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Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, is an effective way to engage your customers and increase the percentage of visitors on your site. Ecommerce marketers use this powerful tool to improve the performance of their site all the time. But as it turns out, Conversion Rate Optimization is not as easy as it sounds. 

You must take the right steps when it comes to Conversion Rate Optimization. This leads us toward CRO research; many people commit the same mistakes when analyzing and researching to tap into customer problems and behavior. A few errors in your CRO research can ruin your Conversion Rate Optimization. The right way to go about this is to carry out thorough, calculated, and insightful research. This way, you will have far more accurate data about your visitors. This will help you get a clearer picture of your users as you tap into user's problems through those insights.  Such insights will significantly improve your Conversion Rate Optimization. 
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In this blog, we will go through some proven customer research methods that you can use to generate accurate data about your customers. Now you can carry out an authentic research plan without having to worry about missing out on essential steps. 

So let’s begin. 

What Is Consumer Research/Conversion Research? 

Consumer research or conversion research refers to a strategic approach that aims to identify problems consumers face, their preferences, dislikes, and demands. In other words, the buying behavior of your site's visitors. The data collected through these researches is interpreted to improve the site to improve site's conversion rate. This is achieved through the use of a variety of research methods. The data shared between customer groups are organized and segmented into different buyer groups and persona; later, these divisions are used to create ad campaigns aimed towards a specific customer group. Without the availability of such data, marketers might invest in useless campaigns that generate zero conversions.   

Your site might be lacking what users demand from your site, resulting in a significant loss of conversions. It might also be true that some pesky features on your site prevent users from buying your products and/or services. Consumer research helps you improve your marketing strategy for customers that want to buy your services. With granular insight into your consumers' buying behavior, you can optimize your approach to amplify conversion rates. 

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What Is A Customer Group? ‍

A consumer group or segment is some individuals who share similar attributes and traits in marketing, for instance, gender, age, location, preferences, and buying habits. Such groups' purpose is to organize customers into sub-divisions so it will be easier to target the individual aspects that the specific groups of audience exhibit. 

Creating such groups helps marketers get a better picture of the audience's buying decisions and habits. Customer groups allow marketers to direct their efforts towards the fulfillment of the needs of these customer groups. 

Marketers may employ different ad strategies, communication, messaging, platforms, and pricing for other customer groups. Another way marketers benefit from customer groups is by prioritizing the most beneficial customers and directing their focus towards them. ‍

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Why Should You Do A Conversion Research?  

Here are some reasons why consumer research is essential and should be among your priorities: 

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1. Customer Satisfaction And Engagement

Your product and services need to cater to the needs and demands of your customers. If your customers are satisfied, then your company will inevitably grow. To ensure customer satisfaction, you first need to tap into their pains, the problems they face with your products or services, and their preferences. 

There's no better way to do this than conversion research. Interact with them, listen to their problems, collect feedback from them, and work on the information to improve your products and services. Carrying out surveys, interviews, and other customer research methods is an integral part of every successful marketer's strategy. 

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2. Appealing To Demographics

Your consumers are likely individuals with distinct opinions, thoughts, preferences, and income. This makes up their buyer persona. What marketers strategize in a room is different from what exists in reality. Other people will have different preferences and therefore different responses towards your products. 

Tapping into these specific demographics is crucial if you want to come up with a top-notch marketing strategy. When you conduct thorough consumer research, you get a far more accurate picture of your customers. You need to invest money in improving your products and services for the demographics that make up the majority portion of your user base. 

Consumer research will allow you to cut down on the mistakes you are making, such as creating advertisements for the customers that don't even match your actual audience in the market. It's recommended to carry out conversion research every once in a while to find out your precise audience. 

3. Improving The Quality Of Your Content

Another reason you should carry out conversion research is that it helps you improve your content quality. The content on your site needs to be as user-friendly as it can be for your customers. Content is one of the defining characteristics of digital marketing, and you need to make sure that the content on your site is compatible with user's needs and demands. 

It's helpful every once in a while to ask your customers if they like the content you post, and if not, then what kind of content they will prefer to see on your site. With continuous feedback, you can continue the excellent work and cease the content that results in a loss of conversion rates on your site. 

This can be easily achieved through simple surveys, polls, and questionnaires. 

4. Improving The Conversion Rate On Your Site 

Another apparent yet essential reason you need to do conversion research is to improve your site's conversion rate. Your customer's experience dictates which content, products, and services are top-notch; if you want to do CRO, then a thorough, in-depth, and methodical conversion research is necessary. Everything in the market depends on user needs and demands. When they change, you too have to change and adapt to a changing environment.  Seeking out the problems users face when they engage with your brands will help you stand out from the rest and help you gain loyal customers. 

