Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is essential for growing a successful online business. By focusing your efforts on CRO you can lift key performance indicators (KPIs) like revenue and engagement while providing a better user experience for your customers resulting in brand loyalty and repeat business.
The best way to lift conversions is by implementing a multi-step CRO strategy or plan rather than aimlessly running A/B tests or implementing website updates based on intuition. Below we will outline a simple step-by-step guide to begin an effective CRO plan that can help you learn more about your customers, grow your business, and provide a significant ROI compared to other marketing efforts like paid advertising.
Step 1: Define your business goals
Conversion rate is a broad term. A conversion rate is calculated as the percentage of users who take a desired action. The question now is: what “action” is most important for your business? If you’re in the eCommerce space, your gut answer is probably that the most important action that a user can make is purchasing, thereby making your goal increasing revenue. However, we suggest that you look deeper into your data and business insights to define more specific goals. For example, maybe you have a decent number of people purchasing, but your revenue could grow exponentially if more people would sign up for a subscription. Or perhaps you have seen incredible success from your email or text campaigns, so you want to grow your subscriber list to capitalize on these channels. There’s no one-size-fits-all goal for CRO, you need to select a goal (or a few goals) that will have the biggest impact on your business and build your CRO plan around those objectives.
Step 2: Gather Quantitative and Qualitative Data
Google Analytics or a similar platform is one of the best ways to gather quantitative data. You should set up GA reports and monitor them regularly to gather insights that will guide your CRO strategy. You can determine what is bringing customers to your website, what stops people from converting, and what drives people to purchase. Maybe users are bouncing off your website the moment they receive an email signup popup, maybe they are dropping off after reaching the PDP, or countless other scenarios that can only be determined by taking a deep dive into the data.
Qualitative data like heat maps (example above from Hotjar), user recordings, and customer interviews are also invaluable for gathering the best data for developing a successful CRO strategy. The great thing about these methods is that they can be effective and insightful for all company sizes, even if you only have a few hundred visitors to your website each month. Maybe your research will show you that customers aren’t scrolling far enough down the page to even see the option for a subscription. Or perhaps customers are clicking on a secondary CTA button like “About Us” when you need to drive more customers to add-to-cart instead.
By reviewing this information regularly you will be able to paint a picture of your customers and get a better understanding of their pain points and needs which will be the most effective guidance for step three. We also recommend that you continually monitor your competitors to gain inspiration into ways you can improve and/or differentiate your business for your customers.
Step 3: Formulate data-backed hypotheses
Now it’s time to put what you’ve learned about your customers and your business goals together to develop specific hypotheses on how to improve your website. The most important thing to consider when developing a list of hypotheses is ensuring that your ideas are testable and measurable. Consider using a template like this to craft each hypothesis: Based on [Observation X] I believe [Solution X] will address [Problem X] for [Audience X] and impact [Goal X]. By using a template like this to relate your ideas back to the goals and research you have defined, you are taking a more strategic approach to experimentation rather than throwing a dart at the board blindfolded.
A strong example of a hypothesis based on this template would be: “We learned that most customers are not scrolling far enough down the page on mobile devices to reach the add-to-cart button. I believe that by implementing a sticky add-to-cart button that is always visible on the PDP we will address the forced scrolling problem for mobile users and lift add-to-cart conversions. Get your team involved with this process and create a list of ideas based on data and user behavior that have the potential to impact your primary business goal(s).
Step 4: Prioritize your hypotheses and create an experimentation roadmap
Once you have put together a hypothesis list, it’s time to prioritize each idea and add them to a roadmap. Compose has planning tools for this exact purpose - you can add each hypothesis to a list and include any additional media, design files, descriptions…etc, along with a PIE score. A PIE score allows you to assign a numbered score of 1-10 on three factors: Potential, Importance, and Ease. In simple terms, this means the amount of potential a specific hypothesis has in improving the performance of a page, how important it is to optimize this page, and how easily the hypothesis can be tested (i.e. designed and developed). These individual scores are then averaged to determine the PIE score for each hypothesis, allowing you to look at your list of ideas and prioritize them based on a combination of these three crucial factors.
Through compose.co, or a different tool with planning functionality like Jira, you can create a roadmap from these hypothesis tickets. Simply add the hypotheses to each month in the order you plan to test them. This is incredibly important because it will allow your team to stay on the same page in terms of CRO priorities, which in turn will expedite your CRO plan. For example, if you already know what test is coming next, you can be sure that it is designed and developed so that it’s ready to go right away once your active test is completed. Having this roadmap or hypothesis pipeline accessible to your team will allow you to move from a fragmented program to a strategic approach that will yield more impactful progress toward your goals more quickly. When it boils down to it, any time that you are not actively running a test on your website is time wasted, so this step is incredibly important.
Keep in mind that you will need to continually update your roadmap as time goes on. Maybe an experiment takes longer than expected to reach statistical significance, causing a delay. It happens, and you will need to adjust the roadmap accordingly. Or maybe an experiment causes a dramatic lift in the target conversion rate, and you would like to re-prioritize a similar hypothesis based on this new information. Your roadmap should be an evolving plan that is continually updated to provide your team with the best possible plan of action to move the needle toward your goals.
Step 5: Deploy and Repeat
As you complete experiments, you will need to continually deploy the best-performing variants to lock in these CRO improvements for all site visitors. It’s also a great idea to filter your results for different audience segments to see if each experiment is showing different results for different groups of customers. For example, perhaps you are testing a new upsell on the PDP that is not showing a significant impact based on the overall data, but when you filter results by device type you notice that on desktop revenue is up by 8% with 95% confidence, while mobile is down. Averaging out your overall data, but making a huge impact for your desktop customers. In instances like this, you can use Compose’s personalized deploy tool (coming soon) to send different traffic segments customized versions of your website.
And then it’s just a matter of repeating the process to keep a consistent flow of new learnings and improvements to your website. Consistency is key - so by building a strategic CRO plan following these steps, you will be able to make continued progress toward your primary business goals.
Conclusion
To make the most out of your CRO efforts it’s incredibly important to build a plan and roadmap that will keep your team aligned on your company goals, customer insights, and experimentation roadmap. By crafting hypotheses that are aligned with your goals and research, you will be able to run more effective tests aimed at the exact growth you are looking to achieve. Then by creating an experimentation roadmap, you will be able to prioritize ideas with high potential, importance, and ease of implementation all while ensuring that you are able to quickly and efficiently move forward with new experiments one after another.
Implementing a CRO plan is invaluable when it comes to seeing quick and sizeable results in lifting KPIs. It will keep your efforts strategically focused rather than testing isolated concepts that will lead to fragmented improvements rather than larger compounding effects toward your primary goal(s).
If you’re looking for an A/B testing platform that allows you to not only experiment but create an entire CRO plan and roadmap, Compose is an excellent choice. Our planning tools have been designed to assist companies in building a complete CRO strategy with a hypothesis list, PIE scoring, road mapping, and more. If you want to learn more about the planning tools, and how they can impact your business - you can check it out here. Or contact our team to schedule a personalized demo.