Every online business watches certain statistics about its website like a hawk. A website is designed to facilitate transactions, whether they involve purchasing products from the site itself or being redirected to another site. These transactions are a measurable variable that can be studied statistically. Each transaction represents a successful transition from visitor to customer. This transition is known as a “conversion.” Every conversion can be tallied and measured against the total number of visitors. The number of customers divided by the number of visitors yields a percentage that is called the conversion rate.
The Importance of Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the most critical statistic about a website.
The conversion rate directly impacts profitability and, as such, is the key to the website’s success or failure. A low conversion rate means too few visitors are being converted into customers. A high conversion rate means that a larger number of visitors are becoming customers. A high enough conversion rate can boost a website’s profits by a large amount. The conversion rate is the pass/fail grade of a website. A low conversion rate can lead to negative consequences such as getting pushed out of the marketplace by more profitable competitors.
Fortunately, an online business can engage the services of a methodology to remedy this situation: conversion rate optimization (CRO).
What is CRO?
CRO is an art and a science. The goal of CRO is to persuade visitors to purchase a product, subscribe to a newsletter or submit an inquiry. CRO is a methodology and not a technique in itself. It uses other techniques to accomplish the goal of successful persuasion of visitors. A website that has been conversion-optimized is like a digital salesman who works for the business constantly without eating or sleeping. CRO provides long-term benefits to websites that use its teachings and recommendations.
The benefits of CRO are seen in the results. Websites that use CRO have experienced an increase in profits ranging from 50 to 200 percent or more. One business experienced phenomenal profit growth of 600 percent after using CRO. CRO works by measuring different variables present in a website. A website consists of multiple elements, such as a title, colors, headlines, buttons, graphics and layouts. Each of these elements represents a potential sales point for a customer. CRO takes all of these elements and creates multiple testing scenarios that reveal which combination of elements results in the highest conversion rate.
Takeaway
Once the results are applied to the website, profits start increasing rapidly. CRO can help take an online business to a undreamed-of level. Business owners frequently cannot imagine the results from adopting even simple principles of CRO. The future for online businesses is very bright as CRO becomes more widely adopted.
Eric Wyatt writes on internet marketing and social media. He particularly focuses on conversion optimization and landing page optimization.
