CRO marketing: how CRO improves marketing campaigns

CRO marketing or conversion optimisation in marketing is an ongoing structured process designed to uncover insight about website visitor behaviour.

The insight conversion-focused research reveals enables the formation of testable hypotheses which seek to change website visitor behaviour.

Whether the goal is to get more people to buy, increase average order value, reduce time to purchase, or increase the number of people doing whatever it is the business wants website visitors to do, the insight gathered through extensive conversion research is invaluable to marketers. We’ve optimised everything from email newsletter signup to purchases and form completions to phone calls over the years.

CRO in marketing is not a list of tactics or hacks which can be ticked off one by one and the concept of CRO being akin to ‘growth hacking’ or a new way to cut corners is misguided and often results in a lot of wasted time and missed opportunities.

CRO marketing and paid media

Digital marketing teams benefit greatly when there’s a CRO team working alongside them because whilst they are busy running the campaign, the CRO team can focus on analysing what’s happening once visitors arrive at the website. The ongoing analysis can then help develop hypotheses which can be tested to improve results.

If a digital marketing campaign generates 100,000 new visitors to your website and costs £200,000, with a conversion rate of 3% and an average order value of £150 you’re spending £200,000 to get sales of £450,000.

If the conversion rate increases to 3.5%, the sales revenue goes up to £525,000. That’s an additional £75,000 in revenue from one campaign with a small increase in average conversion rate.

That small difference can have a huge impact on a business’ ability to reach scale quickly using paid media so CRO and digital marketing go together extremely well when you’re trying to grow a business.

Who should handle CRO in a marketing team?

You should always ask specialist conversion optimisation team (like us) to handle your CRO programme. If there is someone in your team who ‘does a bit of CRO’ you’re going to struggle to get results because CRO is a mixture of disciplines, each requiring specialist skills.

Most CRO teams include people with the following skills: data analysis, user research, user experience design, psychology, copywriting, programming and QA. In our team that’s split up over a team of 9 people. It’s hard (but not impossible) to find people who can do all or most of these things but even these people tend to be better at some of the elements of the job than others.

If the person who does a bit of CRO is actually more of a digital marketer and responsible for the traffic component of your digital marketing campaigns (whether that’s organic, social or paid), they tend to be more focused on that than the experience visitors have once they land on the website, and rightly so.

They may have analysis tools like SessionCam set up and their eye on GA but having a team with a mixture of conversion-focused skills solely focused on behaviour and how to get more people to convert nearly always gets better results, simply because of the amount of time they can spend on it and the skills they bring to the table.

If you also add to the equation that the CRO team will be doing this all day, every day and continually learning and developing, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where the specialist CRO team gets better results, faster. Ultimately though, the best approach to selecting someone to handle CRO is the one that works for your business both commercially and from a results perspective.

If you’re ready to increase conversions on your website and you’d like some help, get in touch and get a free conversion strategy session with a senior optimiser. Call 0161 236 1188 and quote the code CM06.