Boosting the conversion rate of your website or landing page(s) is an essential marketing activity, whether you have an e-commerce store or a B2B SaaS business. Marketers spend a lot of time experimenting with various web page components to see how they impact the conversion rate. This process becomes significantly easier with the right conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools in your martech stack. In this article, we will look at the top twelve CRO tools for 2020.
Table of Contents
- What Are Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Tools?
- 4 Must-Have Google Tools
- Lead Generation Tools
- Survey and Feedback Tools
- A/B Testing Tools
- Qualitative Analytics Tools
What Are Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Tools?
CRO tools are a range of tools that aim to help organizations and marketers boost the conversion rate of their websites. These tools can directly help you improve the conversion rate by offering lead generation/growth marketing widgets or help you research better by running surveys and collecting customer feedback. To experiment with what works for your website, you can use these applications to run A/B tests and evaluate their impact on conversions and understand user behavior using visual analytics tools.
4 Must-Have Google Tools
Before we look at the various categories of CRO tools, it helps to know the following applications as they form the foundation for your CRO strategy. All of these tools are free and pretty nifty to use.
1. Google AnalyticsOpens a new window
This tool probably doesn’t need any explanation. Google Analytics is Google’s web analytics software that allows you to track your website and app’s performance and understand your customers at a very comprehensive level.
2. Google Tag Manager (GTM)Opens a new window
Whether you are using a composite marketing suite or different marketing tools, GTM lets you manage (add, edit, or delete) website tags without editing the website code in a hassle-free manner.
3. PageSpeed InsightsOpens a new window
Page load speed is a key driver of high converting websites. The PageSpeed Insights tool lets you know the exact changes you need to make on your web page/website to improve its overall performance and optimize load time.
4. Mobile-Friendly TestOpens a new window
Google has been prioritizing mobile-first pages on its search engine result pages. A mobile-friendly page also ensures that the user experience (UX) of your landing pages isn’t compromised on smartphones and tablet devices. The mobile-friendly test tool helps you verify whether your page is mobile-friendly or not. It also provides you with the specific issues that might adversely impact the UX of the landing page.
Learn More: Top 10 Landing Page Creation Tools for 2020Opens a new window
Lead Generation Tools
Now that we know the four must-have foundational CRO applications, let’s look at the four major categories of CRO tools. In the first category, we’ll look at lead generation tools or also known as growth marketing widgets. These tools consist of features that make it easy for marketers to collect customer data pretty easily.
1. OptinMonsterOpens a new window
OptinMonster is a powerful lead generation software tool that provides a wide array of features to enable marketers to convert better. For starters, it offers widgets such as popups, fullscreen welcome mat, slide-in scroll box, header bar, sidebar forms, inline forms, countdown timer, content locker (unlocks a content piece once the user submits their details), and coupon wheel optin (gamifies the shopping experience).
OptinMonster lets you display these widgets based on various triggers, such as when the user is about to leave the website (exit-intent) or when they are inactive. You can also schedule them for specific dates and times. You can improve the targeting by displaying the widgets on specific pages or devices. OptinMonster lets you target users based on their referral source, location, interaction, etc. The tool can be integrated with multiple tools such as marketing automation, CRM, e-commerce platforms.
OptinMonster also has a social proof tool called TrustPulseOpens a new window that lets you display recent purchases on your website. TrustPulse is more suitable for e-commerce stores and small businesses.
2. OptiMonkOpens a new window
OptiMonk is another tool similar to OptinMonster that allows marketers to tackle issues related to the conversion rate. It’s lead generation widgets include popups, fullscreen mats, side messages, scratchcards, lucky wheels, nanobars, and pick a gift. The tool comes with 200+ ready-to-use templates and lets you customize them.
Marketers can use countdown timers, offers, and scratchcards to reduce cart abandonment and combine OptiMonk’s recommendation engine with these widgets to promote upselling and cross-selling opportunities. You can also build your Facebook Messenger list by integrating it with OptiMonk, which enables you to deliver messages right into the messenger inbox and boost audience engagement.
