How to Improve a Startup Business with CRO

Starting your own business from the ground up comes with its own unique set of challenges to overcome and ‘firsts’ to face.

To give you and your company the best shot at continued growth and success, it’s helpful to understand every marketing tool in the shed. 

One of the most influential tools startups to utilize while growing your customer base and brand? Conversion Rate Optimization. CRO is the practice of using certain tactics to increase the rate of website visitors who turn into customers. That means adjusting sign-up forms, email subject lines, CTAs, and SEO until you find what works.

CRO is critical to a successful startup marketing department. Startups are typically on tighter budgets than most established companies, so making every dollar count is a must. CRO keeps your budget centered on conversion tactics that provide results.                 

If you’re not already utilizing CRO methods in your daily work, now’s a good time to get started. It’s always a good idea to first evaluate your current state of CRO so you have an understanding of where you need to improve the most and how you might be able to scale back. 

Once you have a benchmark idea of your current status, use the 6 tips below to grow your startup with CRO.

1. Use CRO to Enhance Your Prospects’ Desire

Before your prospects ever get to your website, they’ve built up a desire for something. That’s the whole reason they made their way to your site. Your future buyers want something, and you want to make your business the solution. And that’s the mindset that you’ll need to tap into if you want to convert them from prospects, into leads, and then into customers. 

So, first thing’s first. What does your prospect truly desire? It’s a hard one to answer, but that’s where CRO comes in. If it’s not hard for you to answer, that might be a sign you need to think about it a little harder. Too many CEO’s assume they know what their prospect wants, but they’re still not seeing ideal conversion rates. Usually, that issue lies in their incorrect assumption.

CRO tells you exactly what your audience wants. Once you’ve pulled the data and the research to determine where their desire lies, you can target your audience with specific tactics. The data gathered from split testing and experimenting will help you personalize your site’s content so that it gives your audience what they’ve been looking for.

Once you’re enhancing the desire of every prospect that lands on your page, you’re already setting yourself up for growth.

2. Use CRO to Reduce Frustration

When prospects aren’t converting, there’s no denying that your business suffers. If you’re looking at less-than-ideal conversion rates in your startup, you should take a step back to ask yourself and your team what might be causing the hiccup.

Through CRO, you can test headlines, sign-up forms, and email automation to see what reduces friction between your site and customers, and what leads to more growth in your startup.

3. Use CRO to Gain Traction

Every day you’ll learn something new about your audience and how they respond to different strategies. You’ll be better equipped to make the right marketing decisions for tomorrow based on what you learned today, and the cycle will continue.

Having these small wins each day is a great way to keep the momentum up even when start-up doubts may begin to creep in.

4. Use CRO to Make the Most of the Marketing Budget

One major key to growth? The marketing budget. Yet, even the most robust of marketing budgets won’t do you any good if you’re not spending that money wisely. 

When you spend marketing funds on tactics you hope will work, you’re always running the risk that they won’t bring the results you need. And then what? Money down the drain.

With CRO, you become informed about the motivations and behaviors of your target audience. With this knowledge, you’ll make more strategic marketing moves so that you’re always maximizing the results from each dollar spent.

To put things in perspective, consider this: Start-up A that doesn’t utilize CRO may get 1,000 visitors to their site, with only 100 that convert into customers. Start-up B uses CRO and knows their customer better, so with 1,000 visitors to their site, they’re able to convert 500 of them. 

Guess who’s seeing the most ROI on marketing? You already know the answer.

5. Use CRO to Retain Customers

While CRO is great for helping start-up companies acquire new clients from prospects, it can also help them retain the customers they already have. The longer your company’s relationship with a customer, the deeper you will understand them. 

Once you’ve already acquired a customer, you want to keep selling to them in ways that would benefit them the most and solve their problems. It goes right back to that desire and motivation that brought them to you in the first place.

With deep insights into your customer persona, you’ll be able to cross-sell, upsell, downsell current and past customers. One way to continue gathering these insights and applying them to previously acquired customers is by simply checking in on them with no intention to sell – see what they liked, what they didn’t, and use that information down the road.

6. Use CRO to Improve WOM Marketing

Most people think of CRO strategies and insights as tools digital marketing, but CRO can also increase word-of-mouth marketing. 

Not all WOM strategies are made equal, but it can be hard to tell how yours is doing without tracking behavior and testing to see what works the best. 

By outsourcing CRO specialists or using in-house strategies, you can see which tactics boost your conversion rates the most. Continue to support those efforts rather than leaving WOM up to chance.

CRO: A Start-up’s Best Friend

Tracking your startup’s growth in the early stages is crucial for determining future success. By identifying what work through CRO strategies, you’ll be able to see where your time, energy, and money should be spent for maximized results.