Why CRO is Cool & Top Brands Confirming It

Hey there 👋

Very Good Butchers, selling bean-based vegan meat products, achieved a new yearly revenue of $24M and increased conversion rate by 45%, and a DIY eyelash extension brand, Flutterhabit, scaled from 7 to 8 figures with an added conversion rate of 49%. 

They didn’t spend $$$$$ to get those results. 

And all these gains were made with their current customers – they didn’t even need to acquire new buyers.

Wanna know the strategy these brands used? It was conversion rate optimization (CRO) – and in this post, we’ll show you everything you need to know about CRO, plus our best practices for optimizing the conversion rate of your e-commerce business.

Could this be the start of a whole CRO newsletter series? 👀

1. What Even Is CRO? 🧐

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the practice of increasing the % of website visitors who take a desired action — whether that’s adding an item to cart, making a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter.

Essentially, CRO focuses on understanding what motivates your visitors, what keeps them engaged, and what ultimately persuades them to convert.

At its core, CRO involves:

1. Analyzing User Behavior – understanding how users navigate your site, identify which pages or pathways lead to higher conversion rates, and determine areas of friction that could be hindering conversions.

2. A/B Testing – experimenting with different versions of your website’s elements, such as headlines, images, buttons, and layouts, to see which variations drive better performance.

3. Improving User Experience – ensuring your site is user-friendly, with easy navigation, fast loading times, and responsive design that adapts seamlessly across all devices.

The goal of CRO is simple – get more value out of the traffic you already have by turning more visitors into customers.

If you optimize your conversion rate and it doubles, by proxy your revenue doubles too – and this is without spending tens of thousands on ads or creating a whole marketing campaign.

2. Why CRO Has To Be Your Brands #1 Priority 🎯

Here are a couple of reasons why CRO takes priority above everything else for your e-commerce brand growth:

1️⃣ The Unfair First-mover Advantage 

CRO provides an economic edge that strengthens your business against competitors. By optimizing your conversion rate, you increase profit per visitor, which creates a slight everyday advantage over your competitors. And the longer you focus on CRO, the bigger the gap between your brand & other brands will be. 

2️⃣ Make The Most Out of Your Customers

By maximizing the value of your existing traffic, CRO reduces the need for excessive spending on new customer acquisition. This means you get more out of your current marketing efforts, leading to higher profitability without the need for increased ad spend.

3️⃣ Do Your Customers Search For You?

If your business relies on free traffic from Google, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media & search engines, then CRO allows you to diversify your traffic sources and profit from paid advertising. 

By optimizing your conversion rates, you can afford to invest in paid media, making your business more stable and less vulnerable to algorithm changes.

4️⃣ Even More Free Customers!

Improving your conversion rate naturally enhances user experience, which often means more people will visit your site.

4️⃣ Customer LTV 📈⬆

CRO helps you find what keeps your customers coming back. By fixing potholes on your site that create unnecessary friction, you can increase the lifetime value of each customer.

So far, we’ve covered what CRO is and why your e-commerce business needs it more than anything else – let’s take a look at two case studies that almost made me spit coffee at my monitor when I first saw them.

Quite a sleek design, very different from the older, rugged versions 👀

3. Vegan Meat & DIY Eyelashes Showing You How It’s Done 📈

In the intro, we mentioned DTC brands that grew substantially thanks to CRO – that’s Very Good Butchers & FlutterHabit. What did they even do to grow so fast? 

Very Good Butchers generated a new yearly revenue of $24M & increased their CR by 45%. 

Here are the main tactics they used to make it happen:

• A/B Testing – focused on product pages and checkout flows, they identified high-performing versions for each element. This included testing different headlines, images, buttons, and layouts to enhance user engagement and streamline the purchasing process. 

• Revamping Visuals & Descriptions – by optimizing product images and crafting detailed, compelling descriptions, they managed to keep visitors engaged and reduce bounce rates, which led to more completed purchases.

And what Very Good Butchers did, didn’t require any additional marketing spend – it was essentially a free increase in revenue, customer LTV, and they now have a really visually appealing site, optimized for consumption & purchasing.

If you want to read the full case study, click here to check out SplitTesting’s site.

And then we have FlutterHabit, a brand offering DIY eyelash extensions, went from 7 to 8 figures and increased its conversion rate by 49%.

