Websites are at the core of companies’ digital marketing efforts; today almost all online marketing activities aimed at driving traffic to websites, and converting visitors into sales leads. What happens after marketers acquire these leads? Well, the fact is, most marketers simply forward the leads for the sales team to handle, and move on to acquire more leads.

Can marketers nurture leads to increase the chances of more leads converting into customers? This is where knowledge of conversion rate optimisation will help marketers. Read on to know how you can use conversion rate optimisation to make your content work smarter for you.

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

In internet marketing, conversion optimization, or conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that converts into customers, or more generally, take any desired action on a webpage.

Various sections of a website are capable of facilitating conversion. A few among those are the homepage, pricing page, blog, and landing pages. All these sections can be optimised to convert leads better.

When Is Conversation Rate Optimization (CRO) Right for Your Business?

The best time to start thinking of CRO is when sales and marketing efforts result in a steady flow of leads for your sales team. It’s important to remember that CRO is not only about converting visitors to leads, but also about converting leads into sales more effectively.

Once you decide to start your CRO efforts, it’s important to understand what expectation to set. Analysing the volume of online demand for your product or services is an important first step. You can get an idea of demand in the market by using tools such as Google's Global Market Finder.

Once you get an idea of how much demand there is for your product or service, you need to plan the intensity of you CRO activities to benefit from this demand.

What are the key metrics in CRO?

HubSpot recommends that you use the following formulae to figure out how to tackle CRO at your company, and what goals to set:

1. New revenue goal ÷ average sales price = # of new customers
2. # of new customers ÷ lead to customer close rate % = lead goal
3. Leads generated ÷ website traffic X100 = % conversion rate

The example below cited by HubSpot will give you a better idea of the formulae above:

If your website has 10,000 visitors per month that generate 100 leads and subsequently, 10 customers each month, the website visitor to lead conversion rate would be 1%.

But what if you wanted to generate 20 customers each month? You could try to get 20,000 visitors to your website and hope that the quality of traffic doesn’t decrease. Or, you could get more leads from your existing traffic by optimizing your conversion rate.

If you increased the conversion rate from 1% to 2%, you’d double your leads and your customers.

The table below shows the impact of increasing your website’s conversion rate:

The key point here? Trying to generate more website traffic isn’t necessarily the right approach. Think of it like a leaky bucket. Pouring more water into a leaky bucket won’t fix the root cause - you'll just end up with a lot of waste. Conversion rate optimization is about getting more from what you have and making it work even better for you.

Ready to take the first steps towards CRO at your company? Check out the strategies below, and start testing.