CRO
The CRO process: Framework, Methodology, and Testing Plans
Meenal Chirana
Introduction
Your website might be attracting visitors, but are they taking action? Are they actually converting- subscribing to newsletters or making purchases?
If the answer is ‘not quite’, it's time you invest in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). CRO is more than a strategy, it's the key to getting more from your visitor. We don’t mean to be dramatic, but it is our holy grail when it comes to driving your conversion rate.
Jeremy Abel, chief strategist at rDialogue puts it well-
‘A website without conversion rate optimization is like a car without wheels- it will go nowhere’
Despite this, 68% of businesses are still sleeping on it. To ensure you don’t add to these ranks, it's time to master your CRO process.
In this guide, we provide a complete rundown of the CRO process- from the framework and methodology to the tools you can use and some best practices that will help you ensure your CRO measures always stay ahead and efficient. `
what is CRO process
The Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) process refers to taking a strategic approach to drive the conversion rate. Your conversion rate refers to the percentage of online visitors who take a specific Call to Action (CTA). This could be anything from downloading a guide to making a purchase.
Simply put, the aim of the CRO process is to take steps to create as many conversions as possible. In many ways, CRO is one of the most important aspects of marketing. This is because it helps ensure your visitor’s post-click experience makes them take a beeline to perform the CTA.
CRO Process: Implementing an Effective CRO testing Plan
So how do you go about conducting your CRO process? Well, by incrementally assessing your site or platform with the aim to identify areas that need tweaking to drive conversion rates. It might seem overwhelming at first, but we’ve got a game plan for you to follow. Here are the steps to take:
1. Specify Your Objectives
As you descend into your CRO testing plan, it’s important to have a guiding light to ensure you don’t digress and fall down a rabbit hole. This comes in the form of your goals and objectives for the CRO process. These goals will determine how you conduct the CRO tests and what you analyze.
The goals could be anything from understanding how a specific web page is faring to more targeted like how your customers engage with it specifically. Other examples include evaluating your user journey, conversion funnel, etc.
It’s important to specify your goals at the onset to ensure your next steps are in the right direction. Think of it as a ballet instructor who holds their stick behind you to ensure your pose remains perfect.
2. Choose the Correct User Behavioral Analytics Tools to Gather and Examine Data
Gaining insight into how your users behave on your platform, what they engage with, what they skip, etc., is crucial to optimizing your customer experience and, by extension, your conversion rate.
For this, you must select the right type of CRO tools. For instance, you could consider user behavior tools such as a heatmap or interaction map that give you a visual overview of user behavior through color-coded overlays, as visible below:
The color gets warmer (redder) with the rise in clicks, scrolls, and cursor movements, indicating a greater user interest. As a result, heatmaps can help you understand areas of engagement, friction, and user attention to identify how your users navigate your platform.
Word to the wise- don’t limit yourself to just behavioral tools; be sure to integrate others, such as A/B testing tools, landing page tools, etc., which we’ll discuss shortly.
3. Assess User Experience (UX) and Website Design
Conducting a comprehensive user experience evaluation will help you recognize any issues that could be jeopardizing your conversion rates. Apart from the aesthetic checks, undertake a technical website audit to recognize performance-related issues such as slow loading time, navigation errors, or mobile responsiveness problems. Google finds that the chances of a user bouncing increases by 32% as the page load time rises from 1 to 3 seconds.
It's important to keep in mind that even if your platform wins in aesthetics, it's not necessarily coming in first in user experience. So, performing technical checks is a must. You can also evaluate your user experience based on the following honeycomb for a thorough evaluation.
4. Set Up and Examine Conversion Funnels
Your conversion funnels are an important aspect of your CRO framework. Why? A robust conversion funnel acts as a crystal ball, allowing you to foresee potential bottlenecks or barriers that could discourage your customers from taking action. Here are the steps to help you set up a conversion funnel:
Identify the goals to track, such as purchases, newsletter sign-ups, form submissions, etc.
Create a visual representation of the user journey on your platform.
Lastly, mark the critical stages or pages that lead to a conversion and set up tracking for those.
Analyzing your conversion funnel will help you track user behavior at every stage of the customer journey. In the process, you can identify where customers get stuck or drop off and work on optimizing those areas. For instance, if you notice a substantial number of customers make it to the payments page, but only a fraction moves to the next page, it's time to take a second look at your payments page.
Perhaps the payment gateway is too confusing, slow, or otherwise unoptimized. Getting to the root cause will help you alleviate the problem and facilitate an improved user experience that drives conversions.
