CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization Trends

You might feel like you’re dealing with an alphabet soup: SEO, CTA, B2B, and more. Each plays an important role in drawing in prospective customers and encouraging them to buy your products or services. But one aspect of digital marketing – conversion rate optimization – is currently set to gain a new level of attention in the coming years. As such, you need to listen up and take note of some of the upcoming CRO trends. Some of these trends are continuations of digital marketing initiatives in previous years. This upcoming year will bring some new CRO trends. These will catch your company’s marketing team by surprise if you are not properly prepared.

The CRO does affect your Rate of Return on your investment, and it takes a lot to figure out the right marketing strategy and its proportional ROI return. It can be useful to use the ROI calculator to select a product and its expected ROI time. Surpassing the break-even can be crucial for your ROI investments. It is better to plan than lose in the battleground of the competitive marketplace.

Some of these fresh CRO trends may even blaze a path for future CRO innovations. These can make them all more important to account for. Especially, if you want to remain on the cutting edge of digital marketing.

If you’ve begun your marketing strategy planning for the coming year, take some time and read through this guide. It will cover the coming year’s top 15 CRO trends.

By accounting for each of these trends now, your company’s marketing team will be better positioned. It will be easier to convert prospective customers into committed users online for years to come. And if you are prudent about your CRO implementation, it may not even cost you a dollar!

What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

If you’re drawing a blank on the meaning of “conversion rate optimization,” we can’t blame you. After all, there sure are a lot of acronyms to remember when working to optimize your digital presence today. Even if you consider yourself a pro when it comes to optimizing your company website’s new user potential, a quick refresher on CRO won’t hurt.

Let’s start with a basic definition. Conversion rate optimization is a process of enhancing your website’s pages to encourage the visitors to turn into customers. CRO can take on a variety of large and small forms. Each of them can play a crucial role in establishing best practices for your digital marketing or get actionable data for future marketing campaigns.

Even more important – Though CRO is often spoken of in the context of a landing page, a pricing page, or web hosting, CRO can actually occur on any of your company’s webpages, in theory. Different users take different paths towards finding their desired information online.  It is important to diversify your CRO efforts without spreading your resources too thin.

Also, it’s important to understand that not every CRO method is appropriate for every website.  CRO is so heavily based on user experiences (UX). Digital marketing directors who intend on redoubling their CRO efforts must understand their audience and their regular actions. This should be done before implementing any of the following trends.

Even if one of the following CRO tips ends up falling flat for you, get back up and try another. You should stop until you see a more positive conversion rate on your digital commerce hub.

Adding a chat tool such as WhatApp to your site can help increase conversions. Softgoza has a cool set of mods that can expand the functionality of your users chat experience.

CRO Trends to Keep an Eye On

As we move into the future, CRO trends will become more and more important. Especially those digital marketing managers who want to stay on top of their game to keep their fingers on the pulse of the CRO trends.

This, among other worthwhile benefits, will ensure that these managers are able to adapt their day-to-day operations and long-term strategizing. The final goal: to meet the needs of an ever-fluctuating user base.

Drawn directly from CRO crystal ball, these following 15 CRO trends are currently on course to become standardized features of the digital marketing ecosystem over the next several years. Of course, each and every one of these trends may not play a role in your company’s upcoming digital marketing strategy. However, you should still take them into consideration. This way you can fully account for the forces shaping this thoroughly modern industry

1. AI & Machine Learning to Improve Personalization

The need for personalization in CRO is a growing demand that helps bring in more customers for a business. However, using AI (artificial intelligence) and Machine Learning for better personalization is a new trend.

New technologies have allowed business owners to find relevant consumers using targeted messages. However, the targeting isn’t limited to the Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs) alone. The most common metrics businesses use to personalize their business include:

• Active time
• Demographics
• Device and browser
• Geographic
• Keyword VS search term

However, it’s more complex now since businesses try to target consumers based on

• Personal Purchase History
• Previous Conversions
• Desired Pricing/Deals

2. Personalized Greetings

New customers do not care about companies that see them as prospects and just ways of making money. A personalized greeting such as having the customer’s name pop up on the screen can be a great way to make customers feel more valued.

Several digital tools can help business owners personalize their welcome messages, CTAs, and landing text. It’s like making the company much friendlier with the limited interaction that they have. Companies can even perform A/B testing with different fonts and samples to find out what works best with visitors. You can also segment them into different sections, such as:

• Clients
• Customers

3.  Chatbots: On-demand Q&A’s

Customers and visitors on the website love being heard and valued, so businesses should communicate with them on time. However, it can be challenging for business owners to address their customers.

