3 Ways CRO Can Boost Your Sales (Without Spending More Money)


One of the most important numbers any company doing business online needs to know is: 97%. That’s the percentage of people visiting your online store who are probably not going to buy anything from you.

Yup, that’s right. On average, ecommerce stores have a conversion rate around 3%.

So what do businesses normally do? They try to get more and more people to visit their store, so that the 3% of converted visitors represents valuable sales.

However, not many business consider the fact that if they’d just raise their conversion rate a little–if they optimized their conversion rate–they’d get a lot more sales without having to spend money on ads to acquire new customers.

This is where conversion rate optimization, or CRO, comes into play.

CRO is a way to understand your visitors, see how they behave on your website, discover new ways to make their experiences even better and, ultimately, increase your sales.

Technically, a conversion is any time a visitor takes any action you’d like them to take. This can include clicking on a button, downloading an ebook, or, of course, buying your products.

CRO is therefore important if you want to make sure your visitors are getting the best out of your store and following the journey you set for them. It can not only help you by boosting your conversions, but also by allowing you to save money at the same time.

So let’s look at some of the ways that CRO can help make your website successful without needing to spend more money on traffic.

#1 Understanding your visitor’s behavior

No matter what you’re selling online, it’s one of the most important things for your business’ success to understand your visitor’s behavior.

This includes the way they navigate your store, what they’re interested or not interested in, and how they react to your various messages.

This puts you right in your visitors’ shoes, allowing you to see why they take some actions or why they don’t take the action you’d like them to.

When you understand their behavior, you’ll be able to make the necessary changes to your website. This includes changing the images, colors, button sizes and copy, and even highlighting certain products or features over others.

But if you don’t understand their behavior first, then any changes you make will just be taking shots in the dark and hoping to hit your target.

#2 Improving your visitor’s experience

If you want to improve your sales (or you have some other conversion in mind), you’re going to have to improve the way your visitors experience your website.

The first step, above, is of course understanding how your visitors are currently experiencing your website. But with CRO, you can then use that information to make that experience much better.

You could improve your most popular pages’ loading speeds, copy or layout, to make them more high-converting.

This is exactly what the home security solutions company Kuna did when they wanted to improve their conversions.

Instead of revamping their website entirely or changing their products, they first tracked their users’ behavior and used that data to make small incremental changes.

These changes included adding a red BUY NOW button, introducing a video loop above the fold, and changing the wording in the main paragraph

The result? An amazing 89% increase in sales after just three weeks. That’s by simply understanding the visitors and improving their experience on the site.

That’s the power of CRO.

#3 Increasing your sales while saving money

Once you’ve understood the visitor’s journey through your site, and making incremental changes, you’ll begin to see how you can increase sales without spending a dime on ads.

The usual go-to when there’s a sales slump, as you know, is to look at acquiring more and more customers. This is unfortunate when you realize that the visitors you’re already getting can be converted at a higher rate to the action you want them to take.

It’s even more unfortunate when you realize that by increasing your ad budget, you’re essentially throwing money down the drain since your pages are not optimized.

CRO can help avoid that cycle of losing money, that’s a fact!

You can improve your site’s value by optimising the way your visitors are navigating it towards the desired action.

Usually, the problem is that somewhere along that visitor journey on your site, you’re losing your customers–and that’s often at checkout.

Morphsuits, an ecommerce store that sells PowerPoint templates full-body spandex costumes, noticed that their sales were getting stale, even after running expensive ads.

Looking through their Google Analytics, they noticed that they had significant drop-offs at their checkout. They decided to use CRO strategies to discover exactly what pages and page elements were causing this dramatic abandonment.

When they’d collected the data, they undertook a significant optimization process, which included usability testing, conversion audits, A/B testing and more.

With that data at hand, they quickly discovered that the review cart section of the checkout flow was causing problems. It was plain white interface with no images, and it didn’t motivate their visitors to complete the purchase.

They revamped that page by adding images and improving copy, and their checkout conversion rate improved by 37%.

A great boost in sales–and no extra ads or traffic.

Getting started with CRO


Chances are, you’ve already gotten started in a way with CRO.

Here, we’re simply talking about the way you’ve looked at your site from your visitor’s perspective, and tried to improve their experience.

However, if you’ve done this without the adequate data to guide your decisions and the changes you’re making, then you’re not yet there.

Data and CRO always go together, and that’s where the real results come from.

Luckily for you, you’ve probably got an analytics program of some sort that you can look through and investigate to see how your visitors are experiencing your store.

There are several tools out there that I would highly recommend that you look at, including VWO and HotJar. These web based tools will allow you to create heat maps and also run various A/B tests based on data-driven decisions.

After that, it’s up to you to decide what action you want them to take, when, and how, and then improving your website to optimise it for that particular action.

With that, not only will you have better sales and lower costs, but you’ll also have happier customers.


Matthew Marley


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