User-centric Approach: The Secret to Successful CRO

A high conversion rate is an accomplishment every business strives for, no matter their industry or size. But plenty of companies make the mistake of concentrating solely the numbers of it all, barely stopping to consider the actual users themselves.

In order to devise an efficient CRO strategy, it’s critical to make your potential customers and their website experience a priority. That means shifting your perspective to accommodate the user first. In this blog, we want to shed light on those aspects of CRO that should take precedence if you’re aiming to take a user-centric approach to improving your conversion rate.

What is CRO (conversion rate optimisation)?

Before getting deeper into the CRO process, we should first address what conversions and conversion rates are. 

Conversion rate refers to the percentage of website visitors who have completed a particular desired action on your site. The completion of the action itself is called a conversion, and can range from small things like subscribing to a newsletter to large things like completing a purchase. If 50 out of 500 website visitors complete your desired action, then your conversion rate is 10%. 

Now, conversion rate optimisation means boosting this percentage. It’s a set of practices that is meant to drive more people towards the completion of your desired action. For a lot of businesses, investing in CRO pays off quite well. For example, using CRO tools results in an average ROI of 223%. Moreover, only a 1-second delay in loading can cause the conversion rate to reduce by 7%, meaning loss of potential customers.

Through a user-centric approach to CRO, you can impress your website visitors and achieve a considerably better conversion rate. Let’s see how.

What’s a user-centric approach to CRO?

Behind each conversion there is an individual – a potential customer – whose user experience represents the decisive factor in your ultimate conversion rate. That is where a user-centric approach to CRO comes in. It will still involve all the same steps as any other CRO process, but the difference is in the perspective.

Everything you do within this kind of CRO strategy is based on understanding your users (potential customers) and their wishes and concerns. In fact, 78% of customers say that they remain loyal to brands that understand them. So, it’s critical to know what your users are looking for, what drives them to convert as well as what drives them away. 

Let’s dive deeper into what you should pay special attention to when doing user-centric CRO.

User-centric conversion rate optimisation: best practices

1.    Research, research & more research

The first thing you want to do is conduct extremely thorough research on your users. This involves two things – traditional analytics and user feedback. Naturally, both are extremely valuable to CRO, but for the purpose of sticking with the “user-centric” approach, you might give a bit of preference to the latter. 

General analytics tools will give you a quantitative overview of what’s happening on your website. This numerical data is highly useful, especially for continuous tracking of your conversion rate and overall website performance. User feedback, on the other hand, is a qualitative tool that’ll give you a clearer picture on the reasons behind the quantitative data.

In other words, you can work out why your website visitors are behaving a certain way, what they like about your website, what they’d like to improve, and so on. Information gathered directly from users can be leveraged quite easily. It allows you to expand on the features they enjoy and better the features they aren’t so happy with, so that you can ultimately fully cater to your potential customers.

In the end, that’s what conversion rate optimisation is all about – giving your users such a remarkable experience that they’ll have a great impression of you and complete your desired action. That’s why research should be an indispensable part of any strategy, especially CRO. 

2.    Fantastic page experience

While a great page experience won’t automatically boost your conversion rate, it’s still a key element in the overall performance of your website and thus your users’ satisfaction. That’s why it indirectly plays an essential role in your CRO. There are numerous things to be taken into account when working on user experience on your website, but we’ll take a look at those that affect user satisfaction the most.

One of them is the new set of metrics arriving with the upcoming Google page experience update, which is called Core Web Vitals and measures your site’s interactivity, visual stability and loading performance. This update will affect both mobile and desktop searches and its purpose is for websites to be completely optimised for users in order to have a chance at a good search engine ranking.

Aside from working on Google’s new ranking factor, you should also consider a few other significant elements of your website. First, you should make it visually appealing and easy to navigate. For this, you need to know your audience from the get-go and make sure that your website design is something that group specifically would enjoy.

As for easy navigation, it’s a feature universally found among the world’s high-converting websites. No matter your user’s age, tech skills, or any other trait – everyone loves being able to find what they’re looking for in the blink of an eye.

This means that the actual conversion process should also be as streamlined as possible; in other words, it should contain a minimal number of steps. Ideally, it shouldn’t take the user more than 3 steps to complete your desired action, otherwise they might grow impatient or frustrated and abandon the whole process. Again, this is something that research will help you figure out.

Furthermore, you should always tailor your content to your target audience. In the digital world, we can’t stress enough how multidimensional the importance of content actually is. In this particular instance, it suffices to say that good content means more audience engagement and brand authority and reputation, which ultimately leads to a higher chance of your audience becoming your customers.

Another thing that can’t be emphasised enough is the importance of responsive web design. Research shows that almost 80% of customers will abandon a website if it doesn’t display well on their device. So, with the ever-increasing number of channels and devices available, responsive design is something that really helps websites stay ahead of the game.

And finally, we should talk about the CTA (Call to Action) button. Once the user clicks on that, their decision to convert is sealed, but you’re not really out of the woods yet, as there are a few more things happening in the process. It’s important for the CTA button to be eye-catching, well-placed and inviting. Colours like red, green and orange generally work best, and you should place CTAs in a natural spot, such as below a text they’re referring to. The text on a CTA should be short, but catchy and persuasive. 

3.    Personalisation

Content uniquely tailored to each consumer’s unique identity is a great way to improve user experience, which is one of the reasons content personalisation has really been gaining momentum in recent years. Successful brands are increasingly making use of personalisation tools, for example AB Tasty, to make good impressions on their users and transform them into customers. 

Customers appreciate it because personalised content helps them find what they’re looking for more quickly and makes them feel valued as individuals rather than an undifferentiated group you’re looking to profit from. For businesses, the advantage is that the data collected on users is used in audience segmentation processes, which allows even more precise and effective targeting & personalisation. 

4.    Tests 

Using tools like AB Tasty to perform tests is an integral part of any CRO process, and it typically occurs once all your feedback’s been collected and you’ve outlined a CRO strategy.

Depending on your goals and the amount of traffic you’re getting, you can perform A/B tests or multivariate tests. Simply put, the former allows you to test the performance of different versions of the same page, while the latter lets you test different elements of one page.

In any case, testing is an unskippable step that will help you determine whether your conversion rate optimisation strategy is going in the right direction. And if you’ve done your best to understand your customers and design a tactic in accordance with that, it most likely is.

Summary

Of course, conversion rate optimisation is a much broader topic than what we’ve been able to cover in this blog. But even so, it can undeniably be concluded that users hold the key to successful CRO. Concentrating on user-centred aspects like an exceptional page experience, user insight and personalised content can therefore do wonders for the goals you’ve set. And not only that, but it will also come in handy for strengthening your reputation and brand authority for years to come.

If you’re looking for more information or an experienced CRO agency to help you with your strategy, feel free to reach out! Digital agency GRM Digital provide dependable conversion rate optimisation services that’ll help you achieve your goals.