Everything you should need to optimize the conversion of your marketing campaigns: best tips, strategies, and tools
Part 2
10 CRO tools to enhance your funnel and boost revenue
You put a lot of effort into attracting relevant traffic to your website. Expert content, SEO, ads bring you thousands of visitors… but very few actually get to the bottom of your funnel.
Sounds familiar?
The conversion rate fixing mission may seem impossible. But after reading this article, you’ll Ethan Hunt this game.
Everything you need is the right suite of conversion rate optimization aka CRO tools. These are your teammates who will spy on website visitors’ behavior, find weak points of their customer journey, and provide you with relevant reports. So you could make data-driven decisions for your funnel conversion optimization.
Conversion rate optimization or just CRO tools are instruments that help you increase the number of users performing a target action (i.e. leaving contact info, signing up, making a purchase, etc.)
Roughly speaking, we can divide these instruments into two groups:
The number of platforms that provide CRO tools is endless. You’ll spend hours clicking links on Google, not to mention their testing.
Here are primary criteria to help you pick the perfect conversion rate optimization software.
GDPR compliance. While browsing another CRO tool website, pay attention to their privacy policy. The time when you could use visitors’ data without their permission has gone. While picking CRO tools, make sure they respect your users’ confidentiality.
For example, do the pop-ups, forms, and chatbots they provide have a customer agreement link and checkbox?
Security. Again, you’re going to work with users’ data while enhancing your conversion rates. So the tools you use should guarantee the safety of that data like encryption or Content Security Policy (CSP) that helps prevent code injection attacks. One leak of private information can cost you the trust of your customers. No conversion growth is worth that.
Integrations. Conversion rate optimization is a complex process that requires all hands on deck. Or more like all tools. Everything your marketing, support, and sales actively use:
So check if your CRO tool can be integrated into your tech stack to ensure seamless and effective work.
❗ This top is unbiased — we made sure to choose the best CRO tools in their respective industries. And you’ll find Dashly on this list. Our team is proud of the product we develop since it helped over 5000+ companies boost conversions and sales on their websites. You can check out our cases with SaaS and EdTech companies.
First, gather as much data about your website as possible. The following CRO tools will help you gather analytics data on your funnel, marketing campaigns, and find bottlenecks in.
You’ll also look at your website from a user’s perspective: what pages they’re most interested in, what CTAs work the best, and where they stumble 👀
I also added a few tools for feedback collection, so you could use direct opinion of your customers for CRO.
Let’s go!
Dashly is a conversational marketing platform, one of the main goals of which is to help you optimize the conversion of your website. In terms of the CRO research, it provides a list of tools to collect all possible data on the performance of your website:
Find out the primary info that will help you with conversion rate optimization:
Set up an audience segment for a chatbot to:
It’s a great opportunity to adjust your conversion optimization strategy to customers’ needs.
And if you have a hard time analyzing all the data you have, you can always turn to Dashly implementation team for help. They’ll give you valuable insights on your website CRO.
Maybe your conversion rates suffer from low engagement in the early stages? Or you lose a chance to capture leads before they leave your website?
Okay, I’m getting ahead of things… Too early for hypotheses. Back to business 👇
Pricing
There are three paid plans in Dashly, starting from $39/mo. The price depends on your monthly website traffic and the add-ons you choose to enable. Meanwhile, agent seats are unlimited — your whole team will get access to the tool and its CRO features.
Each plan offers website visitor behavior tracking. However, the more advanced the plan is, the richer your customer data will be.
You have 7 days to check the full functionality of the platform for free.
Dashly’s pros and cons as a CRO tool
✔️ CRO tool with a modern intuitive interface.
✔️ Friendly support that is always ready to help you.
✔️ A lot of integrations to include Dashly in your existing tech stack.
✔️ All the essential CRO features are included in all the paid plans.
❌ No AI.
❌ No email assistant.
❌ Some complex tasks might require developers’ help, but the team is always there for you.
Walk in your visitors’ shoes with Hotjar. This CRO platform provides heatmaps and session recordings to check how engaging your content is and how many visitors actually scroll till the end of a page.
It’s an excellent opportunity to see your customer’s pain points: which pages they stumble on and try to understand why it happens. Later, you can fix it in your CRO process.
Besides, Hotjat provides forms for customer feedback, so you could get direct comments from your audience. Insights for more conversion optimization ideas are guaranteed 😉
Pricing
Pick one of three paid plans for this CRO tool. A free version is also available. The choice of the plan depends on the features you need and the number of sessions (the entire journey of one website visitor counts as one session.)
