CRO and Growth: Top Conversion Rate Optimization Tips From 19 Experts

Peep Laja, CXL Institute

"Many people new to CRO assume it's a list of tactics or a checklist. Sure, there are best practices, but those are where you start, not where you end up.

"Conversion rate optimization is about driving growth through research and experimentation. Those two components are the backbone of CRO. Research helps us understand our visitors and what they do (or not). Through experimentation, we get to optimal solutions for identified issues."

Sean Ellis, GrowthHackers

"The one thing I wish more people knew is that the theory of CRO is relatively easy to understand, but in practice, organizational inertia prevents most companies from experimenting around the highest leverage opportunities. Without addressing organizational/team challenges most people will be disappointed with their CRO and growth results."

If optimization and growth are not a pillar of your ecommerce store and of your business, you won't see the results you are expecting. Approaching all things with an experimentation mindset is key.

In fact, that experimentation mindset should extend beyond your site itself.

Paul Rouke ofPRWDexplains:

Paul Rouke, PRWD

"Conversion optimization is a gateway to bringing a company into the 21st century. The power is in the hands of the audience more than ever and companies need to adapt their way of working to take advantage of this.

"Yes, CRO can help increase revenues and KPIs. It can make acquisition more cost-effective. It's a process which can fine-tune your website. I used to call it a company's ‘greatest growth lever' and when I shared that message around the world, it was only focused on money. What I've realised is that statement still holds true, but it's about so much more.

"CRO is often the first step in introducing an experimentation and customer-centric mindset to the core of a company. It starts withwebsite personalizationbut then it flows into the daily routines of other parts of the business. We're working with companies now that have this experimentation mindset at product level: instead of becoming a product-led business with the hope of their audience ‘buying-in', they roll out a product in stages with experiment parameters and have the audience's response feed into the next steps of the roadmap.

"This means that growth through CRO isn't just about making money, it's about opening up a constructive and fruitful dialogue with your target audience. It's about becoming customer-centric. It's about business optimization.

"A tool we recommend to companies is thewww.CROmaturityaudit.com. We've found that companies who focus on improving their scores across the four pillars in this audit are growing at a greater rate than their competitors."

The four pillars of the conversion rate optimization audit that Paul references are:

Josh Garofalo, Sway Copy

"Too many businesses spend too much money trying to fill their leaky bucket. Right now, they get sales because they're driving traffic to their online store. So, the best path to more sales must be more traffic, right?

"Maybe, but not always. If there are holes deeper in your funnel, it will pay to fix those first, and then drive a bunch of traffic into your funnel (or do both simultaneously).

"For example, do you treat your transactional emails as an afterthought, or do you put a little love into them because you know customers are going to open them? Are your emails sent according to some schedule you made up, or do you use tools like Customer.io to send emails triggered by what each customer does (or doesn't do) in your store? Are you obsessing over your homepage and ad copy, or are you optimizing the copy closer to the purchase? Is your checkout process difficult, or have you made buying as easy as possible?

"By tidying up the pages and flows closer to the transaction, you can get more sales with the same traffic, and waaay more sales when you open the traffic floodgates."

It's true that you need a certain amount of traffic to run proper tests. (We'll get to that in-depth below.) But there is much more to conversion rate optimization and growth than testing.

Sending more and more people to a site or landing page that is “leaking” potential customers is a temporary solution, a bandaid.

With CRO, you can actually enjoy increased revenue from your ecommerce store without increasing your traffic. Afterwards, when you do decide to focus on increasing traffic, the visitors you acquire will be more valuable because fewer of them will be “leaking out”. If you're paying for ads, this is even better news.

Joanna Wiebe, Copy Hackers and Airstory

"That it's as data driven as every other CRO discipline. Conversion copywriters ask questions of the analytics team, review raw data from the research team, contribute to wireframing discussions with the UX team and work through hypotheses with the lead CRO.

"Conversion copywriters don't stare into space, dreaming up fluffy language; they identify sticky copy in voice-of-customer data and strategically organize that copy on the page, in emails and throughout the funnel. They hungrily consume A/B test results, and they're curious about what drives people to behave the way they do. There's more of a science than an art to the work we do."

Josh agrees, adding that there's a lot more to copywriting than, well, writing:

Josh Garofalo, Sway Copy

"The word ‘copywriter' is loaded with meaning for other copywriters and those experienced in hiring good ones. For everyone else, it misrepresents what we actually do. Here's what I mean...

