Mastering CRO: Boost Your Profits with Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices and Expert Strategies

In a world where conversions drive profits, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a key strategy to enabling growth. The goal of a CRO strategy is simple: experiment with your marketing campaigns to find insights that optimize your campaigns to convert more often. Simple, but not easy. 

Becoming a CRO expert can feel like a bit of an experiment itself–and it should feel this way. It can be hard to learn the secrets of testing campaigns, identifying meaningful insights, and putting those insights to the test. But like every strategy, there’s always best practices to get you started. That’s what today’s article is all about–helping you along your path to becoming a CRO master.

Setting your goals early 

The goal of a CRO strategy is clear: increase conversions. But if that’s your only goal along the journey then you’re already falling behind. CRO is not a get rich quick strategy. It takes investment, consistency, and patience to fuel the growth momentum that CRO can spark. For this reason you need to be clear about your goals upfront.

Your goals should center around what you think will drive more results. Yes, you want to convert, but how will you convert? Will increasing customer engagement lead to conversions? Will reducing bounce rates help your campaigns? Ok, now ask yourself how? How will reduced bounce rates increase your chance of conversions? Maybe customers staying longer on your landing page may lead to further upsell opportunities and increased revenue per conversion. 

These are the sorts of milestones you need to aim for as you develop your CRO gameplan. Start small, chain together wins, then push for the bigger brand vision. Continue to expand on your goals and soon the conversions will follow.

Identify your variables

The world of CRO revolves around experimentation. Continuous testing is the goal of any CRO strategy but this shouldn’t be confused with aimless testing. Each experiment should have very precise goals and a clear intent behind it. For this reason, you need a clear understanding of the variables you want to test against and why you’re testing those variables.

There are always the basics you can start with:

• Landing page layout
• Color contrast
• CTA button location 
• Creative images or designs
• Copy

But these are just the foundation of what you’re testing should be. It’s not enough to just say you want to test different copy on your landing page or ads. You have to define the why’s and how’s. Perhaps you want to test a shorter version of your copy due to high bounce rates. Or maybe you want to test new messaging in your copy to find what resonates best with your customers. 

If you can identify the main variables you need to test for early on it allows you to be a lot more intentional about your testing. To do this, you need to look at what your audience is responding to or not responding to. Basing your instincts off your audience data, what theories do you have about what will drive engagement? Start with your data, check your hunches, and set clear parameters before you test.

Create clear parameters

Along with your variables you have to set clear markers for your experimentation cycles. Continuous testing is key to mastering CRO but that doesn’t mean you should prepare one endless test. Your testing cycles should be consistent and exist within very clear rules to be considered effective. If you test without clear guidelines you may run the risk of achieving skewed or diluted results. 

There a few main areas of testing you need to have clear rules about:

• Timelines: No testing should run for too long or for too short. You don’t have time to be wasting your traffic on tests that run far too long but you also can’t waste a testing strategy entirely by ending a test too short. For some marketers, timelines are set for this reason, limiting testing lengths but ensuring tests run long enough to achieve statistical significance. For others, tests are run until a certain amount of traffic is hit to ensure the testing pool is large enough to achieve clear results. The best choice when starting off is a mix of the two. Set a deadline for when a test may be in, but also set your goals for achieving statistical significance so that once you achieve this number the test is over. 
• Statistical significance: What everyone considers significant may vary. It can be hard starting out when you don’t achieve huge pools of traffic quickly. This is why you need a clear idea of what counts as clear statistical significance for your campaigns. For some marketers it can come down to achieving a large enough pool of traffic, but early on you may want to focus on the split of that traffic. If you’re finding only a 40/60% difference in which variables are converting that may not be a large enough split to consider the test conclusive. Try to aim for big gaps in which variables are converting, preferably anything with over a 60% win rate.  
• Inconclusive results: Failure doesn’t truly exist in a CRO strategy. Every test is an opportunity to yield new insights, and even when a test doesn’t achieve the expected results, you’re still achieving results. If you’ve set your parameters and a test has hit its deadline only to result in too narrow of a split to be conclusive, then it’s time to pivot. If your results aren’t conclusive that means you weren’t specific enough with your testing and it’s time to break things down further. This can mean testing with a more specific micro-audience, or breaking your variable down into more specific parameters.

With these parameters defined early on, you should be able to test at ease without running into any major pitfalls. CRO is an investment of resources across the board, which is why you can’t afford to run blindly into the night.

Never stop testing

Once you start to hit the ground running, you’ll realize CRO isn’t a sprint but a marathon–perhaps even a triathlon. Every test is an opportunity for a new test. Once you’ve achieved your fourth or fifth testing cycle, you should start to see your conversion rates hitting new heights and milestones. 

What you want to create with a CRO strategy is a pyramid of insights, each insight building on the last. If you found a variation of your messaging resonates more with your customers than it’s time to test matching imagery, or variations in length of that messaging. You want to build insights to the point where you have an entire new suite of landing page design ideas.

Some CRO experts are able to build up enough momentum to the point where they’re running multiple tests at once. Advancements in AI are helping more marketers achieve split testing strategies or even deploy MABs (multi-armed bandits) to monitor multiple tests at once. No matter what level of CRO you’re at, always be ready to push your testing, whether that’s through testing new variables, audiences, or campaign strategies. 

Trust proven expertise

The key to CRO success always comes down to expertise. But the amount of time required to achieve the experience necessary to maximize CRO is a luxury many marketers can’t afford. For this reason, partnering with experienced experts is always a smart way to fast-track success. 

KNB online hosts a team of experienced designers, brand experts, and experienced marketing strategists. We’ve used our mix of experience to help brands of all business types, goals, and growth stages achieve more results and propel their CRO goals forward. If nothing else, our expertise is a great way for quickly building a foundation of CRO insights that you can build on. 

If you want to meet to learn about our strategies or discuss a personalized partnership with my team then we’re available to meet. It’s up to you, simply click here and book some time so we can evaluate the best path forward for you.