Hotjar offers 15 days of a free trial to test all its features for conversion rate optimization.
Hotjar’s pros and cons as a CRO tool
✔️ Easy to set up tool you can use on multiple websites of yours.
✔️ Provides a comprehensive view of your customer’s journey, which is essential for planning CRO.
✔️ Friendly customer service.
❌ The limit of the page size that can be captured.
❌ Might slow down your website.
❌ Lacks some integrations that could improve the tool’s functionality (like Google Analytics).
Crazy Egg has similar functionality to Hotjar. These two often go together on lists of the best conversion rate optimization tools. Just as the previous solution, Crazy Egg offers heatmaps and session recordings to track users’ activity on a website.
Get the full picture of whom, where, and how many clicks do on your website. Track the entire customer journey with session recordings for better optimization of your website conversions (but we’ll talk about testing CRO tools in detail later.)
Pricing
There are five paid plans for Crazy Egg CRO services. The cheapest one starts from $29/mo. Mind that all plans are billed annually. The choice depends on the number of tracked page views, snapshots (another name for heatmaps), and recordings you require.
The free trial lasts for 30 days — you have plenty of time to check this CRO tool’s functionality.
Crazy Egg’s pros and cons as a CRO tool
✔️ The tool provides you with valuable insights to make data-driven decisions for CRO.
✔️ Easy to integrate with third-party applications.
❌ Limited data visualization.
❌ Pricing might be not suitable for small and mid-sized companies (besides, Crazy Egg offers only annual plans, which can be inconvenient for some users.)
❌ Occasional bugs can interrupt effective work with the tool.
Here comes another tool for user behavior tracking — FullStory. With this CRO platform, you can record users’ clicks, page views, and form filling.
According to FullStory, perfect UX is a key to conversion rate optimization. Thus, their software combines qualitative and quantitative data on user’s actions, so you could improve the customer journey and, thus, boost conversion.
Additionally, FullStory will help you measure customer engagement and enhance UX based on session recordings and bug reports. You’ll be aware of any issue your prospects face.
Pricing
FullStory offers two paid plans for its users. The price for the CRO tool is custom and depends on the number of sessions, features you choose, and the needs of your business.
There’s also a 14-day free trial available to test the functionality of this conversion rate optimization platform.
FullStory’s pros and cons as a CRO tool
✔️ Great tool to get the full picture of users’ behavior, adapt to their needs, and enhance the overall customer experience.
✔️ Users claim that the session filter is “magical” and extremely easy to use.
❌ Some users complain about the system’s bugs and lags.
❌ Poor customer service.
❌ Very slow ROI for the price this conversion rate optimization tool demands.
This list wouldn’t be complete without Google Analytics. It’s always on the top of the best and most popular tools for conversion rate optimization used by businesses of all sizes. With GA, you can keep track of the KPIs and user activity.
By adding UTM parameters, you can also analyze which marketing campaign works best for CRO and scale successful results.
Pricing
Apart from a wide range of features, GA has another great advantage. It’s free. That’s why this CRO tool is so popular among businesses of all sizes and industries!
However, if you’re an enterprise-level company and require in-depth conversion analytics, you can upgrade to Google Analytics 360. The pricing there starts from $12 500/mo.
Google Analytics’ pros and cons as a CRO tool
✔️ The tool is easy to install and set up.
✔️ You’ll get plenty of insights on enhancing your website content and user experience.
✔️ Offers a sufficient free version.
❌ Users complain about unresponsive support.
❌ Self-service opportunities are limited.
❌ The functionality of the paid version doesn’t offer unique features more affordable competitors don’t have.
💡 Useful hack
Integrate Google Analytics with Dashly. After a quick setup, both CRO tools will work in sync, so you’ll get a full picture of your funnel.
If you want to get the full picture of your funnel and customer journey, Mixpanel is a great solution.
With this CRO tool, you can analyze each step of your funnel by any user attribute and find out which prospects convert better. You’ll see how new releases affect your audience and keep track of the most important metrics like Churn or Retention Rate.
Pricing
This CRO tool offers three plans to its users, the paid one starts at $25/mo.
Even on a free plan, Mixpanel provides quite rich data, but if your conversion optimization strategy requires more advanced analytical tools, consider one of the paid plans.
The price is custom and depends on the number of monthly tracked users and add-ons. There’s a calculator on the website, so you can determine how much CRO will cost you with this tool.