"You would be forgiven for thinking that copywriters spend most of their time writing copy. The word suggests that's all we do, and the plethora of inexpensive copywriters with quick turnarounds times reaffirm this myth.

"But any copywriter worth their weight in Bitcoin gets excited when it's finally time to write because it means their job is almost done. That's right, there is so much work that needs to be done before you get your copy.

"Because your product is one of many solutions to a problem — so you need to position yourself in such a way that you stand out to a certain customer. Your product is bought by real people who think, feel, and speak a certain way — you need to write in a way that resonates with this audience. You have made attempts to sell to this audience before — you need to understand what did and didn't work and why. There are a number of research questions that need to be answered before copy that actually sells can be written.

It's true that it doesn't take long to fill your page with words, but a lot goes into filling it with the right ones."

So while copywriting might seem like an exercise in creative writing, it's much more scientific than that. As Joanna and Josh alluded to, there's a lot of research and exploration of valuable data required to write convincing copy that's effective at converting users and visitors into paying customers.

Joel Klettke ofCase Study Buddyagrees the copywriting research process is vital, especially for capturing the voice of your customer:

Joel Klettke, Case Study Buddy

"I wish more people understood that you cannot do effective conversion copywriting if you do not conduct thorough primary research on both voice of customer and existing customer behavior onsite. If ANYONE claiming to offer conversion copy services doesn't send you a proposal with a detailed research plan, then they're not doing conversion copy - they're doing guesswork.

"I also wish more people understood that conversion copywriting does not solely deal with the words, but is deeply intertwined with UX and how those words are displayed. You MUST connect your conversion copywriting with your UX/design work. Otherwise, the siloed disciplines will pull in different directions."

We've written an entire article on theecommerce copywriting research process, but here's the synopsis:

Jen Havice, Make Mention Media

"What most people don't think about when it comes to their marketing copy is context. How does this piece of email or website copy fit into the larger customer journey? Does the copy meet the person's expectations and help them along to achieving their goals?

"Without taking into consideration questions like these, oftentimes businesses don't see positive results. And then get frustrated. So doing your customer research is the first critical step before putting any words on the page. This includes things like interviews, surveys, user testing, and heat maps.

"I always tell people to think in terms of optimizing the entire funnel or journey from beginning to end. This goes for the copy as well. Knowing what your prospects and customers need to see where and when is more than half the battle."

You can use your research to understand the customer journey and optimize it from beginning to end. Why does that matter? To improve conversions across the board, your copy needs to serve and persuade a wide range of visitors at a wide range of stages.

For example, you might be familiar with thefive stages of awareness:

Lianna Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

"Since I'm sure other folks will mention the importance of conducting qualitative customer research--which is the foundation of conversion copywriting—I'll take a sec to stand up for humor. I wish more folks knew that humor can be used as a strategic tool to build relationships, trust, loyalty, and goodwill with customers.

"And while many people DO know this, a lot say, ‘Oh, it's just not for my store.' But humor isn't one-size-fits-all! There IS a sense of humor that will fit your brand perfectly (unless you sell coffins, probably), and when you make a joke at the right time, it can push your nurturing campaigns further than they would go on their own."

Think about it this way. Would you rather talk to the in-store salesperson who has personality and makes you laugh, or the here's-what-you-need-to-know-now-get-out salesperson?

My go-to example for funny ecommerce site copywriting isChubbies:

Brian Balfour, Reforge.com

"I think most people understand you need to be quantitative, but in the process, I think we lose sight of the psychology of our visitors. Why would they do a certain action? What motivates them? How do we reward them? Then, how do we bring those answers to life in our product, landing pages, emails, ads, etc.?Blending this skill with the quantitative sideis really rare, but powerful."

这是一个例子,所有copywriting research comes in handy. Understanding who your customers are, why they act (or not), what motivates them, etc. puts you in a powerful position across the board. You'll be able to not only increase conversion rates, but also make smarter decisions about inventory, shipping, pricing, promotion—you name it.

As Talia Wolf ofGetUplift.coexplains, that all starts with really, truly understanding your customer:

Talia Wolf, GetUplift.co

"The one thing I wish marketers would understand is that it's not about the numbers or the certain discipline you choose.

"You can have all the data in the world, all the new tools, processes and frameworks but at the end of the day if you don't understand your customer, get into her head and create the experienceshewants, you'll never get the results you want.

