What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Conversion Rate Optimization is all about finding ways to increase the rate / number of conversions generated from a website. Conversions are defined as when users perform actions on the website you want them to complete. Desired actions will vary from business to business: for a software business it will be signing up for an account or demo, for a consultant it may be a booking form, or subscribing to a service for a membership business.
There are plenty of guides available on the internet that discuss CRO in detail such as different types of conversions and how to calculate conversion rate, however, in this article, we will discuss the reasons behind low conversion and how conversion rate optimization tools can help with such problems.
Why Use Conversion Rate Optimization Tools?
You may come across conversion rate optimization “guides” where the author believes changing font spacing or button color will result in the conversion rate going through the roof. It is possible you see a slight variation in your conversion rate by performing these tricks but this isn’t true “optimization” and the results will likely not last.
Keep in mind: what might work for one website in a certain scenario might not work for your business and vice versa. The best conversion rate optimizers take best practices with a grain of salt and use their own data and insights to make decisions.
Nevertheless, there are legitimate steps you can take to make simple tweaks to your website design that can have a positive impact on your conversion rate such as:
- Make your web copy more concise
- Adjust your calls to action
- Make your web forms shorter
- Clarify your company’s value proposition
- Boost the incentives
- Create step-by-step instructions
- Improve trust
- Optimize your blog
These, however, are low-hanging fruits that can serve as a starting point in your conversion optimization journey.
Conversion Rate Optimization Tools are the real deal for any digital marketer: they provide analytics-based answers to important questions about how users engage with your site. Let’s take a look at how CRO tools can fix some of the problems.
Reasons Behind Low Conversion Rate and How to Fix it
Businesses can suffer from low conversion rates because of a wide variety of reasons that cause them to lose potential customers and revenue. This mainly happens due to inefficiencies in the marketing funnel and an inability to understand where and what to optimize, and who to optimize for.
Pain #1: Not Investing in CRO Tools and Processes
It’s not uncommon for a business to hire a single employee to oversee CRO. However, CRO is too important to be left to a single employee. It’s a collective responsibility that should be shared by a team of experts.
At any given time, a CRO team needs to collectively possess talent with skills such as Conversion Rate Optimization Manager, Data Analyst, Web Graphic Designer, Copywriter, and someone who understands Web development.
It is equally important to equip this team with the right tools: for businesses that generate leads online, this means a robust set of marketing automation tools: from the basic needs such as CRM and analytics software, to more sophisticated solutions like form & lead tracking solutions or remarketing pixels. Without a sufficiently complete set of tools, your business will waste even more time & resources in its efforts to increase conversions.
Despite this all, 26% of small companies (less than 500 employees) and 20% of large companies (more than 500) surveyed said they don’t have any kind of structured process for conversion optimization. Overlooking conversion rate optimization is a surefire recipe to leave thousands in wasted ad spend and missed opportunities on the table: CRO should be a priority for every business.
Solution:
It is very important for businesses to invest in the right tools and processes so they understand which channels provide them with the highest return on investment in the first place.
The problem, however, is that not all companies have the bandwidth to have a full-fledged team or a web developer working on just conversion optimization. Insiteful includes no-code conversion optimization & in-page analytics features that provide actionable insights to help identify and seal the leaks in your funnel. You don’t need any technical knowledge or a large team to use Insiteful: whether you’re a small business or startup with <10 employees, or a large multinational organization, Insiteful’s robust CRO platform has the tools and plans you need.
Pain #2: Data Data Data
For many companies, most of their marketing budget and efforts are spent on social media channels, brand awareness, and elaborate marketing campaigns. These marketing teams often don’t have very much analytical data on:
- Where are the leads coming from?
- What is their path to conversion from landing?
- What are the demographics of high vs. low converting leads?
- What devices, browsers, and Internet providers are they using?
- What is stopping them from converting?
In the absence of the required analytics, marketers resort to guesses, hunches, and gut feelings or optimize based on the highest-paid person’s opinion. Often, these kinds of teams will waste hours on qualitative analyses such as session recordings and UX interviews.
The pitfall of not having sufficiently robust analytics in place is that your optimization efforts will be akin to throwing darts in the dark, randomly hoping for something to stick. Proper analytics will offer visibility into the bottlenecks and leaks in your online marketing funnel—
Solution:
There are many popular tools available that can help you with gathering analytics data, such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. However, most of these tools require advancing coding knowledge and offer no visibility into a user’s “in-page” actions (ie. where & when they click or scroll).
Studies estimate an average of 3 in 4 potential leads that start filling out your forms don’t complete them (ie. they never click submit) — with traditional analytics like Google, you would have no way of knowing when this happens!
