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Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a valuable exercise for businesses and their marketing teams because it helps them maximize the return on investment (ROI) from existing website and application traffic and marketing campaigns. It is, in short, a way for marketers to do more with less. Some of the top benefits organizations can realize through effective CRO include:
Building a successful CRO program requires tracking metrics from online interactions, like clicks and web form submissions, of course. But that’s not all. Phone call data should also be in the mix, especially for businesses in industries like healthcare, insurance, or home services, where phone calls can be critical touchpoints in a customer’s journey. (The majority of consumers surveyed for the Invoca Buyer Experience Benchmark Report said that they prefer to speak to someone on the phone when making a high-stakes purchase.)
So, overlooking phone call data in your CRO efforts means you are at risk of developing an incomplete picture of how your sites, apps, and marketing efforts are moving consumers along the sales funnel — or not. In this comprehensive CRO guide, you’ll find out more about the vital role data from customers’ phone conversations can play in your conversion rate optimization efforts. You also learn about the fundamental components of a CRO strategy and the nine steps for taking a structured approach to the process.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a business growth strategy that can help you maximize the value of your company’s website or mobile app traffic to achieve more conversions (e.g., sales, leads, sign-ups) without driving up your marketing expenses. This data-driven process can help you identify and eliminate the barriers that can prevent customers from taking desired actions, like making a purchase, and which can lead to suboptimal user experiences.
For example, say your insurance firm’s website attracts robust traffic from mobile users, but you see few transactions from these visitors. By analyzing user behavior, you may find your lack of a click-to-call feature is creating friction for mobile users who want to tap and call your business. Instead of hunting around for your contact info while they’re on the go, they are abandoning your site to search for a competitor who makes it easier for them to reach out by phone.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) and search engine optimization (SEO) are different processes in digital marketing, but the latter does much to help support the first.
SEO complements CRO by optimizing search visibility to increase website traffic. When a website shows up in more searches, it receives more visitors. And more visitors means more opportunities to create customers by using effective CRO strategies.
SEO and CRO work well together, so it’s important to optimize both processes. Getting the balance right can help you improve traffic and conversions. You’ll likely see better metrics for key performance indicators (KPIs) like click-through rate, bounce rate, and dwell time, too.
If you’re feeling motivated to create a formal CRO strategy for your business, what steps should you take to develop an effective one? Here are seven elements we consider crucial to the overall success of CRO strategies.
You can create a strong foundation for your CRO strategy by laying out a compelling value proposition to attract potential customers. Your value proposition should be clear and concise and address a customer pain point that your product or service can help them solve.
Consider Slack, whose value proposition makes clear that its platform can bring “all of your conversations, apps, and customers together in one place.” For businesses with siloed communications, disparate tools, and disjointed workflows that want to improve team collaboration while simplifying IT, Slack’s value proposition is a compelling one.
Developing and maintaining informative, engaging landing pages that make it easy for visitors to your website to find what they need quickly and complete a desired action is another vital step toward building a successful CRO strategy.
Creating clear and compelling CTAs is a simple but powerful way to optimize a landing page. Try different types of calls to action to see which ones work best to motivate your users to convert. For instance, a CTA like “Save Now!” can create a sense of urgency, while a direct but less intense “Learn More” CTA invites users to keep moving along the sales funnel.
If calls are an important conversion for your business, make sure to strategically place click-to-call buttons on landing pages to entice consumers to pick up the phone and call your business directly. You can experiment with placement to see where on the page a click-to-call button works best, either in the header or footer or perhaps floating on the page so it is always visible to the user.
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You can use A/B testing to experiment with two different versions of a CTA or click-to-call button on a landing page. A/B testing, known as split testing, is also valuable for testing other elements on a landing page to identify the most effective variations. These elements might include fonts, images, colors, and text.
A/B testing can help you create a website experience that will resonate with your target audience. You can create two slightly different versions of the same webpage, and show each version to half of your audience at random. You can then measure performance based on metrics like time spent on the page, bounce rates, and conversion actions, such as requesting more information. This data reveals which version is more effective, guiding you to make informed and targeted improvements.