"It's about adjusting to what your customer needs. The only way to truly grow your conversions and business is to be customer-centric."

一旦你了解你的网站访客和客户tomers tick, you can employ other elements of psychology to improve your website conversion rates, including:

Andre Morys, Web Arts

“我希望更多的人深深明白,CRO is not about tweaking websites, but about changing behavior. Usually I take a look in the optimization backlog of new clients as one of the first things, and they are full of pseudo hypotheses that won't lead to any effect.

"‘When we change the button to the left, people will buy more' - that is not a hypothesis, that is a dream. A good hypothesis explains why the change of an element will influence the customer behavior."

Use your understanding of user behavior and human psychology to design tests that aim to alter behavior.

So, for example, changing the button color from blue to green is much less meaningful than removing a secondary call to action to refocus the distracted visitor on the more valuable “Add to Cart” button.

Psychology, much like copywriting, is often considered a creative exercise by those who are new to conversion rate optimization. To the contrary, it's as data-informed as any other discipline and can directly impact your bottom line.

3. Testing

Testing your copy, landing page design, and other website elements can help you increase your ecommerce conversion rate. But before you dive into testing, Tiffany daSilva ofFlowJorecommends putting in the effort to establish a solid marketing foundation:

Tiffany daSilva, FlowJo

"CRO/Growth shouldn't start until you have a solid marketing foundation. I always make sure before I start testing things that I have a solid strategy in place for SEO, PPC and email.

"I look at the website technically to ensure that we are indexing properly, I do keyword research to find new content opportunities and start building out those pages. I make sure that I've built out my PPC campaigns with solid landing pages, keyword sets and have optimized the settings as much as I can.

"Then I make sure that my SEO and PPC Campaigns have been connected to a solid drip campaign.

"Once these are set up, you can start really testing different pieces of your strategy and improving them little by little. Often people come to me looking for one test that is going to grow their company 100% when they don't realize they are already standing on buried treasure that they just need to dig up."

The argument here? You need a strong starting point before you can begin making improvements to your conversion funnel. Often, there are problems waiting to be solved below the surface.

Ask yourself:

Johnathan Dane, KlientBoost

"I wish people were less romantic about their core expertise. You have to balance time and speed. Many times, doing more research only has marginal improvements when it comes to growth vs. executing, seeing what happens and then adjusting.

"The other thing I wish more people knew about would be prioritization. Don't fix the sink if the well is broken.

"Marketing is more holistic than people think, and there is always more growth to be had if you work from right to left, and not the traditional left to right."

"After you conduct conversion rate research or after a brainstorming session, you'll be drowning in growth and optimization ideas. The issue then becomes, “'What should I do first?'”

That's where prioritization comes into play. Don't let the ideas you're most excited about (or most biased towards) take over. Instead, use a prioritization method to decide what to do first. For example, the ICE (impact, confidence, ease) method is quite popular.

Johnathan also touches on the importance of staying close to the money. Instead of working towards the money (traffic, conversions, sales), work backwards from the money (sales, conversions, traffic).

Erin Bury fromEighty-Eightexplains how this starts with proper performance measurement:

Erin Bury, Eighty-Eight

"Even if you're not a data driven marketer, you can still find ways to measure the impact of your marketing efforts. Take influencer campaigns for example - engaging with influencers on Instagram or other social channels can be a great way to get your product in front of a large, engaged audience, and in many cases can lead to sales.

"But it's important to track the impact of your influencer outreach so you know which people are driving traffic and sales, and which are falling flat. There are a couple ways to do this - first, you can give influencers unique promo codes to track who is purchasing with that code.

"Second, you can use UTM codes to create unique links, so if they're sharing a link on Twitter, Facebook, or other channels, you can see how many referral visits to your ecommerce store come from their unique links.

"And finally you can create an affiliate program so when people click on an influencer's link to your store, they get a cut of sales, and you can track those purchases. Even if you're doing campaigns that aren't data-focused - for example a Facebook ads campaign - you can still be tracking metrics to measure the impact of your efforts, and to evaluate whether you should be continuing to invest in similar campaigns in future."

When deciding what to measure, work backwards from the money. Peep once said, “If you want to increase your conversion rate, make everything free.” Your conversion rate would skyrocket, but revenue would plummet.

