Episode 219: What is CRO and why do you need to know it?
Conversion often gets confused with sales. In today's episode, Fiona shares a quick tip about Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). She shares tips on how you can guide people to take the action that you want them to take. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Conversion Rate Optimization
CRO vs SEO
Tips on how to optimize CRO
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Hello and welcome to episode 219 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. This is a quick tip episode. That's really where I share a tip tool or tactic that you can implement immediately in your business. And today it is one that I think a lot of people don't know about. However, they kind of should, but it's something that's super important for business. Especially if you have an online presence, which most businesses do, especially after COVID. So make sure you stick around for that. I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which I am recording this podcast. And that is the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
I also wanted to remind you that if you're listening to this in real-time, it is mid-July coming up to mid-July of the new financial year here in Australia and just mid-July everywhere else. But I wanted to remind you that group coaching is closing soon. So we will not be running another group coaching program this year. We will open it up again next year. So if you are interested in being part of the Group Coaching Program, you just need to check out mydailybusinesscoach.com/groupcoaching. You'll be able to apply. And we go through an interview process and we basically pull together a really lovely group of 10 small business owners. You can be all over the world. Anyone can join this group. You don't have to be in Australia. However, keep in mind that it'll be running through Australian daylight hours for 12 months. We meet every two weeks. It's just incredible to see people's growth at the end of it or throughout it, and just see these friendships form when people connect. So again, if you wanna be part of that, please get on it soon. I would hate for you to miss out it's at mydailybusinesscoach.com/groupcoaching. Let's get on today's quick tip episode.
So if you have been listening to this podcast for some time, you may have heard me mention all sorts of frameworks, all sorts of kind of ideas, and concepts for business. And one that I've mentioned quite a lot is the buyer cycle and kind of the five stages that people go through when they're transacting with any kind of business and a transaction doesn't always have to be financial. It could be referring somebody to you. It could be downloading a freebie. It could be all sorts of things, but they'll go through these five stages of awareness, research, evaluation, purchase, post-purchase, and advocacy if you've done a good job. And so I've talked about those a lot, and I've talked about different ways that you can increase your money and increase different things. According to how people go through that buyer cycle.
One of the things that are really important to consider, and I think a lot of people don't think about it. And actually, today's episode is kind of inspired by one of my clients. Recently, we were talking about this a lot is the idea, what would you call it? Framework, concept, whatever it is of CRO. So CRO really stands for conversion rate optimization. And it's I guess, a strategy that really aims to get people to convert online. So you could also have a CRO, in person. So what you want people to do is to convert and conversion often gets confused with just sales. Like people think, “The conversion is how many people bought something on your website”. Now it is that it definitely is that, but it's how many people take the action that you want them to take.
So CRO for an e-commerce or may very well mean how many sales, like what's the conversion rate of your product detail pages or what' to the conversion rate for this particular category of product. And so you'll have a percentage that's a hundred people come to the shop. If two people buy your conversion rate for sales will be 2% cuz out of a hundred, two did the action that you wanted to take. However, CRO can also be optimizing other things that you want people to do on the website. So that might be filling in a contact form. It could be downloading something. It could be watching a video through to the end. I mean, there are all sorts of things and actions that you're wanting people to take. And if you think about that buyer cycle people are, are aware of you, then they start researching you and then they evaluate you, and then they purchase.
And the conversion rate is one of the biggest ways that you can see if people are purchasing or purchasing at the percentage that you want them to. But conversion rate optimization is really the idea or the strategy of helping people, guiding people to take the action that you want them to take. And so it's a percentage usually, it's quite small, it's kind of sometimes sterilely small, but even in big retailers where they've got huge programs and systems and, and coding and so much software to try and get people to do something, it can still be really low. So you'll have industry rates of conversion rates depending on what you actually sell. So you can literally Google industry conversion rates for shoes, for apparel, for whatever it is. It is low. But the thing is that without focusing on that, we often need more and more people to come in the funnel or in the buyer cycle.
More people to be aware rather than the people that are already visiting us to convert. And so I wanted to mention this tip tool or tactic. The tactic really is to focus on your CRO. So people sometimes get this confused with SEO or even user experience. So SEO is search engine optimization. So that is enabling that if somebody searches for something online and I think it's something like I looked it up the other day, I think it's like 90% of all visits traffic on a website is because of a search. It starts with a search rather than, people just literally typing in your URL and Google, love them or hate them. They're still the giant in this space. Youtube is also a huge kind of search engine, but I'm getting off track.
