You’ve heard the stories and read the case studies.
A 15% bump in conversion rates by anticipating visitor needs. A 34% increase by focusing on clarity on product pages. And so on.
Now, you’re ready to start your own conversion rate optimisation (CRO) campaign.
The only question is: why should you hire an outside CRO consultant when you can do CRO in-house?
The truth is that conversion rate optimisation is a highly specialised skill. A good CRO juggles design, analytics, copywriting and marketing know-how to create better optimised pages.
But if you’re still on the fence, I have five reasons why you need to hire a CRO consultant instead of doing it in-house.
1. CRO requires mastery over multiple skills
At its heart, CRO is essentially the combination of three skills:
● Design, especially conversion-focused design
● Copywriting
● Analytics
Individually, you might have enough talent in your company to satisfy these three skill requirements.
The problem is that these individual skills are usually heavily isolated. Copywriters know little of design while designers struggle with the basics of analytics.
The result is poor communication and coordination, which ultimately affects your test results. A designer who doesn’t know copywriting principles will struggle to align his design with copy requirements, and an analytics guy with poor design knowledge will struggle to offer design suggestions.
In contrast, CRO consultants usually have a “T-shaped” skillset. They are very strong in one primary skill (such as design) but also have decent knowledge of the other two secondary skills.
This means that CRO consultants can offer much better testing suggestions and work with skilled designers/copywriters/analysts to deliver better results.
2. CRO requires a deep understanding of user psychology
Why do people really buy your products?
What elements get customers to trust you more?
What changes can you make to create a more persuasive brand?
These are all high-level questions that have a profound impact on your conversion rates.
And to answer these questions, you need to go beyond simple tactics; you need to have a thorough understanding of user psychology and persuasion principles.
This is a skill that can’t be easily taught. It requires years of reading, research and practice. A skilled CRO not only knows that social proof boosts conversion rates (i.e. a CRO tactic), but also why and where to use social proof (i.e. user psychology).
When you do CRO in-house, you likely lack this insight into user psychology. This means that your tests will usually be limited to “best practices”. You won’t be able to make the kind of radical changes that actually lead to happier users and better converting sites.
3. CRO consultants can help prioritise testing ideas
One of the biggest problems with running a CRO campaign is figuring out what to test, what to skip.
For example, running a CRO audit might show that you have abnormally high user drop-off on the second page of your checkout process.
Based on the audit, you might have even identified a few things to change, such as:
● Adding more payment methods
● Encouraging users with social proof
● Removing navigation menu for a more streamlined checkout page
● Condensing checkout process into a single page
● Adding guest checkout option
From a lay perspective, you have no idea which of these changes will have the biggest impact. You will eventually be forced to test each of these ideas one by one.
However, because checkout pages get very few views, you’ll have to spend a lot of time testing every variant before you can draw any conclusions.
For example, suppose you have 50 visitors to your checkout page every day. To test social proof on the checkout page, you decide to create five variants (including the control).
This means that at most, you can send 10 visitors/day to each variant.
Since you usually require between 500-1,000 visitors to test any variant to a high degree of confidence, you’ll have to run the test for 50-100 days to test just one idea.
Do this for all five ideas and you’re looking at nearly a year long process just to improve conversions on one page.
Because CRO consultants have extensive experience dealing with cases similar to yours, they can help you prioritise your testing. Instead of testing ideas likely to have negligible impact on the conversion rate, you focus on the “big wins” first.
The result is massive savings and better conversion rates delivered faster.
4. CRO consultants can fill-in your resource gaps
Understand that the CRO process requires a number of topic experts pooling in their results to deliver better conversions.
Several of these skills are highly specialised. For example, you might require a graphic designer to make on-page graphics and a UI/UX designer to create conversion-focused wireframes.
The likelihood that you have in-house expertise for all these specialised skills is very low. You will probably have to hire outside experts and freelancers to deliver results.
Finding highly specialised talent, however, can be difficult and time consuming.
This is where CRO consultants come into the picture.
Since CRO consultants deal with a number of clients across different verticals, they usually have a strong network of freelancers with highly specialised skills.
If you have an obvious resource gap (say, a lack of SaaS copywriters on your team), CRO consultants can help you fill it through their network.
5. CRO consultants can help zero-in on overall strategy
One of the things businesses that attempt to do CRO in-house often struggle with is strategy.
Sure, you can get your copywriters and designers to work together to create page variants, but how do you create an overall strategy for testing? Who do you ask to capture quantitative data, interview customers, and audit your site? How do you reconcile your tests with your business strategy?
This is something CRO consultants can help with.
CRO isn’t just a tactic to improve website conversion rates; it’s a process to improve the overall business. When you interview customers to learn about their pain points, you don’t just learn about your site’s weaknesses; you learn about your business’ failings and strengths as well.
Doing CRO in-house means that you will never have a person interacting with different aspects of your business and aligning it with your conversion goals.
And more often than not, a solid understanding of strategy is what sets apart a failed CRO campaign from a successful one.
Over to you
Conversion rate optimisation is a complicated, multi-step process that requires expertise over multiple marketing fields. While you can certainly get in-house people to create your designs and write your copy, you still need a CRO consultant to bring all your in-house resources together, prioritise your tests and chart your overall strategy.
By Ayat Shukairy, co-founder of Invesp
You can find Ayat's presentation on improving conversion rates in the Engagement & Experiential Theatre at 3pm at Integrated Live on 17 November, but you'll have to register for your free ticket first:
PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.
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