Make sure your measurements are accurate and make sure they are as close to the money as possible. Though it's easier, optimizing at the top of the conversion funnel (e.g. email open rates, number of pageviews) will deliver a weaker impact to revenue.

Resist the urge to measure metrics for the sake of vanity!

Speaking of human biases in testing, there's a little something called theconfirmation biasthat Andre urges you to keep an eye out for:

Andre Morys, Web Arts

"Understand that most results of experiments are wrong. There are still too many experiments that are done to prove that somebody is right or somebody else is wrong.

"In most cases, that conductor of the A/B test stops the test as soon as the results are comfortable and fit to the opinion. Psychologists call this ‘confirmation bias' and most optimizers suffer from it.

"You can avoid that by strictly separating the person who delivers the testing idea from the person that decides when an experiment will be stopped."

For example, if you suspect that a change to your product pages will increase adds to cart, you will be more likely to influence the test results to confirm your assumptions. That might mean stopping the test early, running it for too long, interpreting the results inaccurately, etc.

That's why you should run your tests for at least two business cycles and until your pre-calculated sample size is reached. It also helps to avoid “peeking” at your tests while they're running.

Be wary of testing tools! Many will tell you the test is complete because statistical significance has been reached, which may lead to you stopping the test early. Statistical significance does not actually signal test validity on its own, so don't be fooled.

Finally, Alex Birkett ofHubSpotreminds us to be conscious of the narrative fallacy, another cognitive bias, and how it impacts our test analysis:

Alex Birkett, HubSpot

"You can't really explain ‘why' something won or lost.

"Yes, you can theorize and view your experiment results through a framework, lens, or heuristic that seems to cleanly explain a victory or loss, but it's really just a story you tell yourself to simplify things after the fact (they call it thenarrative fallacy).

“例如,你可能会告诉自己,certain experience using a testimonial banner won because 'our audience requires certainty in their decision making and this social proof helps bridge that gap,' and that may be true, but it may just as easily be explained away as 'our audience's attention is being directed away from key product elements on our page and this testimonial banner helps cue their attention in the right place.' Same test, same result, different story.

"What's the point of this? Why can't we just tell stories, what's the harm?

"The harm comes from the evidence that piles up in the direction of confirmation bias. Build up enough confidence in your predictive capabilities, and you tend to avoid certain tests because they don't conform to the narrative you've built up about your audience and CRO program. ‘This variation won't work because the color blue is associated with sadness and our audience needs to be spurred to purchasing with energetic colors,' isn't really a valid reason to rule out an experiment variation.

"Andrew Anderson said this ina CXL postand I love it: ‘The instant that something is ‘obviously' wrong or that something is going to work ‘because…' is the moment that your own brain shuts down. It is the moment that our own good intentions change from doing the right thing and to doing what feels best.'

"My examples are super simplistic here, but they're meant to illustrate this: be humble, stop worrying about the explanation or the story behind your test. Instead, worry about the efficiency and ROI of your program, and how you can improve those."

The story you tell yourself about what works, what doesn't and why matters. It's not enough to be aware of the cognitive biases impacting your ecommerce site visitors and customers. You're subject to those same cognitive biases and they will creep into your test results if you're not careful.

Andy Crestodina, Orbit Media

"Unanswered questions kill conversions. So the first job of the CRO is to learn the top questions and answer them on the page. Here's a prioritized list of the top sources for customers' top questions, ordered from best to worst:

1. Talking directly to customers
2. Talking to sales associates who talk to customers
3. Reading chat logs
4. The site Search > Search Terms reports in Google Analytics
5. 柯yphrase research

"Once you have your list, prioritize it and get those questions answered in that general order. Next, support those answers with evidence, and make sure the call to action is prominent and compelling.

"Conversion is about empathy and clarity. Specific information, strong evidence and clear calls to action!"

Again, all of the qualitative conversion rate research for copywriting purposes is being recycled.

Andy emphasizes the importance of clarity, one of the five heuristic factors, when it comes to boosting your ecommerce conversion rate. It's a good idea to identify the value each product or landing page delivers to the visitor as well as the most important call to action on each page.

Being clear about what you can do for them (value) and what they can do for themselves (call to action) is vital. One page, one goal. Anything else is a distraction, which doesn't benefit you or your visitors.

When communicating the value, Dominic Coryell ofGIMME GROWTHsuggests asking yourself what's in it for the visitor:

Dominic Coryell, GIMME GROWTH

"One thing that I wish more people would think about, myself included sometimes, is really understanding ‘what's in it for me' (me being the visitor) before asking them to do something.

