CRO or conversion rate optimisation is becoming more mainstream, partly due to more coverage in digital marketing blogs and partly thanks to the selection of great CRO tools currently available. But CRO isn’t just about changing the colour of a few buttons and expecting to see massive improvements in your conversion rate. You can test any element of your site from text, imagery, colour and layout – in fact knowing what to test can be half the battle. We’ll be posting some more detailed posts about CRO with real results in the coming weeks.

In the meantime I thought it’d be cool to take a look at conversion rate optimisation using cinemagraphs. Just a light-hearted post inspired by Chris Dyson but I imagine this could be one of the early experiences many people have with CRO 🙂

It’s 9:00am and your boss asks why the site conversion rate is just 0.5%…

You guess that’s bad so you head off to Google to find out what you can do about it…

It seems that CRO is the answer, tweaking and changing site elements to encourage more conversions…

You try to choose something to test but there’s just too many elements…

So you decide to use ‘scientific methodologies’ to select some changes…

You ask the dev team to make the changes, but they…seem…busy…

So you try to make the changes yourself…the dev team notices this and are unhappy…

However, you find a way to edit the code without them noticing…

The change is live for a week. You check the conversion rate just a couple of times…

But your boss appears less patient…

You tell the rest of the marketing team about the CRO test. They seem thrilled too…

Finally the conversion rate goes up a little. You’re expecting…

But turns out the ‘under the radar’ change you made broke the site on iPad…the boss uses an iPad…

The boss, who now bears a striking resemblance to Jack Nicholson, doesn’t like it when the site breaks…

So you return to your desk, looking for inspiration…

…and find someone willing to help – beardy Dave from the Design department…

He tells you about software that lets’s you manage CRO tests easily – it comes with great reporting…

You suddenly feel in control, strangely powerful…

You use the software and carefully monitor the results…

The software helps you run more tests and generate a load more orders, things are busy…

Happy with your efforts, you head to the bar for a well earned drink…

The next day your boss, who now looks suspiciously like Clint Eastwood, seems happy…

And now you’re a CRO legend – the one person people turn to when they want to squeeze more out of the website…

If you’re in this position and find yourself hunting for CRO software, we recommend and use Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely🙂 Both top bits of software, just install one script then the CRO world is your oyster!

P.S Before a deluge of clever commentators notice, not all the gifs above are strictly cinemagraphs (the Jay and Silent Bob image is just a looping gif really) but hopefully it still made you smile!

Cinemgraphs credits: Tech Noir Cinemgraph Collection The Ultra Linx Tripwire Head Like an Orange Buzzfeed Superwhite & Hongkiat

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