Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is the process of making changes in the many different places and ways that users interact with your company’s digital content in order to improve the overall experience and convert more prospective customers into paying customers.
There are so many changes you can make, and so many places you can start. That is, naturally, both a good thing and a bad thing.
The Good
The good thing is simple – there are so many steps that you can take to improve the conversion rate on your site that it’s hard to fail. Any person or team taking the steps necessary to run A/B testing on the site, user experience studies, or any other kind of user testing aimed at increasing the conversion rate, should find pockets of opportunity and success.
The Bad
The bad thing is that there are, for some people, too many changes one could make. It becomes a problem of where to start, and how to prioritize. So much time is spent up front trying to figure out how to begin, that many teams never do.
Let’s address one common issue that many teams tasked with conversion rate optimization run into. That is the myth that only major changes can have the impact your leaders require.
In an effort to impress the people at the top of an organization, CRO teams feel like they need to find the biggest issues and solve them first. They assume that in order to add value, they need to make big changes, and that those big changes need to lead to huge growth in conversion rate. After all, managers and executives are responsible for allocating resources, and unless a CRO team strikes gold, they may be shut down.
And while I’ll admit that there are not enough high-level marketers out there that fully embrace and understand the benefits of conversion rate optimization, we all would do well to disavow ourselves of the “big changes only” myth.
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Small Improvements Can Lead to Huge Wins
The best way that I know to demonstrate that is with an example.
Imagine a CRO team working for a startup in the health industry. This company’s mission is to make it easier to find and book and appointment with a specialist. Their website and app aims to allow users to search, filter, find, and learn about specialists in their area, and shows them available dates and times to make appointments.
The CRO team knows there are a lot of different tests they can run, so they brainstorm ideas and put a big list together. It’s not clear where they should start, but they know they have to.
They decide that the first test they want to run is a simple one. When someone lands on their search page, instead of showing all the filter options up front, they create a simplified search and hide the other options under an “advanced search” button.
The test goes live and after about 30 days, it is clear that the new design is beating the old design. There is a 5% increase in the number of searches and a 2% increase in the number of appointment bookings. And while those may sound like small numbers to the outside world, 5% more searches and 2% more bookings on a site that draws 300,000 visitors each month means 6,000 additional bookings every month. And over the course of a full year, if a booking is worth $5, that is $360,000 in new revenue. For one small test!
Conclusion
Yes, your assumption that some tests will add more value to the business than others is correct. However, that is no reason to procrastinate or argue about where to begin. Simply begin. Because the successful tests will build upon each other, and will grow in the value that they add over time. And the sooner you start, the sooner you will find a result like the one above.
For every month you delay, you are costing your company $30,000.