Here’s what they did:

• Again, A/B Testing – they conducted A/B tests across the whole website, including the homepage, product pages, and checkout. Seems like no matter how hard you try to ignore it, testing each element of your site is the only way to find which variant gets the click most.

• Platform-Specific Landing Pages – created landing pages for different traffic types. Mobile users saw an optimized layout for their smaller screens, while desktop users got a layout suited to bigger screens.

• Optimized Subscription Offering – FlutterHabit adjusted its subscription model to increase customer LTV, encouraging repeat purchases and furthering customer loyalty.

And if you want to see FlutterHabit’s full case study, click here to read on DTCpages.

CRO isn’t something you can master in a day by implementing the above strategies, however – and this is why we’re starting an entire newsletter series on conversion rate optimization, how you can implement it in your e-commerce brand and grow a lot, for free. 

Today marks the first post for this series – let’s have a look at the best cart & checkout practices to increase your CR%.

Stay tuned for more exciting updates from Ecommerce & Unicorns! Subscribe now:

4. Cart & Checkout Optimization A-Z ⚙️

The cart & checkout are the steps in the funnel that turn visitors into actual customers – and, more often than not, they’re also a big reason why they don’t end up becoming buyers.

Let’s take a look at two cart elements that are crucial to implement & split test, and how other brands are doing it. For simplicity, we’ll focus on Ridge and their wallets & accessories.

1️⃣ Cart Upsells

Right before the customer buys, it’s best to provide additional products that are either at a discount, pair well, or nudge them a little with persuasion.

“Upgrade & Save” & “Get Up To 40% Off Popular Add-ons”

Ridge Wallet knows what sells. If you’re already buying a $150 wallet, you wouldn’t feel nearly as bad getting another wallet for your keys for only a third of the price, and why not look further into add-ons for your new products?

It’s a very smooth, linear upsell that just works.

Now let’s have a look at a free shipping bar, which can boost average order value greatly. Sadly, Ridge hasn’t implemented this yet, so we’ll show a different example.

2️⃣ Free Shipping Bar
“$ away from free standard shipping”

Nobody likes paying for shipping. We dislike shipping prices MORE than we don’t like adding more items to our cart to remove that pesky shipping price. Sounds like self-sabotage, but I can’t help it either 😂

Glossier right here adds a progress bar, showing the customer how much they need to spend to get free shipping, and it’s obvious this mechanism alone makes them a lot of money.

We’ve covered the key elements that get the potential buyer to become an official buyer with cart upsells & the free shipping progress bar, let’s move towards the next step – checkouts. 

3️⃣ Express Checkout 

The checkout is the make or break for your buyers. This page has to be as smooth, optimized & frictionless as possible because one little annoyance could lead to a lost customer. Let’s have a look at what brands are already doing.

In the big red circle, nearly every payment method available in the U.S is shown, apart from Google Pay. Notice how they’re really big, bright, and clickable?

These buttons are specially designed to give the customer a sense of freedom of choice, while also turning the payment process from a 10-minute drag of filling out your information to “Your order has been placed” within less than a minute (if they have their payment info already saved on one of those services).

4️⃣ Remember Me.

The “Remember Me” basically tells the customer that buying another item will be easier next time – they won’t have to re-enter their payment information or even their address. 

P.S – If you want to know more about the best types of checkouts (specifically on Shopify), click here to read our post.

Need help with setting up your TikTok Shop & integrating with Shopify? Give us a visit at ECORN, we can help.

5️⃣ Clear T’s & C’s For Shipping

At this point of the checkout, the clear terms & conditions of delivery are provided once the customer enters their zip code or full delivery address, this is standard & also reassures them.

6️⃣ One-Page Modern Checkout

Ridge & many other brands actually stick to a very simplified checkout page, and instead of having the customer click through multiple pages to finally place their order, they get everything on one single page:

Everything is already there – they just need to fill it out and confirm. This minimizes friction, improves the user’s experience during purchasing, and, consequently, makes them love your brand more. 

You now know of the main mechanisms within carts and checkouts that increase conversion rates. In our upcoming posts, we’ll be covering more ways to optimize the CR% on your site. Stay tuned!

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Daniil from ECORN