Cloud IQ are the conversion optimization specialists. Virtually every online business nowadays has a problem: 98 per cent of the coveted and painstakingly acquired visitors leave a site without engaging. And 75 per cent of would-be shoppers abandon their shopping carts before checkout. This trend lays bare the biggest challenge for every website: conversion. Here we review the reasons conversation rate optimisation is the next big thing and demonstrate why a 0.2 per cent investment in it yields 10 per cent uptick in revenue. Curious yet?
Endless user acquisition = pouring money into a bottomless pit
OK, the cost of acquiring customers is not truly a bottomless pit, but the numbers above do not lie, either. Paying top dollar to get more eyeballs on your online venture is only half the battle, and classic online marketing does ruefully little to convert browsers into buyers.
What complicates the problem further is the design and development of user conversion, which is still at a low level of automation, so many man-hours go into creating tailored strategies to bring you about 2 per cent conversion in the end. This is a luxury no business can afford, regardless of size, popularity, or capitalisation. Luckily, there is now an elegant and powerful strategy that can put your money in the right place and make every resource count. Enter CRO.
Conversation rate optimisation in a nutshell
Conversation rate optimisation (or CRO for short) is poised to be the next big shift in online marketing – and rightfully so. Its premise is simple: track user behaviour on your site non-intrusively, collect customer data which can be leveraged in on- and off-site remarketing effectively, follow up with abandoners individually, and ultimately complete the transaction where traditional marketing’s efforts have come to a grinding halt. This used to be a resource and cost intensive process. Happily, due to recent tech advancements, it is now possible to deliver all of this autonomously, in real-time.
CRO is still developing, but the principles behind it are very promising. To quote Forrester, “To take full benefit of optimisation opportunities, you ideally want it to happen invisibly within each customer experience. Conversion rate optimisation no longer has to be so costly, time-consuming and arduous, if machines can help carry the load.” We explore each of these key characteristics below.
Seamless integration within the customer experience
People surf the Web more vigilantly than ever before, and they are as ad-averse and newsletter-intolerant as can be, unless you listen and respond to deliver the desired experience and message . Modern CRO techniques circumvent this obstacle by integrating the conversion effort into the user experience in such organic ways that opting into your mailing list and completing a transaction on your site become a natural step of the engagement process.
A powerful way of fighting that 98 per cent click-away rate is to seamlessly get an email opt-in at first and then acquire enough user information (like geo location, browsing behaviour on site, or session structure) which allows you to later trigger those undecided with relevant follow-up information and nurture them from abandoners to customers. There are excellent tools which can do this for you with minimal investment and high efficacy.
Automation is your friend
Gone are the days when human eyes and brains were tasked with following visitors and converting them into customers. CRO relies on increasingly sophisticated algorithms and automatically generated data to assemble the ultimate conversion package for each potential sale. It also involves detailed monitoring of your marketing campaigns’ effectiveness and reach because the proof is in the pudding, and this one sure tastes good. Automation comes with precision, speed, and low costs, all working in your favour.
This is why CRO pays off
For the reasons above, even a tiny bit of resources re-allocated to conversion optimisation generate massive returns: CRO focuses on the part of e-commerce that actually generates revenue. You cannot go wrong with that!