5. Examine Landing Pages and their Efficiency
Your landing page is your lifeline when it comes to the CRO process. Be sure to analyze its layout, design, and messages to confirm that it promotes your objectives. Some of the arears to evaluate include:
CTA Effectiveness: Check your CTA’s tone, messaging, design, and placement.
User Interaction: Assess how your users interact with your landing page, how they navigate it, and what they engage with most through user behavioral tools such as heatmaps.
Lead Generation Forms: Evaluate your forms based on factors such as clarity, length, etc.
6. Undertake Content Assessment
A thorough CRO testing plan will include a comprehensive content assessment. You see, the relevance, quality, presentation, and clarity of your content impact the user’s decision of whether to convert or bounce off.
And for this very reason your CRO methodology must involve a complete evaluation of your website content’s quality and value. Here’s how to go about it:
Analyze your content’s alignment with your target market’s pain points, needs, preferences, and expectations.
Examine the tone, voice, messaging, and overall readability to confirm whether your content is resonating with your customers.
Assess the visual elements of your content, such as videos, images, banners, etc., for loading speed and effectiveness. Conduct checks for outdated information, broken links or any other oddities that could compromise user experience.
This might seem tedious, but we promise you- a thorough content evaluation allows you to flag areas where content can be improved and helps drive conversion rates by enhancing the user experience.
7. Collect and Analyze Feedback
So, you’ve done your part in checking your platform and inferring what’s working and what’s not. Now, it's time to hear it from the horse's mouth.
For this, consider collecting Voice of Customer (VoC) data through surveys, online reviews, social media comments, feedback forms, and customer support conversations. Analyze this data to understand the other side of your conversion rates- what does the customer like, what don’t they like, what would they want offered, etc.
Doing this will help you drive your customer retention rates, reduce your Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and improve conversion rates.
8. Run A/B Tests
Crossing your fingers and hoping your landing page or content version works for your audience is wishful thinking. And considering how much is riding on it (sales targets, market standing, productivity goals), it’s important to go with more than your ‘gut’ feeling.
This is where A/B tests come in. These are tests that test difference elements within your landing page or content to understand what combination achieves the highest engagement and drives a particular goal, in this case- conversions.
Performing this test can help you identify areas that need improvement to reduce bounce rates, drive sales growth, and improve conversion rates.
9. Share Insights
Once you’ve completed the CRO process, it's time to inform all relevant stakeholders about the insights you’ve gathered. This is essential, considering a CRO process is a hefty undertaking that has likely cost your team precious hours and funds.
Now, while most teams skip this very important step, we recommend you take out time to do it anyway. For the simple reason that informing all relevant teams of your progress helps establish a positive working environment where every team member stays well-informed and aligned with big-picture goals.
10. Optimize Your CRO Efforts Continuously
Okay, so you’ve completed the CRO framework and informed the stakeholders. Surely, it's all done and dusted, right? Wrong.
The CRO process is an ongoing one that needs constant check-ins to ensure changes are implemented and actually help drive conversions.
Be sure to evaluate your results and key takeaways from time to time to make sure your conversion rates are always optimized. Doing this will help you recognize issues early and make tweaks and adjustments before they snowball into problems that affect your business goals.
Benefits of the CRO framework
If you’re wondering whether CRO is all that and worth your time and effort, we’ll just let you know—YES!
Here are some of the benefits of undertaking CRO testing:
1. Gain Insight into The Customer Journey
CRO analysis allows you to gain insight into how online users make their way through your website or platform. Monitoring what they engage with most, how long they engage with it, and what they skip helps you identify gaps and bottlenecks that could be compromising your user experience and conversion rate.
In short, a CRO testing plan empowers you to understand your prospects’ and customers’ sales funnel journey and recognize where they exist to prevent them from doing the same.
2. Identify Elements That Comprise Conversion Rate
A robust CRO process empowers you to identify and rectify elements that could be compromising your website’s conversion rates. It assesses factors such as CTA effectiveness, use experience and the like to get to the root of the problem. This means some good ol’ testing to understand what works and what’s heading for the bin.
A/B testing is core to the CRO process and helps you identify elements that might be jeopardizing your conversion rate.
Along with that, Split testing (another name for A/B testing) also highlights the changes you can make to improve your conversions. We’ll be discussing this in detail further on.
3. Evaluate Your Usability and User Experience (UX)
CRO process requires you to evaluate your entire customer journey, allowing you to understand how your customers interact with your platform. It helps you identify broken links, tedious navigation, or text overload, which might be causing your customers to bounce off without performing the CTA, impacting your conversion rate.
4. Align Your Content with Customer Expectations
Chances are your content team has spent their blood, sweat, and tears creating blog posts, eBooks, and social media posts. But, if, after all that effort, your content isn’t engaging or relevant enough for your target audience, it’s all for nothing.
