What Are The Steps of Conversion Rate Optimization

What is Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Rate Optimization is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action on your site, whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or booking an appointment.

Essentially, CRO involves improving the customer journey to encourage visitors to take those important actions.

In this article, we’ll dive deep into conversion rate optimization and explore how it works.

How Does Conversion Work?

Imagine you’re a vendor at a crowded trade fair, surrounded by hundreds of other vendors selling similar products.

Your aim is to attract people to your stand and convince them to buy your products (convert) or hire your services. To optimize your conversion rate, you need to answer three key questions:

1. Does my product meet their needs?
2. How can I attract people to my stand?
3. How do I convince them to buy from me?

At a trade fair, what initially attracts people to a vendor is often the appearance of their stand, including banners, posters, and overall aesthetic appeal.

In digital marketing, this is equivalent to the design of your landing page’s User Interface. For some visitors, the landing page is their first point of contact with your brand and plays a key role in their decision to stay or leave.

Once you’ve attracted visitors to your stand or landing page, the next step is to engage them long enough to communicate the value of your products or services.

This is where your value proposition and messaging come into play, convincing visitors they’re in the right place.

If you capture their interest, the final step is getting them to take the desired action, whether purchasing or signing up for an event. This is achieved with a clear and compelling Call to Action.

The essence of conversion rate optimization is attracting visitors, engaging them with your message, and finally converting them into customers.

What is Conversion Rate?

Conversion Rate is a key metric in digital marketing that represents the percentage of visitors to your website who take a desired action.

This action could be anything from making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, downloading a resource, or booking an appointment.

The conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions (completed desired actions) by the total number of visitors and multiplying by 100 to get a percentage.

For example, if your website had 1,000 visitors in a month, and 50 of them made a purchase, your conversion rate would be:

Conversion Rate = (50 / 1,000) * 100 = 5%

Why Is Conversion Rate Optimization Important

Conversion Rate Optimization is important for businesses across all industries, not just eCommerce. It helps businesses better understand their customers and optimize their websites to increase conversions,

Here are other reasons why CRO is important:

1. Better Understanding of Customers

Investing in CRO provides valuable insights into your customers’ behaviors, thought processes, and motivations.

Analyzing how users interact with your website helps identify pain points, understand what drives them, and tailor your site to meet their needs better.

2. Generation of Revenue

The ultimate goal of most CRO processes is to boost the percentage of visitors who convert, which directly translates to increased revenue.

Whether selling products, offering services, or generating leads, a successful CRO strategy ensures that more traffic turns into paying customers or engaged users.

3. Reduces Customer Acquisition Cost

A well-executed CRO strategy means you’re getting more out of your existing traffic. Converting a higher percentage of visitors reduces the need to spend heavily on acquiring new customers. This efficiency lowers customer acquisition costs, allowing you to allocate resources more effectively.

4. Ads and Campaigns are more specific.

With the insights gained from CRO, your marketing team can create more targeted and effective advertising campaigns.

Understanding your audience’s preferences and behaviors allows you to craft ads and content that resonate more deeply, leading to better campaign performance and higher ROI.

5. It gets you ahead of the competition.

Effective CRO can give you a significant edge over your competitors. Consistently improving your conversion rates increases your market share, enhances brand awareness, and improves your website’s ranking in search engines.

This positions you ahead of competitors who may not be optimizing as effectively.

6. Improves Customer Experience

CRO isn’t just about increasing conversions but improving the overall user experience. You create a positive impression on visitors by making your website more intuitive, responsive, and user-friendly. This leads to higher satisfaction, repeat visits, and long-term customer loyalty.

What are the steps of Conversion Rate Optimization?

Now that you understand conversion optimization, it’s time to discuss the steps involved in detail.

Our friends at Invesp have explained the conversion rate optimization process using the SHIP framework, which divides the processes into four distinct stages,

S– Scrutinize
H– Hypothesize
I– Implement
P– Propagate

 

Stage 1: Scrutinize

The first step to optimizing your website’s conversion is gathering information about your visitors and existing customers.  At this stage, your research will also cover your website. You want to get the metrics for each website page or specific pages where you want to convert your visitors.

1. JTBD

The jobs-to-be-done framework helps businesses understand the underlying motivations behind why customers use their products or services. Instead of focusing solely on the product, JTBD emphasizes the “job” that a customer is trying to accomplish in a given situation.

The idea is that customers “hire” products to fulfill a job or solve a specific problem that goes beyond the product’s basic functionality.

The JTBD framework allows you to explore three key dimensions of customer needs:

• Functional Needs

These are the practical, task-oriented reasons customers use your product. For example, a customer might hire a video conferencing tool to hold remote meetings. Functional needs focus on what the product does and how it solves a specific problem or completes a task.