The event triggers are similar to OptinMonster. OptiMonk offers targeting options such as traffic source, geotargeting, returning visitor, number of visited pages, browsing history, time spent on page/site, etc.
OptiMonk also has a social proof tool called ProveSourceOpens a new window that shows leads and sales on your website.
3. IntercomOpens a new window
Intercom’s customer messaging tool enables businesses to generate leads using conversational AI. Its Business Messenger uses chatbots to convert visitors into leads. They can further help businesses to qualify the leads and schedule meetings/demos.
Intercom’s lead qualification process lets you set up different rules so that the chatbot can route the website visitor to the appropriate person/department depending on the nature of their query.
While it may not be perceived as a typical CRO tool, you can use this product as a sidekick to the lead generation tool in your martech stack to automate the lead generation process. Intercom integrates with a range of application categories such as analytics, marketing automation, CRM, surveys and feedback, and scheduling tools.
Learn More: Top 20 Landing Page Design Examples for 2020Opens a new window
Survey and Feedback Tools
Survey and feedback tools make it easy for marketers to collect customer’s thoughts, feedback, and opinions that are crucial for research purposes and to form hypotheses for the A/B tests.
1. SurveyMonkeyOpens a new window
Creating a survey questionnaire from scratch can be challenging. SurveyMonkey gives a solid head start by providing a wide array of templates for marketers that they can use to design surveys.
Its templates cover various areas of marketing, including customer experience (CX), market research, product feedback, and customer engagement. SurveyMonkey can help you collect customers’ feedback on your website or any changes you may have made recently and understand if it’s working in your favor or not.
Businesses can also use Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to understand customer loyalty and satisfaction. Since NPS surveys are quantitative, it becomes effortless to get the exact sentiment of your customers.
Besides SurveyMonkey, the company also offers tools such as Usabila, TechValidate, and GetFeedback that help organizations improve their research activities.
2. QualtricsOpens a new window
Qualtrics offers survey and research tools for CX, product, and brand management along with other business functions. For CRO purposes, Qualtrics’ Product Experience feature would be highly relevant for marketers. You can collect feedback through the mobile, website, in-app, email, SMS, and in-product in real-time and implement the necessary changes that would help you boost the conversion rate.
Qualtrics CoreXM is a centralized platform that enables organizations to manage customer insights, concept testing data, and other information on a single platform.
Perhaps, the biggest offering by Qualtrics is Qualtrics iQ, an AI/ML-driven tool that extracts key takeaways from open text responses. Along with this, its predictive analytics capabilities are powerful to help you extract insights from data, predict trends, and anticipate customer behavior.
3. TypeformOpens a new window
Typeform is a nifty tool to create surveys, questionnaires, and polls. You can design aesthetic surveys without any design or programming skills, besides Typeform offers a set of templates to help you get started.
VideoAskOpens a new window is another tool by Typeform that allows you to run surveys and collect customer feedback through videos. You can set conditional logic to route respondents to different questions depending on their responses. You can embed them on your website so that you can collect one-to-one responses.
Its powerful integration capabilities let you integrate these tools with Slack, Airtable, Intercom, and plenty of other martech tools.
Learn More: Top 5 Tips of Market Research: How to Attract more Clients to Your Website?Opens a new window
A/B Testing Tools
Running experiments to see what works is essential for the success of CRO activities. Therefore, A/B testing is a crucial component of CRO. Here are three A/B testing tools to help you run A/B tests effectively:
1. OptimizelyOpens a new window
Optimizely is an experimentation tool that lets you run tests across your website. Personalization impacts the conversion rate, and Optimizely helps you do precisely that without the need for any programming skills. You can test the call-to-action (CTA), form fields, and other web elements and run the tests for various segments. You can segment the target audience by persona, industry, etc. to deliver the variants.