The CRO framework helps you ensure your content aligns with your audience’s expectations and user intent. And when they like what they see, they’re more likely to perform the CTA.
5. Optimize Costs
Your conversion barriers are steadily draining your finances. With the CRO framework, you can identify and eradicate these to drive your conversions and ensure the maximum ROI on your budget.
Tools For CRO Analysis and Testing
Did you know that businesses that leverage CRO tools witness a 223% average ROI? Makes the decision of onboarding a CRO tool a no-brainer right? So, without ado, here’s a look at the different types of CRO tools:
1. A/B Testing Tools
A/B testing tools are the second most leveraged tool for conversion optimization after analytics tools. This popularity is simply because these allow you to try, iterate, and test different versions of the same landing page or content to understand which one will drive conversions most successfully.
It helps you understand what your audience responds to and what they engage with most. This insight, in turn, helps you create improved user experiences and optimize your platform and content confidently.
2. Analytics Tools
These tools help you understand what’s under the hood of your website or platform. That is to say, how your engine is doing and whether you need an oil top up. With analytics tools, you understand customer trends and preferences and gain qualitative data to help you paint a complete picture of all user interactions.
These are critical when you begin creating theories based on your insights and can help set benchmarks for future performance as well.
3. User Testing Tools
These tools get customers to ‘actually’ test your new products, new features, etc., before they get offered to the masses. They help facilitate focus groups for you to understand user sentiment for specific offerings or features.
4. Landing Page Tools
Landing pages are not your ordinary website pages. These are specially created for digital traffic that is directed from a specific ad campaign and have one purpose: to drive conversions by offering further information on what the ad campaign discussed.
Landing page tools help you create landing pages that meet your unique requirements. If you’re looking for a user-friendly yet powerful landing page tool, explore Fibr AI. With Fibr AI, you can experiment and publish a variety of AI-tailored landing pages- all without changing your CMS.
5. User Behavior Tools
As previously discussed, heatmaps are an ideal example of user behavior tools. These tools give you insight into how your user engages with your platform, what they linger on and what they completely skip.
Any marketer worth their salt knows the value of behavior tools as these essentially give you a window into your customer’s mind. And once you have that, developing marketing strategies and meeting goals get markedly easier.
6. Lead Capture Tools
These tools help collect and organize your leads’ information. They are essential for CRO, as once you have all the necessary details on your visitors, you’re better positioned to provide them with just the right content at just the right time in their customer journey.
In other words, these allow you to strike the iron when it's hot, improving the chances of users converting.
7. SEO Tools
These tools help you optimize your platform for improved Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking. They offer you insight into your competitors’ ranking and help improve your site in terms of the number of backlinks, keyword comparisons, and more.
8. Survey Tools
Last, but not the least, survey tools help you gather feedback from your customers. Use them to ask for suggestions, ideate new features, identify bottlenecks, and flag issues within the customer journey.
For every different type of CRO tool mentioned above, you’ll find a plethora of offerings. And sifting through these can soon become tedious and frustrating. To save you time and help you identify the best one for you, here is a quick checklist to keep in mind when analyzing tools:
Privacy and Security: Your chosen CRO tool should be robust and safe. This is especially true if you plan to run experiments and tests such as A/B tests. Look for features such as multi-step logins, single sign-on, etc., to judge the security of your tool.
GDPR Compliance: Make sure your chosen tool is compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provisions.
Integrations: Your chosen CRO tool must integrate with your existing tech stack. This will prevent data silos as well as ensure you don’t have to use multiple analytics tools to gain a complete picture of your website performance.
Best Practices for CRO
Here are some tips to help you drive your CRO efforts:
1. Prioritize Text-based CTAs in Blog Posts
A study by Infolinks finds that 86% of consumers suffer from Banner Blindness. This phenomenon involves users subconsciously ignoring banner-like information on websites to preserve their browsing experience.
This, paired with the fact that users aren’t scrolling all the way down to the conclusion of your blog post, calls for an overhaul of how and where you place your CTAs.
To combat this, place your CTAs within the text of the blog post. This ensures your users read it and gives you a chance to back up your claims as to why they should choose you—in a non-banner-like way.
2. Insert Lead Flows in Your Blog Posts
Lead flows refer to high-converting pop-ups that are specially designed to catch users’ attention with high value. We know you might be thinking pop-ups are annoying and could instead be counterproductive. But if your pop-up offers value, your user will actually thank you for it.
At least that’s what happened for Campaign Monitor, which found that its free eBook pop-up offer captured 271 leads and converted 10.8% in just 30 days.
