Standing out from the crowd is crucial if you want to become a successful freelance developer .

The only way to do this is by investing in new, applicable skills that businesses will value.

Nothing is arguably more important than being able to increase the number of conversions of a potential client’s website.

Think about - businesses hire developers because they want a specific problem solved or they need help in taking their business’s online presence in a particular direction.

It varies from client to client but one thing remains true amongst them all:

They all need websites that generate more sales and get more sign-ups.

That’s what businesses want and, many times, what they need to survive.

This is where CRO comes in…

If you can position yourself as knowledgeable in this field, you’ll never have problems landing and retaining clients ever again.

What is CRO?

CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization .

What is a conversion rate?

It's essentially the percentage of users who stay on your website to perform whatever action it is that you're trying to convince them to take.

To truly provide your own and clients' websites with the best conversion rates, you need to be focusing on understanding what drives, stops, and persuades your users.

These can be referred to as drivers, barriers, and hooks.

Drivers are the factors that bring visitors to your site such as an online ad, a social media post, or a news mention. They are also the specific wants or desires of your users such as "needing a new suit" if your website is an e-commerce site selling suits.

Barriers are the factors that lead to your users leaving your site without completing the desired action. In this case, it could be technical reasons such as a partially functioning site (eg. broken links, content not loading, or very long wait times).

They can also be non-technical yet incredibly important such as poor colour choices, low-quality images, and a generally poor user experience. It's not always this extreme but you should be getting the picture.

Hooks are whatever convinced your user to take the particular desired action (eg. purchasing the suit).

These can be as simple as a relatable, convincing call-to-action or well-thought-out site design. By understanding these aspects of their web journey, you can work on providing them with the best user experience possible. It is the quality of this entire experience that will determine whether the website converts a user or not.

While CRO is filled with spreadsheets of numbers and statistical jargon, it really is this holistic approach of getting into the head of your website users and figuring them out that will provide the best results that outlast any 'quick fix' that some blog post comes up with.

Calculating Conversion Rate

Being able to calculate and interpret your clients' website conversion rates is very important. Luckily for all of us, calculating it is only a short equation away.

Conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions (desired actions taken) by the total number of visitors and multiplying the result by 100 to get a percentage.

If an e-commerce site had 7 sales after 350 users visited the site last month, its conversion rate would be 7 divided by 350 (0.02), multiplied by 100 = 2%.

Average Conversion Rate

At first thought, one might think that many websites probably have a conversion rate of around 20% to 30%.

The reality is much lower with conversion rates generally sitting around 1% to 4%.

It is difficult to get too much helpful meaning out of this figure though due to the large variation in conversion types such as ad clicks, newsletter signups, checkout completions and so on. Many companies also don't publicly share their conversion rate numbers.

It's not wise, then, to compare your site conversion rates to an industry standard. Rather, it may be better to a baseline conversion rate for a website and then improve from there as you begin to better understand the drivers, barriers, and hooks of your site's visitors.

By giving your visitors what they want, conversions will flow naturally.

How Does CRO Apply to Developers?

Developers are hired to solve problems.

By understanding CRO, you are setting yourself miles apart from the sea of developers who "can build you a site in a couple of days" as CRO skills make you an asset for any client who wants to successfully grow their business. Turns out, every client wants this.

By marketing yourself as someone who understands and can effectively implement CRO, you are no longer a developer who simply builds websites.

No, you are now a professional business upgrader thanks to your ability to get the most out of a business's online presence.

By increasing conversion rates, you're literally bringing more money into the hands of business owners. The pros to possessing a skill such as CRO is, without question, certainly demands attention.

If you want to become a more successful freelancer that garners the respect of clients, it's simple - learn Conversion Rate Optimization.

A Huge CRO Success Story and How to Create Your Own CRO Success

I love this story and find it fascinating :)

It all started and ended with a simple form on the website of an e-commerce giant.

