Hold on a minute…
Are you relying on marketing strategies from some years ago?
Given how rapidly trends and customer behavior have evolved in the past few years, that data is outdated and irrelevant today.
In fact, you can in no way base your optimization and experimentation efforts on such data.
Imagine you run a D2C brand, and for the past few years, you figured the average website conversion rate in your industry was 1%-2%. Content with this, you suddenly stumble upon some data and realize everyone else has leveled up — the new average is a whopping 3.5%. Now, you have to level up your game if you want to stay competitive.
This is why you need fresh, up-to-date data in your hands to stay ahead. In this blog, we share the latest conversion rate optimization statistics, keeping you in tune with what’s working today. With this data, you can ensure your strategies are relevant and capable of turning your website visitors into paying customers.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Conversion rate optimization is the art of converting more visitors on your website into your goals (e.g. sales or leads). By increasing your conversion rate, you’ll be able to boost your website revenue without actually needing more traffic.
What Are the Benefits of Doing CRO for Your Website?
The biggest benefit of conversion rate optimization is that it helps you generate much more revenue from your website. Here is how:
- Generates more sales on your website, with your existing traffic, which means you don’t have to spend more money driving more sales.
- Increases your average order value (AOV) so when your users purchase, they buy more products per order, or more expensive products.
- Maximizes your return on investment (ROI) from your marketing spend, and reduces the cost per acquisition.
- Improves your website so that it engages more visitors, and increases the chances of them returning and converting into paying customers in the future.
What Kind of Results Can I Expect From Doing CRO?
This depends on how much effort you put in and your level of expertise. With modest efforts you can increase your conversion rate by 5-10%.
This may not sound like much, but it often has a big impact on your revenue.
If you maximize your efforts with CRO you can get amazing results like these I got for my clients:
- 44% increase in conversion rate for UnboundMerino.com, and $216K in annualized revenue.
- 164% increase in conversion rate for ManlyBands.com, and $988K in annualized revenue.
- 19% increase in conversion rate for JosephJoseph.com, and £260K in annualized revenue.
- 66% increase in conversion rate for an online mattress retailer, and $2.6M in annualized revenue
What Are the Main Elements of CRO?
CRO is made up of four overlapping main elements – conversion research, user experience (UX), website persuasion, and A/B testing and personalization. Making strong use of these will increase your chances of gaining more conversions, and therefore boosting your sales.
- Conversion Research: Gather insights and improvement ideas from conversion research. This comes from web analytics, heat maps, visitor recordings, surveys, user testing and expert CRO reviews. This is the most essential piece of CRO, and cannot be done effectively without it.
- Website Persuasion: Don’t just hope your website converts your visitors. To engage and convert many more of them, use copywriting best practices and influence techniques, including the usage of social proof, scarcity, urgency and reciprocity.
- User Experience (UX): Improve your website user experience so visitors can browse and convert more easily, including using best practices for improving your website navigation, forms and user flow. Without it, it doesn’t matter how well your website ranks in the search engine results page (SERP) or how persuasive it is.
- A/B Testing and Personalization: A/B tests and personalization techniques are used to discover and show the highest converting experience for your website. This is very useful, but not essential, particularly because so many websites don’t have enough traffic or conversions for this.
All of these elements overlap and feed into each other to gain better results from CRO, particularly conversion research. For example insights from conversion research feed into better ideas for A/B testing and personalization.
Why is Conversion Research So Important?
Don’t just guess at what to improve on your website, or only listen to what your boss wants to improve, as this often fails to get good results on your conversion rate and revenue.
Conversion research is essential for determining what needs improving and why from your users and customers.
There are 5 elements of conversion research that you need to use to gain the best results:
- Visitor recordings. Use these to watch exactly what visitors do on your website. They are great for discovering visitor issues, like page elements or form fields they find hard to use. Always gain insights from these recordings for pages you want to improve.
- Heat maps. These are a good compliment to visitor recordings. Don’t just presume you know what website visitors click on or how far they scroll – check these for your key pages. Great for revealing CTAs, images and content that should be clicked on more.
- Surveys. It is essential to find your visitors and customers issues, doubts, hesitations and needs with visitor surveys and customer surveys. Discovering this will help you create very high-impact website improvement ideas and boost your website optimization efforts.
- User testing. Gain feedback from your target audience while they try to complete tasks on your website and ask them questions. This is a great way to discov what your target audience think of your website, their issues with it, and what needs improving.
- Expert reviews. This is done by an experienced CRO expert (often called heuristic analysis), and is a fast effective way of getting CRO insights and recommendations. These are offered by CRO experts including myself, CXL and WiderFunnel.
Insights from these elements of conversion research then feeds into better ideas for the other elements of CRO, including A/B testing.
Avoid copying ideas from website competitors – just because they are doing something doesn’t mean it works well or will work on your website. Instead monitor what best converting websites are doing like Amazon.com and AO.com. Ideas from your HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) rarely work well either, unless they are an expert in CRO or web usability.
Conversion research is often neglected or not well understood, apart from web analytics, so you have huge potential to take advantage of this element of CRO in particular.
