Anil Kondla
Last Updated on July 16, 2024 by Team Experts
Conversion rate optimization or CRO is already being used by millions of businesses worldwide – and to great success. This approach can help you achieve a variety of marketing goals and increase your sales.
Obviously, CRO can be particularly effective during the holiday season when your customers are looking for the best presents to buy for their loved ones. Hence, here’s everything you should know about conversion rate optimization and how you can use it for your holiday campaigns.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
So, what exactly is conversion rate optimization. Simply put, it is the process of improving your conversion rate (i.e. increasing the percentage of conversions) of your website, mobile app, or landing page. Conversions can involve anything from making a purchase, even for smart money to filling out a form to signing up for your email newsletter to any other action.
CRO usually involves a variety of techniques, so it’s really more of a strategy than a single practice. Most of the time when using CRO, you will be brainstorming ideas about how you can improve certain elements of your website or app (or landing page). Then, to see whether your ideas are true, you will be using A/B testing or multivariate testing.
What Are Some Good CRO Statistics?
If you are still unsure about the benefits of conversion rate optimization, it’s worth looking at relevant statistics. Claire Pike, a digital marketing expert from the best essays writing service reviews site where you can buy research paper, puts it this way, “What better way to trust a strategy than to see its effectiveness expressed in numbers?” Here are some good CRO statistics to check out:
- On average, CRO tools have a ROI of 223%!
- The most popular form of CRO is A/B testing with 56% of marketers saying they use this method. It truly doesn’t take much to learn how to do it.
- 70% of marketers use CRO results to inform their further planning on different marketing initiatives.
- Furthermore, only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates. In a situation like this, CRO seems to be a necessity rather than a one-time gimmick or experiment.
While CRO can help you achieve a variety of goals, one of its biggest benefits for you is that it will help you lower your customer acquisition costs by relying mostly on your current customers and site visitors (or app users) By focusing on improving your conversion rate, you will also acquire more customers and may even increase your revenue per visitor. Ultimately, CRO can play a crucial role in expanding your business.
How Can CRO Help You During Holiday Campaigns?
In terms of marketing during the holidays, CRO is essential for you to achieve greater than usual reasons. The holiday season is a time when all brands try to get the most out of the resources they have which is why it’s so important to create a marketing strategy that will get you the best results possible. That’s exactly what CRO is for – it helps you maximize these results by improving the different elements of your website, mobile app, or landing page.
Just to give you an idea about sales during the holiday season, here are some statistics:
- In 2019, total holiday sales in the US reached $722.6 billion. That same year, e-commerce sales in the US during the holiday season reached $135.35 billion.
- 2019’s Cyber Monday was the biggest online shopping day in US history! It saw a total of $7.9 billion in digital sales.
- The average order value (AOV) during the holiday season of 2019 was $152.95.
All of these numbers are showing growth compared to the year before it, but what’s even more interesting is that they have continued growing in 2020 and will likely grow even more in the nearest future. By using conversion rate optimization for your holiday campaigns, you will be able to get the most out of your marketing and significantly increase your sales.
What Are the Best Practices of CRO for Holiday Campaigns?
Obviously, without knowing how to use CRO correctly during the holiday season, you won’t be able to get the results you are aiming for. Isaac Preston, an expert on CRO from the custom writing reviews site Supreme Dissertations, expert in comparative essay writing, explains it this way, “Conversion rate optimization combines different tactics that work together towards a single cause – increasing your conversions. It’s a big mistake to only use a single technique.”
Hence, here are the best practices of CRO for holiday campaigns you can start using immediately:
- Start with Lead Capturing: Both the months leading up to the holiday season and the holiday season itself are great for capturing leads. Start your campaign early so that you get more email newsletter sign-ups. You can use exclusive discounts and special offers as an incentive for people to sign up. Experiment with timing when showing the sign-up pop-up to see what works best. Encourage customers to create wishlists (e.g. send them email reminders and show pop-ups) and then use wishlist data to help you plan your further marketing.
- Use Social Proof to Your Advantage: Everyone has heard of UGC (user-generated content) and its importance. However, you can go beyond simply using customer reviews to persuade more people to purchase from you. Utilize FOMO (fear of missing out) by using special copy on your product pages that creates urgency and scarcity. For example, “selling out fast”, “almost gone”, and “limited number of items left” are all great examples of this. To benefit from FOMO further, you can integrate countdown timers for exclusive offers.
- Show Your Customers What Is Offered: Of course, your current and potential customers can easily browse your website and find anything they wish (especially if you have filters for easier searching). But a great idea is to make the first step yourself and show them exactly what is offered. To do this, create holiday gift guides and recommendation lists. Find themes your customers will like (e.g. “gifts for dads” or “gifts under $100”) and see which ones get more attention. Then, market your products accordingly.
Which Mistakes Should You Avoid with CRO?
While sticking to the best practices is crucial, you should also remember about common mistakes to avoid that could derail your CRO strategy. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Establish Conversion Metrics Beforehand: The best way to measure the effectiveness of your efforts is by knowing what you will be measuring and how. For e-commerce, conversions usually mean product and/or service sales, add-to-cart rate, shopping cart completion rate, email newsletter sign-up rate, lead generation, and others. Remember that you can apply CRO techniques to your website, but also to your mobile app and landing pages. Choose your metrics based on your platform.
- Work with The Different Parts of Your Conversion Funnel: Instead of only working with a single point in your funnel or, on the contrary, seeing it as one whole entity, break up your funnel into parts and work with each one separately. This way, you will be able to identify even the smallest details that can be improved.
- Know the Elements of Conversion Rate Optimization: Knowing the basics of CRO will help you work with more complicated techniques of this approach. The primary elements of CRO are navigation and site structure, page speed, website copy (headlines and body content), CTAs, landing page design, and forms. Other elements, however, can also be improved with CRO.
- Avoid and Minimize Distractions as Much as Possible: Distractions are the ultimate conversion killers. The more pop-ups your site has, the more distracted your potential customer will get. If you have any forms they should fill out, make them as short as possible. Work on your overall design – any elements that stand out too much could become major distractions.
- Don’t Make Purchasing from You Complicated: Your customers should be able to place an order quickly and easily, so make it simple for them to do so. In addition to that, avoid any hidden costs. Nobody likes to suddenly discover additional shipping charges or taxes they should pay for. Such hidden costs could significantly impact your sales.
Final Thoughts
To sum everything up, using different CRO techniques for your holiday campaigns can definitely help you achieve a lot, both in terms of marketing and sales. As long as you have a solid plan for your conversion rate optimization strategy and you stick to it, you will be on your way to success. Use the tips in this article to further help you with holiday CRO.
Read more: Handling Chargebacks During the Holidays
