Conversion Rate Optimization : The Complete Guide for Course Designers

Sep 15, 2022

Conversion Rate Optimization is the answer to cutting out the clutter in the Internet and making your online footprint so that your content is found easily. If potential customers visit your virtual real estate which is your website, all information should be presented the visitors in a manner that is valuable and helps move ahead in their customer journey.

  • It turns out that over 50 percent of landing page pages aren't properly checked to improve conversion rates.
  • Further, according to CrazyEgg the most well-known analyzer of conversions, the majority of websites tend to have bounce rates of between 26 and 70%. The result is that the majority of visitors abandoning the site without clicking on the CTA button.
  • On the bright side, research also shows that a website's ROI has potential to grow by 30% if it is equipped with a conversion rate Optimization (CRO) budget that is used to maximize conversions.

Glossary:

What exactly is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Also known as conversion optimization, encompasses the gamut of processes which can be implemented to enhance the performance of your website's inbound traffic. Effectiveness here implies skillfully navigating website visitors for taking desired actions and converting them into qualified leads for your business/organization.

Thus, the conversion rate is the proportion of visitors to your website that turn into leads. Conversion Optimization will ensure that your web visitors respond, often through clicking on the call-to-action (CTA) click.

What is the reason why conversion rate matter?

      Therefore, to increase the impact and return on investment of your combined marketing activities in terms increasing leads while reducing acquisition costs and attaining your revenue goals, funnel optimization by focusing on CRO matters.    

A powerful conversion rate optimization (CRO) technique

In order to improve your conversion rates It is essential to know what's happening in the minds of your website customers and the ways they use your website. The knowledge gained will place your website in a position of advantage to know which conversion bottlenecks are the most important and then address them through a well-defined CRO strategy.

Optimized Conversion Rate Optimization strategies aid in increasing the probability of web visitors turning into leads and, in turn, paying customers. So no surprise that marketers focus on enhancing the conversion rate of their website, and 69% of marketers consider conversion of leads as their top priority.

A Conversion Rate Optimization method will be effective if it's customized to the needs of your individual website pages. Intuitively, the goal of an "About" page is always distinct from that of the "Courses" page or "Blog" area. A cookie-cutter approach, simply replicating the same approach for all of your online course website pages, doesn't work.

  Here are some tips to be aware of when you start to design your conversion rate optimization strategy:  

  • The first step is to identify the most important pages of your site for your information product.
      Most of the time, the pages that are the homepage or websites for courses are what matter to most course creators. But, services and blog pages tend to do pretty well and should not be ignored.
  • Leverage a good tool for heat mapping to determine specific areas on these websites where users are likely to click if there was the CTA buttons. Heat mapping tools typically represent a visitor's actions by visually showing the journey of their clicks as well as hovering, scrolling and even eye tracking.
  • Create and insert Calls To Action (CTA) at optimized spots. Additionally, you should support your CTA buttons with the strength of compelling copywriting conjunction with a site that delivers a good user experience.
  • HTML0 Leverage the available tools and techniques for Conversion Optimization (more on these below) to keep track of your conversion rates on a continuous basis.

Three Conversion Rate Optimization Formulas that you should know before you implement CRO strategies

The first step in determining what's going on behind the scenes before people decide to click the CTAs your website has embedded your website is to establish a number of key performance indicators (KPIs). This understanding helps to clearly identify where you are and the direction you'd like to reach by implementing your optimization strategies.

Some KPIs to track include the Conversion Rate and the number of new Net Customers, and Lead Goal.

1. Conversion Rate

Conversion could be described as any action that you wish your visitors to take. It could be the number of users signing up for your newsletter, buying your product, online course, etc. You need to have an agreed upon metric for conversion. Once you have the metric you can measure, calculating the conversion rate is simple.

Find out the total number of visitors coming to your site. Based on this, you can determine the number of people who convert.

After that, you can Divide the conversions by the total number of visitors coming to your site.

Finally, multiply the number 100 and you will get your conversion rate in terms of percentage.

  The formula of Conversion Rate = [Total Conversions ] x Total website visitors] x 100  

Conversion Rate Formula

2. The total number of new Net customers

The metric shows your actual potential to grow and is dependent on your goals for revenue. Therefore, if you want to obtain a true estimation of the Number of Net New Customers you need to identify the goal of your revenue first.

After you've got this figure, you may then divide that amount by the present selling price to calculate the quantity of new customers. You may use an average sales price if you're selling across different price points.

