The first part of inbound marketing is SEO (search engine optimisation) or PPC (pay per click) advertising, through which you attract more visitors to your website by improving visibility for important search terms. But website visitors on their own are not sales. The second part of inbound marketing is, therefore, conversion rate optimisation (CRO): the process of converting these website visitors into; first – lead enquiries, and second – happy paying customers.
In this article, we look at the tools that will help you maximise your website conversions, focusing mostly – at this stage – on lead generation.
The golden rule of CRO: User Experience (UX)
First, a disclaimer. There aren’t any tools that directly increase conversions (although there are some prompts that encourage them, such as a pop-up window that is triggered whenever a person leaves your site). Instead, you encourage conversions by providing visitors with an excellent user experience (UX), which means giving them the information they need and making it easy for them to get in touch with you.
Why use CRO tools?
CRO tools help you optimise these areas of your website by identifying customer behavioural patterns on site and revealing areas for improvement, e.g.:
- Which pages have the highest and lowest bounce rate
- Where visitors come from before visiting your site (e.g. Google keyword search, paid ad, social media etc)
- The drivers that prompt people to visit your site
- Where your barriers are – factors that cause visitors to leave your site without making contact
- The presence of bugs, broken images, slow performing pages, non-functioning plug-ins etc
- The content angles and messages that give you the best chance of conversion
- The causes of abandoned shopping carts (for ecommerce)
- Whether or not visitors can find the information they are looking for in response to keyword queries
- The pathways visitors take around your website
- Pages that rarely get visited, and why
CRO is, therefore, predominantly a matter of data analytics and testing. Using a good CRO tool gives you access to metrics such as page bounce rate, time spent on site (session duration), pages viewed per visit, proportion of new vs returning visitors, and site speed. As you’ll never get the chance to hear feedback from most website visitors, using CRO provides the customer-centred insights you need to improve your website UX and increase conversions.
What are the best types of CRO tool to use?
There are dozens of CRO tools available, a few free and many paid, and all carrying out different functions with varying levels of success. Some are great, such as Google Analytics and HubSpot – but no business has time to try them all, so instead of reviewing individual platforms here, we’ll explain the general functions of CRO tools to help you narrow your choice. Some platforms cover more than one area:
1) Analytics
Analytics tools reveal the ways in which visitors interact with your site, with Google Analytics being the best-known example of this kind of tool. Metrics you can measure and analyse include session duration, bounce rate, visitor location, traffic type (paid or organic) etc – with each measurement painting a picture of what works and what doesn’t on your site in terms of conversions.
2) A/B testing
A/B testing lets you compare and analyse different types of content – e.g. two versions of different blog articles, adverts, or landing pages – to determine the most successful conversion strategies. A testing tool progresses beyond the insights provided by analytics by letting you test theories and make targeted improvements to your content, all validated by real-time data. By testing content to see which versions get the most interactions, you can focus on the best means of driving conversions and avoid approaches that don’t work as well.
3) Reporting
CRO tools crunch a lot of data about website performance and user behaviour, and this is presented in a variety of ways by different CRO platforms. Many let you generate and download custom reports on a variety of metrics in different written and visual formats, and others utilise intuitive ‘heat maps’ of your site to help you quickly visualise the user experience and identify pain points and barriers to conversion.
4) Added Functions
Some platforms provide tools to directly encourage lead conversions or solicit feedback, by adding specific functions to your website. These include social proof tools, chat bots and live chat apps, surveys, incentive content pop-ups, landing page editors etc.
Convert more website visitors into customers
At JDR, we incorporate conversion rate optimisation into every aspect of content creation, website design, SEO, and paid advertising. If you are disappointed in your website conversions or want to find out how you can gain better results from digital marketing, please speak with one of our team today for an initial assessment of your needs.
Image source: Unsplash
