Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is a crucial part of any brands digital marketing performance. Marketers need to understand how to use CRO to ensure their site or app visitors are completing a desired action. This action is a conversion, which could be anything from a call-back or a subscription, to making a purchase. CRO tactics can vary depending on the nature of your business and your digital marketing goals.
As with most advertising techniques – you will benefit from knowing the best tools to use. Tools can really help to speed up and improve the process of turning visitors into customers.
We’ve created this quick handy guide to highlight some of our favourite CRO tools and how you can use them to drive more conversions. We will cover tools that can help you with the major CRO categories, including:
- Lead Capture
- Research
- Analytics
- Feedback
These tools can help you improve the user-friendliness of your site and also ensure you can build a stronger connection with your target audience.
Research Tools
When creating content for your site or app- you should always be aiming to share content that is going to lead you towards your objective. This means before sharing content, you’ll need to do your research.
CRO is all about making your digital marketing efforts count – so, it’s essential that you have an understanding of what works and what doesn’t with your audience.
We recommend using research tools to check out what other digital marketers are doing and how successful they’ve been. There are a lot of research tools out there, but we’ve narrowed it down to two:
Headline Analyzer
We’ve mentioned this tool before in our content marketing tools blog. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer works by giving your headline or title a score out of 100. Now, although this is a content marketing tool – it’s equally as useful for CRO. This is, again, because good content will be content that leads to a conversion – so, the two come hand-in-hand.
Your score between 1-100 is based on things like word choices, grammar, and character and word count. It can help you see your title from a user perspective, plus you can see exactly what it looks like on either Google or an email subject line.
A good title can make a huge difference when it comes to grabbing users attention. If user’s aren’t drawn in by a title, there is no chance of a conversion. We suggest using Headline Analyzer to test how well any headline is likely to perform before going live.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo allows us to gain useful insights that reveal your most shared content on any topic. All you will have to do is enter your keyword or topic – and the tool will pull together any relevant content that is highly shared or linked to. You can decide whether to look at content from the last day, week, month, or year (we suggest looking at a mixture).
The more your content is shared, the more likely it is to gain authority and lead to conversions. So, it’s helpful to do your research and take some tips from the best articles and resources that are already out there. As a digital marketing agency, we’d use BuzzSumo to understand the key elements that make a web page popular and then take this on board in our own content.
Lead Capture Tools
Lead capture tools refer to anything that will help you capture more leads on your site. The purpose of a lead capture tools is to boost the amount of leads that are going to convert.
HubSpot
HubSpot offer a popular CRO tool that helps to find out more about your customer journeys. It works by using contact forms to analyse user’s path through your web pages – meaning you will find out how users are navigating your site.
How does this impact CRO? Well, the tool offers in-depth insights on both your current site visitors and prospects. The site pairs your contacts database with a dashboard that can tell you which digital marketing efforts are leading to conversions and which one aren’t.
In a nutshell – it can help you find out how users are navigating through your site, and what you can change or keep the same to ensure more people are converting. Oh, and it’s free!
HelloBar
HelloBar is another great lead capture tool that also enables you to add a popup form to your site. The purpose of the form is to grow your contact list for things like emails and newsletters, as well as promote your social platforms, showcase your sales and more. The tool can be used for free – or you can upgrade to a paid plan if you want access to more features.
Analytics
Google Analytics
They key part of CRO is understanding what your customers want. Google Analytics provides a free way to track your visitors and find out how long it takes them to bounce from your site. You can also see which sources are bringing people to which web pages on your site.
The main use of Google Analytics is understanding how your visitors got to your site and why. For example, you can track whether they used a smartphone or desktop, and which keywords they used in their search. Again, understanding how your customers arrived and why they left will help you to change anything that’s not driving conversions.
Feedback
SurveyMonkey
While making sure more customers are finding your site is important – it’s equally as important that they will use your service again. We suggest using a feedback tool to gain product feedback and access customer satisfaction ratings.
SurveyMonkey is a really simple tool that let’s you create a short survey on customer experience. You can use this tool to gain demographic information and discover what your audience enjoy about your site or app.
This is great for conversion rate optimisation because you can find out directly what makes people want to convert and what doesn’t. Once you’ve gathered enough first-hand information, you can use your results to work on and optimise your conversion methods. This also shows that you care what your customers think!
Our CRO Process
At Summon, we understand how to increase the percentage of site visitors that are turning into customers. We use CRO to improve our clients return on investment (ROI) and ensure their digital marketing efforts are paying off. If you have any questions – feel free to get in touch.