Avoid these 5 common conversion pitfalls

CRO marketing, or Conversion Rate Optimization marketing, is one of the most sought-after skills within the digital marketing industry because of its ability to grow revenue while not hurting your marketing budget. 

On the other hand, most marketers are not aware of adverse CRO practices that harm their ability to improve conversion rates. 

Let's explore the 5 common CRO mistakes that you should avoid. 

1. CRO is not only about A/B Testing

Knowing how to do A/B testing is a great starting point for your CRO campaign. Nevertheless, it's crucial to note that A/B testing is only one of the many CRO tools.  

For instance, pages with low traffic can be a challenge to run A/B testing as it will take a long period of time to gather sufficient significant data. 

If you have a low traffic, consider using the session recordings tool to see what your visitors are actually doing on your website. Use these qualitative insights to create better user experiences to improve conversion rates when you are not able to launch a test.

2. Writing CTAs copy without considering user segments

Call-to-action (CTA) copy can have a huge impact on your conversion rate. When writing for CTA copy, many have ignored the fact that visitors to your website are at different stages of the purchase journey.

For instance, visitors at the awareness stage may not be familiar at all with your product features. Therefore, a less committal CTA copy such as "Learn More" or "Read More" is more likely to increase the engagement rate. 

For visitors who are at the desire or action stage, consider using a more direct copy such as "Buy Now", "Join Us", or "Sign Up Now" to shorten the purchase process.

Web personalization tool is one of the valuable CRO tools you can use to customize CTA copy for different user segments.

For example, if you notice visitors from Google already have the basic product knowledge because they did the search and found you on the search engine, you can try a more direct CTA copy to persuade them to take the desired action.

If there's a pattern showing visitors from social media are not familiar with your product features at all, try using a less committal CTA copy for them. 

3. Not specific about your CRO goal

While CRO has the ability to impact revenues directly, CRO marketing is not solely about improving purchases online. The term "conversion" can comprise any action, some examples are: 

• Improving engagement rates
• Enhancing AOV (Average Order Value)   
• Increasing LTV (LifeTime Value)
• Reducing Churn
• Lowering Bounce rate 

When launching a test, it's critical to define the specific success metrics that align with your user segments. For example, increase video click-through rate among first-time visitors from social media. 

4. Ignoring the good performing pages 

More often than not, many marketers focus on optimizing areas that are underperforming and forgetting about the high-performing pages.

For example, if you are writing blog posts to convert users to customers, there are chances that some good old blogs only started gaining organic traffic after numerous months. 

By optimizing these high-performing old blogs for more traffic and conversion, you could easily double the number of your customers. 

5. Not setting up tracking mechanism properly

CRO marketing is a data-driven approach to marketing that focuses on improving the conversion rate of your website. In other words, it requires tracking a set of the right data to make your CRO campaign successful. 

Tracking quantitative data and having conversion numbers tell you a small part of the story. Most of the time, you'll need to dive deeper to understand your user behavior on site.  

Many marketers are not leveraging user interaction metrics enough such as scroll depth data or user attention maps for their CRO campaign. 

Tracking and studying a whole set of user behavior data will give you a much greater understanding of where your website works well and where it falls short.