Driving traffic alone to your website isn’t enough. You need to be engaging visitors — encouraging them to take a desired action such as:
- Subscribe to your newsletter
- Sign up for a free trial
- Book a demo
This is where Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) comes into the picture.
It involves implementing and testing tactics that prompt site visitors to convert.
“Something as simple as a color change or tweak in how we position our free trial can make all the difference [in driving those conversions],” notes Andrew Wray, the Chief Revenue Officer at Toggl.
The benefit of it all? Lead generation and increased sales and revenue. By optimizing pages, CRO also improves visitors’ experience with your brand — making it a vital component of a successful marketing strategy.
The CRO Framework
To begin with, dig deep into your target audience.
Go beyond on-the-surface details like geography and demographics to segment your audience by behavior, priorities, and interests.
For example, let’s say you’re marketing a popup builder for tech consultants, your broad target audience.
By going deeper, you can find that it divides into agencies and freelancers. In turn, these segments can be further segmented by ecommerce and B2B agencies, and beginner and senior freelancers.
Once you’ve a strong understanding of your audience, map out their customer journey. These are the steps they typically take and the pages they visit before buying from you.
The aim here is simple: the better you know your audience and their purchase journey, the better you can optimize landing pages for relevance (and, subsequently, conversions).
With these foundations in place, outline your goals. They could be:
- Growing sales and revenue
- Generating leads
Based on your goal, determine the marketing metrics you’ll track.
For instance, if you want to generate more leads, track email sign-ups. Similarly, if you’re aiming to move likely-to-buy-from-you leads further in your sales funnel, you’ll want to track demos booked.
Then use the PIE (Potential, Importance, and Ease) framework to prioritize your conversion rate optimization efforts.
For each conversion rate optimization test you’ve planned to achieve your goal(s), ask yourself:
- What potential does this improvement hold?
- How important is this improvement for driving conversions?
- How easy or difficult is this improvement to implement?
Now, rank each answer between one and 10 so that each strategy has a score that can be compared. By the end of this exercise, rank implementations based on their impact to pursue the ones with the greatest impact as part of your marketing execution efforts.
6 Strategies For Enhancing Conversion Rates
From testing different CTA text, button sizes, and colors to optimizing page load speed, there are tons of strategies you can play with.
It helps to bear in mind though: CRO doesn’t require you to start from scratch all the time. In several instances, it’s tweaking elements on existing pages to identify what converts.
1. Improve page load speed
Webpages that load in one second have a 3x higher conversion than sites that load in 5 seconds. Conversely, pages that load in one second have a 5x higher conversion rate than those that load in ten seconds.
Portent’s research shows how page load time impacts conversions.
Google’s old but reliable data also confirms conversions reduce by up to 20% for every second of delay in a page loading.
To this end, Hallow’s Director of Organic Marketing, Stephen Spiewak advises:
“Try to make your page as technically sound as possible. You don’t need to be a developer but collaborating with technical teams and ensuring that your pages load quickly is a cross-functional win. If your landing pages also drive traffic organically, page speed improvements can help with SEO as well.”
2. Personalize for traffic coming from different sources
Visitors coming from different channels have different expectations. They might also differ in their likelihood to purchase.
For example, folks coming from Google may be further along in their buying journey, having a specific intent to buy. Similarly, Facebook-driven people may just be casually browsing.
By tailoring landing pages based on traffic sources, you ensure your messaging is relevant to visitors. Doing so, engages readers — increasing their user experience and ultimately leading to high conversion.
“Most CRO tools allow you to customize your on-site marketing efforts based on traffic sources,” Stephen points out.
“Are people visiting the page on mobile or desktop? Have they come from a search engine or your brand’s social media account? Optimizing for these will allow the landing page to be more relevant and compelling to the visitor.”
The best part?
After you’ve identified your audience’s intent, you can feed the information into an AI editor to create personalized landing pages at scale.
3. Design landing pages targeting secondary keywords
Another strategy to improve your conversion rates is to create new landing pages for secondary keywords.
Once you’ve tested a landing page for its conversions, convert it into a template.
Then feed your AI content editor the template and information about the target audience, their search intent, and details about your product positioning to create more landing pages. From there, edit and publish.
The team at Toggl took this approach. Their Chief Revenue Officer, Andrew Wray shares,
“One part of our strategy that has really worked for us is building out different landing pages for secondary keywords. For example, we don’t just rely on a general time-tracking landing page to drive traffic. We break it down into sub-landing pages focused on pain points, like billable hours or budget tracking, so when someone clicks on our link in the SERPs — it has the information they’re looking for.”
