Do you know where your CRO (Conversion) budget is going?

Image credit to @kmuza 

A business isn’t functional without conversions (we know you know). Taking qualified leads and converting them into paying clients is the core focus of every business strategy (well, duh). Utilizing marketing and sales, businesses budget for strategies that help boost conversion rates. 

If you and your business pay an agency or in-house marketers to work on the optimization of your conversions (or CRO), do you know where the budget is going? Do you know what strategies are being implemented, and if they work? 

That is what we are here to help you work out. 

What is CRO?

Before we break it down, let us have a look at what CRO is and how it impacts your business. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process and strategy to enhance your content and website to boost the conversions you get for your product or service. 

This process helps to boost numbers of leads, increase revenue and lower your acquisition costs in order to generate more valuable leads for your business so you can grow. 

A conversion can happen from various areas of your website. So what CRO is here to do is make your website sell for you.

Let’s quickly break a few things down...

What is a conversion rate? It is the percentage of visitors who undertake your desired action within your business. Whether they sign up to your email list or buy from you. 

What is a good conversion rate? Depending on your industry and the people you are targeting. But you might be looking at anything above 2-3%. You might even think your conversion rate is low but it is above average. 

How to calculate your conversion rate? Simply do this {number of conversions} / {number of visitors} x 100 = conversion rate. 

What is your CRO budget? 

So the budget for CRO is what you put aside in your marketing spend (or business spend) to increase your conversion rate. You might do this in-house or look for an agency that specializes in helping you increase your conversions. 

Before you jump all in you need to make sure you have a conversion rate optimization budget. We want to guide you through making the most of your CRO budget. 

The guide to your CRO budget 

Of course, first, you really need to understand the cost of a conversion optimization agency. This will help determine if it is a good fit for your budget. If you are already investing, have a look around to refresh the right figure. 

This isn’t the easiest thing to answer, everyone has a different price and slightly different service. Really it comes down to what you can afford realistically and the value an agency can provide. You can read more about this in an article by Invesp.  

How much of your budget should go to CRO? According to Crazy Egg, around 30% of your marketing budget is a good amount of conversion rate optimization. 

Understanding the Conversion Rate Optimization strategies 

The next step, of course, is knowing the different strategies used for CRO. Once you understand the strategies you can then work with your agency (or marketers) to create the best ones for your business, getting more “bang for your buck”. 

Here are a few: 

1. Call to actions within blog posts
What is the next step within your blog posts? What are you asking your audience to do next? 

A popup is designed to attract your audience to your offer. Maybe a mailing list or a product. It pops up when people land on your designated site.

3. A/B test your landing pages
Testing and trialing different landing pages to see what page generates the most conversions for your product or service. 

There are visitors to your site that skip the normal buyer’s journey and want to speak with your sales team from the beginning. There are actions you want these people to take so they easily can become marketing qualified leads (MQLs). Run tests and see what works the best, then optimize the process (and automate as much as possible).  

5. The right messages and copy 
Live chat software can help engage website visitors from the moment they land on your site. Or perfect that one sentence or key message and copy to help convert your audience. 

6. Optimize blogs that perform well 
If you have blog content that gets a lot of visitors, look to see what improvements you can make. Can you add more CTAs or next action steps for the readers? 

7. Retarget your visitors 
Unfortunately, our visitors don’t always take action when we want them to. That is why retargeting is so important. You can use Facebook or other ad services to re-engage those who have been on your website before. 

8. Create a signup flow 
A signup flow is the first interaction a new user has with your company, in the journey of signing up to your service or creating an account. Upflowy is here as a no-code solution to help you optimize your signup flow. Analyzing the signup drop-off is also important to help increase the conversion rate. 

Of course, to get people to our website in a bid to convert them, we also need to think about the lead generation tools. 

What are your lead generation programs? 

Lead generation is just that, how you generate leads to your website, email list, or any space of your business. Once you generate a lead, then of course it is all about the conversion. When you understand the lead generation programs you are utilizing, it helps to indicate where your money is going in your CRO budget as well. You can also measure whether these are effective tools. 

Hubspot map out the various lead generation in this guide, but it gets broken down into: 

• Social media (CTAs to your website) 
• Freebie/white paper 
• Advertising (online) 
• Content marketing (blogging, podcasting, YouTube) 

What lead generation are you using within your business? 

Final thoughts 

How much of your budget should be spent on conversion optimization? As mentioned, around 30% of your marketing budget should be going towards CRO. But of course, it pays for itself. The more conversions you have, the more money your business will make. Optimize your conversion and reinvest into your marketing strategy to bring in more leads, more conversions. 

When you know the strategies your agency (or in-house) is taking to help with your CRO, you can understand where your investment is going. Looking for new strategies with your CRO budget? Looking to see more results? Ask your agency how Upflowy can help your business.