• Emotional Needs

Emotional needs address how customers feel when using your product or service. Customers may seek products that give them a sense of security, confidence, or peace of mind. For example, customers may choose a secure online payment system because it makes them feel safe about sharing their financial information.

• Social Needs

These involve the social context or status customers seek to achieve through product use. For example, purchasing a luxury car may fulfill a customer’s desire for social recognition or status. In a business context, choosing a well-known project management tool might give a team credibility among peers or clients.

2. Expert Review

A website expert review is a thorough evaluation conducted by professionals with expertise in web design, user experience (UX), usability, and digital marketing. It focuses on these two important evaluation aspects.

1. Heuristic Evaluation

This evaluation focuses on usability and technical issues that impact how users interact with the site:

• Tactical and Functional Issues: Experts assess problems such as broken links, form errors, and technical glitches that disrupt the user experience.
• Mobile Responsiveness and Browser Compatibility: Ensuring the site works smoothly across all devices and browsers is critical.
• Performance: Slow load times can drive users away, so site speed is evaluated for optimization opportunities.
  

2. Conversion-Related Evaluation

This evaluation looks at elements affecting the site’s ability to convert visitors:

• Unclear CTA: Evaluates the effectiveness, visibility, and clarity of calls-to-action, ensuring they guide users effectively.
• Content Clarity: Poorly written or confusing copy can harm conversions; experts check if messaging is clear and aligned with user expectations.
• Form Optimization: Simplified forms reduce abandonment; experts assess form length and usability.
• Trust Elements: Reviews, testimonials, and security badges are crucial to building user trust, which is critical for conversions.

3. User Research

User research is a critical component of conversion optimization. You can’t effectively optimize a website without deeply understanding your visitors’ needs, challenges, motivations, and behaviors.

User research can be broadly categorized into qualitative and quantitative research.

1. Qualitative Research

Qualitative research focuses on understanding the why behind user behavior. It provides insights into users’ thoughts, emotions, and motivations.

Qualitative research helps uncover patterns and commonalities in user experiences through interviews, usability testing, and open-ended surveys.

This type of research is invaluable for identifying user frustrations, needs, and expectations, which can inform your optimization strategies.

2. Quantitative Research

Quantitative research, on the other hand, analyzes data and metrics to determine what users are doing on your website.

It provides statistical insights that help validate or invalidate assumptions made during qualitative research.

Through methods such as A/B testing, heatmaps, and web analytics, quantitative research allows you to measure and track user behavior across your site. This data-driven approach is essential for making informed decisions and identifying areas for improvement.

Combining qualitative and quantitative research gives you a comprehensive view of your users.

4. Data Analysis

Now that you have the raw data from your research, you can see the session recordings and heat maps, but you don’t even know what they mean. What now?

Data analysis at this stage of the conversion optimization process involves gathering, processing, transforming, and interpreting data from your research to obtain valuable and actionable information that can contribute to the next stage of the conversion process.

Additionally, analyzing data from your research is very important because it will help reveal patterns, relationships, and trends and identify insights you can use to optimize conversion rates on your website.

5. Competitive Analysis

Competitive Analysis involves identifying your key competitors, researching their marketing strategies, and what they are doing differently. 

Competitive analysis is integral to conversion optimization because it lets you look beyond your products to see what your competitors do.

The goal of competitive analysis in CRO is to identify your product or website’s strengths and shortcomings compared to your competitors.

6. Usability testing

In CRO, Usability testing reveals many user— and website-related conversion problems. It involves determining how easy your website or product is to use with a selected target audience or user segment.

A typical usability test involves giving test participants tasks on your website to see if they can complete them independently. There are two popular types of usability testing, each with its benefits.

1. Moderated Usability Testing:  Here, you can have someone from your team coordinate and monitor users while they try to complete the tasks.
   
2. Unmoderated Usability Testing:  Here, you want your interview participants to complete the tasks in their natural environment and without any supervision.
   Usability testing reveals issues designers and developers might have missed, affecting your conversion.

Stage 2: Hypothesize

Hypothesizing is an integral part of the conversion optimization process because it helps you make informed guesses about solving issues observed from the research analysis.

1. Prioritize

By now, you should have a comprehensive list of issues you have uncovered from your research. Do you just dive in, head first, and try to solve all the problems at a go, or do you decide which issues take precedence?

This is where prioritization comes in the conversion optimization process.

Now, you want to determine issues that need to be fixed immediately and those that require further investigation. The other problems that do not require further investigation can be grouped into a separate list.

