Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of incrementally testing and fine-tuning parts of a website including website usability, website design, and customer influence elements in an effort to maximize the conversion opportunity for traffic flowing to the site. It often involves split testing one or more on page variables against each other to discover which combination works best to boost website conversion.
The Ecommerce Expert is highly skilled in guiding web businesses to a higher level of success. As leaders in the conversion marketing field, our founder has contributed to and been featured in top trade journals and magazines including Practical E-Commerce, Search Marketing Standard, WebWholesaler, Internet.com’s Ecommerce-Guide, Independent Retailer and Entrepreneur.com. Our expertise has been called upon by small, medium, and enterprise level companies to help them find answers to their most challenging problems—and each time we responded with amazing results.
Our list of client success stories include companies as small as one person start-ups, to international brands like British Broadcasting Corporation, eBay, Tide Dry Cleaners, P&G, Fischer Homes and everything in between. There isn’t a challenge we aren’t eager to overcome for our clients.
The process we use to achieve higher conversion rates for our clients follows a specific and proven 5 step path which includes Testing, Measuring, Analyzing, Refining and Repeating. Our CRO services apply this 5 step process to each of the following three website parts.
Website Usability
Usability guides the placement and direction of content within the design and technology. The goal is convenience for the visitor’s interaction. Powerful usability enables a frictionless customer experience where intuition versus thinking drives the visitor’s movements.
A well-designed website that has high usability includes intuitive and instructive navigation, clear call-to-actions, articulate value propositions, credibility-building communications and a convenient order process.
Customer Influence
Influence is where the seller guides the buyer down a deliberate sales process. A usable website generates average sales; an influential and usable website can skyrocket sales. An influential website is like a consultative sales person providing information, helping to evaluate alternatives, adding reassurances, feeding the emotional appeal, and skillfully pulling the visitor towards the purchase not always “now” but assuredly at a point in the future.
Influence includes personalization, suggestive selling, relevancy, trust, assurance, sincerity, helpfulness.
Influence is not manipulation. It is not the stereotypical used car salesperson tactics of cheap talk and deceptive ploys. Powerful influence is about intimately understanding the visitor’s needs to provide them the right information at the right time. It moves them clearly and easily through their buying process.
Website Design
Design is the façade around the technology. It adds curb appeal to the website and directs the visitor’s eye towards a desired path. Great design directs a visitor’s actions through the effective use of colors, graphics and lines.
The design is initially recognized by the visitor in forming their first impressions about your ecommerce business. Design is like a person’s clothes or dress style; it doesn’t provide substance, but it forms our willingness to interact, to commit time and to frame the possibility of fulfillment.
And like people’s clothing style, we naturally associate stereotypes to a design to speed our decision process.
Whether fairly perceived or not, design plays a crucial role in setting expectations. With the average visitor spending 10 seconds or less determining our website’s relevancy with their goals, design will either connect or expel them.
Ultimately design plays a supporting role to usability. Great design drives great usability.
When combined with PPC Management, Conversion Rate Optimization offers client’s the best opportunity at increased performance from all campaigns.