This article explores why consumer brands must use CRO strategies for business growth and the limitations they must overcome to streamline and optimise marketing efforts. Most marketing and business strategies often talk about driving users to your website. However, that is just the first step.
Businesses need conversion rate optimization efforts to strategically transform every click on their website into a meaningful action that ultimately results in consumers paying for a product or service. Ideally, over repeated visits.
CRO or conversion rate optimization is a strategic approach that targets website visitors to increase the number of people who perform a desired action on your site. This is what is known as a conversion, which could mean different things to different businesses based on campaign objectives, i.e. generating a service query or completing a purchase.
A successful CRO strategy helps grow conversion rates through customer experience optimization.
Why is CRO Critical for Consumer Brands
Today, CRO is a fundamental pillar for any successful marketing strategy. It includes all kinds of approaches a business takes to ensure a higher conversion rate on its website. According to one report, about 50% of businesses claimed that their brand marketing strategies have CRO as a critical component.
While SEO marketing, social media platforms and paid media marketing are important to drive traffic to your website, it won’t matter if there’s no way to convert this traffic to paying customers.
How Indian Brands Are Using CRO Strategies
Undoubtedly, CRO is a critical part of any successful digital marketing plan. Beyond leads and sales, CRO provides a significant edge to any business’s marketing efforts. This is because CRO takes a data-driven approach to report, measure, and track large volumes of concrete data.
For example, email campaigns usually work better for a SaaS company as compared to a paid search campaign due to the nature of the business. However, if business organisations don’t have the relevant data and insights to understand how to modify their existing strategies, they can lose out on significant revenue streams and high-quality leads.
Let’s take a look at some Indian brands and how they used conversion rate optimization services to achieve various objectives on a special occasion like India’s Independence Day.
Case Study 1 – Ola, a leading cab aggregator in India, ran a limited-time Independence Day Travel Campaign.
When Independence Day usually falls around the weekend, the resulting long weekend gives people a chance to travel. Weekend getaways are a common interest among larger sections of Indian customers.
People use this time to take a short trip, spend time with their relatives or visit their parents. Ola appealed to its customers’ emotions by providing outstation cab offers during the week of Independence Day. It also offered an exclusive discount for first-time users of the Ola app and outstation services.
Additionally, Ola collaborated with travel companies Yatra and Club Mahindra to provide lucrative offers on hotels and other types of stays.
Case Study 2 – Flipkart, a leading e-commerce company created a limited-period offer.
While festivals are fun, most of them often end quickly. A successful CRO strategy would show businesses how to leverage this window of opportunity by driving urgency around completing purchases.
Indian e-commerce platform Flipkart introduced the Flipkart Freedom Sale to celebrate the spirit of freedom, which ran for only 4 days. This meant users had less time to think over the purchase, they could either buy a product at a never-before price or lose the opportunity.
Since most customers plan their purchases around festivals and holidays, this did not require any new customer behaviour. It simply sped up the consumer journey.
Case Study 3 – E-comm giant Amazon runs online micro events.
While sales themselves are quite lucrative for customers, e-commerce sites also incorporate micro events into these sales.
Amazon is known to regularly run ‘lightning deals’ – instant flash deals that offer a significantly greater discount than the ongoing offers.
The catch is that these are limited-period deals and customers are more motivated to ‘buy now’ instead of adding products to their wishlists or to their carts and then think it over.
Limitations of Conversion Rate Optimisation Strategies
Don’t forget that there are also certain drawbacks to prioritizing CRO over everything else.
A leading digital marketing agency like Techmagnate offers Martech consulting Services, leveraging deep market knowledge to guide businesses through the myriad challenges with strategy and execution.
Let’s take a look at some of the key challenges brands must face head-on vis-a-vis conversion rate optimization.
1. CRO won’t provide a real or full picture
When marketing teams focus only on fixing things that show a higher conversion rate or cater to CRO metrics alone, they can’t get to the real reason why something is or isn’t working.