You’ll also want to track how many phone calls and how many conversions by phone each webpage version generates. You can do this easily if you are using call tracking and analysis software like Invoca. However, you can also use Invoca to analyze phone conversations to determine how many of those calls were good leads and how many callers ended up buying from you. This data is far more valuable than simply knowing whether someone clicked on a click-to-call button because they may not have been an actual sales lead.
You can even use Invoca’s software to detect key phrases that callers use so you can incorporate them into your A/B testing. For instance, if your analysis indicates most callers to your home services business use the phrase “value for money” when looking for a quote, you can incorporate and test that phrase on your landing page, in Google Ad campaigns, and in other content promoting your business.
Optimizing your website for conversions includes ensuring your page load speed is as fast as possible. Slow-loading pages are a major source of frustration for website users. That’s true for desktop and mobile users, but especially the latter group. According to website load time statistics curated by Moneyzine, more than half (53%) of mobile users will leave a webpage if it takes more than three seconds to load.
Moneyzine also notes that the first five seconds of webpage load time can make or break conversion rates. And through an analysis of e-commerce and conversion data from 20 websites with thousands of pages, digital marketing agency Portent found that sites that load in one second have conversion rates 3x higher than those that take five seconds to load.
The upshot: Providing a fast-loading web experience for users can benefit your company’s bottom line. There are plenty of tools available to help you test your website’s speed. If your tests reveal your pages are running slow, you might want to reassess your web hosting service by researching if the provider is too small to handle your current (and future) needs. You can also accelerate load times by optimizing your site, compressing videos and images, refining code, and reducing plugins and extensions.
Are you using customer testimonials to full effect on your website and in other marketing materials for your business? They should be a core feature of your CRO strategy. Satisfied and loyal customers can be your greatest advocates, so make a point to leverage positive online reviews — and always ask for testimonials from happy clients.
Social proof, in the form of shares and likes, endorsements, or positive reviews, can also move the needle for your business when it comes to attracting new customers and driving conversions. It’s sometimes referred to as “the wisdom of the crowd,” but social proof is more like a form of “herd mentality.” If one or more people report that something is good, then more people will want whatever it is, too.
We touched on this earlier, but it’s worth mentioning again: If your website is not optimized for mobile users, you’re at risk of losing out on many potential conversions. Your sites and apps must be optimized for mobile, with fast-loading pages, easy navigation, and clear and consistent messaging, if you want to provide seamless user experiences and grow your mobile traffic.
Responsive design with a mobile-first approach can help ensure your users have a consistent experience when accessing your digital properties from any device. Also, keep in mind that Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking. So, if your mobile site isn’t optimized, it can impact your search engine rankings, which, in turn, affects your visibility and traffic. (See these mobile site and mobile-first indexing best practices from Google.)
It’s also important to recognize that mobile users tend to have different browsing habits compared with desktop users. For example, they typically have shorter sessions and browse content at a faster clip. Additionally, many mobile users are searching for local businesses and are primed to make quick decisions. With an optimized mobile site, you can capture these spontaneous conversions more effectively by making it easy for users to take action, such as calling your business, accessing location information, or making a purchase on the spot.
Research from Invoca shows the telephone is the preferred communication channel for more than two-thirds (68%) of customers considering a high-stakes purchase, like health insurance or a vehicle, especially when they have questions or need customer service. But what about the nearly one-third of consumers who prefer to transact online?
Optimizing web forms like requests for information and sign-ups for newsletters can help drive conversions with this population of users. You can optimize forms by revisiting their design. Some questions to consider as part of your evaluation include:
You can also improve the web form experience for users by adding functionality. For example, users completing forms often make mistakes when typing, such as transposing letters in email addresses, like yhhoo.com instead of yahoo.com. That form is useless once they submit it because the email address is wrong. A function that recognizes misspellings of common addresses minimizes those mistakes.
Remember, you can add functionality while still keeping things simple and seamless for users. You can offer auto-fill options, for example, and ensure mobile responsiveness. Other best practices that can help boost conversions include placing forms strategically on webpages, using only essential fields, making CTAs prominent, and adding security badges to earn trust.
