CRO Is More Than Button Color Tests
Red, blue, or green? There’s no debate that button colors are a great way to begin testing on your website, but it’s imperative that brands don’t get stuck on this singular aspect of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Part of shifting consumer demands and increased privacy regulations include a push for more holistic online experiences that authentically meet audience needs.
Brands need UX design and website optimization, more than ever.
of consumers says that they are unlikely to return to a website that does not provide a satisfactory user experience. | of consumers say that the experience a company provides is as important as the product and services themselves. |
CRO focuses on how to drive website visitors to perform a specific, desired action. While it certainly includes confirming what color CTA leads to more clicks, the true power of CRO lies in determining how to speak to a unique customer base in a way that’s most meaningful to them. Like everything digital, innovation is needed to experience continuous growth. That’s where an advanced CRO strategy comes in.
At Rise, we’ve secured success for our clients by recommending strategies and actions that depart from the standard execution — and demonstrate long-term impact.
Rise’s iterative approach uses data to research, develop, analyze, and learn. The resulting recommendations become just part of an overarching CRO cycle, one that goes well beyond button colors.
Here are some of our tips on how to optimize your website conversion rates, and more!
Tips for Testing Beyond Button Colors
1. Establish your CRO ‘north star’.
First, you need to define what you want to learn from your testing. What does success look like for your brand? It’s important to start by establishing a single KPI that will be most indicative of growth. This will act as your ‘north star’ that unifies efforts, while providing an efficient way to analyze the data. The insights you glean from testing will allow you to determine what does and doesn’t work against that KPI, so you can then maximize your resources and budget accordingly.
2. Use testing to see things from your customer’s POV.
How does your website design align with what your users want? What you think your customers want, and what your customers actually want, may be two entirely different things. It’s easy to default to focusing your CRO strategy solely on increasing conversion rate — but true impact is seen when you prioritize your user experience as one-of-a-kind.
Use testing to determine a fact-based, user-centric experience. That way, you can grasp an authentic understanding of a smooth website journey, and not just what it is assumed to be.
Here are four powerful ways CRO can help you to discover your customer’s POV:
- Five second testing helps you establish what a customer sees on your webpage in the first five seconds, and how they perceive the purpose of the page.
- Heatmaps share a view of where and how visitors interact with a specific webpage.
- Exit surveys allow users to share first-party information on why they are taking the actions they do, and how to address their behavioral patterns as they exit.
- Qualitative interviews. Conducting these one-on-one interviews lets you discover influential content, opportunities for improvement, notable pain points, and the overall journey a user takes on your website. Interviews like these will identify the best ways to optimize your website in a way that accurately speaks to your user base.
3. Keep your audience on a macro level until post-test analysis.
Being able to see how different audience segments engage with your test provides granular data that helps secure a variety of insights. For example, how did new users experience the test versus returning users?
However, it’s harder to gather accurate data when you segment too much, too soon. Plus, rushing your segmentation causes the test to take much longer to reach statistical significance. You should wait to review any segmented data until the full test is completed, and you are conducting a post-test analysis.
If the whole test is statically significant and showing a positive result — for example, the overall audience responded positively to your newest test — take the next step to explore additional segments, like how mobile users engaged. Knowing how and when to leverage well-timed segmentation provides important learnings that lay the groundwork for future tests.
4. Build on each test for further learnings.
Testing is crucial to creating the optimal user experience, but only if it is on an ongoing basis. Building momentum from each test is key to constantly knowing what website experiences resonate best with your target audiences. That’s why we recommend an iterative testing approach: It will allow you to garner more impactful results in your analysis, and provide key historical context that can shape future strategy.
Optimizing for the Future
When you move past the color spectrum and focus on the full range of web design testing, your brand is able to identify conversion rate optimization best practices that deliver impactful results — all while informing ongoing strategy decisions that maintain momentum. Aligning your KPIs, relying on robust testing practices, and focusing on effectively segmenting your audiences enables you to consistently create the best user experiences on your website. A seamless digital journey for them means positive and lasting results for you.