Kevin Bloom“Spend money to make money,” they say. But there are some great ways to increase revenue and profits without massive monetary investments, including today’s topic — conversion rate optimization (CRO).
Simply put, CRO is the practice of testing your conversion content pieces to determine how even minor changes on a page can impact the number of visitors taking action. It’s a measure of how well you’re motivating visitors.
This is involves creating a number of pages with slight variations in design, wording, etc. to test which version(s) encourage the most downloads, registrations, or whatever action you’d like visitors to do.
In a sense, CRO is the very heart—or at least tests the very heart—of modern marketing. It helps you understand what types of content and triggers your prospects respond to. Then, CRO generates data that can have a real impact on your bottom line.
Maybe this is all new to you—or maybe you’re just trying to convince your designers and wordsmiths that the extra work is worth their effort. Either way, we’re here to help.
Today we’re presenting the top five ways conversion optimization can benefit your professional services firm.
1. Reduce Your Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the count of how many people visit a page on your website and then direct navigate away from your site. If this number is high, you know that visitors aren’t finding what they thought they would find (or that they found their answer right away – but that’s another topic).
If you have a high bounce rate (generally over 60-70%), your page is most likely not relevant to the search performed by the visitor, or the quality of the page or its content didn’t appeal to them for some reason. There are a lot of reasons visitors might steer away from a given page on your site, and guessing at these is an exercise at futility.
Conversion rate optimization, on the other hand, can test variations of a page and offer metrics on the people bouncing. Reducing bounce rates means more people are continuing to engage with your site, accessing gated content, and continuing down the sales funnel.
2. Drive More Downloads
A high bounce rate on landing pages means few people are completing the registration form to access your gated content. Testing and optimizing these landing pages will result in a higher number of downloads and more visitors being exposed to your content.
After all, what’s the point in content that no one sees? Putting content behind a gate can be risky—unwilling to sign up for another mailing list, some visitors will forfeit accessing content that they would have otherwise found relevant and useful.
This means CRO is critical on these landing pages. You don’t want to send prospects bouncing away from both your content and your email list. But once you’ve optimized your landing page, the number of downloads are sure to grow. And so is our next topic, your email list.
3. Build Your Email List
As mentioned above, an increase in the number of downloads of your gated content also translates to more email addresses in your list. A larger email list means more potential clients. And this isn’t a list of random addresses – these are targeted visitors to your website.
The fact that they visited your page in the first page suggests that they have interest in your industry, content, services, and in pursuing a relationship with your firm. They might not become clients overnight, but getting them on your email list brings them one step closer to doing business with you.
For even greater email list efficacy, gather some other data on the landing page. Information like industry, company size, geographic location, or visitor’s position in their company can help you tailor your email marketing to them.
Advertising doesn’t just promote your services – it can also play an important role in driving content downloads, increasing both your expertise and visibility.
4. Create Better Pages
We’re defining “better” here as more effective at creating conversions. Design and messaging will not always align with conversion rates. This is because design choices and selection of the best messaging are fairly subjective endeavors.
But remember that with CRO, your bottom-line is the number of conversions. Strong design and messaging prowess are important – and can certainly help conversions – but it’s also possible to have pages you find less visually appealing increase conversions. Finding the right combination of design elements and messaging is what CRO is all about.
5. Improved Decision Making
Decisions based on guesswork and gut feelings have little place in the age of data. There are a lot of software platforms designed specifically to help you track conversion rate optimization efforts.
Some good examples of these include Optimizely and Experiment Engine. They offer hard numbers on the statistical significance of observed conversions and bounce rates. This helps you make informed decisions when building or redesigning your website that are backed by data.
This removes guesswork from the equation and grants your firm the confidence that its choices will pay off in greater conversions rates. This means more clients, higher revenue, and greater growth—all at very little expense.
Ready to learn more? Download the free ebook Online Marketing for Professional Services below.
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