  The formula of net New Customers = Goal for Revenue (Road Goal) / Average Sales Price  

Net New Customers Formula

3. Lead Goals

Lead goals, also known as "lag goals", are your everyday success stories that act as a way to reach the larger goals of revenue. In light of your performance today in terms of conversions, there are two approaches to approach improving conversion performance.

One is improving the number of customers you have converted, as per your existing traction. The other is maintaining the conversion rate but attracting increased traffic which, in turn, leads to higher conversions. The first one is superior and better optimized way.

  The formula for Lead Goal = [Number of New Customers / Lead-to-Customer Rate[Number of New Customers / Lead-to-Customer Rate  

  where Lead-to-Customer Rate is [Total Leads/Total Customers*  

Lead Goals Formula

Now, let's move towards learning more about strategies for optimizing conversion.

Four essential Methods to Optimize Conversion Rate

1. A/B Test -

A/B testing helps you compare two versions of a web page and see which one performs more effectively. The website is presented to a randomly selected group and another version to another random group of control. Finally, the effectiveness of both pages is measured between two groups.

2. Lead Flow -

Lead Flow is the process that helps your leads move to move through your sales funnel, and helping them make a conversion in a systematic manner. It's an essential part of a structured lead management strategy and assists in guiding users to click your CTA button.

Lead flow can vary depending the source of your website traffic and the CTA buttons your visitors need to click. One of the most important aspects in lead flow the assignment of values to leads. Once you know who your most valuable leads are, you can invest more resources to help to convert. In this way, you can allocate your time and resources towards converting your most promising visitors without wasting limited resources on visitors who aren't likely to convert.

In case valuable leads do not convert and you want to fix any flaws that you're in a position to recognize. We've discussed qualitative tools to address such issues below. The tools that you can use to get qualitative information will help you see an insider's view of the people who visit your website and how they are thinking and feeling regarding your offerings and services.

3. Testing Landing Page -

A landing page refers to every website whose primary goal is to convert visitors to buyers. Visitors may visit your landing pages after following links from advertising, paid ads, social media sites, and so on.

But, not all landing pages are the same and could not perform well in conversion. Thus, using the above A/B test is crucial to optimize landing pages.

For example, you can try and replace the web form with chatbots and see which one performs better during A/B testing. AI-enabled chat boxes usually outperform traditional web forms in most landing page tests.

It is also possible to enhance your landing page by noting the most important elements you need to evaluate. They could include compellingly written sales message, a crisp headline, as well as pricing strategies for the course's levels to online course creators. It is also possible to check your landing page's images video, fonts, and style, as well as the layout and design of the page.

4. Conversion Copywriting -

The basis of conversion copywriting is knowing your intended audience and how they act. This is based on analyzing existing website pages, running A/B tests on website copy, as well as taking feedback from customers seriously. Like other processes for optimizing conversions it is possible to use the power of heat mapping and click tracking to determine which versions of your content perform the best in terms of conversion rates.

To implement conversion copywriting on your online course website, make sure that you have different variations of the copy and try it among your target viewers. Then it is your choice to choose the version that is most likely to get clicks on your CTA. Continue to edit and modify your content as new information becomes available to you.

Which tools are best to use in implementing the Conversion Rate Optimization strategy?

There are several quantitative and qualitative tools that are available to you when you implement the strategy of optimizing your conversion rates. Five of them are essential tools for each of the categories that should be sufficient for the implementation of a complete CRO strategy to increase the size of your online course.

These are five quantifiable tools for implementing the CRO approach

Numbers have always been a reliable measure of efficiency. The tools that quantify help you to understand the mathematics behind the number of visitors use your website in the form of numbers, which makes them integral to CRO.

  1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics forms the gold benchmark for mining out details on your website's performance as well as customer behavior in it. Installing it on your website is easy. After it is set up, it is a great platform to understand your customers regardless of the device they use around the metrics of bounce rates, how long they stay on the site, and many more.

The information gathered from Google Analytics enable an understanding of how visitors tend to interact with the content on your website. It also generates machine-learning-enabled reports to reveal better and deeper insight. It also allows you to export shareable reports that are quite useful to share with any specialized professionals you may be working with to improve the performance of your website like SEO conversion.

  2. KISSMetrics

KISSMetrics is an improved tool designed for the user that helps you understand more about the web users you are targeting.

