Conversion rate optimization today, especially for larger companies, often comes down to how well a customer experience flows from the first contact to first purchase or commitment. And there are tools out there to help you increase that CRO.

There's no arguing that there are tools on the market that offer all the bells and whistles. However, if you don’t need everything that comes with the package, you’re wasting money and likely overwhelming your CRO team. Instead, it makes sense to piece together a suite of tools that are conducive to your CRO goals.

The following five tools can be used by any company to examine various segments of the customer journey and implement customer feedback into CRO. 

1. Effective Experiments — Streamlined Communication and Workflow

Effective Experiments, at first glance, looks like many other project management tools. However, dig a little deeper and it has a lot more to offer if you're willing to learn how to use it.

How it works

Effective Experiments makes it possible to track all current projects and ongoing market experiments from a single dashboard. Different users can also report individual results for their projects and variations within the larger whole. This platform integrates with many data collection tools professionals use to run their marketing experiments, including Google Analytics, Slack, and Adobe Target.

Simply put, Effective Experiments helps you manage workflow. You can easily share your research, working processes, and timelines all in one place.

Here’s what the process looks like:

• Set up your project

• Invite your team

• Use the dashboard of tools to create the necessary task and workflow charts

The data collected can be transformed into visual representations of progress and which can be shown in various charts, graphs, and maps. 

New experiments and ideas can be proposed to the team and workflows can be put together and put into action—all tracked and in one place. 

Why is it different?

Effective Experiments functions differently than industry leaders like Trello. Trello is great if you are looking to save information. For example, when you look at Trello, you have cards to manage different parts of your projects.

However, you still need to use various tools to gather the rest of your data. You most likely have to dig through emails, manage workflow, create reports, and send out emails to your team. With Effective Experiments, all of these components to project management are in one place.

Is there proof that it works?

Effective Experiments is used by the Dutch CRO company Online Dialogue to manage their proprietary workflow and support their clients’ needs. They have found that it is unique in that it documents every detail of the research data collected during a CRO campaign. Recently, Online Dialogue used this tool during an 11-week experiment they ran for Euroflorist. The result was a 4.3% conversion increase. The ability to use a tool that went beyond A/B testing was key to this success.

2. Clicktale — Smarter Analytics and Data Sharing

Clicktale is one of the few tools that is beginning to crack the code on behavior and it does so with little human input on the setup and development side.  

How does it work?

When Clicktale is set up on your website, it's easy to see, visually, where and when customers get hung up in the purchase or research process. This tool takes all of the data collected from analyzing on-site customer activity and points out problem areas. 

Clicktale’s user-friendly design makes it possible to visualize, with heatmaps, where your customers are dropping out of the conversion funnel. Clicktale also helps you see how people interact with your forms.

• You can create drop reports to understand why visitors abandon your forms.

• Time reports make it possible for you to see how long it’s taking people to fill out the forms.

• You can also look at what fields are most often left blank so you can try to change them.

Why is it different?

Adobe Analytics is an industry leader in CRO. It’s a great tool to use if you want to segment your visitors into "checkout" and "abandon cart." It's also an excellent solution if you are looking to show what device—laptop, phone, tablet, or desktop—your clients are using when they interact with your site. 

Adobe and many other industry leaders fall short of Clicktale's ability to examine why visitors behave the way they do on your site.   

In essence, Clicktale not only gives you insights about checkouts and abandon carts. You can also look at quite a few more conversion metrics:

• weakest conversion point heatmaps

• success vs. failure heatmaps

• individual session playbacks to see why a conversion failed

• A/B testing tools to validate theories

Is there proof that it works?

Panogames.com, a partner of THQ and Atari, uses Clicktale to keep track of how potential customers view the content on their websites. Key insights have led to the repositioning of compelling content and increased revenue. 

3. Conductrics — Show the Right Content to the Right People

Personalization is becoming the new normal. People expect to be served the right content. However, how do you get them past your landing page so that they interact with your content? Simple: A/B testing. 

Your content needs to have the right headlines, descriptions, CTAs, and layouts. Conductrics is the tool to make sure you are getting these details right. 

How does it work?

Conductrics is designed to help CRO teams learn what layout on their website works best. 

You can either let machine learning automatically preset the best variations of content for each visitor or you can create business rules to present different CTAs, headlines, images, or functionality for each type of visitor you set. 

Why is it different?

Many companies use Unbounce at an A/B testing tool. Unbounce can deliver valuable data to your company for a reasonable monthly fee of around $30. It also has some excellent features like multiple goal-setting capabilities and a platform for building webpages.

Meanwhile, Conductrics has quite a few more features than many of its competitors.

• It can be self-hosted.

• Traffic can be segmented.

• There is an option for multiple goal setting.

