Five CRO Strategies Only the Pros Know
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If your website’s performance has stalled, it might be time to revisit your approach to conversion rate optimization (CRO). In this post, we share five strategies for optimizing your website for conversions, from focusing on high-quality leads to tailoring offers to different personas.
When it comes to conversion rate optimization (CRO), most marketers focus on two metrics: current performance and industry benchmarks.
These metrics make sense as a starting point. Setting realistic website goals is hard without knowing where you currently stand. And, almost by definition, the average conversion rate for your industry should be attainable.
However, I would argue that your goal shouldn’t be to achieve an “average” level of performance; instead, you should be trying to break into the top 10% of companies in your industry. Why? Conversion rates vary by industry, but the conversion rate for the top 10% of companies in each industry is usually 3 to 5 times higher than average.
In this post, I’ll share five strategies to elevate your approach to conversion rate optimization. Each one is meant to supplement the foundational CRO work — like persona research and continuous A/B testing — you’re likely already doing.
(If you’re not already doing those things, check out my post on the fundamentals of conversion rate optimization.)
1. Focus on Lead Quality
It can be easy to view your site’s conversion rate as a binary metric where every lead is equally valuable.
However, generating too many unqualified or low-intent leads can sometimes be a net negative — tying up your sales team and impacting down-funnel metrics like closed/lost rates.
As you evaluate your site’s performance goals, work with key stakeholders to reach a shared understanding of things like lead scoring and the right balance between volume and quality. You might find that a lower conversion rate can be balanced (or even outweighed) by higher-quality leads, which can have a dramatic long-term impact on your business.
Best Practices:
- Redefine valuable conversions: Work with key stakeholders to set targets for leads and conversions. Determine what counts as a valuable conversion for your business, how many lower-intent leads you’re willing to nurture, and whether you have the right programs in place (from educational resources to email sequences) to support these leads.
- Strike the right balance between volume and quality: Depending on your business and industry, it might make sense to prioritize fewer leads that are more likely to convert — or enterprise leads that are likely to deliver a much higher customer lifetime value.
- Prioritize high-intent leads: Shift campaigns and CTAs toward leads that show strong buying signals, even if it impacts top-of-funnel metrics like clickthrough or conversion rates.
2. Prioritize Ease of Use
96% of visitors leave a website without converting — and a lack of usability is one of the most common reasons why.
Whether it’s slow loading speeds, difficult navigation, or poor mobile functionality, people today have limited patience for poor UX or usability issues. And for the 1.3 billion people globally with disabilities, a lack of digital accessibility can magnify these issues, leading to even higher bounce rates and missed conversions.
In 2023, AudioEye scanned nearly 2 million web pages across 40,000 enterprise sites and found that the average page had 37 accessibility issues, many of which impacted users' ability to navigate sites or take key actions.
As a best practice, we recommend regularly testing the usability of key user flows on your website — such as logging in or filling out a form — to ensure that these actions are simple and friction-free.
Best Practices:
- Optimize pages for conversions: Strategically place your most valuable content (e.g., forms, social proof) above the fold while removing any links or CTAs that don’t support the page's goal.
- Simplify forms: Use enrichment tools to automatically add contact information to forms — reducing the number of fields users must fill out. Additionally, make sure that each field is labeled programmatically (so people with visual impairments know what information to enter) and can be filled out using a keyboard alone.
- Improve site speed: Look for opportunities to improve the loading speed of your pages, whether it’s optimizing images, reducing the number of redirects, or enabling browser caching.
- Design for universal access: Ensure your site is responsive and can adapt to different screen sizes. Follow the best practices of inclusive design — such as making sure that information is perceivable to all users — to ensure that the widest possible audience enjoys a seamless browsing experience.
3. Change the Offer
One of the most common CRO mistakes is offering the same promotion to every visitor — without considering what they’re trying to accomplish or where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Having a couple of primary offers you rely on for lead generation or conversions is fine. However, tailoring your offers for different personas or buyer stages can significantly improve engagement. For example, you might target a lead in the awareness stage with an educational resource while offering someone further down the funnel a discount or free trial.
As a best practice, map out which offers make sense for each persona and buyer stage. Then, fine-tune each customer touchpoint—whether it’s a web page, display ad, or email—to feature the offer(s) that will drive the most conversions.
At AudioEye, our automated accessibility platform monitors websites in real-time to find accessibility issues. We’ve found that getting people “into the product” with a free scan of any page URL on their site tells a more compelling story than simply sharing general industry statistics — and it’s one of the primary offers we use in lead generation.
However, we also recognize that some visitors already recognize that accessibility is a challenge for their organization — and are looking to evaluate different vendors. For these prospects, we also offer product demos and free trials.
Best Practices:
- Talk to your customers: Use persona research to understand what prospects are looking for based on role, industry, or buyer stage.
- Lean into segmentation: Use data and past behaviors to segment visitors and personalize content, including dedicated landing pages, recommended content, and dynamic content with pages.
- Test different offers: Try multiple approaches and gather customer feedback to determine what works best for your audience.
4. Focus Your CRO Efforts on High-Value Pages
Depending on the size of your website, optimizing the conversion rate of each page might not be realistic.
Some pages might not get enough traffic to warrant individual attention. Others might have a different goal — like search engine optimization — that might not be aligned with your standard approach to CRO.
As a best practice, start with a smaller batch of high-value pages (or key page templates). Not only will this help you prioritize pages with the most potential to positively impact your business, but it also enables you to incorporate more stringent usability and accessibility testing.
At AudioEye, we use automated testing to find and fix many accessibility issues. However, some issues cannot be identified by automation alone, which is why we also recommend custom testing of key pages and user flows. Doing so can help identify accessibility barriers — like forms that cannot be filled out using a keyboard alone — that would otherwise go unnoticed.
The same goes for usability testing. Automated tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar can give you broad insight into your website’s performance, but focusing on a smaller number of pages or templates enables you to also get qualitative feedback on their design, layout, and messaging.
Best Practices:
- Analyze specific conversion rates: Analyze conversion rates across pages and user flows to reveal critical insights that overall average metrics may conceal.
- Prioritize high-impact pages: Focus your efforts on the pages with the most potential to improve overall performance and drive meaningful results.
- Ensure accessibility on key pages and user flows: Incorporate accessibility into your most-visited pages and user flows — enabling users of all abilities to engage with your essential content.
For Meaningful Results, Go Beyond Just A/B Testing
If you want to keep improving your website’s conversion rate, you need to do more than simply A/B test headlines, CTA placement, and button copy.
Although these tests are valuable in their own right, they’re also the kind of things that your competitors are also testing. It’s hard to create separation when you’re running the same CRO playbook as everyone else, which is why it’s so important to look for additional ways to improve lead volume and quality.
By investing in personalization, improving collaboration between sales and marketing teams, and eliminating accessibility issues that can prevent people from taking key actions on your site, you can unlock the full potential of your CRO efforts.
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