Thus, they resort to chatbots to answer on-demand questions and answers. Business owners can pre-load questions and their answers on a chatbot and let visitors get real-time answers to their concerns.

4. Add Video Content

Video content is a must for businesses that want to engage their customers in more sales. Video content attracts more users, allowing them to connect with a larger user base.

You can promote products, increase sales, or even market a new project with a well-defined CRO digital marketing using video content. Moreover, businesses can use video marketing tools to make their content look more professional for a better ROI.

5. Conduct A/B Testing

A/B testing is a great way to experiment with new ideas and getting feedback almost instantly. For this, business owners need to divide their users into two groups and provide them with different features and content on the website.

You can analyze the numbers, responses, and conversions on this testing and find the best course of action. It is the quickest way to try two ideas that you can’t decide between. However, business owners need A/B testing analysis to increase conversions through the most effective CRO trends.

6. Improve Page Speed

The page speed of a website is a significant concern for business owners as it determines the overall customer experience (CX) and the website’s efficiency. The world of digital sales is becoming robust, and most customers do not wait long enough for their websites to load.

A recent Akamai study claims:

“A 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7%. A two-second web page load time delay increases bounce rates by 103%. Fifty-three percent of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.”

Visitors judge the website’s performance in the first three seconds of visiting it, so increasing your page speed is crucial. You can hire optimization experts to improve your website and page speed. The page speed will improve the overall UX (user experience) and increase conversions.

7. Optimize for Mobile Devices

Improving your websites for mobile devices is essential in today’s world, as most visitors on the internet use mobile devices. These users can access your websites from anywhere, so it’s only logical to optimize your website so it performs well on mobile devices.

It is also a quick way to increase your overall traffic by adding unique mobile-based features. Some great options include voice assistants (VA) and augmented reality (AR). Once your website can target mobile users, it will pump up customer responses using the best CRO trends in mobile optimization.

8. Localize Your Content

Localizing your content is a great way to make users feel connected to the business. They should know your business is ready to assist them locally, making it more approachable. Targeting customers through localized site pages is the best way to make them feel valued and target them individually.

However, localizing the content extends from conventional keyword research for the business and requires a more consolidated approach.

9. Social Proof: User-Generated Content

Social Proof is one of the most exciting concepts for increasing your CRO. For example, you can add social proof on the landing page of your website to increase its results. However, quoting customers is insufficient, as you need more (UGC) user-generated content . The UGC can help increase CRO very quickly.

Once the customers start seeing their UGC, it becomes easier for them to trust your business and make a purchase. It is a great way to increase your CRO because the UGC can target different website domains. For example, a business can utilize the content generated by users for:

• Increasing sales
• Launching new products
• Adding reviews, etc.

10. Track User Activity

Understanding user behavior is a great way to increase your CRO. It helps you segment the audience according to the user’s persona and target them accordingly. Analysis and targeting tools are the best ways to track user activity and can significantly help business owners.

Once the businesses can start tracking activity, they can use the data that they collected to make suitable campaigns, apply the right business strategies, and more. Tracking user activity also requires hiring a professional analyst to help understand audiences better.

11. Personalization

First up is an overarching trend that will certainly come to influence the way digital marketers plan their webpages and data collection going forward. The operative word here is…personalization. Regardless of the setting, prospective customers always appreciate the feeling that they are receiving special treatment.

Through mindful planning, your company’s website can reflect a spirit of personalization. It may well affect your conversion rate going forward

Social media platforms led the charge on the personalization front several years ago. Now it’s time for other websites to catch up. You certainly don’t need the scale and resources of Facebook or Twitter to accomplish your personalization goals. You can take a page from their book and tailor parts of your interface based upon a user’s browsing history or geographic location.

This can even extend beyond the bounds of your website, through advertisement retargeting (detailed below in trend #4)

Overall, your personalization efforts should be geared towards creating “value” for each and every new visitor. While “value” can be defined broadly in this context, any “value” that you are concerned with creating should result in a conversion, ideally.

As a result, you may need to test out several different personalization modules. For example, a customizable interface or adaptive content recommendation. Once it’s done, you can settle on a method that best suits your audience.

12. Clear Calls-to-Action (CTAs)

Here’s a call-to-action for you – make your calls-to-action clearer this coming year! You’re likely already using devoted calls-to-action in your website’s content. However, you may not be utilizing them to their full strength.

That’s not entirely your fault, though. Many savvy internet users today are able to gloss over calls-to-action without feeling their impact (a phenomenon sometimes known as “banner blindness”). This, in turn, causes a fair number of missed conversions.

