What CRO Looks Like in the Wild (Plus Successful Examples)

Marketers use conversion rate optimization (or CRO) to boost the efficiency of their existing digital strategies. The aim of any CRO campaign is to take an audience already in the sales funnel and amplify the total revenue per user by eliminating weak points in the conversion process. When you see an app deliver bug fixes, a site update to become more mobile-friendly, or a once-complicated checkout process becoming streamlined, you’re likely witnessing CRO in action.

Here’s why it’s worth deepening your understanding of conversion optimization, how it can assist just about any campaign, and which successful examples of CRO can prove instructive when it comes to implementing changes within your own business.

Why CRO is Important to Digital Marketing Efforts

One of the big advantages of CRO is its focus on meaningful metrics. Picture an upper-funnel awareness campaign driving audiences to your ecommerce website in huge numbers, only to create nothing more than a blip in total sales. In a sense the campaign proved successful — it located and attracted a large volume of qualified users as intended and drove them to your site — but too many inefficiencies and gaps elsewhere the sales process failed to deliver a healthy ROAS.

An emphasis on CRO identifies these gaps (which can be anything from lengthy or broken checkouts to poor mobile UI) and gets the most out of your otherwise-healthy campaigns.

Benefits of a Successful CRO Plan

By uncovering flaws in your conversion process, CRO exposes specific problem areas in your customers’ path to purchase representing the most room for growth. Maybe a website is losing visitors just before checkout because it lacks a guest checkout option, or critical landing pages load too slowly and contain too many irrelevant products to hold a user’s interest. The task of conversion optimization can be applied to just about any aspect of your marketing structure, and the benefits can be felt across your entire campaign setup.

The digital advertising space is a complex ecosystem of KPIs, platforms, channels, strategies, attribution models, and rules to win at SEO and shifting trends. The biggest benefit of effective CRO is its ability to cut through that noise, maximizing the value of each of your current strategies and elevating bottom-line performance.

3 Successful Examples of CRO in the Wild (and What They Can Teach Us)

1. Highrise Upped Its Conversions by 102% Just by Being Personable

It’s a tough balancing act determining just how much information on a landing page is the right amount to prove useful without being overwhelming. If there’s anything we can learn from Highrise’s now-famous example, it’s to err on the side of more inviting design aesthetics.

Considering a relatively simple redesign of the task manager’s conversion page to cut needless text and include a woman’s smiling face increased the site’s conversion rate by 102.5%, it’s safe to assume a focus on human elements is sometimes all it takes to encourage greater trust in your brand. Customers like knowing there are real people behind company branding, and good things happen when site design prioritizes people over a dizzying block of text.

2. L’Axelle Discovered the Power of Actionable Word Choice

There are countless examples of improved UI and design increasing sales across ecommerce sites, but we don’t want to overlook the impact our friendly neighborhood copywriters can have on a campaign. Take cosmetics brand L’Axelle’s underarm sweat pad campaign for example — its former use of “Feel fresh without sweat marks” wasn’t achieving results, due to a rather indirect CTA. A simple ad copy swap to “Put an end to sweat marks!” increased cart adds by 93%.

Sometimes, all it takes to drive customers to check out a product is a call to action that’s actionable.

3. Intuit Increased Order Value by 43% with Better Customer Support

If smart design and intentional ad copy can boast such staggering effects on performance, imagine what the addition of 24-hr customer support can do.

Not only did software giant Intuit enjoy an uptick in conversion rate by adding live chat and chatbot options to its base site — by facilitating better interactions between brand and customer, overall satisfaction with the company increased, as did the average order value.