To do any job right, you need the right tools, whether you’re building an adult treehouse or optimizing your conversion rates (we’d rather be doing the former too).
But conversion rate optimization (CRO) matters to your marketing ROI. For every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is invested in converting them. So, a substantial chunk of the budget is dedicated to generating leads, while only a small part is used to actually turn those leads into customers. That’s a massive budget discrepancy, which probably explains why only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates.
Maximize your CRO budget with CRO tools that will get you the most bang for your buck. Here are a few we recommend for ecommerce marketing strategies and websites.
Usability Testing Tools
If your customers can’t easily read and understand the written and visual elements of your website, product pages, and checkout, they won’t convert. Usability tests examine the basics of your website. Here are some online tools to test the overall usability of these marketing elements.
Readable
Use Readable to increase the readability of your landing page copy, blog posts, or email copy. The service tests your copy for unnecessary words, technical jargon, and passive voice. These bad writing practices stand as verbal barriers between your audience and your content. Readable.io will grade score your copy and indicating trouble areas. You can score your entire website or a single PDF.
GRT Calculator
The Golden Ratio is the mathematically perfect measure of proportion, which gives viewers the most pleasing experience. Since your page layout and text blocks are also visual, you can apply the Golden Ratio to it too. The Golden Ratio Typography (GRT) Calculator is a mouthful, but this tool will have your copy layout matching golden ratio standards in no time. Input your current font type, size, and the GRT Calculator will output the optimal line height and column width to make your copy easier to read.
Five Second Tests
With the free Five Second Test tool, you can create small focus groups of users to see if your website pages are quickly communicating the right messages. Upload a screenshot of the page(s) you want to test, and the service will show them to participants for five seconds. Then it will give them a short survey, asking questions like these:
- What’s the purpose of the page?
- What are the main elements you recall?
- Who do you think the intended audience is?
- Did the design/brand appear trustworthy?
- What was your impression of the design?
Five seconds is about the limit for making a first impression with online visitors. Five-second impressions give you valuable feedback to test against your expectations and to make usability adjustments that increase conversions.
Optimize With A/B Testing Tools
Split or A/B testing is a must if you’re going to move the needle on your conversion rate. The main goal of A/B testing is to minimize your marketing guesswork. But just running two versions of a landing page and measuring which converted the best isn’t the end of CRO. Both landing page options could still be sub-optimal versions—it’s just that one is less bad at converting. So, you have to dig deeper. Here are some A/B tools that help you throw out the guesswork and get down to increasing conversions where it matters.
Unbounce
If you’re looking for an entire A/B testing solution, Unbounce will give you plenty of tools and options for testing your marketing strategies. The platform comes with page builder tools for branding and designing your own landing pages, pop-ups, and sticky bars. You can create A/B variants of these assets and make small adjustments to headings, button placements, and forms. Run the tests, then interpret your results. All-in-one platforms like Unbounce are perfect for businesses that don’t have developer resources. With these A/B testing services, you build and test your assets on the platform’s website.
A/B Test Calculator
Even if your A/B test shows your email respondents are converting better with one email over another, that doesn’t mean the results are statistically relevant. The difference could just be random chance. Use the A/B Test Calculator to see if your results are worth doubling down on.
Headline Analyzer
Your page title or blog header tag is the first thing the majority of shoppers will see. So, your headlines need to meet customer expectations. Use the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer to increase the conversion power of your headlines. The analyzer looks at the overall structure, grammar, and readability of your headline. And it even scores the emotional connotations of your titles, suggesting revisions if they fail to excite, delight, or intrigue.
CTA Button Generator
Your call-to-action button is the key to conversion. It literally holds the conversion act up like a flashing neon sign for your customers to see—“Buy Now”, “Subscribe”, and “Get Started.” What your CTA button says, what it looks like, and where it’s placed changes its effectiveness. So, study call-to-action button best practices, then use the CTA Button Generator to customize your A/B versions.