Optimizely Performance Edge ensures that the performance of both variants isn’t adversely impacted by utilizing an Experiment Delivery Network. Its AI/ML-powered analytics helps you identify false positives so that you don’t get follow the incorrect conclusions.
2. AB TastyOpens a new window
AB Tasty lets you run A/B/n, multivariate, and funnel tests. Although these terms may sound similar, they are quite different. For instance, A/B/n tests let you test and compare two or more variations of the same element. In contrast, in multivariate tests, you experiment with combinations of change to see how they interact, and funnel testing shows changes consistently across different pages.
Along with A/B testing, AB Tasty also offers run-of-the-mill growth marketing widgets and qualitative analytics tools like session recordings, heatmaps, and page flow.
The tool can be integrated with a range of web analytics, CRM, CDP, DMP, e-commerce, and CMS applications.
3. Google OptimizeOpens a new window
Google Optimize is a part of the Google Marketing Platform suite. The tool offers A/B/n, multivariate, and split URL testing. You can also implement variants on your server and use Google Optimize to analyze the results. While Google Optimize is suitable for small businesses, its enterprise version called Google Optimize 360 lets you run up to 100 experiments simultaneously.
Similar to other tools in the category, its WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor enables you to make changes on the fly without any coding requirements.
You can customize the tests by segmenting the audience based on the UTM parameters. Optimize 360 offers more advanced and granular segmentation capabilities.
While Google Optimize is free to use, its premium variant Optimize 360 is said to be priced somewhere around $150,000/yearOpens a new window .
Learn More: Improving E-Commerce Conversion Rates: How to Automatically Merchandise Your ContentOpens a new window
Qualitative Analytics Tools
Qualitative or behavioral analytics tools help marketers understand user behavior in a visual way. Instead of providing stats and numbers, these tools show how users navigate through the website, where and potentially why they drop off, and so on.
1. HotjarOpens a new window
Once you have implemented lead generation widgets, done audience research, set up and run experiments, you need to see how they are performing to amplify what’s working. Hotjar comes with visual analytics features such as heatmaps (click, move, and scroll), visitor recordings, conversion funnel visualization, and form analysis. All these features can help you identify areas where users get stuck and resolve them by implementing necessary changes. You can also launch experiments based on the visual data to see their impact on the conversion rate.
Along with these features, Hotjar also lets you set up feedback polls, descriptive feedback, and surveys on your website.
2. VWOOpens a new window
Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) is a comprehensive CRO product suite that offers visual analytics as a part of its product. VWO Insights consists of heatmaps, form analytics, session recordings, funnels, and on-page surveys to understand user behavior.
VWO also has A/B testing tools, web push notifications, cart abandonment campaigns, etc. VWO’s FullStack tool enables organizations to perform multi-channel experiments and mobile-app testing.
3. Crazy EggOpens a new window
Crazy Egg is a straightforward visual analytics tool that represents visual data in the form of heatmaps and session recordings. You can also run A/B tests using the tool. It allows you to analyze the behavior of users coming from different sources, which can further help you design landing pages for specific campaigns and mediums to increase the conversion rate. You can also understand how the buyers interact with the checkout pages and what causes drop-offs and fix the churn accordingly.
You can integrate Crazy Egg with applications such as Shopify, Wix, WordPress, and AWeber.
Learn More: What Are the Top 10 Web Design Mistakes to Avoid?Opens a new window
Closing Words
Most of the tools we just saw have overlapping offerings. For example, VWO is a complete CRO product suite, whereas Crazy Egg offers exclusively visual analytics and A/B testing features. Before subscribing to any tool, take stock of the existing applications in your martech stack and proceed accordingly. So, if you already have Crazy Egg in your stack, you can go for Typeform to conduct surveys, along with any of the lead generation tools. It’s about striking the right balance so that the data you’re already collecting with Google Analytics complements it and doesn’t overwhelm you.
Do you have any questions related to CRO tools? Tell us in the comments below. For the latest news and trends update in the world of marketing, follow us on TwitterOpens a new window , FacebookOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .