Most membership bodies and charities are fantastic at driving awareness. They invest heavily in a range of marketing channels to get people to visit their websites. But traffic on its own doesn’t drive action. If your website leaks users, pushing more visitors into the funnel just inflates your cost per acquisition.
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) fixes those leaks. It does so by understanding user behaviour, making data-informed changes via experimentation, and thereby increasing the amount of transactions, revenue or leads. For charities and membership bodies, CRO acts as a layer of validation between ideas and what gets deployed on a website – effectively de-risking your organisational decisions. CRO typically pays for itself, providing a minimum of 4x return on investment from A/B testing.
Here is how a solid CRO strategy can make your website work harder to convert the traffic you’re bringing in:
Extracting maximum value from your existing traffic
I’d argue that all organisations are sitting on more potential than their current conversion rate suggests. Using an evidence-led approach when designing for donations or signups can shift outcomes dramatically:
- By finding a new way for webcam viewers to donate, we helped The Donkey Sanctuary achieve a 300% uplift in donations.
- By reframing how tickets were sold, we significantly improved donation and Gift Aid opt-in rate for Chester Zoo.
- By exposing more people to donations on Blue Cross, we delivered a 10% uplift site-wide.
Eliminating silent conversion killers
Every signup or donation journey has moments where people hesitate and leave – it could be because of friction, lack of clarity, or a poorly communicated proposition
- CRO exposes these hidden obstacles and helps you understand why people are leaving, through analytics data all the way to asking people questions on your website.
- By actively searching for bugs, we can quickly identify & fix small problems that can turn into big conversion killers.
Replacing guesswork with the truth
Internal debates about what members or donors “want” can be a stab in the dark if there’s no data to back it up, or if you’re working with outdated personas.
Another common trap is assuming that copying another organisation’s “best practices” guarantees results. Blindly copying others can be risky and might not work for your own user base. CRO replaces this guesswork by validating improvements with real on-site users instead of relying on opinions.
- Stop non revenue-generating ideas in their tracks – the reality is that only 33% to 50% of data-informed website changes actually deliver a real impact.
- Don’t spend on development if you don’t need to: testing prevents you paying for and shipping changes that won’t make an impact, saving long-term on your development budget.
- Learn from your failures – whilst failure is a strong word, we need to know what doesn’t work, as well as what does. Website testing provides a valuable learning experience you may be able to apply to other areas of your organisation e.g. marketing materials.
Reduce churn and strengthen retention
CRO can often be viewed as purely an acquisition tool for new sign-ups or first-time donors, but the same principles apply to renewals / future donations as they do to first-timers. If your renewal process is clunky or if your repeat donation prompts are poor, you might be actively making it harder for people to support you. You can also optimise your post-website journeys and conduct A/B testing to measure differences.
Furthermore, you can work on strengthening retention before the conversion, too. By testing the prominence of your newsletter signups and supporting materials, you can get more people into your nurture funnel to engage with your content (and become more ‘sticky’) – increasing the likelihood of conversions further down the line from those who aren’t ready right now.
CRO acts as a multiplier for your marketing budget
For membership bodies and charities, every pound of marketing spend needs to be justified. Instead of fighting the continuing battle against rising acquisition costs, CRO improves the efficiency of every channel you currently use to send people to your website. When your website converts at a higher rate, your return on ad spend (ROAS) improves, your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) drops, and your marketing generates more impact.
CRO isn’t a one-and-done project, it’s a habit of continuous improvement by continually learning, generating ideas, and only shipping the positive changes that compound over time to deliver real sustainable revenue growth.
Want to see how CRO can transform your membership or charity engagement? Explore our work with MemberWise here.
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