CRO – Conversion rate optimisation cannot defined in one dimension. For instance, there are several approaches to optimise your homepage—from improving the UX to making the copy more persuasive. However, there is no single practice that will guarantee immediate results, testing every practice that you adopt is a great habit and important.

Know your visitors to identify leaks in your funnel

It’s tough to coax people into taking actions that translate into a business goal when you don’t know them. Delighting them is even harder. Study your visitors’ interests, requirements, demographics, and behaviour on your site well to know who they are before setting up a CRO strategy for your conversion funnel.

• Utilise visitor behaviour analysis tools such as heatmaps, session recordings, and click maps to understand their hesitation on the pages critical to your business. You might discover usability issues, which usually sit in the blind spot.
• Run enter and exit surveys on your landing pages to dig deeper into your visitors’ psyche and identify leaks in your website that can be fixed. For example, you may trigger an NPS survey for your power users upon entry, and exit surveys to ask drop-offs the reasons they are not moving ahead in your funnel. The reasons could be many, ranging from pricing and value proposition to features offered. 

Have well-defined goals and specific hypotheses

Your goals and hypotheses for an experiment should be backed by data from your qualitative and quantitative research. Don’t fall for the ‘obvious improvements’ and ‘no brainer’ assumption traps while experimenting. Without a clearly defined hypothesis, you would not know what you are testing, why you are testing, and how to interpret the results. Goals should pave the way for your optimization journey to become better with every experiment.

Prioritise your CRO roadmap

Shoot-from-the-hip guesswork leads to random testing, which in turn leads to sluggish conversions. Without a proper roadmap in place, you end up testing every other page every month and end up deriving inconclusive results. These results neither have a clear conclusion on your visitors’ behaviour nor do they contribute to conversions. 

You must have a prioritized CRO roadmap planned, well in advance, for your experimentation efforts to yield fruitful results. Pick up the bolder, impactful, and targeted tests first to gain larger returns in the shortest time.

• Prioritise easy-to-implement tests that promise a high financial impact.

Measure micro conversions

Every step in your conversion funnel has a conversion goal. You can imagine conversions as a spectrum. On the right-hand side, you have the main goals that directly impact your business’s net profit, while on the left side, you have intermediate metrics such as the number of sign-ups your button generated or the click-through rate (CTR). These metrics, also known as micro conversions, contribute to the main conversion goal at every stage of your conversion funnel. Hence, it’s a good practice to measure them. 

If your website does not drive colossal traffic, make use of these micro-conversion metrics for your subsequent experiments as they are much larger in number and can be instantly measured.

Don’t tweak your running experiment

Many testing software allows you to stop your running test so that you can make the changes suggested by early test data. However, CRO experts suggest that this should be avoided as it harms the data.

Ensure that you keep running your tests until they reach a statistical significance of 95%. You can calculate your test duration to estimate how long you should run a test, and also check whether your results are significant, using readily available online tools. 

QA your experiment

It is a good practice (read: hygiene) to perform a quality check on your experiment before running it. Ensure that your goals are defined and are getting tracked correctly in your testing software. It is also important that the test is being rendered correctly for your targeted audience, across browsers, devices, etc. 

‘Zoom out’ to have your next test planned

CRO is an iterative process. Every test brings with it a set of learnings. Successful ones that lead to high conversion rates give your competitors a tough time and present you with many opportunities for further optimization. If your test does not win, you haven’t lost anything.

Instead, you learn from it. Have a look at your conversion funnel and fix your eye on the next thing in your optimization pipeline.

Have the right tool in your arsenal

One of the most important and often overlooked aspects of any CRO program is the tool(s) it uses. Being a scientific and logical process, CRO warrants sturdy processes, and a tool makes for the foundation. CRO programs are typically started off using existing systems (email, sheets, etc.) While this may turn out great for a start, it can very quickly get out of hand. It’s important to be mindful and onboard a tool well in advance. 

Hyper-personalisation solutions, of which there are considerable distinctions, identify consumers’ future behaviour by ranking every SKU by the greatest likelihood of that individual consumer to purchase from all the SKUs you have listed, in order of greatest likely buying propensity. It presents them to that individual at exactly the right moment, thereby maximising not only that individual’s customer imminent likelihood to purchase but lifetime value CLV potential too. 

Conclusion

Experiments can be quite volatile in the beginning. You must understand that CRO is a marathon and not a sprint. The best practices mentioned in the blog post will have a deliberate and incremental effect to give you an initial push.

Also, the agility in your strategy and patience in your experimental temperament will take you a long way while you build upon your existing optimisation efforts.