly check in with your website and keep an eye on your metrics. And while it can seem overwhelming, the best practice CRO tactics that we’ve discussed above are sure to get you on the road to success.
But before you strap on your helmet and don your gloves to optimize your conversion rates, there’s one last step you need to take. And that’s onboarding the right CRO tool to be your trusty sidekick.
You find this is Fibr AI. This AI powered personalization platform helps you tailor your landing page for every SMS, email, prospect, ad, you name it! As a result, you convert more website traffic and reduce your Customer Acquisition Cost, helping you optimize your budget to the fullest.
Ready to see Fibr AI in action?
FAQs
1. What are CRO principles?
The principles of CRO include having a clear value proposition, offering compelling incentives to your website visitors, alleviating conversion barriers and making your visitors feel safe.
2. How to optimize landing pages for conversion rate?
To optimize your landing page to drive conversions, include an impactful headline, minimize page load speed, keep your website design simple, add social proof, integrate high-quality visual elements, and conduct A/B tests.
3. What are some of the top CRO best practices?
Some of the top CRO best practices include understanding your visitors to recognize funnel leaks, focusing on your offering’s functionality with clarity, integrating new buyer personas, offering live chat support on your site, recording your takeaways from tests, and integrating the right CRO tool into your operations.
