As a small business owner, it can often feel as though every single decision you make will affect your business in a much more impactful way than large corporations feel. Let’s face it, if a large business makes a wrong move here and there, usually it can course-correct quickly and with little damage done, but for a small business, even the smallest oversight can lead to a disaster that is much harder to come back from.
What this means is that as a small business owner, you need to be aware of everything that is happening with your company, including the good and the bad, and react accordingly. Nowhere is that more evident than with your company’s website. Often small businesses rely on the company’s website to draw in new clients/customers, create leads, and even generate sales if it is an e-commerce platform. With that said, one term you may come across is conversion rate optimisation, or CRO.
Confused as to what exactly CRO is and why it’s important to your small business’s website? Let’s take a closer look.
Conversion rate optimisation – what exactly is it?
First things first, it’s important to get a good understanding of what conversion rate optimisation – CRO – is. If you’ve come from a background that doesn’t have any sort of formal digital marketing or website design/developing experience, there’s a good chance that CRO will seem like a mystery to you.
In very simple terms, CRO is actually a process where you make it possible for visitors to your website to take action. The idea is that you provide them with a step or action process that will then convert into a lead or even a sale. Now even though it refers to leads and sales, you don’t have to have an e-commerce platform to be concerned about CRO. A lead is a visitor who can potentially be a customer down the road, whether online or in-person at your business/storefront.
Where are the common places to convert visitors into leads?
When implementing CRO practices, there are some common places that these conversions tend to take place. You’ll have opportunities to convert on blogs, the website’s homepage, landing pages, and a pricing page. All that’s required is a place to provide visitors with a chance to take action.
Think about it, you could provide visitors with an informative blog and then ask them to submit their email address to receive the next blog, or perhaps on a pricing page where they can provide their information to receive a free quote. There are plenty of different ways you can gather leads.
Why is it so important to your business?
As a small business owner, you may be wondering why CRO is so important to your company, especially if you don’t have an e-commerce platform. The fact is that it can help you to be more profitable. Each time you can convert a visitor into a lead, then you are increasing your odds of making a sale down the road. So in theory, the more leads you gather, the more sales your company will realise.
Tracking your efforts will prove beneficial
It’s also important to note that you’ll need to track your CRO efforts in order to determine if they are successful. It may be that you need to change direction, try a different technique, and just shake things up a bit. The only way this is clear is by tracking your efforts and then analysing the results.
A professional website design company can clear up any questions
Even after taking the time to learn about CRO and why it is so important to your website, it doesn’t make you an expert. This is exactly why bringing in a professional website design company can make sense. Take, for example, Fat Media, which not only specialises in website design but helps companies with their conversion rate optimisation.
The team at Fat Media understands the importance of tracking your website visitors, knows how to go about tracking them and what software to use, and then works to put together the findings in a clear and concise manner so areas of issue can be identified and addressed.
Using professionals just helps to make your job a little easier, and ensures that the website is performing at its peak levels where CRO is concerned.
Don’t discount the value of conversion rate optimisation
While there are all different techniques, processes, and practices that you can use to help grow your small business and make it more profitable, CRO is something you don’t want to overlook. If you’ve got a website for your company, then you should be giving thought to your CRO efforts regardless of the industry you are in, the size of your company, or your target market.
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