The goal of prioritizing is to ensure that you give priority to issues that need less effort while they have a high impact on your conversions:

If you have difficulty deciding on what hypothesis to implement first, the CRO team at Invesp developed a Prioritization Framework that uses different criteria to evaluate each problem.

Some of the important evaluation criteria in the framework include the following:

• What is the potential impact of the problem?
  How much will this problem affect our overall conversion rate?
• Is the problem above the fold?
  Above the fold are problems your website visitors will see on a page before scrolling down.
• How was the problem identified?
  Was it through expert review, heatmap, session recordings, user testing, or qualitative data?

Another known method for prioritizing hypotheses is described using Widerfunnel’s PIE framework. This framework provides three main factors to consider while prioritizing test ideas.

• Potential for improvement: will testing the hypothesis result in improvement
• Importance: how important is solving problems?
• Ease: how easy will it be to implement the hypothesis

Now that you have prioritized test ideas, you can start implementing these ideas. The test aims to check if your proposed solutions can solve the current problems.

2. Hypothesize

You can think of a hypothesis as a…

“A research-based statement aims to explain an observed trend and create a solution to improve the result. This statement is an educated, testable prediction about what will happen.”

Your hypothesis should be clear and straightforward enough for you and your team members to understand and act on.

Another vital thing to remember during the hypothesize stage is that you have to develop hypotheses for the different conversion-related problems you discovered during the research analysis.

 

For example, if there is a problem with a landing page, you can develop a hypothesis with multiple tests to see which works best. Always remember that hypothesizing is not a one-shoe-fits-all formula.

Additionally, each hypothesis should have a specific conversion goal it’s trying to solve, i.e., a single hypothesis must target a particular conversion optimization goal.

3. Design

We’re now in the last step of the hypothesize phase, where you design solutions to the hypotheses you prioritized from the previous step. It’s easy for the team to develop many design ideas at this stage; however, ensure that the selected designs are based on hypothesis.

Stage 3: Implement

1. Development

It’s time to get your developers, who must have been part of the process from the initial stage, to implement the design ideas that the team came up with while hypothesizing.

2. Quality Assurance

You should not launch a product or service without making efforts to ensure that stakeholders have confidence in it and that it meets customer expectations.
Another important part of QA also involves making sure that your product meets the required policies of the government and other regulating bodies.

3. A/B Testing

Let’s assume your problem was with your landing or checkout pages. You have implemented the hypothesis by creating a new design for the landing page. How do you know if your new designs are doing better than the original?

This is where A/B testing comes in. Instead of relying on assumptions or gut feelings, you can test your new design directly against the original to see which drives better results.

In an A/B test, your visitors are randomly split into two groups. One group sees your original design, and the other group experiences the new version.

When conducting an A/B test, you must have goals and metrics you’re tracking. By setting and tracking specific goals, you have a clear direction on what you want to achieve, and you can also measure the performance and success of your test.

Conversion rate optimization tools like Figpii offer a Free account that provides features such as A/B Testing, Session Recordings, Heat Maps, On-site polls, and Surveys.

Stage 4: Propagate

This is where you turn test results into actionable insights that inform future decisions. After running A/B tests for the hypotheses you implemented, it’s important to understand how these results can influence ongoing optimization efforts and lead to meaningful improvements.

1. Post Test Analysis

Now that your tests have concluded, it’s time to dive deep into the results. The goal of this stage isn’t just to confirm whether a test succeeded or failed but to extract valuable insights that can inform the next steps in your optimization journey. Here’s what to consider during your analysis:

• Compare Results: Evaluate the performance of each variation against the control. Did the change lead to a statistically significant improvement in your key metrics?
• Identify Patterns: Look beyond individual test results to spot trends in user behavior. Are there consistent findings across multiple tests that could point to larger optimization opportunities?
• Understand Why: Whether your test succeeded or failed, the real value lies in understanding why. Analyzing heatmaps, session recordings, and user feedback can offer context and help uncover the reasons behind the results.

The insights gathered from this analysis should serve as a roadmap for future testing and optimizations.

2. Document Results and Best Practices

Before sharing findings with the team, document everything thoroughly. This is a crucial step to ensure that insights are easily accessible and can be referenced in future optimization efforts. Documentation should include:

• A summary of the test hypothesis, goals, and results.
• Data from the A/B test, including metrics, success rates, and any significant findings.
• Observations about user behavior patterns and trends.
• A record of which strategies or changes were most effective.

Proper documentation creates a repository of knowledge for the team to refer to, ensuring that all learnings are retained and can help inform future experiments.