SEO is really about driving people to your site. So I often say to people, SEO is similar to like if you had 10,000 people come to a physical shop, that's SEO, it's driven those people to the shop. The issue is that lots of people spend thousands of dollars on SEO agencies and all of that. And it's great, but if they can just get people to the shop, then make sure that that shop is ready. So if you had 10,000 people come to a shop and there was nothing on the shelves, or it was really hard to find a sales assistant or you didn't accept, I don't know credit cards or there are all these other things that may not work. So you could work with an SEO agency and believe me, I've heard so many people come to me and have complained about their O agency.
And I'm like, “Okay, but did you give them objectives that you wanted to hit?” And also you made sure that your website was really working as well as it could because their job is to drive people to your website. It's not always to finish the whole thing off, which comes through conversion rate optimization. So SEO is kind of, it can be in some agencies. They're really awesome. And they look at the whole picture, but a lot of the time people are like, I can get you to rank for these particular keywords or I can get you to rank higher than you are ranking. So that's great. However, just because you get more traffic to the site doesn't mean that that traffic is doing what you want it to do, which is really the people, that traffic is converting or are downloading or taking the action.
And so conversion rate optimization is the other half of that. Now we've got all these people in the shop. How do we make the shop as attractive as possible? Whether it's a shop with products, services, or a mix of both. And so yes, you can focus on the SEO, but without focusing on the CRO as well, sometimes you can feel really let down. And this is what people will say. They'll be like, “I spent all this money with this agency.” And it's like, but the agency kind of did their job. What hasn't happened is that the website hasn't been considered as a whole thing. The other thing that people sometimes confuse CRO with is user experience, which is also called UX. So there are all these acronyms, but UX is really about the user's experience.
So how do people feel when they go through the website? Is it easy to use? Is it easy to find things definitely that go hand in hand with CRO because if you are trying to add something to a cart and you can't even see the add to cart button, which believe me is so often, far down the page, as opposed to adding to cart should always be at the top people before the description because people will see it. And sometimes they're just having an impulse and they just wanna buy it. Don't make me think. I'm getting sidetracked, but CRO is things like overlaps with UX because it is getting people to do something. And user experience is all about guiding people to do things but also letting them enjoy the experience of your website as well.
So if you are not focusing on CRO, if you've never heard of the term CRO, maybe do some digging into it, I'm actually gonna do a longer coaching episode this week. So if you're listening to this in real-time on Tuesday, you can come back, make sure you hit subscribe because on Thursday I'm gonna be going into this in a bit more detail. What sort of things can you do? What are good examples of CRO? What does it mean for different types of businesses? So make sure you hit subscribes. You don't miss that episode on Thursday, Australian time, if you have never heard of CRO or you've never considered it for your business, definitely take today's quick tip episode as a kind of reminder that this is a really important part of your online business, particularly if your in e-commerce or any kind of online retail product, the CRO strategy has to be there.
So that is it for today's quick tip. It's really about opening up your eyes to CRO making you aware of what CRO is. Again, it's conversion rate optimization. Doesn't always have to be sales, but in Thursday's episode, I'll be going into this in more detail. So again, make sure you hit subscribe, but for now, just let yourself sit with the idea of CRO. Are you doing it? Are you actively looking at the buyer cycle for your business and thinking about how do I move people from evaluating that this is right for me, whether it's downloading something, whether it's actually paying for something, whether it's getting in contact, and filling out a form. If you are say an interior designer, how much am I focusing my attention and my efforts on moving them from that to when they actually take the action, which is CRO, conversion rate optimization.
So there you go, another acronym to add to your kind of small business tool belt. Don't feel overwhelmed if you're listening to this and thinking, “Oh my God, another thing I have to learn”, just come back on Thursday and listen to the more in-depth episode, or you can do so much Googling out there and check out conversion rate optimization for your particular industry. But it's definitely something that you need to focus on in order to achieve the rest of your business goals. All right, that is it for today's quick tip episode, you can find the full transcript of this in case you wanna go back through anything I've just said over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/219. And just a reminder again, we will be closing the applications for Group Coaching. This is the last one for the year. So please check that out at mydailybusinesscoach.com/Groupcoaching. Thanks so much. See you next time.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you wanna get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram @mydailybusinesscoach.