The form was incredibly simple, it had two fields, two buttons, and one links but it was causing visitor frustration to the point of fewer sales being completed.

Why?

This form was being presented to visitors after clicking on “checkout”. The form then prompted a visitor to either login or register before finishing the purchase.

And this was the root of the entire problem.

Some visitors had simply forgotten their passwords and were too fussed to reset them, others didn’t want to first register before making a purchase.

The result?

Far fewer sales completed and a ton of potential revenue missed.

This may not sound like a problem that every visitor faces but, when a small fraction of one’s customer base represents potentially millions of dollars lost, then it’s certainly worthwhile to find a solution.

A UX/UI company was brought in and their simple (in hindsight, anyway) fix made all the difference.

By replacing the “Register” button with “Continue”, and adding a message stating that registering wasn’t required to checkout, a huge CRO success story was born.

Sales went up 45% in the first month and, in the first year since the redesign, an additional $300 million worth of additional sales had been completed.

That e-commerce giant's name is Amazon.

The solution was so simple in hindsight but, at the core, it was all about understanding visitors’ concerns and site journey barriers.

By figuring out what was causing visitors to leave, the design company could conjure up a simple yet extremely well-targeted fix that made all the difference.

This is the holy grail of CRO success stories which is to say that you won’t immediately find this kind of success. If anything, it highlights the importance of understanding your site’s visitors.

That said, let’s take a look at several CRO best practices that could be a good place to start when improving the conversion rate of an existing site or when strategising the design of a new one.

General CRO Best Practices

• Use a strong colour for all CTA (call-to-action) buttons
• Place CTAs above the fold
• Use urgency (e.g., time-limited offers) to drive sales
• Always display client testimonials
• Use fewer form fields on your forms
• Design a website with conversion-actions in mind

The winning approach is investing in understanding and learning from your users and using the insight to build an optimization strategy that continuously improves the websites you are working on.

How to Implement CRO as a Developer

Once you have designed and shipped a site and are looking at improving its conversion rate, there are several tools and approaches you can turn to:

1. Quantitative tools

As the name suggests, these tools are what allow you to gather numerical data to track what is happening on your websites.

Google Analytics is classified as a quantitative tool, even if it is just a general analytics tool.

Other quantitative tools include website heatmap tools that look at clicks and movement on the websites. Then there are also funnel tools that track where users drop off in a sales funnel, tools to analyze form submissions and a number of others.

2. Qualitative tools

Whereas quantitative tools look at the “what” of your website activity, qualitative tools assist CRO-specialists to get answers to the “why” driving certain visitor behaviour.

This ranges from something as simple as website feedback surveys from visitors who have experienced the website to something more visually detailed such as a website session recording (there are tools available for this).

The idea here is to really get a real sense of the quality of the user experience from the perspective of new site visitors.

3. Testing tools

Quantitative and qualitative tools are what give you numerical and experiential insight into your visitors’ journey and subjective experience when they are browsing your websites.

Now it’s time for you to take this information, form a clear picture of what’s really going on, and start implementing and testing new strategies to address problems that have surfaced.

A/B testing tools are great for this as they allow you to test different variations of a page to find the best performer.

Website heatmaps and session recording tools are also incredibly useful for testing and understanding the efficacy of implemented changes as you’ll be able to view directly how visitors interact with your website’s content.

This can be truly invaluable in understanding where people are dropping off (and money is being lost)

Conclusion

The world of development is a rapidly changing one and it can be tough to stay ahead of the curve.

One thing is and will always be certain though - you remain relevant and sought after for as long as you can provide tangible value to your clients.

And nothing oozes ‘value’ more than a developer who can build or maintain a site and do so in a way that directly results in increased cash inflow for his/her clients.

Conversion Rate Optimization is a great skill that you, and all your future clients, will reap the rewards of for years to come.

You can find some of the best CRO learning content on platforms such as Udemy - get cracking.

Hope you found value from this article :)

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