Once you have addressed the seven elements outlined above, you can focus your CRO strategy on the conversion funnel. The conversion funnel is often used interchangeably with the sales funnel, but they are not the same thing:
As such, the conversion funnel is really just a small component of the entire sales funnel, which focuses on getting a lead to take an action, such as signing up for a free trial or demo, that then moves them further along the sales funnel.
The conversion funnel has four main stages:
You can optimize each touchpoint in these stages by reviewing your customer data, including data that you collect offline, including from phone conversations. This can help you determine where and why users drop out of the funnel.
For example, your review of conversation analytics data might surface keywords that indicate some callers picked up the phone because the web form they tried to fill in to request more details about your company’s services has a broken link. A review of online activity confirms this, allowing you to make an immediate fix. You might even review the web form to see if it can be slimmed down to make the customer’s experience in completing it quicker and easier.
Whatever the specific aims of your company’s CRO strategy, it’s important to maintain a structured approach to achieve your objectives. By following a defined structure, you can realize measurable improvements in conversion rates. We suggest using the following nine-step approach, where each step builds on the last to deliver a comprehensive optimization strategy.
What are your conversion goals? Are you going to track online form completions, sign-ups, demos, free trials, purchases, or all of the above? Are you going to add conversions completed by phone calls into your measurement?
As to the latter question, the answer is you should. While online conversions are convenient for digital marketers to track, they only tell part of the story. Using a call tracking and analytics platform like Invoca can make identifying conversions occurring over the phone as easy as detecting online conversions, allowing you to bridge the gap between online and offline data.
Remember, you can’t truly gauge your progress if you are not measuring the same conversion goals throughout the CRO process. Clarity and consistency are the foundation for measuring CRO effectiveness.
Set a baseline conversion rate by using your current data to calculate your current conversion rate. Here’s the formula to use:
Conversion Rate = (Number of Conversions / Total Visitors) × 100
This conversion rate number will be your benchmark for measuring future improvements and assessing the impact of your CRO strategies. (Later on in this guide, we’ll discuss what this number should be, ideally.)
The next step is to gather user data and customer feedback. This information will help you understand customer behavior and make data-driven CRO decisions to respond to customer preferences and ease pain points more effectively.
You can employ tools like Google Analytics to build a picture of your customers’ online interactions, and you can use heat maps and online session recordings to collect additional quantitative data. Then, you can enhance that information further with qualitative data from surveys, reviews, testimonials, or feedback forms to help you gain more insight into where customers may be encountering friction in their journey.
You can deepen your understanding of consumer behavior and conversion barriers even more by capturing analytics from phone conversations your customer service and sales teams have with leads. Invoca’s call tracking and analysis provides a wealth of data you can visualize in real time to inform your CRO strategies and decision-making.
Your data analysis should focus on identifying trends in customer behavior. Are a lot of users exiting your website from the same page? If so, that’s a friction point you’ll want to examine closely. A call tracking tool like Invoca can identify which pages are driving the most calls — and even which pages are driving the best leads.
This analysis, which can cover 100% of calls and provide actionable data in real time, will help you optimize pages, ads, social posts, and other marketing collateral to drive more conversions based on what you know is working. Importantly, it can also shine a light on the webpages and other touchpoints that aren’t performing well, empowering you with insight to revamp or refine those specific areas by changing messaging, adding more detail, fixing glitches, and more.
With the results of your analysis of user behavior in hand, it’s possible to form a hypothesis about why certain elements of your marketing strategy or your website or app may not be hitting the mark. A good CRO hypothesis should be clear, actionable, and measurable. It should form the basis of your CRO strategy and predict its outcome.
A classic CRO hypothesis uses a “If this, then that” structure. Here is an example of what this can look like in practice: A travel agency marketer reviews data from website users and callers and determines that adding an extra click-to-call button with “1-800-CRUISES” to a page advertising cruises will result in a more than 15% increase in sales. The marketer can add the button and measure results, tested against that hypothesis. If it works as expected, the marketer might deploy the same tactic on other pages on the travel agency’s site, such as 1-800-GLAMPING for high-end camping vacations or 1-800-BEACHES for seaside resorts.
You’ll want to perform statistically significant tests to support your CRO strategy. This means running tests over a longer duration, not just spot tests, to collect as much data as possible.
