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Here's a reality check for marketers: according to HubSpot's 2024 State of Marketing report, companies spend $92 on attracting visitors for every $1 they invest in converting those visitors into customers. We're pouring resources into filling the top of our funnels while neglecting what happens after people arrive.
Even more eye-opening, Build Wealth reports that less than 2% of websites use any kind of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) technologies. This represents a huge missed opportunity, especially as marketing teams face growing pressure to deliver more with tighter budgets.
Let's clear something up right away: CRO is much more than just A/B testing. While testing is part of it, CRO encompasses everything that helps turn visitors into customers. When done right, it dramatically boosts the return on all your marketing efforts by making sure the traffic you've worked so hard to attract doesn't go to waste.
In this article, we'll explore why CRO deserves more attention, how to build an effective optimization framework, and why accessibility might be your biggest untapped conversion opportunity.
Why CRO Should Be a Priority, But Often Isn't
Despite being what experienced marketers call "the lowest hanging fruit" for driving growth, CRO remains significantly underinvested in most companies. But why?
Many organizations view CRO as simply testing button colors or headline variations, asking: "How much impact can these small changes really have?" This limited perspective misses the strategic value of a comprehensive CRO program.
When treated as a core marketing function rather than an occasional tactic, CRO becomes transformative. As Chad Sollis, Chief Marketing Officer at AudioEye, puts it, CRO represents an opportunity to "double leads, double revenue really quickly."
The real power of CRO emerges when it serves as a gateway to other marketing initiatives. By understanding how different audience segments interact with your website, you create insights that strengthen everything from content creation to paid media, email campaigns to product development.
Yet CRO often falls to the bottom of priority lists. It requires building a capability that many organizations haven't developed, demanding both technical skills and strategic thinking that crosses department boundaries.
The CRO Framework: Audience First
At the heart of effective CRO lies a genuine understanding of your audience—not through fluffy personas that detail what time people drink their coffee, but through actual behavior data that drives action.
According to Sollis, audience understanding makes up 60-70% of successful CRO implementation. The good news? When it comes to CRO, you have an advantage in segmentation compared to broader marketing initiatives: you're focusing specifically on people already visiting your website.
Here's how to gather actionable audience insights:
Web Analytics and User Behavior: Start with the data you already have. What sources bring traffic to your site? Which landing pages get the most visits? This information provides your first layer of segmentation.
First-Click Behavior: The first action a visitor takes reveals volumes about their interests and intent. As Sollis explains, "What is the first click they do? If they're abandoning, then you have a problem with the page that they're actually landing on... But if they create a next action, that creates a segment for you."
These behaviors allow you to make informed discoveries: "These people are interested in product X when I thought they were interested in product Y" or "This is their problem versus that is their problem."
The content visitors consume, the product pages they view, and the search terms they use on your site all provide valuable clues for effective segmentation.
Similar to a lead scoring model, this behavioral segmentation happens through technical tools that track on-site behavior. Different pages and actions carry different weights, with product and pricing pages typically having higher impact than others.
Building Effective Tests
Once you've established your audience segments, it's time to build tests that will improve conversion rates. Sollis recommends a three-component framework:
- Audience Segmentation (60-70% of success): As discussed above, identifying the right segments forms the foundation of effective CRO.
- Content Alignment (second most important): This includes the actual information, offers, and value propositions presented to each segment. For consumer businesses, this often includes promotional offers, though it doesn't have to. For B2B companies, it might focus more on solving specific business problems or demonstrating ROI.
- Creative Execution (least important but still necessary): This covers design elements, button placement, colors, and layout. While teams often spend the majority of their time here, it's actually the least impactful of the three components.
The key is aligning content to the outcome you're trying to drive. For a B2B or SaaS business, that might ultimately be generating leads or trials. However, recognizing that visitors often need to take several steps before converting is crucial.
"You might have to understand that to get them to trial, you actually need them to go two or three steps into the website before they're willing to engage in a trial," Sollis notes. "So if they're in step one, your goal is get them to the next step. If you're in step three, your goal is to get them into trial."
By understanding this progression, you can optimize each step of the journey rather than focusing solely on the final conversion point.
The Overlooked CRO Opportunity: Accessibility
Perhaps the most overlooked opportunity in CRO is optimizing for accessibility. Many companies view accessibility primarily as a way to avoid lawsuits or as a social responsibility initiative. While these are valid concerns, this perspective misses the significant business opportunity.
"People with disabilities actually account for about 25% of web traffic on the internet," Sollis reveals. "So one in four of every visitor has disabilities. That is an opportunity to personalize and to optimize to a segment."
The numbers are compelling:
- People with disabilities represent $20 billion in buying power in the US alone (on first purchase)
- Only 3-4% of the internet is accessible, meaning those who find accessible sites become extremely loyal customers
- When including the buying power of family members who develop loyalty to accessible brands out of empathy for their relatives with disabilities, the potential market expands to $8 trillion
Viewed through this lens, accessibility becomes not just a compliance requirement but a substantial CRO opportunity that spans across B2B, D2C, and all types of companies.
Implementing an Effective Accessibility Strategy
A comprehensive accessibility strategy requires more than just installing a plugin. Sollis outlines a three-pronged approach:
- Automated AI Technology: This can solve approximately 40% of accessibility issues. However, it's important to note that "a lot of folks think they can buy software, it'll solve the problem entirely. And that's not the case."
- Human-Assisted Technology: Expert auditors evaluate website experiences and implement changes via technology to achieve greater compliance.
- Development Integration: Integrating accessibility into your software development lifecycle for websites or products ensures ongoing compliance.
This combined approach yields not only the highest level of compliance but also "a level that will achieve the highest conversion for a massive component of your audience."
Beyond direct conversion benefits, accessibility improvements can drive additional value:
- Enhanced SEO performance through improved engagement metrics
- Better optimization for generative AI engines, which increasingly serve as discovery channels
Conclusion
The gap between what companies spend on attracting traffic versus converting it represents an enormous opportunity for marketers willing to invest in CRO. By approaching conversion optimization as a comprehensive discipline—with audience understanding at its core—organizations can dramatically improve their marketing ROI across all channels.
The three-part framework of audience segmentation, content alignment, and creative execution provides a structured approach to improving conversions. Meanwhile, accessibility stands out as a particularly underutilized opportunity to reach a significant segment of consumers while building brand loyalty.
As marketing budgets face continued scrutiny, the ability to extract more value from existing traffic becomes increasingly important. CRO offers a path to not just incremental improvements but potential step-changes in performance.
The question isn't whether you can afford to invest in CRO—it's whether you can afford not to.
