Much has been written on the Econsultancy blog recently about the importance of conversion rate optimization, but to what extent are businesses actually doing it? And what methods are most popular?

The latest version of our Conversion Optimization Report, published in association with Redeye, asked respondents about both of these areas, revealing some interesting findings.

Encouragingly, 55% of client-side respondents said that CRO is ‘crucial’ to their overall digital marketing strategy. Only 10% rated it as ‘quite important’ or ‘not important’.

According to business consultant and all-round digital whizz Dan Barker:

“It’s a rarity to get any kind of consensus on what is/isn’t ‘crucial’ in any business, so this essentially vindicates that if you do not feel it’s in your interest to focus a good amount of resource on CRO, you are a big exception among website owners.”

However, despite this consensus, the report indicates that businesses are failing to dedicate enough resource to CRO.

For the third year running a lack of resource and budget were cited as the main barriers to improving conversion rates.

CRO methods

The report also asked respondents about which methods they currently use to improve conversion rates. While the list isn’t exhaustive, it shows that the simplest forms of CRO are the most popular, which is to be expected.

A majority of respondents (61%) said they use A/B testing, while online surveys (54%) and copy optimisation (51%) are also popular methods.

Tactics that involve some level of personalisation achieved lower scores, perhaps due to the data and tech capabilities required to implement them properly.

For example, website personalisation is only used by a quarter of respondents (25%), while abandonment and behavioural emails scored 34% and 37% respectively.

If you’re one of those who has yet to implement basket abandonment emails, you can find out how to get started in our Fundamentals of Email Marketing Guide.

And to learn more about CRO, download Conversion Rate Optimization Report or book yourself onto our Conversion Optimisation training course.