• It can be used in email campaigns.

If your CRO team is looking for a useful landing page tool, Conductrics is one of those often-overlooked tools that can assist you with running those A/B tests.

Is there proof that it works? 

Can you imagine generating 25 million Euros (about 28 million USD) in additional revenue from just one tool? That's what happened when the Finnish lottery system Veikkaus Oy hired Conductrics to improve their ability to suggest games to patrons to provide a more relevant experience for each player. 

4. Ethnio — Conduct Smarter UX Research

No matter what research you need to recruit participants for, Ethnio makes it easy to create attractive screeners and guide anyone through the application process.

How does it work?

Once participants have been found, the Ethnio system helps track them, maintain their privacy, and even helps with zero-fee payments.  

The process is simple. You insert Ethnio's JavaScript into your website, and you can control how your screeners appear. It works on the desktop and mobile versions of your site. 

If you don’t want to add screeners to your website, you can send them out via email. 

Ethnio also allows you to target users based on location so you can have different screeners for different regions.  

After you’ve gathered enough data about your UX, you can begin to modify and adjust it accordingly.

Why is it different?

When it comes to surveying users, Loop 11 is a popular platform. Companies such as Target and IBM rely on Loop 11’s tools to gather feedback from users. 

Both Ethnio and Loop 11 allow CRO teams to place a snippet of JavaScript into your website and then build your template and conduct your UX research. 

Loop 11 falls short of Ethnio’s features in one area — links. Ethnio allows you to send out screener links via email and social media. The platform even comes equipped with its own CRM so you can easily reach out to participants.

Is there proof that it works? 

Ethnio is a powerful tool for large organizations, including those involving healthcare research. For example, it has been adopted by the UK's Alzheimer's Society to design more effective web-based tools for those affected by dementia and their families. Ethnio assisted this organization in the task of collecting volunteers and tracking them, all while maintaining complete privacy for the participants. This helped to lower dramatically the cost of participant outreach as well as provide a nearly infinite pool of participants.

Compliance can play a big part in placing intercepts and getting better conversions. For many organizations, these strict standards can seem like significant roadblocks. This is especially true in healthcare and government organizations. The US Federal Election Commission, for example, had problems with pop-up layering and consent. Ethnio helped them to sort these issues and get people to use the feedback system at more touchpoints.

5. WebEngage — Get Better Responses from Your Audience

With no feedback, your optimization efforts will be stopped in their tracks. How do you know the "why" behind your UX without feedback? Sure, you can use a few of the other tools mentioned above instead, but you could use them in addition to this tool to get the most precise picture. 

How does it work?

WebEngage is a marketing automation app you can use to gather customer feedback to increase your CRO. WebEngage allows any user to set up contextual campaigns utilizing a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor. These campaigns will help not only send your customers surveys: it can also be used to set up a simple, automated text interview, or offer an incentivized push notification for a little feedback. 

To set up any of this, all you need to do is drag and drop certain items into your flow, narrow down who should receive what form of contact, and schedule your campaigns. 

Why is it different? 

When it comes to marketing automation, HubSpot is by far the industry leader. However, it comes with a much bigger price tag than its competition.

The giants in the automation industry all do pretty much the same thing. They offer automated email responses, CRMs for managing clients, lead integration, and segmentations.

Companies that choose WebEngage over HubSpot and other big-name competitors reported similar findings. WebEngage users see a much faster ROI because of the price tag. 

Is there proof that it works? 

Tata Group is India's oldest conglomerate. They own dozens of influential, worldwide brands. One of their newest ventures, Starquik, is in the online grocery space. With so much competition, they were having trouble gaining new users. However, WebEngage was able to significantly improve the number of unique users that became customers. 

It produced a conversion increase of over 2,000% compared to what they had seen before introducing individualized WebEngage journeys consisting of several messages sent throughout the customer's initial few weeks of contact. By using incentives and reminding a user of past behavior, they began to make their service into a habit.

Conversion Optimization is the Result of Many Incremental Improvements

As you can see from the examples above, CRO is an ongoing process no matter how extensive your business has grown. Though firms that haven't done as much optimization, like Starquik, may see more considerable conversion numbers, larger organizations, such as Veikkaus Oy, may see more significant improvements in their overall financial situation from even a small CRO increase. 

In business, growth is necessary. Without it, companies stagnate and eventually fail. CRO is one way to prevent this from happening, and these five tools can help.

 Effective Experiments can streamline everything for you. Clicktale can show you where your customers are dropping in the conversion funnel. Conductrics can assist you with your split testing. And, Ethnio and WebEngage can get you the feedback you need from clients.  

The better conversion rates you get, the more market share you can potentially acquire. All you need to do is show your team the tools.