The 9 Biggest CRO Marketing Mistakes You’re Making

Common CRO Marketing Mistakes

Converting website visitors into leads requires constant change. Fine-tuning workflows is not enough to get the conversion rates you need. You must improve your conversion rate optimization marketing to increase your conversion rates. Start by looking for and addressing these CRO marketing problems.

Confusing CRO with A/B

Companies often believe that conversion rate optimization is the same as A/B testing but it is not. Yes, you should try different headlines, calls to action, and page layouts as you do in A/B testing. But you shouldn’t rely on any one individual change with CRO..

Making multiple changes on a single page increases your chances of improving your conversion rate. So does sticking to the changes for long enough to produce statistically significant results.

Weather.com increased conversions on one of its landing pages by 225 percent within a few weeks by “making multiple, radical changes instead of testing one variable at a time,” according to a Moz.com article on common CRO mistakes. The company made changes to the page’s design, headline, navigation and other elements.

Statistical Illiteracy

Statistical significance implies that changes in your conversion rates were related to actions you took instead of random chance. The higher your statistical significance, the more confidence you can have in your results.

But the field of statistics is much bigger than significance. Familiarity with concepts such as sample size and confidence intervals also will help you avoid reporting bad data when assessing the results of your CRO efforts.

Muddled Data

Website analytics can be overwhelming. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you can easily get lost in data like page rankings and referral sources.

You must know what to measure to assess your progress in converting leads. Start by defining “conversion.” Are you trying to get visitors to download a piece of content or request a product demonstration?

Be clear and concise with data evaluation. Make sure your numbers match your conversion rate plan.

Settling for the Status Quo

Companies often don’t optimize pages that are doing well, even though they could be doing better. You could increase conversions by optimizing high traffic pages.

HubSpot used historical optimization to more than double the number of monthly leads generated by the old posts that they optimized. The monthly organic search views for those optimized pages increased by an average of 106 percent.

HubSpot began by determining that 76 percent of monthly blog views came from posts that were more than a month old. More than 90 percent of leads came from such posts.

It optimized the pages in part by more closely aligning the offers that it made in its calls-to-action with the topics of the old posts. For example, offering a press release template at the end of a post on “How to Write a Press Release” almost tripled the post’s conversion rate, increasing it to 3.92 percent from 1.15 percent.

Look for similar opportunities by identifying your most-viewed posts from the past and the keywords that visitors used to find those posts. Then incorporate those same keywords into your call-to-action for a tightly aligned offer, which may not have been available when you first published your post.

Lack of Structure

Your previous attempts to increase the conversion rates for leads to MQLs, MQLs to SQLs, and SQLs to opportunities may not have yielded the results you wanted because your company may lack the infrastructure to succeed in CRO.

Companies often don’t establish a clear process for conversion optimization that needs to be followed by everyone in the organization, according to a WWO blog post on CRO challenges to solve. For example, they may not have a person or team dedicated to CRO. Or, if they do, they work alone instead of with other team members who also could help.

Sharing a dashboard where all CRO activities are planned, reported and updated can garner broader support within your company, thereby increasing the effectiveness of your efforts. Encourage everyone to contribute to conversion optimization, building upon data as you do so, the WWO article suggests.

Bland Experience

Customers like feeling special. They are less likely to buy from you if you treat them like everyone else, especially if a competitor gives them the attention they want.

Almost half of the 8,000 consumers surveyed by Accenture for its Pulse Check 2018 said that they had left a company’s website because it wasn’t personalized. Ninety-one percent of respondents said that they were more likely to shop with brands who recognized them, remembered them, and provided relevant offers and recommendations.

To make sure customers are getting the individualized treatment they’re looking for, digital marketing consultant Shane Barker recommends prioritizing a personalized website experience.

Too Slow to Answer

People shop online largely because they don’t like to wait in line to make a purchase or stay on hold to get answers to their questions. Forcing them to hunt for information regarding your product or services, such as for pricing or availability, can drive them away.

More than 80 percent of shoppers say that the ability to compare prices and get answers to questions are important when buying something for the first time, according to a Pew Research Center study on online shopping and purchasing preferences. Offer online chat so that shoppers can quickly get the information they want.

Not Inciting Action

Visitors will leave your site if you don’t give them a reason to engage with you. Boost lead capture by creating strong calls to action, such as clickable buttons and fillable forms that urge them to contact you, download content, or sign up for a newsletter. A/B test wording and colors to increase your conversion rate.

No Clear Direction

Companies often lack clear CRO goals. They also often based their efforts on instincts instead of data, which could provide a better path to improvement.

Flashpoint Marketing suggests following these conversion rate optimization best practices:

• Establish goals and objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
• Make decisions based on objective data and customer input.
• Be structured, systematic, and strategic in your CRO efforts.

Markets constantly shift, and buying behavior is always evolving. You will fail to convert leads to opportunities if you don’t keep up. Increase your conversion rate by identifying and solving CRO marketing problems.