The Beginner's Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Today, most marketing teams are focused on driving traffic toward websites in hopes that this traffic then converts into qualified leads for sale reps to close. The cycle continues and business grows.

尽管这是对标准营销剧本的简单简化查看，但它与大多数企业和营销团队有关。

but there's something missing — a tactic that few marketing teams focus on, yet one that propels the companies that do toward long-term, sustainable success and growth: Getting more out ofexistingtraffic and leads (versus entirely new traffic).

That's where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in.

In this guide, you'll learn about the power of CRO, why your business should focus on improving your conversion rate, and how to get get started.

什么是转换率？

转换率是完成所需动作的访客的百分比（换句话说，转换）。例如，所需的措施可能正在填写网络表格，注册服务或购买产品。

Conversion rate isCAlculatedby dividing your number of conversions by your number of visitors and multiplying that number by 100 to get the percentage.

Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is the process of enhancing your website and content to boost conversions. A high conversion rate means your website is well-designed, formatted effectively, and appealing to your target audience.

The process of optimizing for conversions allows you to boost your number of highly-qualified leads, increase revenue, lower acquisition costs, obtain greater value from your current leads and customers, and, simply,grow better。

Conversions can happen all over your website (e.g. homepage, pricing page, blog, landing pages, etc.). As a business, you want your website to be designed in a way that converts website visitors into paying customers. With so much potential throughout these areas of your website, you must optimize each location to allow for conversions.

How Websites Benefit From CRO

这是您网站的四个领域，可以在很大程度上受益于转化率优化。

1. Homepage

Homepages are prime candidates for CRO. In addition to making a first impression on visitors, the homepage is also an opportunity to retain those visitors and guide them further into your website.

You can do this by emphasizing links to product information, offering a free signup button, or even incorporating aChatbotthat solicits questions from visitors at any point during their browsing experience.

2. Pricing Page

Awebsite's pricing page can be the make-or-break point for many website visitors. CRO can help a pricing page convert visitors into customers by modifying the pricing intervals (e.g. price-per-year vs. price-per-month), describing the product features associated with each price, and including a phone number for visitors to call for a price quote.

3.博客

Ablog is a massive conversion opportunity for a website. In addition to publishing thoughtful and helpful content about your industry, a blog can use CRO to convert readers into leads.

This process often includes adding calls-to-action (CTA) throughout an article or inviting readers to learn more about a topic by submitting their email address in exchange for an ebook or industry report.

4. Landing Pages

Landing pagesAre inherently designed for people to take an action. An event landing page, for example, can be optimized with a video of last year's event to encourage visitors to register this year. And if a landing page is being used to share a free resource with visitors, it can be optimized with preview content from that resource to encourage visitors to download it.

现在您知道可以在哪里进行转化的优化，您可能想知道如何知道何时准备开始该过程的业务。

CRO什么时候适合您的业务？

Simply, if your business is attracting website visitors, then you should take CRO into consideration. That's because, no matter how established or large your company is, you want to convert your visitors into qualified leads, customers, and brand advocates — and you want to do so in the most effective, impactful, and reliable way.

With the process of conversion rate optimization, you'll get more out of yourexistingwebsite traffic while ensuring you're targetingqualifiedleads.

尽管这是一个简单的概念，但设定转换目标并不那么容易说：“本月本月将50个人转换为6月，因此我们希望下个月转换100人。”

You don't just want 50 more conversions from a webpage. Instead, you want 50 more conversions for every X amount of people who visit it. (This is your conversion rate — thepercentageof people who convert on your website based on how many people have touched it).

提供一个更好的理解你sta的地方nd at any point in time in regards to conversion rate, here arethree commonly-used formulas您的企业可以用来理解，分析和改进。

CRO Calculation 1: Conversion Rate

As we mentioned earlier, to calculate conversion rate, you must divide your number of conversions (or leads generated) by your number of visitors (or web traffic), and then multiply that number by 100 to get the percentage.

