Here’s a stat that should wake up any marketing leader: Businesses that continuously A/B test report 37% higher conversion rates than those who don’t. (Source: VWO) In the world of digital marketing, conversion rate optimization (CRO) can be a game-changer. The ability to turn website visitors into customers is at the core of any business’s growth strategy. However, businesses continue to struggle in this arena.
If You’re Not Doing Real CRO, You’re Losing Revenue—Guaranteed
All too often, we hear things like, “We tried A/B testing and it didn’t really work for us; we changed the color of the buttons to blue because someone said that it was a ‘best practice,’ and we ended up losing conversions, so we switched them back to red.”
When your CRO strategy is just ‘Make the button blue’ but your bounce rate is screaming for therapy.
Companies often get caught up in the excitement of testing specific elements on a page, such as button colors, headlines, or call-to-action placements, without considering the broader context of user behavior. While A/B testing these elements can lead to some small improvements, they usually don’t address the more significant underlying issues in the user’s journey. Having an idea and marching into A/B testing is the wrong approach.
The Importance of a Comprehensive Data Analysis
A comprehensive analysis involves stepping back and examining the entire experience a user has when navigating a website. It’s about asking questions like:
- Where does the user journey really begin and end?
- At what points are users abandoning ship?
- Is the experience from ad click to landing page actually cohesive, or are you losing them at hello or at the back door (email)? Yes, CRO should be integrated with your CRM.
- What are the friction points? Confusion, overwhelm, or simply not enough reason to act?
This isn’t guesswork. It’s about following the digital data—heatmaps, analytics, scroll and click data layered with the why from surveys, interviews, and usability testing. Only then do you see the real story: not just what people do but why they do it (or don’t).
The Magic Bullet—CRO Includes Two Critical Elements
Read carefully because this is the difference between your success and failure. There are two critical components to effective conversion rate optimization:
- Comprehensive data extraction and analysis, and the ability to translate insights into actionable data.
- If you understand all the data and have all the hypotheses but have no way to deploy tests, it’s just useless data. So, you need a marketing team member who can implement tests based on your data-created hypothesis.
A winning strategy will most likely require more data analysis and patience than it will to implement the tests. Sometimes, a boat engine mechanic can fix a huge boat motor simply by knowing where to hit the hammer—CRO is similar.
The question to ask yourself: Do I have a great data analytics leader and website developer on my staff ready to get the ball rolling? If so, you may just be able to get the CRO wheels in motion.
So, what does a winning, data-driven CRO process actually look like in action? Read on for Part 2, where we’ll break down the five essential steps and show you how world-class brands turn analysis into higher conversions.