3. Share and Educate

Once you’ve gathered your insights, you must communicate them with your team. Sharing your findings ensures everyone is aligned and can contribute to future improvements. During this review process, the team should ask important questions such as:

• What did we learn from the test?
• Which hypothesis proved accurate?
• What changes resulted in the most significant impact on conversion rates?
• Were there unexpected outcomes?
• How can these insights inform future tests or adjustments?

Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices

Regarding CRO, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but several tried-and-tested best practices can significantly improve conversion rates.

Implementing these practices can lead to better user experiences, higher engagement, and more conversions.

1. Understand Your Audience

Before making any changes to your website, ensure you deeply understand your target audience. This involves gathering insights through user research, data analytics, surveys, and feedback to know what motivates or frustrates your visitors. The more you know about your users, the better you can tailor your site to meet their needs.

2. Focus on Mobile Optimization

With more users accessing websites via mobile devices, ensuring your site is fully optimized for mobile is critical. A responsive design, fast loading times, and a smooth user experience across devices are essential to keep mobile users engaged and converting.

3. Test One Variable at a Time

When running A/B tests, it is important to focus on one variable at a time. Whether you’re testing headlines, call-to-action buttons, or form placements, testing one element ensures that you can accurately pinpoint the change driving the result.

4. Simplify Forms

Overly complicated forms can discourage users from completing them, leading to high abandonment rates. Reduce the number of form fields to the absolute essentials, and consider adding features like autofill or progress indicators to streamline the process. The simpler the form, the higher the likelihood that visitors will convert.

5. Create Clear and Compelling CTAs

Your call-to-action (CTA) is one of the most critical elements on your page. It should be clear, specific, and action-oriented. Make sure your CTA stands out visually and conveys exactly what the user will get by clicking the button (e.g., “Get My Free Trial,” “Download Now”). Avoid vague phrases like “Submit” or “Click Here.”

6. Leverage Social Proof

Trust plays a significant role in conversions, and social proof is a powerful tool to build that trust. Include customer testimonials, case studies, reviews, and trust badges on key pages to reassure visitors that others have had positive experiences with your product or service. This can reduce doubts and encourage more conversions.

7. Optimize Page Load Times

A slow website can frustrate users and lead to high bounce rates. Every second counts, and page load times directly impact user behavior. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify areas where your site’s speed can be improved and make necessary adjustments to ensure your website loads quickly.

8. Use Visual Hierarchy Effectively

Your website should guide users toward the most important actions through clear visual hierarchy. Ensure that key elements like headlines, CTAs, and value propositions stand out. Use contrasting colors, bold fonts, and appropriate spacing to make essential information easy to spot and act upon.

9. Utilize Heatmaps and Session Recordings

Tools like heatmaps and session recordings allow you to see how users interact with your site, where they click, and where they drop off. This data is invaluable for understanding user behavior and identifying areas of improvement.

Heatmaps show where users’ attention is focused, while session recordings let you see the user journey in real-time.

10. Continually Test and Iterate

CRO is not a one-time project; it’s an ongoing process. Run tests regularly, analyze the results, and use the data to make informed adjustments. As your audience and market change, your website should evolve to meet their needs. You ensure your website is always optimized for the best possible performance by continually testing and iterating.

Conclusion

The primary goal of every eCommerce owner is to get people to buy their products or hire their services, and one way to achieve that is by investing in conversion optimization. In this article, we have discussed the steps you can take if you want to see improvements in the conversion rate on your website.

Conversion Rate Optimization FAQs

What is an example of conversion optimization?

An example of conversion optimization is improving the checkout process on an eCommerce website. For instance, reducing the number of form fields on the checkout page can streamline the user experience, making it quicker and easier for customers to complete their purchases. By removing unnecessary steps, businesses can reduce cart abandonment and increase the conversion rate.

Is conversion rate optimization worth it?

Yes, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is worth it. CRO helps you get more out of your existing website traffic by increasing the percentage of visitors who take the desired actions. This reduces the need to spend additional money on acquiring new traffic, improves user experience, and can lead to significant revenue gains without requiring major site redesigns.

What is CRO and SEO?

CRO focuses on improving the user experience and increasing the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action. On the other hand, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aims to improve a website’s visibility in search engine results, driving organic traffic to the site. While SEO brings more visitors, CRO ensures that those visitors convert into customers or leads. Both work together to maximize a website’s effectiveness.

What is a CRO Strategy?

A CRO strategy is a long-term, data-driven plan to improve website conversion rates. It involves understanding user behavior through research, developing hypotheses, running A/B tests, and making informed adjustments to various site elements, such as forms, CTAs, or page layout. The strategy typically includes both tactical actions (quick wins) and broader strategic initiatives that align with overall business goals.