产生的铅÷ Website Traffic x 100 = Conversion Rate %

CRO Calculation 2: Number of Net New Customers

To calculate your number of net new customers, you'll want to divide your net revenue goal by your average sales price.

New Revenue Goal ÷ Average Sales Price = Number of New Customers

CRO Calculation 3: Lead Goal

And lastly, to calculate yourlead goal, take your number of new customers and divide it by your lead-to-customer close rate (which is your total number of leads divided by total number of customers) percentage.

新客户的数量÷铅到客户关闭率％=领先目标

Here's an example of these formulas in action:

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%.

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 your traffic doesn't decrease — although, that's a risk you'll likely want to avoid. Rather, you couldobtain more leads from yourexistingtraffic by optimizing your conversion rate。这是较小的风险，更有可能为您的底线产生更好的结果。

For instance,if you increase your conversion rate from 1% to 2%, you'd double your leads and your customers。The following table is proof of this — you can see the positive impact that results from increasing your website's conversion rate:

Notice the drastic当您提高转化率时，生成和新客户的潜在客户数量增加。

Not only that, but it's clear thatgenerating more website trafficisn'tnecessarily the right approachwhen trying to improve your conversion rate— in fact, this chart shows you that you can grow your business substantially without increasing traffic at all.

Hard to believe? Think about this way: Pretend you were trying to fill up a leaky bucket. If you pour more water into the bucket, you won't fix the root cause of the issue — instead, you'll end up with a lot of water that's wasted (not to mention, a bucket that will never fill up all the way).

Are you ready to take the first steps toward CRO at your company? Review the strategies below and start experimenting.

CRO Marketing Strategies to Try

Here are some applicable conversion rate optimization marketing strategies to test and implement at your company.

1.在博客文章中创建基于文本的CTA。

While it's good practice to include a CTA in s blog post, they sometimes fail to entice visitors to take your desired course of action.

bAnner blindness是一个真正的现象，与人们习惯于忽略网站上类似横幅的信息有关。这种缺乏关注以及事实网站访问者并不总是会一直读到博客文章的底部（而不是内容上的“小吃”），这意味着需要另一种方法。

That's where the text-based CTA comes in handy. Here at HubSpot, we ran a用基于文本的CTA进行测试— a standalone line of text linked to a landing page and styled as an H3 or an H4 — to see if they would convert more traffic into leads than regular CTAs located at the bottom of a web page.

在HubSpot对10篇博客文章的有限测试中，常规的横幅横幅CTA平均仅贡献了博客帖子生成的潜在客户的6％，而最多93％的帖子线索仅来自锚定文本CTA。

2. Add lead flows on your blog.

Alead flowis another conversion rate optimization element you can include on your site.铅流是旨在吸引注意力和价值的高转换弹出窗口。

You can select from a slide-in box, drop-down banner, or pop-up box, depending on your offer. We experimented with the slide-in box on the HubSpot Blog and it achieved a 192% higher clickthrough rate and 27% more submissions than a regular CTA at the bottom of a blog post.

3. Run tests on your landing pages.

Landing pages are an important part of the modern marketer's toolkit and, as mentioned earlier, integral to conversion rate optimization.

这是因为着陆页是网站访问者成为潜在客户或现有潜在客户的地方，更深入地与您的品牌互动。要优化着陆页，请运行A/B teststo identify your best design and content features for audience members.

For instance, withA/B testing您可以快速，轻松地测试网站副本，内容优惠，图像，表单问题的不同版本，并且web pages确定你的目标受众和respond to best.

Get everything you need to start effectively A/B Testing your website today.

4. Help leads to immediately become a marketing-qualified lead.

Sometimes visitors want to get right down to business, skip parts of the typical buyer's journey, and immediately speak with a sales rep (rather than be nurtured).

