In the age of product-led growth, the importance of organizations’ marketing sites seems to have somewhat diminished. As a “product person” with an engineering background, I’m fully behind the product-led growth philosophy. That said, in my chats with leaders at many organizations, it seems to me that an important opportunity is often missed: improving the conversion rate of your marketing site.

I propose that someone on your team, typically marketing, sales, or product (or a combination thereof), be responsible for iteratively improving your marketing site. And by improving, I don’t mean beautifying; beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s not something that adds value to our organization*.* I mean improving the percentage of visitors who sign up/purchase/reach whatever goal is most important to your team.

CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization

First, a quick definition: conversion rate can be broadly defined as the percentage of visitors or users who reach a given goal. For your marketing site, this is often “the percentage of visitors who sign up,” “the percentage of visitors who purchase from our store,” or “the percentage of users who schedule a sales call.”

Conversion rate optimization is simply the practice of making changes, ideally iteratively and in a quasi-scientific fashion, in an attempt to improve conversion rates.

Beauty Doesn’t Matter. Conversion Does.

I’ve worked with quite a few website designers over the years, and I can only recall one in all of those interactions who brought this concept to the table from the get-go: it doesn’t matter one bit how beautiful your website is. The only thing that matters is conversion rate.

Do beautiful websites convert? Sometimes, but it’s certainly not a guarantee.

The best example of this concept, in my opinion, is Amazon. Few would consider Amazon to be a beautiful website even now, and those of us who were around during their early heyday know it hasn’t ever been. What Amazon is great at, obviously, is conversion. They make it easy to find what you’re looking for. They make it easy to purchase once you’ve found what you’re looking for. They make it easy to trust that you’ll receive what you purchased in a timely manner. That’s all that matters; that’s the value your marketing site brings to your organization.

Small Increases, Like in Investing, Equal Large Long-Term Gains

You’re probably familiar with the power of compound interest over time. The same concept applies to conversion rates.

I’ll stray from my familiar world of B2B SaaS and take the example of a typical Shopify seller. If we set an audacious, seemingly unattainable goal of doubling our conversion rate, all we need to do is increase the conversion rate of:

Ads by 19%
Landing page by 19%
Shopping cart by 19%
Checkout by 19%

Why 19% and not 25%? Because each improvement compounds over time.

Now, consider your organization. If you went to your CEO tomorrow and said, “I feel fairly confident I can increase our conversion rate by 5% in 6 months and more than 10% within a year,” what would they say? How valuable would that be to your organization?

Statistics 101: Make Big Changes, Avoid Meek Tweaking

One of the most common mistakes teams make when broaching the CRO world with their marketing site is making small changes: changing the primary color of your buttons, increasing the border radius of elements…meek tweaks.

Smaller tweaks might give you statistically significant results if you get on the order of hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors. If you aren’t familiar with statistical significance, look into online A/B testing calculators and read about why you need fairly large numbers of visitors or fairly large changes in results to really be able to know with some certainty that the change you made improved your conversion rate.

In the B2B world or smaller B2C companies, you may not get enough visitors for small changes to make a measurable difference. Therefore, you’ll need to focus on making significant changes to your marketing site. Remove or add pages. Add simple, single-input email signup forms on every page. Radically change or even entirely remove your signup form. I’ll get into some more ideas below, but the point is you’ll usually need to make significant changes if you want to see significant results.

A Bit More Statistics

I don’t want this to turn into a statistics deep dive, but I do want to touch on the basics of the concepts you should know. Let’s consider:

Poll #1 asks 10 people who they’re going to vote for in the next presidential election
Poll #2 asks 10000 people who they’re going to vote for in the next presidential election

Which poll is more likely to correctly predict the outcome of the next presidential election? Poll #2, because it’s closer to a representative sample of the population.

Now apply this to our website:

Scenario #1: 10 people visit your website, and 5 convert. You make and deploy a change. Another 10 people visit your website, and 6 convert.
Scenario #2: 10000 people visit your website, and 500 convert. You make and deploy a change. Another 10000 people visit your website, and 600 convert.

In which scenario can you be more confident that the change made a real improvement? Scenario #2, clearly. Put the above numbers into an online A/B testing calculator, and you’ll see that you can be more confident in scenario 2.

So, larger numbers of visitors help us be more confident in our results, but what about larger changes in results?

Scenario #1: 10000 people visit our website, and 500 convert. You make and deploy a change. Another 10000 people visit our website, and 510 convert.
Scenario #2: 1000 people visit our website, and 500 convert. You make and deploy a change. Another 1000 people visit our website, and 700 convert.

Which scenario would you be more confident in? Clearly we can be more confident that the change we made in scenario #2. The improvement we saw in #1 could very easily be down to luck, whereas the improvement we saw in #2 is less likely to due to luck.

Act Like Scientists & Statisticians, But Remember We’re Not

While statistically significant results are ideal, we’re not attempting to flesh out the laws of nature. Use your team’s knowledge of your company, industry, and customers to help determine whether a change you made had a positive impact. If, after deploying a chang,e you find that our A/B testing statistics tell us “there’s a 72% chance the change you made had a statistically significant impact,” you have two options:

Let more customers view your change (meaning, wait longer before making another change)
Stop your test and make a best guess at whether the change was positive or not

I’d argue that it’s likely more valuable to keep iterating, keep making changes than to continue running your test for a longer period of time.

Some General Tactics

Iterate Frequently / Agilely

The most powerful tactic I’d recommend is setting up a process, a system your team follows that forces you to make regular changes. The power of experimentation is greatest if you frequently experiment. Making a major change to your marketing site once every year or two won’t be very impactful, even if the changes you make do increase conversion rates.

Use a Website Builder

I’m not sure why engineers sometimes resist this idea, but consider using a website builder (Webflow, Framer, etc.) for your marketing site.

There are a ton of benefits when compared to having engineers build your marketing site in something like NextJS:

Non-technical team members can fully plan and implement changes
Changes are typically faster and easier to implement
Localization and other valuable features are baked in

Think Big

Remember that we need to try making significant, major changes. If you’ve got a cluttered, 20-page marketing site, what if you pared it down to 3 pages? Instead of a sign-up page, what if it was a modal that would pop up on the page the user is currently viewing? What if you entirely removed your sign-up form and instead directly forwarded new users into an account? Try live video chat customer support. Think big.

Iterate Frequently on Your Marketing Site, Grow with CRO