8 conversion rate best practices for 2024
1. Craft a clear value proposition
Developing website copy with a clear value proposition is a fundamental component in website optimization to convert visitors. It communicates the unique benefits of your product or service to potential customers, effectively demonstrating how your offering is the most effective solution to their needs.
To craft a compelling value proposition, you should follow these steps:
- Identify your target audience and understand their needs, pain points, and desires.
- Identify what sets your product or service apart from the competition.
- Clearly articulate the benefits your product or service provides.
- Use simple language without unnecessary jargon.
- Use a customer-centric approach.
- Be specific about what makes your product or service unique.
- Gather feedback and iterate based on it to ensure your value proposition resonates with your audience.
As part of your optimization efforts, don’t forget to regularly revisit your value proposition to ensure it remains relevant.
2. Write engaging, benefit-driven headlines and copy
Another vital component in optimizing your website for more conversions is writing engaging, benefit-driven headlines and copy on all your pages, including your homepage, category pages, and product pages.
When crafting your headlines, make sure that they:
- Grab attention
- Present a clear value proposition
- Are specific
- Evoke an emotional response
- Are action oriented
- Utilize numbers
Warby Parker’s homepage provides a great example of an engaging, benefit-driven headline. The headline “Try 5 frames at home, for free” is specific, action oriented, and presents a clear benefit.
3. Use testimonials and social proof
Incorporating testimonials and social proof is a powerful strategy for building trust and credibility with site visitors.
There are several types of social proof that can be used for conversion rate optimization, including:
- Customer testimonials
- User-generated content
- Case studies
- Reviews and ratings
- Influencer endorsements
- Social media followers
By showcasing the experiences and opinions of satisfied customers, you can instill confidence in your offerings.
It’s also important not to bury those awesome testimonials you have at the bottom of a product page. Instead, try adding a positive testimonial to the above-the-fold section like Vegetology did. This helps website visitors quickly gain a deeper understanding of the product and see that other people have had positive experiences with it.
4. Simplify your forms and CTAs
Simplifying forms and CTAs (calls-to-action) is an effective approach to boost your conversion rate optimization efforts. Clear and concise CTAs help guide visitors toward the desired action.
When designing clear and effective CTAs, it’s important to:
- Use language that encourages action
- Ensure the CTA is in line with the context and content of the website or landing page
- Optimize the design and placement of the CTA to make it stand out visually
5. Make data-driven decisions instead of relying on gut feelings
Making decisions based on data should be a key part of every CRO strategy.
By relying on actual user behavior and preferences rather than intuition, you can make informed decisions that lead to higher conversion rates and increased revenue.
Utilizing tools such as Google Analytics and Hotjar can help you gather and analyze valuable data about visitor behavior and preferences.
You can also rely on user feedback to collect more information about the website experience and understand user behavior.
In the example below, you can see how Flip used a survey popup to collect information about why people aren’t ordering their service.
6. Shorten the checkout process
Shortening the checkout process is imperative if you want to increase the number of conversions. A lengthy or complicated checkout process can be a significant barrier for potential customers, leading to cart abandonment and lost sales. In fact, a too-long/complicated checkout process is the reason behind 17% of lost sales!
To optimize the checkout process, consider simplifying things, providing guest checkout, and offering multiple payment options.
7. Continuously run A/B tests
A critical aspect of refining your website’s performance and enhancing user engagement is the consistent implementation of A/B tests.
By pitting two versions of a web page or element against each other, you can gauge which variant elicits a higher conversion rate. This empirical approach empowers you to make informed choices regarding design and content elements that resonate best with your target audience.
Here’s how you can get started with A/B testing (also called split testing):
- Select an A/B testing tool
- Establish goals and hypotheses
- Focus on tests with a high potential impact
- Carry out tests regularly
- Iterate and optimize continually
Running constant A/B tests can eat up a lot of time, but recent advancements in AI have introduced automation to streamline the process.
OptiMonk’s Smart A/B Testing tool is at the forefront of this innovation, leveraging advanced technology to automate 99% of your tasks.
By conducting parallel tests on each element of your landing page, this tool ensures efficient and rapid experimentation, allowing you to stay ahead in the competitive online landscape.
8. Re-engage abandoning visitors with exit popups
Exit-intent popups are one of the best CRO tools out there as they’re a powerful way to re-engage visitors who are about to leave your website.
By presenting a compelling offer or message just before the visitor exits the page, you can capture their attention and encourage them to complete their purchase or sign up for an email list.
Wrapping up
Implementing the 12 conversion rate optimization (CRO) best practices discussed in this blog post can significantly improve your website’s conversion rate and boost online sales.
By focusing on crafting a clear value proposition, writing engaging headlines and copy, and continuously running A/B tests, you can make the most of your website traffic and target qualified leads.
Remember, optimizing your website for conversions is an ongoing process that requires constant monitoring and refining. By staying up-to-date with the latest CRO trends and best practices, you can ensure your website remains engaging and optimized for your target audience, ultimately leading to increased conversions, sales, and success in the digital landscape.