Don’t Leave Money Sitting on the Table
Think about your local grocery store or one of the big department stores. Imagine the layout and how it captures your attention. Special sale items are placed where you can see them when you walk in. Other items on sale are located on the end caps. Big ticket items, such as electronics, are often located at the back of the store. As you walk back to that area, you must pass by a lot of other interesting and cool products.
Once you have your purchase in hand and walk to the checkout lane, notice all the last-minute buys or impulse purchase items that are located where you can reach them just before you check out. This design isn’t random. Every store has strategically placed all items where they have the most impact.
Now, imagine if the store owner disregarded that setup or forgot to place sale signs where people could see them. You would say they were missing out on big revenue potential. But that’s exactly what happens when you forget to incorporate CRO into your website.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization and Why Does It Matter?
CRO stands for conversion rate optimization (or conversion optimization). CRO involves testing various design and content elements on your website in order to generate more leads or sales (conversions) from the pool of visitors already coming to your site.
CRO works hand-in-hand with SEO. Consider SEO, or search engine optimization, as like getting someone into the store. The purpose of SEO is to get people to your website.
Whereas, CRO is all about getting them to contact you or buy something once they are on your website. CRO is like the in-store advertisements, such as end caps, that entice shoppers to buy a specific item. For your website, CRO is critical for converting more visitors into leads or customers, which is the purpose of your site in the first place.
The following screen shots from Google Optimize illustrate the difference between doing and not doing CRO. The median price per transaction on this particular client’s website went from $59.65 to $72.61 by simply reducing the number of call to action buttons from three to one (on the homepage).
That might not sound like a lot, but multiply the lift in the per transaction value by tens of thousands of visitor sessions and we’re talking a lot of money. To be exact, the one A/B split test we ran for our client yielded them an additional estimated $79,911 per month. That is nearly $1 million ($958,932 to be exact) per year that was just sitting on the table!
That’s a huge win considering all we did was split test a button. Think about it. What if we had never done CRO on that website? Well, our client would be about $1 million poorer per year.
Go Get Your Money!
CRO doesn’t have to be difficult, but it does have to be planned strategically. Not doing CRO in conjunction with SEO is like leaving money on the table or walking away from a good deal. To find out more about CRO or how it can help your business specifically, contact us. If you’re not doing CRO, then you need to start now. It might not be $1 million in your case, but it’s still time to grab more of your money… that’s just sitting on the table.
Have you tried CRO yet? If so, what was your biggest challenge? Let me know with a comment below.