To get around this limitation, create a website that aims to meet customer needs as your top priority and keep that at the centre of all your marketing efforts.
This is not to say you shouldn’t observe CRO metrics, but rather that your analyses should not be limited to only CRO numbers when you’re trying to understand user behaviour, thoughts, feelings and actions
2. Increased conversion is not the same as increased revenue
Conversion rates don’t tell you the total number of conversions or how many people are visiting your website. It only tells you how many people are accomplishing the tasks that you want them to complete.
When you’re analyzing conversion data, make sure you use the context of other user data like revenue, website visits and user feedback to get a more accurate picture of what drives your users to engage with your website or complete a purchase.
3. Increased website traffic can actually lower conversion rates
If you spend too much time and all your resources on driving website traffic, it can show a reduced conversion rate.
This is not exactly a bad thing since it could still mean higher revenue even if your conversion rate isn’t as high. Take a more holistic approach when optimizing for conversion rate metrics and don’t forget the context of other analytical metrics.
Advantages of CRO
But the picture isn’t all dark. In fact, considering how effective CRO tactics can be, the reality is quite the opposite.
Understanding the full potential of CRO implementation becomes easier when you see the most important benefits of conversion rate measurement and tracking. Here are some advantages that effective CRO techniques can drive, especially for Indian businesses.
- Higher return on investment (ROI)
- Data-driven decision-making
- Improved UX
- Adapting to changing market trends
- Better CAC (customer acquisition cost)
Let’s take a look at each of these benefits in more detail.
(conversion rate optimization) is a critical component of your marketing strategy and directly affects your ROI.
1. Higher return on investment
CRO
When you enhance your website using insights from your CRO strategy, this not only converts more customers but also increases your business ROI, including both marketing efforts and product development.
2. Improved decision-making
Business decisions backed by data create a pragmatic business model that is necessary for scaling up sales. Businesses need data-backed feedback to ensure stronger decision-making and business growth. Incidentally, providing customers with data backed analysis and strategic next steps is exactly where a digital marketing agency excels.
Using CRO strategies for business growth eliminates any uncertainty in the decision-making process. It gives you valuable insights into the most effective strategies, the ones that you need to implement more and the ones that need improvement.
- Improved user experienceOne of the most important business goals that CRO helps businesses achieve is a smoother user experience for customers visiting their websites. They can choose to test two different options, compare results and implement the one that draws more customers.
This improvement to the user experience is backed by data and therefore gives you a higher chance for success.
4. Adapting to the newest trends and technologies
Using CRO strategies and platforms allows businesses to track critical data that ensures business owners find areas of improvement on their websites or apps while reacting to market changes and evolving user needs.
CRO helps businesses with responding to current market trends and explores existing elements or actions that are outdated and need to be removed or upgraded.
5. Improving customer acquisition costs (CAC)
As mentioned before, CRO strategies can effectively increase business ROI. Consequently, business owners spend less money per view/click on paid advertising as they focus on internal upgrades.
CAC or customer acquisition costs are one factor that all companies strive to reduce.
ROAS or return on advertising spend is made up of the spending on advertising, web banners etc. With a better marketing budget and implementing low-cost optimising actions, businesses can get improved results without increasing the cost of acquisition (CAC).
Choose Techmagnate for Conversion Rate Optimization Services
With almost two decades of Martech expertise, Techmagnate, a digital marketing company in India, specialises in strategic guidance to businesses aiming to optimise their marketing technology efforts for customer engagement, acquisition and retention and business growth.
Businesses can benefit from a wide range of services like stack audits, platform management, business-to-platform alignment, strategy development, KPI alignment, implementation assistance and ROI optimisation.
Techmagnate has helped businesses choose the right platforms and tools, ensuring effective integration and leveraging data-driven insights for enhanced market performance.
The agency also ensures you stay updated on emerging technologies and trends in a quickly advancing market, helping you maintain a competitive and innovative edge among their competitors.
Get in touch with their team of experts for data-driven business growth and higher ROI.