‍5. Standing Out Among Your Competitors  

Every good thing that your competitors don't do can be an advantage. Many companies ultimately neglect this vital aspect of customer satisfaction, and this can be an excellent opportunity to gain a competitive edge in the consumer market. When you stand out from the rest, consumers are naturally drawn to your brand. 

Interacting with your consumers and collecting feedback from them will provide authenticity to your brand. This can also be a great potential opportunity to win loyal customers when you value their opinions; they will likely come to respect you as a customer-oriented brand. 

6. Your Business Growth 

Finally, customer satisfaction and higher conversion rates are a huge factor in your brand's growth and prosperity. Taking the right decisions and always evolving are defining traits of a successful business. There's no better way to ensure growth and success than to engage with your customers and collect valuable data from them. 

When it comes to conversion research, there are two main approaches that you can adopt to gain valuable information and data. Those approaches are quantitative and qualitative; let us talk about the first one. 

Quantitative Approach Towards Consumer Research 

The quantitative approach towards consumer research is concerned with large numbers. Analyzing data and statistics that are relevant to marketing. Quantitative analysis can provide you granular insight in numbers about where you lack and where you need improvements. With these insights, you know where you need to invest your money to improve conversion rates. 

Quantitative research is mostly based on analytics. It focuses on what the user does with your brand as opposed to collecting input from your customers. Knowing what the user does with your brand is valuable information if your goal is to improve your site's performance and ultimately improve the conversion rate on your site. 

Sometimes users do not answer the questions you ask from them in surveys, and sometimes the users are not sure how to describe their experience with your brand. In those cases, too, quantitative research and analytics are powerful tools to identify your user's behavior when they are on your site. 

There are tons of elements that come under the umbrella of quantitative consumer research; some of these are discussed below: 

• Conversion rates: This includes the impression shares, opt-in rates, and the click-throughs on your site. 
• Time stats: This includes the load time of the site, the time the user spends on the page, and the time before the user clicks call-to-action.
• Device stats: This includes the stats from a user device such as a cellphone, desktop, or a tab.
• Traffic stats: This includes everything relevant to site traffic, such as visitors, page views, and referrers. 
• Mouse stats: This includes mouse behaviors such as scrolls, clicks, confetti, and heat. 

It's clear from the above examples that quantitative analysis can help you cut down the issues people have with your site, such as load time issues. Loading time is a huge component of SEO and a huge reason people tend to migrate to other websites when they don't get a quick response from the site. ‍

Solving these issues significantly helps to improve your conversation rate. Now let us look at the more specific approach towards conversion research, i.e., qualitative research. 

Qualitative Approach Towards Conversion Rates 

Now let us move on to the specific problem solving of Conversion Rate Optimization. This allows you to tap into your visitors' psychology and behavior and brings you closer to understanding the motivations, preferences, demands, and opinions of your customers. 

This qualitative analysis requires proper engagement with your visitors. This approach is typically carried out by using some feedback elements such as surveys, polls, chat boxes, forms, and questionnaires. When you use such feedback tools, the user feels that his opinion is being valued, and hence you gain loyal customers. 

The difference between quantitative and qualitative analysis is that while quantitative analysis provides you with raw data, qualitative research offers you detailed, authentic, and interactive answers from the audience. While the former is excellent for improving the overall conversion rate, the latter allows you to improve your site's small elements that can cause a big difference in your conversion rates. 

There are a variety of methods that marketers use to carry out qualitative consumer research; some of them are discussed below: 

• Interviews: In-person interviews are a great way to engage with your user base. While it's true that carrying out interviews is a time-consuming task, it is nevertheless very fruitful if you want to gain valuable information about your consumer's needs, demands, problems, and preferences.  
  

The information gained from interviews is helpful when you want to improve your products and services' performance. You should carry out these interviews after every 12 months to stay up-to-date with your consumer needs. 

• Surveys: Everyone has heard of surveys. There are some of the most widely-used methods by companies to engage with their users. Surveys might not be as detailed as interviews, but it can't be denied that they are an easy and efficient way to collect valuable data from customers. 

There are many ways of conducting surveys, such as through social media platforms, advertisements, emails, face-to-face feedback, apps, websites, and text messages. Surveys need to be an essential part of your marketing strategy.  

The Takeaway 

Conversion research is essential to the success of a Conversion Rate Optimization. It allows you to tap into granular insight about your customer's behaviors and promotes engagement and contact with your user demographics. 

The more you engage with your customers, the closer you will get to improve your conversion rates. It's recommended that you make conversion research an integral part of your CRO strategy, and you will be on your way to improving your site's performance.