What is CRO Strategy and How to Apply it in Business

A CRO strategy in marketing consists of implementing different marketing techniques to improve a business’s conversion rates.

Although conversion rate optimisation strategies can be carried out by different teams within a company, such as sales, customer service or marketing, among others, in this article, we want to focus on the latter, that is, on how the marketing team can increase the conversion rate of a business.

Now that you know what CRO is in marketing, and before we get into the subject, you need to know that there are different conversion types. The thing is, conversion is any action that we want the user to perform. In this sense, we can find attraction conversions such as visiting the website (which is located in the first phase of the funnel), decision conversions such as filling out a form (which takes place when the user already knows more about the brand), sales conversions such as buying a product or contracting a service and loyalty conversions such as getting an up-selling purchase (aimed at users who are already customers).

How to boost an effective CRO strategy in marketing

The most important thing when implementing a CRO strategy in marketing is not to put the cart before the horse. What does this mean? Well, you first have to analyse what conversion you want to improve, where and why, and then select the best strategy, and not the other way around. But don’t worry; we’ll show you the four steps to do it correctly and avoid making mistakes.

Oh, and remember: although we have focused these steps on CRO strategy in marketing, they can be used by any team to implement such a strategy.

1. Research and analysis

First, you must establish and clarify what conversion you want to improve. In this sense, you can aim to increase the number of sales, subscribers to your newsletter, and visits to your website. The possibilities are various.

Once you have this clear, it is time to start researching and analysing your website to discover how users interact and what may be failing or interfering with the conversion rate.

In this research, we will have to conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses. With the first, we will obtain numerical data that will allow us to identify behaviour patterns and trends. Time on page, duration of visit, bounce rate or number of clicks are some data we will obtain with this analysis.

With the second, we will know the reason for this data and understand why users behave the way they do, thus having a more prosperous and profound vision of the situation.

In other words, in this first phase, the objective is to obtain a clear vision of the customers’ journey in our company. Obviously, for the research and analysis stage, you can rely on a series of tools we will discuss in the article’s last section.

2. Create a hypothesis in your CRO marketing strategy

Once we have all the data, it is time to establish possible reasons and assumptions that justify these results and ways to improve the conversion rate we want to work on.

For example, a hypothesis: customers visit the product pages of my e-commerce a lot, but then they don’t buy the items. Considering that I receive many questions via social media about the characteristics of the product, a possible solution to improve conversion rates would be to improve the product descriptions on the website.

Once you have the hypothesis and how you will test it (the what and the how), you must establish what result would validate said hypothesis. In this context, it would be that if by changing the description of all my products, my conversions go up by X%, it means that the hypothesis is true. Therefore, you must indicate what percentage would validate the proposal. If this is not true, then your hypothesis would not be correct.

3. Perform tests

Now is the time to take action and test the hypothesis. There are different types of tests that you can put into practice to do this. 

A/B tests are interesting if you are a brand starting and do not yet have much web traffic. A/B tests involve significant changes; a high traffic volume is unnecessary to obtain relevant results. These tests compare versions of the same page (original and modified) that differ in a specific, significant element.

However, it receives a large volume of traffic to your website. It may be more attractive to opt for multivariate tests, where several aspects of the website are changed instead of just one compared to the original. They are also more interesting if you want to test more radical changes.

Finally, split tests consist of testing two completely different versions of a website, landing page or page and help make even more radical changes within a hypothesis.

4. Review and continuous improvement

At this point, you will need to analyse the test results and draw conclusions. In other words, you will know whether your hypothesis was correct. If correct, it is time to propose improvements and implement changes. But if not, you must return to step two and re-establish a new hypothesis.

A conversion rate optimisation strategy needs to be implemented, and more than just the improvement, It must be monitored continuously to ensure it continues working over time. Even if the hypothesis was correct at a given time, it does not mean that it will be accurate forever.

In this sense, when the hypothesis that was correct at a given moment is no longer accurate, it will be time to return to step two.