While getting traffic to your website is great and all, it doesn’t mean much if visitors don’t become customers. This is where conversion optimization comes in — it involves tweaking your website to enhance the completion of a given activity, which, more often than not, is a sale. Going about it without a plan, however, won’t make much of a difference. So, what are the steps of conversion optimization? That’s exactly what we’re going to cover in this guide. So let’s get started, shall we?
Step 1: Identify What Needs to Be Improved
The first step is to do thorough research and data collection to identify what needs to be improved so that you can apply the relevant conversion rate optimization best practices. This can be done through user research, analytics data, and A/B testing.
Although this stage can be time-consuming, it is well worth the effort to save yourself time and headaches in the future.
This first step in our conversion rate optimization checklist includes looking at KPIs like customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, monthly recurring revenue, and sales cycle duration.
Quantitative data, or cold, hard numbers, may provide a clear picture of your customers’ click-through rates, time on sites, and much more. You can use heatmaps, questionnaires, KPI analytics, and A/B tests to collect this type of data. Alternatively, conversion rate optimization software can help you track visitor behavior and identify areas for improvement.
Once you know what needs to be improved, you can move on to the next step.
Step 2: Create a Conversion Optimization Strategy
The next step of your conversion rate optimization process is to create a strategy. This will involve setting specific goals, identifying the areas of your website that need improvement, and coming up with a plan to make those changes. Start by identifying your conversion goals.
You’ll also want to assess your website and pinpoint the biggest opportunities for improvement. Look at factors such as page design, conversion funnel, copywriting, user experience, and call-to-action buttons.
If you don’t know where to start, some of the well-known conversion rate optimization techniques include:
- Improving the loading speed across your site
- Creating CTAs that anticipate user needs
- Add social proof
- Reducing on-page distractions.
You can also use conversion rate optimization services to help you with your CRO strategy development.
Step 3: Form Your Hypothesis
A hypothesis should be a key element in all conversion optimization strategies. It allows you to test different assumptions about what might be causing conversion rate issues on your site or app and then measure the results to see if your hypotheses are correct. That’s why it should be a crucial step in your conversion optimization process.
Without a hypothesis, you are essentially flying blind. You may get lucky and hit upon a winning combination of changes, but more likely, you’ll just end up wasting time and money on changes that don’t have any impact. Here are some tips for creating a good hypothesis:
- Make sure your hypothesis is specific. For example, “I think increasing the size of the CTA button will increase conversion rates” is a specific hypothesis, while “I think adding a CTA will increase conversion rates” is not.
- Make sure your hypothesis is realistic. You want to be able to actually test it, after all.
- Make sure your hypothesis is relevant to your site or app. For example, increasing the CTA button size may be a good idea for a site that sells physical products, but it’s not likely to have much of an impact on a site that sells digital products.
Once you have a good hypothesis in place, it’s time to put it to the test. The best way to do this is through experimentation, either through A/B testing or multivariate testing. By using a hypothesis-driven conversion rate optimization strategy, you can be sure that your efforts are targeting the issues that are actually causing problems on your site or app. This will lead to better results and a higher conversion rate.
Step 4: Prioritize
The next step in our conversion optimization rate guide involves prioritizing your ideas and hypotheses based on how likely they are to impact conversion rates. To do this, you’ll need to consider factors like the potential size of the improvement, how easy the change is to implement, and how much data you already have on the current state.
By prioritizing your conversion optimization efforts, you can make sure that you’re always working on the most impactful changes first. This will help you get the most out of your CRO strategy and ensure that your conversion rates keep climbing.
There are a few different ways to prioritize your ideas, but one of the most common is the ICE Score method. This involves rating each test on three factors: impact, confidence, and ease.
The impact is a measure of how much of an improvement a test could make. Confidence refers to your ability to design and implement the test. Ease is a measure of how easy it will be to set up and run the test. Once you’ve rated each test on these three factors, you can add up the scores to get an overall ICE Score. The higher the score, the more important the test is.
You can also use other methods to prioritize your tests, such as the PIE framework which rates tests based on their potential impact, ease of implementation, and confidence level.
Step 5: Implement and Test
The implementation stage is one of the most important steps covered in our conversion optimization rate optimization guide. This is where you put your conversion optimization plan into action. This includes code changes, design changes, and anything else needed to make your plan a reality.
There are a few things to keep in mind when implementing your test:
- Make sure that your changes are made in a way that allows you to track and measure the results. This could involve adding tracking code to your website or setting up analytics software.
- Test one change at a time. If you try to test multiple changes simultaneously, you won’t be able to isolate which change is responsible for any resulting increase or decrease in conversion rates.
- Be prepared to wait for results. It can take some time to gather enough data to accurately assess your test results.
Now that you have a solid hypothesis, it’s time to put it into action. This is where the rubber meets the road, and you start to see whether your changes improve or harm your conversion rate. There are a variety of ways to implement your hypothesis, but as we mentioned earlier in this CRO guide, the most common is through A/B testing. Conversion optimization statistics show that President Obama raised an additional $60 million using A/B testing, so it’s safe to say this method works!
In an A/B test, half of your traffic is targeted to one version of a page (A) while the other half sees a different version (B). You then measure how each version performs in terms of conversions.
Step 6: Analyze and Review
Once you’ve made your changes and are tracking the results, it’s time to analyze the data to see if your hypothesis was supported. If so, congrats! You’ve just successfully managed to optimize for conversions. If not, you’ll need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new hypothesis to test, meaning, step 3 in this conversion optimization guide.
There are a few key metrics you’ll want to look at:
- Conversion rate — the number of visitors who take the desired action divided by the total number of visitors. For example, if you’re aiming for a 5% conversion rate, that means five out of every 100 visitors should take the desired action.
- Bounce rate — the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate indicates that something is wrong with your site or that your content isn’t relevant to what people are looking for.
- Time on site — the average amount of time people spend on your site. A low number often indicates that people are having difficulty finding what they’re looking for or that your content isn’t engaging enough.
By analyzing these metrics, you can get a good idea of how well your conversion rate optimization tactics are working. If you don’t see the results you want, don’t be afraid to make further changes and continue experimenting until you find a strategy that works for you.
The Summary
So, there you have it — a simple six-step process for conversion rate optimization that will help you turn visitors into customers and increase your sales. Now that you’ve learned what the steps of conversion rate optimization are, it’s time to put this knowledge into practice. Start by testing different elements on your page and measuring their impact on visitor behavior. If something is not working, try a different approach. And remember, conversion rate optimization is an ongoing process — there’s always room for improvement when it comes to your website’s performance.
