Ten Questions To Help You Hire The Best CRO Agency

Unbounce reports 44% of brands across the world spend more than $10,000 every year on A/B testing their products! How much are you investing in booming your brand?

The good news is you don’t need a big budget to supersede your competition. However, you need a dedicated Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) team to ensure you’re constantly growing.

• Did you know former President Barack Obama raised $60 million through A/B testing?
• In 2011, even Google ran 7,000 A/B tests.

CRO tools can increase your ROI by an average of 223%.

It should come as no surprise that outsourcing to the top CRO agency will still cost you much less than hiring in-house CRO specialists.

So, let’s walk you through why you need CRO and how you can select the best CRO partner for your brand.

Value Added Through Conversion Rate Optimization

Just a refresher, Conversion rate optimization (CRO) includes all the practices and strategies that help increase the percentage of users performing the action you want them to take on your site.

From macro-conversions like clicking the ‘add to cart’ or purchasing your product to micro-conversions like signing up for your services or filling out forms, you need CRO to succeed, period.

Why Your Brand Needs Conversion Rate Optimization

Hint: Not following the “best practices” is in your brand’s best interest. Take a look at these famous CRO case studies:

1. Basecamp’s Counterintuitive Decision To Remove Trust Elements

In 2007, Basecamp, a powerful project management tool, released Highrise, a CRM solution that allowed users to easily share contacts and manage communications. Since its launch, Basecamp wanted to scale its signup rates. So, they experimented with a completely new design.

Take a look at their original page:

It checks all best practices:

• Testimonials
• Bold CTAs and other visual cues
• Good use of color contrast

And yet, they wanted better conversions. So, they decided to revamp the entire site!

Take a look at the six redesigns and their conversion rates:

• Smiling faces are welcoming and boosts trust.
• Highlighting the best testimonial that addresses their services and the value provided made more impact.
• They had a cleaner, simpler design.

The aftereffect? 102% rise in their conversion rate!

2. World Wildlife Fund’s Straightforward And Intuitive Web Page

The famous World Wildlife Fund wanted to get more signups to their newsletters. Here’s how their landing page originally looked:

Following their intuition and experimenting allowed them to stand against “best practices,” and here’s the redesign:

“Best practices” then enlisted:

• having a clear CTA that stands out
• gathering as much data from your reader
• having more fields on the contact form.

Although their new design wasn’t too different from the original, it went against all best practices.

But, adding a few extra details (like telling readers exactly what they’re signing up for), changing the CTA to the left, and removing unnecessary fields was the best conversion rate optimization strategy to follow.

The aftereffect? 83% increase in newsletter signups!

There are many other examples of how conversion rate optimization can help your brand make decisions in its best interest. Blindly relying on industry standards or best practices isn’t always in your best interest.

Many conversion rate optimization agencies don’t always have the experience to suggest you the right strategies. That’s what differentiates the top CRO  Agency from the rest.

Let’s understand how to select the right CRO agency for your brand:

Questions To Help You Select The Right Conversion Rate Optimization Agency

There are multitudes of CRO marketing agencies today, and to help you select the right partner for your brand, here are a few questions to ask the sales representatives of your shortlisted CRO agencies.

1. Do you have a CRO specialty?

A jack of all trades is bound to be a master of none.

Sure, a CRO consultant can provide services like web design, front-end development, or copywriting, but a specialist will help you bring home the prize.

2. What is your process/ methodology?

CRO is solely data-based. Let no one tell you otherwise.

• Is the answer to this question providing you with real insights into the agency’s process or methodology of working?
• Are they instead talking about their intuition never failing them?
• Are they thinking strategically?
• Do they ask you questions about your metrics (traffic overview, average order value, current conversion rate, and revenue)?
• Are their strategies user-driven?

Don’t just partner with the first result you find when you type “CRO agency near me” on search engines.

3. What shapes consumer choices?

Simply changing the prices or mindlessly switching up your web design won’t result in increased conversions.

The agency needs to live and breathe consumer psychology.

Ask them about their knowledge:

• What books do they consume?
• How many clients have they worked with?
• Examples from their work on how consumer psychology drove sales.

Don’t forget to ask them for their case studies for successful projects so you know what to expect.

4. Which was your least successful project, and why?

Every brand faces setbacks. If the conversion optimization agency denies this, it can mean one of three things:

• They’re very new to the industry
• They’re lying
• They don’t have concrete learnings from their setbacks.

Better you move on.

5. What is the average experience of your CRO experts?

Experience sheds a lot of insight on expertise. And conversion optimization needs that expertise, versatility, and patience that only experience can bring.