3. Run A/B tests on Your Landing Pages
Running A/B tests on your landing pages is a critical part of your CRO efforts, and there are no two ways about it. Landing pages are where your visitor is essentially introduced to your brand and where they become a lead, or if they’re already one, they engage with your brand more deeply.
To ensure you put your best foot forward and drive conversion rates, run A/B tests to understand what resonates and engages your audience best. You can use it to test different versions of your content, images, and banners or even form questions to understand what works with your audience.
4. Drive Leads to Become MQLs
A visitor with a high buyer intent will often want to skip the usual stops along the customer journey to get straight to the point and talk to a sales rep. Its important that you nudge such visitors to take specific actions that make the Marketing Qualified Leads or MQLs.
MQLs are essentially leads that have a higher chance of converting than regular leads. A combination of compelling web pages and smart CTAs can encourage them to take action. For instance, you could optimize your conversion paths for visitors who book a product demo as they display a high buyer intent.
To help drive leads to become MQLs, run tests to find what brings you the most customers and then optimize the process for that. Your aim should be to remove hurdles and barriers from your sales process.
5. Support High-Converting Web Pages with Messages
Consider integrating live chat software to engage your website visitors in real time and offer guidance and support wherever needed. Add this to your top-performing web pages, such as product pages or pricing pages, to help leads get targeted information in real time.
You can also consider making chat boxes action-based. For instance, the chat box could appear if the visitor has stayed on your page for over a minute. Your chat box might help them clear doubts or gain the information they need to take action.
6. Optimize Your Top Blog Posts
Your blog posts can help you drive conversions as they help showcase your industry expertise and credibility. To optimize your blog content, start by identifying the posts that receive the maximum web traffic but don’t match up when it comes to conversion rates.
This disparity could be due to issues with the SEO, CTA, etc. Assess the content performance thoroughly to understand how posts that bring in the maximum number of visitors can also help nudge them to take action.
7. Ensure Your Ads Have Appropriate Landing Pages
Imagine seeing an ad that shows you the exact Adidas Sambas you’ve been looking for. You’ll probably click it faster than you can say ‘Adidas’. But when you’re redirected to a new page and that instead shows you shirts, caps, shoes and everything else that the ecommerce platform sells, its going to rupture your experience, and pour a cold bucket of water on your excitement.
Not only that, you might even resent the brand for baiting you, you accepting the bait and then having to do the heavy lifting of finding your favourite Sambas from their catalogue. Not an ideal situation, right? You’re gonna hop off pretty quick.
This is why you need to personalize and align your landing pages with your ad campaigns- to ensure your visitors are directed to a page that gives them more insight into what they’ve shown interest in.
The best way to achieve this, is to onboard a landing page optimization software.One that can help you personalize multiple landing pages that don’t just align with your ad campaigns but boost their success by offering visitors a streamlined and customized post-click user experience. Wonder where you can get that (wink, wink).
8. Retarget To Keep Website Visitors Hooked
You could be doing everything right and still not have visitors take the action you want them to. For this, consider retargeting them on other platforms such as Facebook or X to bring back their attention to your website.
Retargeting essentially monitors your website visitors to show them ads while they’re on other websites. Make the ads compelling, sharp, and with good visuals to make your retargeting efforts really make a difference. Doing this will get your visitors to come back and increase their chances of taking action.
Start Optimizing with A Reliable CRO process
Now that you have a reliable CRO testing plan, know how to make a CRO framework, and have some actionable best practices ready to go, you can hit the ground running and start optimizing your conversion rate to make it the best it's ever been. What’s more, you don’t have to look far and wide for the right CRO process tool too.
Consider partnering with Fibr AI to personalize your landing page for each ad and make your visitor’s post-click experience as relevant as possible. Leverage the power of AI to boost your brand reach and customer acquisition efforts with Fibr AI.
To check out Fibr AI in action, book a demo today!
FAQs
1. What is CRO?
CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization refers to the process of optimizing your landing page’s or site’s experience depending on how visitors engage with them. It helps drive the chances of a visitor taking a desired action (converting) by identifying actions that can help improve your conversion rate.
2. What is the CRO test framework?
CRO test framework is a roadmap that lays down the steps you need to take to optimize conversions. The steps include specifying goals, selecting the right analysis tools, assessing feedback, A/B testing creative elements, etc., to drive conversion rate.
3. Why Should You Conduct CRO tests?
Conducting CRO tests helps analyze the customer journey, facilitates A/B testing, evaluates user experience (UX), aligns content with customer expectations, streamlines the checkout process, and, most importantly, optimizes costs.
4. What are CRO tools?
CRO tools are solutions and platforms that marketers leverage to gain insight into user behavior, identify bottlenecks, and experiment with user experience in order to boost conversion rates.
