The ultimate guide to choosing the perfect CRO supplier
Are you attracting plenty of visitors to your site, only to see them fall away without taking action? CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) is an important part of your digital marketing strategy, and it focuses on ways to increase the number of people who take action when they visit your site.
The action you want them to take will vary from business to business, but some typical actions might include:
- Booking a call
- Buying a product or service
- Filling out an enquiry form
- Downloading a lead magnet (such as a free PDF)
- Subscribing to a newsletter
Brands often find that, despite investing heavily in a beautiful website, it is failing to convert people. That’s where a CRO specialist comes in, and in this article we’ll tell you how to narrow down your options to find the perfect CRO supplier for you.
Browse our directory of CRO experts
What is CRO?
In the simplest of terms, a good CRO strategy converts more of your website’s traffic into customers, and it’s well worth investing in. After all, what’s the point of designing a great website and investing in SEO and PPC if it’s not going to generate profit for you? CRO is very popular with ecommerce sites looking to increase sales, but it can also be important if you’re a brand that’s looking to generate more leads.
CRO can be very helpful in identifying stumbling blocks or conversion choke-points around your site – there could very well be a part of the site that is letting you down in terms of user experience. So, while CRO is a very useful diagnostic tool, it’s not uncommon that you’ll need to spend time improving certain areas of your website and/or enhancing your content and user experience to make a big difference to your conversion rates. A CRO specialist will identify areas for improvement and test changes using a range of techniques, all the while focused on the main goal: to drive conversions.
What does a CRO strategy factor in?
A CRO strategy focuses on 2 core areas; qualitative and quantitative data:
- Qualitative data helps you better understand visitor motivations and can include user surveys and research, interviews and exit surveys.
- Quantitative data uses tools, metrics and analytics to understand visitor behaviour on your site. This could include heat map analysis (showing where visitors spend most of their time on a webpage), funnel management and data segmentation.
What should a CRO supplier do for you?
When you approach a CRO expert for help, it’ll be because you need them to help you boost the number of visitors who take desirable actions on your website – so you’ll need to be clear on what action you’re looking for – what does ‘conversion’ mean to you? Sales? Leads? Or other engagement such as building a community of subscribers? A good CRO provider will help you understand this if you’re not quite sure.
Conversion rates are very easy to measure using tools like Google Analytics, so they should ask you about what’s working and what’s not in your current CRO strategy. They’ll consider how you currently record and measure conversions – and whether that’s the best method based on what you want to achieve.
Be wary of any CRO supplier who says they can guarantee an increase in conversion rates on your first call without first analysing your site and how it currently performs – as with any digital marketing services there are lots of caveats to success.
What makes a good CRO supplier?
A great CRO practitioner will listen carefully to your needs and ask you pertinent questions to fully understand what you want to achieve from your CRO strategy. They’ll take time to understand the metrics behind your business before recommending a strategy that will make a difference to you. They will have a range of skills from content enhancement through to website design and data analytic skills – or they will have a team around them that can offer these different skills to build a comprehensive CRO strategy.
How do CRO suppliers price, and what factors affect this?
Most CRO consultants have a few packages to choose from, ranging from basic to bespoke, and this will depend on how much work will be involved and how far you want to dig into the detail.
If you’re working with a CRO agency you should expect to be billed monthly and this may include a commitment to a contracted amount of time (e.g. 6 or 12 months). A CRO freelancer may be able to offer more flexible payment terms, including charging by the hour. No matter which CRO expert you engage, make sure you fully understand their pricing terms and what’s included for that before committing.
If extra work is required outside of your agreement, for example, if extra A/B testing is required or more user surveys are needed, then there may be an additional fee added.
What’s the difference between using a freelance CRO consultant and a CRO agency?
The main benefit of using a CRO freelance consultant over an agency is that their fees will likely be considerably lower. If you’re looking for a budget-friendly CRO strategy, this is probably the route for you. But, if the stakes are higher and you have more marketing budget to invest, then an agency will be able to offer multiple skills to help make your website the best it can be, including project managers, data analysts, developers, designers and copywriters.
Marketing Supermarket’s top tips for finding the perfect CRO supplier for you
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Ask the right questions
Before committing to a CRO expert, ask them to review your website and give their opinion on which web pages they would focus on optimising, which tools and processes they would use and where they would recommend you focus your budget.
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Check their social proof
Online reviews, testimonials and case studies will tell you a lot about the quality of the CRO expert. To make things easier, you’ll find all of these on their Marketing Supermarket profile.
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Understand how they will communicate with you
How will they report, and how regularly? Who will be your main point of contact and what sort of response times can you expect?
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Know what you’re looking for
It will help to know which metrics you want to increase and what you want to get out of your CRO strategy before you start shopping around.
Why use Marketing Supermarket to help you choose your CRO supplier?
Marketing Supermarket saves you time and money by helping you narrow down your choices depending on what’s important to you, what your budget is and what sort of timeframe you’re working with. We’ve developed a set of questions which are quick and easy to answer, but that will ensure that you only spend time speaking with CRO freelancers or agencies who are able to help you with your specific requirements, and that can supply these services within your budget.
Use our free and simple tool to find and compare CRO experts, and check out our guide on how to compare CRO suppliers to help you make your choice.