Let’s look at the skills manager from a CRO marketing agency has:

• Analytical skills
• Well-versed with consumer psychology
• Sound knowledge in HTML
• Proficient in SEO & digital marketing
• A clear understanding of web design

When you get on a call with the sales rep of a conversion optimization agency, they usually connect you with the manager.

That’s why you must explicitly ask for the portfolio of the CRO expert that would eventually manage your account. Then, get on a call with your potential agents. Ask them a few of these qualifying questions:

• What’s the difference between a Conversion Rate Optimization Agency, an SEO agency, and a Digital Marketing Consultancy? Of course, do your research beforehand. But this question will give you some insight into their understanding and expertise.
• Many firms believe that an agency specializing in eCommerce acquisition (AdWords agency or an SEO agency) would optimize your landing pages for conversion. However, don’t expect web designers, AdWords specialists, or SEO experts to specialize in CRO. Far from it. If this is your consultant’s understanding, you’re better off continuing your search.
• With the abundance in the availability of knowledge, a lot of agencies do know basic CRO techniques. But only true CRO specialists know how to execute these methods strategically. For example, scaling your leads isn’t the same as scaling your ROI. For all we know, non-specialists would tell you to have discounts on your products. This results in increased traffic to your website, but your bottom line remains the same.

If they’re hesitant to share those details with you, you should move on to the next agency on your list.

6. What tools do you use?

CRO marketing agencies have access to multiple tools. Most of them are for A/B testing:

Optimizely
AB Tasty
Convertize
Google Optimize 360

Apart from running A/B tests, A few other useful CRO tools are:

• Heatmaps: Contentsquare, Hotjar
• Funnel Analysis: Mixpanel, Amplitude, or Heap Analytics
• Feedback Systems: Qualaroo

Your conversion optimization agency should help you understand the tools and how they would use them for your brand.

7. Are there any additional costs apart from your quoted charges?

Conversion rate optimization tends to involve some hidden costs. But if you ask about this upfront, it need not be hidden. Here are some cases where your CRO marketing agency might charge you additionally:

• Suppose you don’t have access to an AB Testing tool to monitor your site. Then, depending on your volume of visitors, these charges can go upwards of £1000 each month!
• Heatmap tools, Funnel Analysis platforms, and Survey platforms can quickly increase your overhead.
• Depending on the complexity of your project, staff costs could increase for the number of hours spent.

This is why we suggest you ask about these details upfront. Make an informed decision.

8. How will you measure success in this project?

As with other partnerships, understand and ask for the goals and performance indicators (KPIs) proposed by the conversion optimization agency.

• If you’re an eCommerce site, you want increased sales that don’t shrink your margins. However, if your CRO agent is insistent on you focusing primarily on micro-conversions (the clicks on an ‘add to cart’ button), they’re probably not worth their salt.
• If you’re in the SaaS industry, you need increased subscribers who eventually become paid users. Here, micro-conversions count.
• If you have a lead generation site, your conversions are an increase in lead generations.

The points we mentioned above account for high traffic to your website. Suppose your traffic isn’t as high to gain significant insights. Then, your CRO agency will rely on evaluating qualitative data.

Also, note that measuring success isn’t about the immediate goals. You can evaluate your future CRO partnership through the lens of:

• Transfer of skills from the agency to your team
• Well defined KPIs at the start of your project
• A clear-cut strategy for success

9. What do you need from my team?

CRO is a complicated process. Also, remember it is a partnership you’re entering into. Sometimes there would be a need for give-and-take. For example, your conversion optimization agency might need your resources like the intervention of your web developers and design team.

Some questions to ask:

• What format would you deliver the new designs to us in? For example, do you generally use simple Wireframes, PSD, or HMTL?
• Do you need assistance with Front-End resources for launching A/B tests?

10. Do you guarantee increased conversion rates?

While NOTHING can be guaranteed, we’ve added this question to help you screen out agencies that do. CRO is too complex, with too many variables to have written guarantees. Top CRO agencies know this and will always explain to you all the variables and factors outside their control.

Just as an example, If you decide to run a Native Advertising campaign, and all this while you’ve been getting visitors from Search Adwords campaigns, this would certainly affect the search intentions of your traffic. Furthermore, it would reflect in your conversion rates.

How dishonest would it be then for an agency to assure you a rise in your conversion rates?

In the end

You now have ten great questions to help you weed out all the agencies that don’t have your best interest at heart. From the two case studies we shared, you know how important it is for you to scale your conversion rates. So, next time you search for ‘CRO agency near me,’ you’ll be prepared to select the right partner for your brand.

WebSpero has successfully increased the conversion rates of our clients up to 15X for the past decade. As a result, we’ve grown our clientele globally. More than 700 of our clients vary across all industries. So, if you’re looking for a conversion optimization agency, schedule a free consultation now.