Be sure to include data from phone calls as part of your testing and analysis to get a complete picture of how you are making progress toward your CRO goals and what problem areas are persisting or cropping up.
You can also use A/B or multivariate tests to compare different versions of webpage or app elements like CTAs, headlines, click-to-call buttons, and images and determine which are most successful at driving conversions.
One compelling reason to run tests over a prolonged period (if not continuously) is so you can monitor results after you’ve implemented changes that earlier tests indicated you should make. Apply successful test results across key pages and ensure the changes you make align with the conversion goals you defined at the start of this process.
Continuous testing and monitoring should deliver sustained improvements that you can adapt, as needed, to make your CRO strategy as effective as possible.
Your tests and user data should be constant sources of insight that can help inform and guide your company’s CRO strategy. Consumers change behaviors frequently. Their tastes change, as do economic conditions that can impact their buying habits.
Conversions grow (and fluctuate) over time, and you will have to constantly adapt and refine your strategy based on a changing consumer landscape. Even the best CRO strategy won’t increase your conversion rate immediately.
Your online and offline data can help you glean insights to strategically enhance your landing pages, mobile apps, and marketing copy. The key is to have enough data and be able to analyze it quickly and efficiently. This is where AI technologies can provide a major lift to your CRO efforts by revealing insights at scale that can help you optimize your digital properties and marketing messages to improve conversion rates.
Earlier, we referenced CRO’s symbiotic relationship with SEO and the importance of having optimization strategies for both. You must also align CRO strategies with SEO, content marketing, and paid advertising by thoroughly integrating them into a comprehensive approach.
When you use a tool like Invoca, you are effectively bridging the gap between offline and online touchpoints by creating additional digital data from analog phone calls. Integrating this data into your CRO and marketing strategies enhances the entire effort — and maximizes marketing ROI.
We’ve outlined the benefits of a CRO strategy and the elements that can shape your strategy. We’ve also provided a general overview of a structured CRO process. A question you probably would like this CRO guide to answer now is this: “What conversion rate can I expect to achieve if I create and implement a winning CRO strategy?”
The truth is that what constitutes a “good” rate can depend on your industry, your target audience, how many leads you generate, and the quality of your website and app traffic. That said, if you are looking for a general rule of thumb, a good average conversion rate is between 2% and 5%.
Studies have found that conversion rates trend higher for businesses in industries like financial services or the food and beverage sector, while rates are lower for companies in industries like industrial equipment manufacturing. Even within industries, conversion rates can fluctuate depending on the traffic source. The average conversion rate for an insurance search ad is 5.1%, while the conversion rate for a display ad is almost 1.2%.
So, focusing on the benchmarks may not be the most productive exercise as you engage in CRO. Yes, you want to have a high rate. However, the purpose of a CRO strategy is to drive incremental improvements based on the baseline you created in Step 2. So, anything north of that number, measured at any point in time, tells you that your CRO strategy is working.
We hope this conversation rate optimization guide has equipped you with some useful ideas for how to approach developing a new CRO strategy or refining an existing one for your business. We can’t stress enough that conversion rate optimization must be an ongoing process. The goal is to continually improve the customer experience so that you can convert more targets into leads, turn more leads into customers, and achieve the best marketing ROI.
Using Invoca’s technology to help support your CRO strategy can give your marketing team the tools and insight they need to excel at optimizing the customer journey efficiently. Invoca can help you achieve your conversion rate optimization goals by providing vital data and customer insights from phone calls, giving you a complete data picture of customer behavior and more meaningful insights into your customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points.
Not only does Invoca’s call tracking and monitoring software capture the moment a customer converts during a phone call, but it also isolates all the data around that call and every other customer call your agents and reps handle. This provides a wealth of information that you can analyze with Invoca’s AI-driven features. And you can put those insights to work straight away to improve your websites, apps, and marketing content and eliminate conversion barriers so your business can win more sales and generate more revenue.
If you’d like to learn more about the critical role that data from customers’ phone calls can play in optimizing conversion rates, check out these resources from Invoca:
To explore how Invoca’s AI-driven solutions can help you boost CRO by providing a complete picture of the factors driving or preventing conversions, contact us today for a customized demo.