4. Optimize for search intent and business seasonality
Another thing to keep in mind as you design and/or optimize landing pages is business seasonality and its impact on your conversion.
“Your landing pages may be static year-round, but someone coming to a landing page for Taylor Swift tickets the night before a concert compared to someone coming when she’s not currently touring have vastly different intents,” Stephen shares as an example.
You’ll want to test different CTAs based on this seasonality.
Stephen explains, “There may be a higher funnel leadgen play that makes more sense when you’re out of season. Conversely, when it’s your peak periods, and a week, month, or quarter can define success for an entire year, you’ll want to take advantage of that window to drive the business forward by being more aggressive with the CTAs you employ.”
5. Test different CTA styles and copy
“Calls to action are a critical element of landing pages and nudge users to actively interact with them. When adding CTAs, important considerations like their placement, text used in them, and their format are important,” observes Swapnil Pate, the Co-Founder of GrowthSRC Media.
Ideally, “make sure to add a clear button or a contact form as a CTA in the first fold of the page. Also, add CTAs in sections where you are talking about benefits or features of your product on the landing pages.”
“As with the text to be used in CTA buttons, consider testing multiple texts to see which ones generate higher interactions,” Swapnil advises. “For example, text like ‘Get a Demo,’ ‘Try for Free,’ ‘Get Free Access,’ etc. have proven to increase conversion rates by 12 to 54% for our clients.”
See how each of these example CTA copies uses an action verb (‘get,’ and ‘try’)? These encourage action, making them worth testing for your specific audience.
“Along with buttons as CTAs, a simple signup box also works wonders in terms of getting a higher number of leads from landing pages.”
6. Give away relevant assets for free
For landing pages aimed at driving leads, offer relevant freebies (think: free tools like calculators and useful downloadables such as checklists) to get folks in your funnel.
“An industry report, calculator that tells price reduction after signing up with us, or simply a playbook or checklist of the user’s core activities or problem statements can drive better conversions,” says Swapnil.
In fact, adding a free downloadable asset to a few of his clients’ landing pages has resulted in up to 150% increase in conversions.
At Coschedule, we use this approach as well:
Example of how we use freebies to generate more leads.
Testing And Analysis
A/B testing CRO efforts is as important as implementing them — after all, testing lets you identify elements that drive more conversions.
Keeping all factors constant, test a specific change, say different CTA button colors, to find out what’s resonating and encouraging action.
Instead of benchmarking your conversion rates against the industry’s best from the get-go though, focus on improving internal numbers initially. This prevents overwhelm and also lets you understand what engages your unique audience.
“[However], most tests fail,” Stephen shares a heads-up. “Don’t be discouraged if you don’t immediately move the needle. Learn from these and test again.”
Advanced CRO Techniques
Two more tips to boost your conversion rate optimization efforts before we wrap up:
Use trust signals abundantly
Trust signals like customer testimonials, logos from brands you’ve worked with, customer count, and ratings from third-party review platforms like G2 and Capterra imply you’re trustworthy.
Example of trust signal used on CoSchedule’s academy landing page.
Visitors can tell their peers trust you, which increases their interest in buying from you. Results from case studies and customer reviews also help them visualize the results they can expect from you.
Leverage AI to scale efforts
From brainstorming ideas to writing landing page copy and summarizing test results, AI can help speed up your efforts and boost efficiency significantly.
Using Coschedule’s AI generator, Hire Mia, for example, you can quickly create landing pages, provided you’ve done the homework of understanding who each page targets.
Fill in the prompts that our free landing page generator asks — entering product details and campaign goals.
Next, hit Write My Copy to make custom landing page content.
Use Hire Mia’s free landing page generator to scale CRO efforts.
Besides using Hire Mia to create your landing page’s first draft, you can also use it:
- Research high-converting landing pages for inspiration
- Give suggestions for headlines and CTA copy
- Review grammar mistakes in your copy
- Restructure content for readability
Parting Takeaways On Conversion Rate Optimization
CRO is pivotal to running marketing campaigns that drive results.
However, it takes extensive learning and testing with a solid understanding of your target audience, goals, and the customer journey.
An efficient way to boost your workflow though is using AI to help with producing and optimizing landings for:
- Specific audience segments
- Visitors coming from different traffic sources
- Visitors with varying search intents and coming in different business seasons
All this ensures you’re offering visitors a personalized experience by giving them the information they need to convert.
Here is CoSchedule’s AI-powered tool to help you with just that — optimize your marketing efforts.