Dive Deep With Data Analytics Tools
Analytics tools underpin your CRO by showing you insights into customer behavior, where traffic is coming from, and what channels are working. Data-driven insights help you find CRO opportunities. The better your data, the more accurate your CRO strategy.
Paid analytics platforms like Glew.io generate detailed reports — and they build them on their own servers, not yours. This way, you won’t slow down your page load times with heavy data processing. Here are some other analytics tool options.
Google Analytics
Use Google Analytics to get conversion metrics like cost per conversion, a total number of sessions, or time-on-page. With Google Analytics, you can drill down into device types to see what browsers or mobile devices aren’t converting well. There’s likely a patch or update that could increase your overall conversion rate for older versions with bugs. You can also create custom reports that locate conversions based on the source of your traffic. From there, you can allocate more resources to those areas or optimize your messaging.
Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is a customer engagement platform that analyzes customer data with the goal of increasing conversions. With Kissmetrics you can see all of your customer behavior analytics, audience segmentation, and email campaigns in one place.
Kissmetrics tracks people, not just page views. Google Analytics can also track individual customers. However, it takes some skill and advanced knowledge to pull it off. Although Kissmetrics doesn’t have an A/B testing feature, it can easily integrate with third-party split testing services like Unbounce or Optimizely.
Crazy Egg
If you’re looking for an affordable and effective analytics solution, Crazy Egg is a good option. Crazy Egg is a paid marketing and analytics platform that aims to reduce shopping cart abandonment, maximize registrations, and increase subscriptions. Crazy Egg offers visual reports and heat maps that show where customers are coming from, what they view and use on your site, and suggestions for optimizing conversions. The platform also anonymously tracks individual site visitors so you can dissect their every move. As a bonus, Crazy Egg also has A/B testing features, an easy-to-use page editor, and analytics reports to track results.
Uncover Customer Attitudes With Surveys
Maximizing your conversion rate requires an in-depth understanding of your customers’ attitudes toward your brand and your products. Here are some survey tools that’ll shine some light on your customers’ feelings.
SurveyMonkey
Create customized surveys to send to a variety of audience segments with SurveyMonkey. With a service like SurveyMonkey, you can run your own market research and get instant feedback from customers. And you don’t need a developer. Build surveys and track results right on SurveyMonkey’s platform. Create surveys that look at broad metrics like a Net Promoter Score or ask questions about website design.
Google Forms
Google Forms features unlimited surveys and responses. There are many themes to choose from, and you can customize the survey forms, adding images and videos. Google Forms is the only free survey software with skip logic, which is a feature that changes what question or page a respondent sees next based on how they answer the current question.
Skip logic (aka conditional branching) keeps you from overwhelming respondents with irrelevant questions by skipping unneeded sections of your survey for them. This increases the accuracy of your surveys and cuts down on dropout rates.
Improve the Customer Experience With Site Speed Tools
Over half of your store’s visitors will leave your site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Slow page load speeds can kill your bottom line. Make sure you’re meeting customer expectations by testing your site with these speed tools.
GTMetrix
Use GTMetrix website tester and reports to not only find your loads times but identify your biggest speed problems. A GTMetrix test will grade your site and rank your issues from most to least impactful. Plus, the service gives you suggestions on how to fix the problems. Some of the issues are easy for the average store owner to resolve themselves, while others may require developer services. But you’ll at least know where to start when trying to increase your conversion rate.
Pingdom
Pingdom is a monitoring service that keeps critical conversion points like signups, logins, or checkouts working fast. Their free website speed test will grade your page load time and give you optimization suggestions. For a fee, Pingdom will monitor your site 24/7 and notify you of any problems.
The paid service also comes with reporting features that show you speed rates over time, letting you find problem areas quickly and identify the root causes. Use Pingdom to smooth out your website interactions and keep a consistent experience—a prerequisite to converting customers.
Get an All-in-One Service Instead
All of these tools are indispensable to converting more visitors to customers. But instead of buying individual tools, save money and time by investing in a hosting service that comes standard with CRO tools for page load speed monitoring, analytics, and cart abandonment solutions.
Check out our fully managed WooCommerce hosting plans to get started today.