There are a few remedies for this problem that most (if not all) digital marketers can take note of while creating future website content. First off, always include a call-to-action as soon as possible. In other words, don’t bury your lead deep within your copy or hide it among a sea of images; make sure that your call-to-action is plain to see and as enticing as possible without overselling your product or service.

Also, if possible, make your call-to-action visually appealing without becoming overly distracting. Many companies that offer consultations or service quotes often accomplish this by placing a brightly colored button. It contrasts the background color near the top of their webpages.

Also, if you are able to perform A/B style testing (detailed below in Trend #3), you are much more likely to find a CTA method that reliably returns conversions.

13. Quantitative Testing

Looking towards the future, digital marketers need to work the scientific method into their strategic planning. Specifically, digital marketers need to implement a cycle of forming hypotheses, testing with a live user base, and gathering actionable data.

When implemented correctly, these live tests can provide a digital marketing team with a treasure trove of data. Managers can use them to modify a website’s user experience to meet a core audience’s needs.

For example, many digital marketing teams have begun to utilize the power of their modern  website platforms to perform A/B tests on their live website. In essence, an A/B test allows a team member to add in two or more different options for a particular article title or CTA repetition and then gather data on which option received the most attention from users.

When compounded, data gathered from these tests can allow a website to become more personalized to its primary audience’s interest (which meets the criteria of trend #1 above).

14. Retargeting

One of the CRO trends is retargeting. Have you ever noticed that you only ever seem to get ads online for companies whose websites you’ve visited recently? Well, that isn’t just a coincidence. In fact, many major online retailers today participate in a process of retargeting in order to support the conversion process after a prospective customer has left their website. Retargeting has particularly become a favorite of digital retailers who are working to segment their current and future customer base.

Though retargeting (sometimes known also as “remarketing”) comes in several forms, they have all been found to be effective at returning a percentage of the so-called “digital window shoppers.” Digital window shoppers make up nearly 98% of some prospective customer bases. They are making it essential to use methods such as retargeting to convert at least a portion back into active customer base.

Depending on the mechanics of your website hosting platform, you may be able to initiate retargeting right from your standard dashboard. However, outside services also exist to give your business a second, third, or even fourth opportunity to secure that all-important CRO.

15. Cross-Platform Experiences

Finally, savvy digital marketers who are looking towards the future need to fully understand the importance of cross-platform experiences. That’s because it is becoming increasingly common for repeat users of a website to access the domain from several different platforms, including desktop browsers and mobile apps.

An ideal cross-platform experience allows for a seamless transition between the two without the need to sacrifice any core functionality or accessibility.

In many cases, the actual work of creating an optimized cross-platform experience will fall to a UI/UX team who has experience with cross-platform strategization. That being said, the data gathered through your quantitative testing (described above in trend #3) can greatly support key choices. For example, formatting, font choices, and content placement.

Recently, some website building platforms allow for instant cross-platform experience analysis through live previews. If these are available to you, utilize them each and every time something is added to your website. This way you ensure that both desktop and mobile users are receiving equal opportunities to complete a conversion.

Pages that Can Benefit from CRO

You may be experiencing some difficulty finding places to implement each of the upcoming CRO trends. If so, consider checking out the following pages on your own website. As a matter of CRO best practice, these are often hotbeds for conversion activity. As such, they are ready for optimization from year to year.

Homepage or Landing Page

Whether you call it a homepage or a landing page, this particular web page needs to have your biggest and best CRO elements on full display. Many internet users today make a decision about whether they want to stay on a website in a couple seconds. It is essential that all CRO elements be prominent and enticing.

However, on the reverse side, you may need to tone down your homepage’s CRO emphasis. Especially, if your website’s tone is becoming overbearing or confusing. Be sure that any CRO materials implemented on your homepage is streamlined and accessible. They still remain direct enough to make audience conversions probable.

Blogs

Sometimes, implementing a new CRO on your main website can upset the delicate digital balance that you’ve created up to this point. To avoid that hassle, many digital marketing managers have started implementing blogs into their website. There, they can host in-house and freelance content that is relevant to their users while also trying out some of the trendy new CRO methods described above.

Pricing Page

Any and all pricing pages must be formatted and designed with conversion in mind. After all, these pages are often where prospective buyers do their comparison shopping and make the final decision to purchase your product or service.

Sometimes you’ll find that a bunch of prospective buyers are jumping ship on your pricing page. In this case, consider implementing a CRO or two to refocus their attention.

Conclusion

Improving the CRO of a business requires focusing on it’s various aspects, it requires following a holistic approach and tracking the user activity efficiently.

Users must also focus on localizing their content and connecting with the customers through personalized messages and content. You can also use chatbots to help customers get assistance whenever they require.