Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) has traditionally been considered the vital practice of increasing the number of users on your page that actually convert. This has become a critical part of improving e-Commerce site performance and is also practiced by many brand marketing teams. In addition to "converting to a specified action," with the development of personalized website experiences, an additional consideration for CRO attention are "the points of engagement" a prospect takes in their onsite journey and your communication with them. These engagement points provide a map for developing long-term value in a prospect. CRO techniques are also now being applied to optimize these engagements along with basic sales conversions.
Moving your company forward towards improving CRO is easier than you think. Although there are lots of tools out there to improve CRO, there are some rather simple and proven tools that can move you in the right direction. These tools are grounded in the concept of using data from customer experience and marketing automation to improve a person's visit to your website and to personalize contact.While automation ensures that a visitor is targeted properly with the right offer automatically to increase conversions, personalization ensures that every offer that is presented to a visitor is tailored to their specific needs. A whopping 65% of consumers said personalization and promotions are most important to their shopping experience, according to a report from Oracle. The nature of online shopping gives e-Commerce sites the upper hand when it comes to personalization.
Below are four tools that can quickly help you improve your CRO and automation.
Lucky Orange
The first step in improving CRO is to improve your site's usability. Usability analysis and testing is critical to website design for outdoor brands. We start our usability analysis and testing with Luck Orange. Lucky Orange is your one-stop shop for conversion. This tool will allow you to see how many people are on your site, how they found you, and how they navigated your website. It allows you to compare historical statistics and see what keywords, locations, referrers, tweets, and language are driving traffic.
Lucky Orange is a user-friendly tool, offering users an easy-to-read dashboard that compiles and highlights information pertaining to visitor activity and website statistics. Some key components of the dashboard include 'tops sources' that allow users to see what brought visitors to their site, a 'real-time count' that displays the amount of people currently on your website, 'conversion funnels' that display where people are dropping off in the conversion process, and a filter feature, allowing users to filter the data in an effort to determine where conversions are stemming from.
Lucky Orange has a number of other features that similarly support conversion. For instance, this tool uses the data it collects to create heatmaps that allow you to see the major points of interest on your site. It also has the capabilities to collect the data behind visitor recordings, form analytics, and visitor polls. Simply put, these features will allow users to understand how actual people are interacting with your content and offerings, what is and is not intriguing people, and whether or not visitors are appreciating certain aspects of your website based on questions you pose to them.
Lucky Orange ultimately allows you to determine where you need to focus your energy based on the performance of your website elements. You will also be able to track your progress over time in terms of conversion points, content, new designs, and more.
Lucky Orange comes in handy when determining where to place certain elements on a website page. For instance, if we need to determine where to place a specific conversion point, we will refer to the heatmaps that Lucky Orange provides and determine where most of our traffic’s eyes and interest land. Lucky Orange aids in decisions, such as whether or not to change a page template or change where a form lives on a website.
Button Optimizer
Buttonoptimizer.com is a great free tool that can help improve your call to action (CTA) buttons. Your CTA's are the contact point for converting. In a study by HubSpot, they found that personalized CTAs convert 202% better than default versions.
ButtonOptimizer is a great choice for inspiration or design ideas, or even a ready-made PNG or CSS code to put directly in your page.
All you do is set up your button according to the tool’s parameters. You can use this tool to create several different buttons and split test them to see which one converts best for you.
Besides this useful free tool, HubSpot's automated platform allows you to easily design and build your CTA within the Marketing Hub for easy insertion into any page content in just one click. All the tracking and implementation is taken care of for you. HubSpot also offers a free starter pack if you want to try out something more robust. Here's a list of 31 CTA examples you can use to inspire your work.
Seventh Sense
Next on our list is Seventh Sense. Seventh Sense acts as artificial intelligence for HubSpot and Marketo. This tool is a timesaver in the sense that it has turned the act of collecting and cleaning big data into an automated process.
It offers insight and uses predictive analytics within your sales and marketing processes. This tool is your solution to sending out emails at the best time on an individual basis. Seventh Sense applies its use of artificial intelligence to determine when a recipient would be most inclined to interact with the content and emails you are sending them based on their previous behavior and more. One of the best parts of Seventh Sense is the fact that, as you collect more data over time, the platform will adjust and handle the increase in data without a problem.
As we all know, timing is everything and, lucky for us, that sentiment resonates with Seventh Sense. Seventh Sense will accurately help you determine when and how often to communicate to your audience based on data. Upon connecting with individuals at optimal times, engagement rates will quickly increase, ultimately leading to increased revenue.
Seventh Sense is a great solution for optimizing workflows and increasing their effectiveness. The tool will determine the best time and the best day to send content to an individual based on their time zone and individual habits. As a result, Seventh Sense can immensely improve open rates and click rates.
TrenDemon
Last but not least on our list of favorite conversion and contact automation tools is TrenDemon. TrenDemon will crawl your website and identify the best-performing content. The tool offers analyses of how each piece of content is contributing to your marketing efforts. It will allow you to view your content and website features in a new light, as it highlights each element's contribution to your business goals. In TrenDemon's easily digestible 'Overview' users will be able to see where visitors are in relation to the customer journey, view patterns in successful journeys, and observe the impact your content is having on your business goals.
This tool allows you to properly segment different parts of your database and target content. TrenDemon’s dashboard will crawl your website and depict your best-performing content and, as a result, guide you in choosing what to post across your social media platforms. When it comes down to it, this tool unearths whether or not your content was worth the time and effort. TrenDemon allows users to grasp whether or not their content did its job by converting visitors into leads, ultimately changing the way we produce content moving forward, or similarly allowing us to capitalize on a method that seemed to work.
One of our favorite parts about TrenDemon is the fact that it allows us to manually set up and customize pop-ups and suggestions based on our own data and information. Whereas other tools customize pop-ups and suggestions based on predetermined algorithms, TrenDemon gives users the freedom of using their own data and knowledge to make customizing decisions themselves. Therefore, we can segment content based on our custom lifecycle stages and more.
These tools can only be successfully implemented when proportionately balanced with your personal understanding of your business and marketing goals. In other words, don’t force it.
We selected these tools because they are the best fits for our needs, and because they all work well together. It's absolutely critical to understand that if the tool doesn’t support your strategy, or if it doesn't get you one step closer to a marketing goal, don’t be afraid to say no or walk away.