Insiteful, on the other hand, uses a single line of code to track your existing forms and provide you with all the analytics you need to understand your users and where or during what activity do users leave your site. Best of all: Insiteful is compatible with virtually any form builder or web platform / provider. From smart field-level insights (ie. confused or abandoned fields) to form funnel analysis & visualization, Insiteful has all the tools to reveal the causes of abandoned forms and boost conversions from any web form.
Pain #3: Traditional Analytics Leave Gaping Blind Spots
We mentioned Google Analytics in the previous point and will use it as a benchmark for analytics as it is used by millions of businesses. These traditional analytical methods don’t work for modern digital marketing: The biggest issue is that they are focused on site-level analytics, which lacks visibility when it comes to in-page analytics: how users interact within each individual webpage.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool, but it will not provide all the metrics and data you need. It will also leave you entirely blind to bottlenecks in your digital funnels. Specifically relating to tracking forms & calls; Google Analytics is not well equipped to report on these things.
- If a prospect clicks to call you from your website
- If a visitor starts booking an appointment but doesn’t finish submitting
- If a user gets confused & retypes a specific form field several times
- If a visitor grows frustrated and “rage clicks” on a button that doesn’t work
- If many leads are dropping off upon being asked for a specific detail
Similarly, more complex solutions like FullStory and Adobe Analytics come with their own issues: analyzing heatmaps & session recordings waste hours on non-actionable insights, and relies on smaller sample size with no real-time analysis and reporting.
Solution:
These problems can be mitigated by using solutions that are more user-centric and built specifically for conversion optimization (rather than general analytics) purposes:
Insiteful can automatically track & optimize your forms in just two clicks — for a fraction of the price (to compare, Google Analytics 360: the full-featured, premium version, costs roughly $150,000 annually in licensing). Insiteful is a powerful tool to uncover more leads from your existing web forms and automagically track, engage, & convert 100% of prospects that start to fill out your forms.
Pain #4: Resistance to Change
Change is something that we subjectively perceive as a threat to our established beliefs. People usually react to change by trying to preserve the status quo. Businesses are often not willing to implement conversion rate optimization tools and structures because it requires breaking the status quo.
In many businesses, CRO falls under marketing managers who don’t really understand it. Because of this, many high-level managers are able to mandate changes in the CRO process without consideration of the thoughts of those actually doing the work.
Solution:
While making changes to the CRO process, some people in marketing might feel outside their comfort zone. Some ways to deal with this situation can include:
- Explain the reasoning behind the changes by providing evidence-based research to prove the value of conversion rate optimization tools.
- Highlighting the inefficiencies of the current system and how the business is losing potential revenue and customers.
- Conduct a conversion rate audit and explain the finding to the team.
Using a CRO tool like Insiteful will provide you the complete reporting and native / no-code integrations necessary to propose and implement sophisticated CRO strategies, without requiring any technical help or knowledge.
Pain #5 Organizations Do Not Have a Lead Recovery Process
Although some industries have a higher percentage than others, conversion rates usually fall around 2% to 5%. It means 95% of the people that come to a website don’t convert. The reasoning behind this is most people are moving in the conversion funnel i.e. collecting information, seeking answers, and making decisions.
Businesses are mostly focused on bringing traffic to their website via marketing and advertising channels but don’t have any process in place to follow up with these potential customers who visit the website. They usually have no way of knowing who is not converting and why they are not converting.
This can translate to thousands of dollars in missed opportunities and revenue every month. Many digital marketing and B2B strategies revolve around getting customers to sign-up, but these often overlook a far greater growth opportunity: getting more people to convert from clicks to customers from your existing efforts.
Solution:
Insiteful is a turnkey form abandonment & lead recovery solution: set up end-to-end automation with the most advanced conversion optimization platform for all sizes of businesses. Our industry-leading solution captures unfinished form responses & partial leads. These leads can easily be synced to your CRM, or Slack, and/or added to remarketing ad audiences (Remarketing is a technology that presents ads after a visitor has left your website: the ads are displayed as previous visitors travel to other websites such as Facebook or Google.)
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Insiteful also includes other exciting features such as greeting the previous visitors who return and allowing them to resume their progress. Our platform analyzes and optimizes your website on every key page, helping you identify bottlenecks, improve form UX and grow your conversion rate with strategies that consistently beat your benchmarks.
With an easy-to-use interface and the industry’s most powerful data collection engine, Insiteful’s conversion rate optimization (CRO) platform helps any business get more leads and sales from their website and forms.