Mixpanel doesn’t have a free trial, but you’ll get access to all the main conversion rate optimization tools on a free plan.
Mixpanel’s pros and cons as a CRO tool
✔️ One of the best analytics tools for enterprise-level companies.
✔️ Reliable software with a wide range of features for CRO.
✔️ Easy-to-use platform with responsive support.
❌ Quite an expensive CRO tool for small and mid-sized businesses.
❌ Very limited data range for user flows (only 2 weeks).
❌ Some data may be missing from the reports.
💡 Useful hack
You can integrate Mixpanel with Dashly to enrich your data. Choose the events you’d like to have a deeper analysis of in Dashly and send them to Mixpanel in a few clicks.
Heap gives you tools to keep track of all your website activity. It’s possible because of non-stop activity recording. This analytical CRO software provides detailed insights on your website traffic and its conversion rates throughout the funnel.
With Heap, you get tools that monitor the KPIs crucial for your conversion rate optimization strategy (such as Churn, Retention, Bounce Rates and so much more.)
Pricing
You have four plans to select from, including a free one. However, its functionality for CRO planning is quite limited, so you may want to consider the tool’s paid plans.
The price for Heap’s conversion optimization tools depends on the number of monthly tracked users or customer sessions (it’s a period of user activity on your website).
You have 14 days of a free trial to test if Heap suits for your conversion rate optimization tasks.
Heap’s pros and cons as a CRO tool
✔️ The platform provides tools for effective customer data collection and finding bugs on the customer’s journey.
✔️ Records all your website activity non-stop from the moment you install the tool — you won’t miss anything.
❌ Dashboards configuration and customization are quite limited.
❌ UI looks outdated.
❌ The initial setup might be complicated, so you have to turn to tutorials or the support team (however, some users mark the support as unresponsive.)
Finally, you have all the necessary data on your hands. Prepared some CRO hypotheses to test? Time to experiment 👩🔬
For this most exciting part, you can use chatbots, pop-up messages, banners, change the design, or CTA buttons. And of course, you’ll have to A/B test different options to find the most effective one and then measure the campaigns’ success.
So, let’s take a look at a few tools that will help you bring your CRO ideas to life and test their efficiency.
Dashly is a conversational platform that satisfies the needs of marketing, sales, and support teams. All thanks to versatile website conversion tools, you can implement and test different strategies and compare them without a developer. Here are just a few:
If you require help with tool setup, you can use ready-made campaigns or ask for help experts of the Dashly implementation team. It’s a separate service Dashly offers.
These guys launched over 450 successful projects, boosting conversion to payment/signup/subscription etc.
First, our experts will help you analyze the funnel. Then they’ll develop a customer communication strategy, so you could increase conversion rate at each stage of the funnel.
Pricing
Dashly offers three paid plans, starting from $39/mo. However, if you need access to a full CRO toolset, I recommend the Marketing plan. This plan allows you to set up triggered campaigns and launch various CRO experiments.
You can also extend the number of available chatbots and other triggered messages with add-ons.
The price for this conversion rate optimization software will depend on your website traffic and the add-ons you choose to include in your package. The number of agent seats is unlimited — invite the whole team!
You’ll get 7 days of a free trial to test the full functionality of the platform.
Dashly’s pros and cons as a CRO tool
✔️ CRO tool with modern intuitive interface.
✔️ Friendly support that is always ready to help you.
✔️ A lot of integrations to include Dashly in your tech stack.
✔️ All the essential CRO features are included in all the paid plans, including the cheapest one.
✔️ Visual builders to launch campaigns without a developer.
❌ No AI.
❌ No email assistant.
❌ Some complex tasks might require developers’ help, but the team is always there for you.
Undoubtedly, Intercom is the industry leader when it comes to customer communication. This platform has a wide range of tools to check your hypotheses on conversion rate optimization.
Here are some of the features available:
And advanced analytics will help you see the results of your CRO campaigns.
Pricing
Intercom offers three major plans to its users. For CRO purposes, pay special attention to the toolset offered on the “Convert” plan.
The prices on all plans are custom and depend on the agent seats you need and the number of unique visitors you reached via Intercom’s Outbound messaging. All in all, you’ll find out how much you’ll pay only after a conversation with the sales team.
There’s a 14-day free trial, but it requires your credit card details.
Intercom’s pros and cons as a CRO tool
✔️ Easy-to-install tool with a wide range of features.