"Take ‘Share with a Friend', for example. A lot of people throw share buttons on everything. I often ask myself, ‘What is there to share? Am I missing something share-worthy? Why would I share this?'

"If we remember to ask ourselves, ‘Why would I share this?' before popping those buttons, we de-mystify the UX and avoid cluttering the UI.

“我认为分享按钮经常扔一个page because a marketer thinks ‘Why not? If I can get some people to share, that's great!' Which is true and I've done that. But then I see that no one shares and I think I have a shitty product. The problem is I haven't thought enough about the value of the share for the visitor.

"What is the incentive? Will people think I'm privy to knowledge they're not? (i.e. I'm a good source of knowledge wealth). Do I get early access? Do I get a financial reward?

If you can't find value for the visitor in sharing, you have two options. Don't add the button. Or, put pictures of kittens into your share message. Kittens are always worth sharing, so when in doubt..."

The moral here goes far beyond share buttons. It's twofold:

1. Be overly concerned about the value every element of every page delivers to the visitor.
2. Don't put something on a product or landing page unless it serves a meaningful purpose.

You have to serve the visitor first. Every element of every page should be purposeful and provide value, including your calls to action and products.

Now, UX is particularly interesting because there are a ton of best practices that have been circulating for years. Some valuable, some not so valuable.

For example, Noah Kagan ofSumo's conversion rate optimization tips remind us to be conscious of our above the fold real estate:

Noah Kagan, Sumo

"Be extremely intentional with above the fold of your website. It is the PRIME real estate. Instead of a fancy stock photo, use a clear CTA to generate leads or sales. Last but not least, keep testing different CTAs to improve the bottom line."

If you're not familiar, “above the fold” refers to the portion of the site that's visible without having to scroll. It's a holdover from the newspaper era. As you can imagine, discussions about the importance of the above the fold area have been around formany years.

In this case, the best practice has stood the test of time.

The above the fold real estate is still incredibly important, especially when it comes to a landing page, pricing page, checkout page, and other core pages on your ecommerce site.Nielsen Norman Group recently foundthat the average difference in how users treat info above vs. below the fold is 84%—impressive, given the changing landscape. For example, with the rise of mobile devices, the fold as we know it has changed quite a bit.

As you can see, best practices aren't inherently bad. They can actually be a good starting point, as Peep mentioned at the beginning of the article. But it's important to understand thewhybehind them.

For example, you'll read that people don't scroll, so all of your important information needs to be above the fold. That's inaccurate. Actually, a recent study found that11% of mobile usersstart scrolling within four seconds of the page loading.

People do scroll—it's not the 90s. And they will even click your calls to action below the fold. So, why does the fold still matter, really? Because your above-the-fold content sets the stage. It sets expectations for content to come and quality to come.

Justin Rondeau ofDigitalMarketeris a proponent of choice best practices as well:

Justin Rondeau, DigitalMarketer

"So this might be a bit controversial, but I REALLY wish people both outside and especially inside the CRO and growth discipline would know/admit that best practices aren't as bad you think or have been taught.

"Sure you shouldn't blindly apply best practices and expect to see massive lifts in leads, sales, etc. BUT! To fall back on 'you have to test that' to know anything is time-consuming and dangerous.

"Simply put, for most companies, there are a finite number of true experiments they can run each year. If they have to test everything, then nothing will get done. So there needs to be some kind of standard for a starting point. That starting point is...you guessed it: BEST PRACTICES.

"Think about it. The term 'best practice' is really just a synonym for 'common practice'. Something that is common is familiar, and a familiar experience is much easier to navigate than an unfamiliar one.

"Again, I'm not saying we should adopt all best practices in some kind of 'one size fits all' approach to marketing. You use best practices as a starting point, get to a baseline, then start to customize using testing methodologies that are actually meaningful.

"You are looking for outlying results. You want to take the average conversion rate for your industry and double, triple, hell, quadruple it. In order to do this, you need to at least have a baseline to start from with a familiar and usable foundation. From there you can do all your fun processes and tricks to find the outliers for your business.

Best practices aren't as bad as you think (or have been taught)."

As long as you understand the why behind the best practice and remain aware of how it's evolving over time, it can be useful. Especially if you don't have the web traffic to test yet and haven't had a chance to dive into conversion rate research.