There are specific actions you should encourage these high-intent visitors to complete so they can easily becomemarketing qualified leads (MQLs)— and they can take action through a combination of thoughtfully designed web pages, compelling and clear copy, andsmart CTAs。

For instance, at HubSpot, we discovered that visitors who sign up for product demos convert at higher rates than visitors who sign up for free product trials. So, we optimized our website andConversion paths适用于预订演示或与销售代表会议的人。

Admittedly, this depends on your product and sales process, but our best advice is to run a series of tests to find out what generates the most customers. Then, optimize for that process. The key here is to look for ways to remove friction from your sales process.

5.构建我们rkflows to enable your team.

有很多Automated workflowsyou can create to enable your team with the help of营销自动化软件雷竞技苹果下载官方版。

For example, with营销自动化, it's possible to send带有工作流的自动电子邮件。然后，leads canbook meetings with reps in one click。Meanwhile, reps receive notifications when leads take high-intent actions such as view the pricing page on your website. Or, if you work in ecommerce, you can send an email to people who abandon their shopping cart as a reminder.

6. Add messages to high-converting web pages.

Uselive chat software与您的网站访问者实时聊天，并根据需要提供支持和指导。为了增加转换，请将这些消息传递功能添加到您的高性能网页（例如定价和产品页面）中，因此Leads可以实时获取所需的信息。

您还可以使消息传递和聊天机器人基于操作。例如，如果某人在页面上花费了超过一分钟的时间，您可能需要自动提供帮助和回答他们可能遇到的任何问题（同样，live chat tool, like HubSpot, makes this easy).

7. Optimize high-performing blog posts.

Again, publishing blog articles opens the door to a big opportunity for conversions. Even more so if you already have existing blog content on your site — in fact, at HubSpot, the majority of our monthly blog views and leads come from posts published over a month ago.

To get started优化您的博客内容, identify your posts with the highest levels of web traffic but low conversion rates. (Possible causes of this issue may be related toSEO, the content offer you are promoting, or your CTA.)

In one instance, we at HubSpot added aninbound press release template offer关于新闻稿的博客文章 - 结果，我们看到该职位的转换增加了240％。

此外，查看您的博客文章的转化率很高。您想将更多合格的网站流量推向这些帖子，并且可以通过优化搜索引擎结果页面（SERP）或updating it as needed确保它是新鲜和相关的。

8. Leverage retargeting to re-engage website visitors.

您的关键转换度量是什么都没关系：寒冷，坚硬的事实是，您网站上的大多数人都不采取您想要的操作。通过利用retargeting, you canre-engage peoplewho left your website.

重新定位通过跟踪您网站的访问者并在网上访问其他网站时为他们提供在线广告的工作。当您重新访问访问最高转换网页的人时，这尤其有影响力。

The normal inbound rules still apply here — you need well-crafted copy, engaging visuals, and a compelling offer for retargeting to work.

（如果您是HubSpot客户，请看一下AdRoll integrationCAn improve your conversion efforts.)

Now, let's talk about how you can get started with CRO at your company.

How to Get Started with Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Maybe you're wondering, "Where do I start with CRO?”

Enter:PIE framework。before starting a CRO project, prioritize your efforts by ranking each element onPotential, Importance,And舒适。

使用PIE框架回答上一节中概述的每个策略的以下问题。然后，Assign a score between one and 10 (one being the lowest and 10 being the highest) to each strategy。

• How much total improvement can this project offer?
• 这种改进将有多有价值？
• How complicated or difficult will it be to implement this improvement?

Once you've assigned a score for each strategy, add up the numbers and divide the total by three- 这给出了一个分数，显示哪些项目将产生最大的影响。然后，首先要处理得分最高的项目。

PIE框架并不完美，但易于理解，系统性，并为同事之间的CRO协作和沟通提供了一个起点。

begin Using CRO

There are many "best practices" out there when it comes to CRO but, ultimately, you need to find out what你的Customers respond to, and what drives results for你的business.

Keep these three follow-up actions in mind when getting started with CRO today:

• Use the three formulas to start the CRO conversation.
• Experiment with CRO strategies to discover what works for your business.
• 利用PIE框架来帮助您优先考虑策略。

Editor's note: This post was originally published in January, 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.