Apart from bounce rate and information on time-on-site In addition, you will be able to gain detailed insights about actual user behavior on the site. This allows you to connect your data and reports with real-life users, which makes it excellent to integrate with your CRM tools in case you use the tools to market your courses.

If you're someone for who quantitative tools can be intimidating, KISSMetrics can make it quite easy for you to understand the story of the figures.

  3. Clicky

For course creators If your target audience includes users who reside in certain areas, such as countries within the European Union, you are bound to follow regulations of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements when it comes to collecting information from users.

The Clicky tool is GDPR-compliant and a analytical tool that not only safeguards the privacy of your web users but also generates valuable reports for the website's owner to increase your conversion rates. Clicky is an excellent tool to gain accurate insights about page views, JavaScript events, actions made while browsing the site as well as other information.

  4. Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics is powered by predictive analytics. It makes it easier for you to know the reason behind each conversion. This lets you adjust the marketing strategies you already have and spend your money wisely. Although most tools offer valuable details about the activities of website users, Adobe Analytics reveals what occurs just prior to when a user converts.

Pre-conversion behaviour is an essential and valuable insight that can help determine why people choose to click on those CTA buttons.

  5. MixPanel

Understanding your power users is the key to generating higher sales and building revenues. Courses online usually need subscriptions, and frequent purchase of learning modules and material. Therefore, it's important to know who your most powerful users are as well as what make they stay on your web pages for longer. MixPanel helps you to link the behaviours of visitors to your site to retention strategies, and design ongoing customer nurture strategies.

There are five quality methods to help implement a CRO strategy

Qualitative tools are also quite important as they reveal essential insight into the reasons why people act in the manner they do. Contrary to quantitative tools that give reports or numbers based on various metrics These tools can help to understand user behaviour patterns using a descriptive way.

Please remember that both quantitative and qualitative tools are compatible with one another.

  1. Qualaroo

Additionally, it will not affect the speed of your website - a factor that can hinder conversion goals for several. It is possible to use Qualaroo to ask your visitors for feedback regarding your website as well as gain insight into how they feel about your online courses. Plugging in this feedback, you are able to implement changes so that you're better prepared for success.

  2. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is an ideal tool to build surveys or questionnaires that seek direct answers from customers.

If you've got your website contacts and email addresses, you are able to send them a link to your SurveyMonkey questionnaire with questions. Once they participate in your survey, you will have your responses recorded on a delightfully-designed form. As a tool, SurveyMonkey can be integrated on your website, making collecting feedback and data fast and simple.

  3. CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is perfect to know where visitors go to and the places they don't.

The application on the web takes a snapshot of your website and provides five distinct reports, out of which one called the Heatmap Report is the most sought-after. This report informs you which webpage areas have the highest click activity rates. It can help you place your CTA button on the best locations. Other reports furnished by it include insights on where to put your CTA in accordance with scrolling behavior and colour-coded information of specific clicks, also known as Confetti Report. Confetti Report.

  4. UserTesting

Your website visitors can be your most reliable source of information regarding what they think of your website. UserTesting offers you videos of actual people speaking out about their experiences regarding your site as they use it. It helps you gain quantitative and subjective assessment of your website performance. For instance, if your online course is challenging to navigate, then videos produced via UserTesting can give away that data.

  5. Olark

Olark is an application for live chat that allows you to connect with your customers , and address their queries in real-time. The tool provides live chat insight that helps to understand how your customers view your site and online course. Additionally, it lets you keep notes on your live chats, and utilize user feedback to help improve the quality of your online courses as well as your web.

A quick recap of Conversion Optimization Methodologies for Creators of Online Courses

Although every site and course is different however, there are some standard rules for optimizing websites that provide online training.

  1. You can have a well-functioning site with the most important pages such as Homepage, About Us, Products and Services, Blog as well as Contact.
  2. Identify the audience for your online course and put an effective digital marketing plan to implement. This can include both advertising on social media and pay ads.
  3. Clearly define who your primary target audience is , and continue making changes to your site based on ongoing A/B tests , as well as feedback from your users.
  4. Make use of both quantitative and qualitative tools to simplify and automate your CRO strategy. This will aid in gaining more insight into what your potential customers are, and what you need to accomplish to ensure they stay in your site over a longer period of time.

Optimizing conversion rate is an effective practice that can help leads progress efficiently through your sales funnel. It requires the time and energy of an ongoing endeavor. As a course creator you may find it overwhelming to manage all the things.

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