✔️ The major features are easy to set up.
❌ Customer service can take days to reply.
❌ Lack of transparency in pricing — you won’t know how much you’ll pay till you talk to the sales reps (some users also complain about occasional overcharges.)
❌ Integration setup is complicated.
Check out the Intercom vs Dashly comparison. We’ll tell you what these two platforms have in common and how they’re different.
VWO is one of the easiest tools for CRO hypotheses testing. The software is developed for running A/B and multivariate tests and is aimed at helping you increase your conversion rates.
Mainly, this tool helps you test minor changes on your website like CTAs, page design, etc. However, you can create some widgets in easy-to-use visual builders.
You can track the results of all your experiments in the admin panel of this CRO platform:
Pricing
There are three paid plans offered for VWO testing CRO tool. However, the price for each of them is custom, you’ll get it only when you contact their sales department.
You can also enjoy VWO’s CRO tools for 14 days on a free trial.
VWO Testing’s pros and cons as a CRO tool
✔️ One of the easiest tools to run CRO tests that provides useful insight.
✔️ A lot of features included for a lower price than competitors’ (Optimizely or Adobe Target.)
✔️ Excellent customer service.
❌ Tracking is hard to set up without developers’ involvement.
❌ Occasional bugs break down the reporting system.
❌ Testing threshold for small and mid-sized businesses (your traffic might not be sufficient to launch CRO experiments.)
UsabiityHub is another powerful tool to test your conversation rate optimization hypotheses. It offers a wide range of features for it. Mind that it mainly focuses on communication design — how well your landing pages convey value.
First, this CRO tool offers a prototype test, which means real customers evaluate your Figma templates. Then, you can launch preferences tests and first-click tests.
And the most curious feature is the five-second tests. A visitor who enters your website has five seconds to get the message of your landing page and answer a few questions. It’s one of the quickest ways to find out how you’re perceived by your own audience.
Pricing
UsabilityHub offers four plans, including a free one. However, only three people get access to the tool on a free plan, so it might be more suitable for small businesses.
Overall, the choice of the plan depends on the size of your team and the number of features you need for CRO testing.
Unfortunately, there’s no free trial available, but you can test the tool’s limited functionality on a free plan.
UsabilityHub’s pros and cons as a CRO tool
✔️ The testing feature is easy and fun to use.
✔️ A great tool to collect feedback quickly and effectively.
❌ Inconvenient billing system — you have to pay for the subscription and per test.
❌ Lack of customizations in CRO tests.
❌ Some test instructions are unclear and confusing.
Conversion rate optimization is hard. So much to take into account: funnel analytics, user’s behavior, and feedback. It might take 10 hypotheses to find one that actually works. Non-stop process that takes a lot of your energy and nerves.
I really need to add some positivity here…
Well, with the right tool set, this work will be more effective. It can even get fun! We recommend testing a few tools from this top on a free trial to find the best conversion rate optimization software for your business.
You can start with Dashly. It offers tools for visitor behavior tracking (empowering it with integrations) and a wide range of features for testing your CRO hypotheses.
Dashly helped over 5000+ businesses boost their revenue and conversion. Now it’s time to write your success story 👇
Good luck with your experiments! Hope to see you very soon 😉
Conversion rate optimization or CRO is a process of increasing the number of website visitors that perform a target action. A target action could be leaving contacts, signing up, or making a purchase.
CRO tools are analytical and testing instruments that will help you develop and implement hypotheses on the conversion rate optimization of your website.
They can be specialized like Hotjar, which focuses on website and user analytics. Or they could be versatile like Dashly and provide you with instruments for both analytics and implementation of your CRO ideas.
There’s no universal CRO tool. Your choice depends on the price, the number of agent seats, and the CRO features your tool offers.
You can test a few tools on a free trial to pick one that suits your CRO needs the most.
All CRO tools provide different services with different features. However, there are certain criteria you should pay special attention to:
This allows you to ensure safe and secure work with data and synchronization with other tools you already use.
To improve your website’s CRO, you have to analyze the data in the first place. Check customer’s way through your sales funnel and users’ behavior on your website.
Then, based on this data, you can start hypothesizing ways to improve your conversion rate. After that, you can pick tools for the implementation of your ideas.
To carry out all these tasks, you need to find a conversion optimization platform.
You can carry out experiments with CRO yourself. Or you can turn to experts for help. Dashly implementation team will work out and set up the best CRO scenarios for your website.
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