First week of CXL Conversion Optimisation Mini-Degree: Review

This week I covered:

CRO — introduction
Course 2 — Best practises
Course 3 — Intro to conversion copywriting

Course 1: Introduction to conversion optimisation

The introduction provided an engaging overview of the course and defined CRO as a process designed to increase the performance of a website by measuring how visitors behave. The course shows how a CRO program can generate ideas and effectively collect and prioritise them. Experimentation is integral to the process of separating good ideas from bad ideas, and using data to help here will improve your business. Finally the introduction to CRO touches on A/B testing as one of the best ways to experiment on digital traffic and outlines how to implement an effective test.

Conversion optimisation at its core is:

• Ideas
• Testing
• Statists

Ideas

The first step means asking some questions about your site and then managing those ideas, to establish the right questions to ask. The hypothesis list was a really useful tool for establishing a filtration system.

1. Make a list
2. 2) write a hypothesis (a prediction) e.g. If I __________ I expect ________ as measured by __________.
3. 3) Research and rank ideas based on criteria, or using the ICE scale — impact, confidence and effort to test.

Good sources of insight are;

• Google
• Existing research — from past within your company
• Google analytics
• User testing — having someone run through your site and talk through their process or performing various tasks. Ask them questions about their preferences. See where they click first and perform 5-second tests.
• User intelligence — eye tracking, heat maps, scroll reports, screen recordings and verbal feedback.

These sources of insight are ranked by the effort they require. At each step you’ll have more focused data. Put these ideas into the hypothesis list and repeat this process with many people, therefore increasing the sample size.

Testing:

This is where A/B testing was first broken down;

The process is presenting visitors with different versions of a creative and seeing which one is more successful.

To perform a successful A/B test requires an understanding of statistics and only tests one thing. You therefore need to pin down where and what you are going to test. This type of testing is designed to eliminate bias and to follow certain rules;

1. The sample size must be significant — large enough to predict the future, hopefully hundreds of people
2. The data is collected over time
3. Data is collected on recent traffic on your current site
4. Is it quantitative, meaning that you can apply statistics to it
5. Prospects and customers are being teste
6. It is a double blind test. This means that the subjects of the experiment do not know what they are testing, or that they are being tested. This ensures they cannot shape the data.

Statistics

This is where the data that you have uncovered can be presented on graphs and discussed with colleagues and clients. Is it important to use data and statistics when presenting your findings as it makes you so much more credible as a marketer.

Course 2: Best Practises

This course took a deeper dive into the elements of a website that affect conversion. My feeling is that in later courses some of the lecturers will do away with some of these best practise concepts, but it is good to have a thorough understanding of them to start. The course consisted of 18 lessons that covered these elements of a successful ecommerce or B2B website:

1. Web forms
2. Ecommerce category pages
3. Buttons and call to actions
4. Fold and page length
5. Ecommerces sign up
6. Incoming calls and call tracking
7. Principles of persuasive design
8. Typography and content
9. Redesign v evolutionary design
10. Home pages
11. Pricing
12. Website speed and optimisation
13. Visual hierarchy
14. FAQs
15. Visual design
16. Internal search
17. Shopping cart pages
18. Ecommerce checkout pages

Going through each of these lessons I discovered a recurring theme of concepts;

• Research
• Reducing friction
• Testing

Instead of going through each lesson and explaining what I learnt, I would like to define these themes with examples.

Research

Within any company, research is the foundation of success. However it is very often overlooked and permeated with bias. I have already covered sources of insight as defined in the first course, which is another way of saying research. One thing that has become clear from this course is that the process of optimisation is cyclic:

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Research → Implement → Test → Research → Implement → Test…ect

Your initial research will inform your implementation, which you will then test. Your findings then become the starting point for more research and the cycle goes on and on.

A research example for creating ecommerce category pages was to make sure to use breadcrumbs on your site, so that you can track the users navigation. This is research for the next phase of optimisation. Research means knowing your customers really well. Another example of something you can implement on-site is to have a search bar so that you can see unfulfilled searches. This can inform your product listing, copy and whether you have any broken pages.

Information is best gathered through a mix of quantitative and qualitative sources. Gathering qualitative information in the form of surveys, user testing, watching user session videos, eye tracking and peer reviews are essential research tools. For example if you have a phone sales operation then call tracking is helpful to identify potential triggers that can then be woven into the copy and CTAs. GA can then be used to collect quantitative data by creating an event or goal that ends in a phone call. Through this process you are seeking to answer questions such as:

• What did they do before calling? What pages were they on?
• Which page did they call you from?
• What PPC or SEO keyword did they use?

Taking your research to implementation then requires the next most important phase of optimisation, which I believe to be — easing friction for the user.

Easing Friction

This is an abstract concept that means enabling the user to complete the marketing funnel in the easiest way possible. Any points of friction along the funnel may cause the customer/ user to abandon their search. Once you’ve researched your users characteristics and uncovered where they are struggling on your site, you can simplify and enhance their experience. Some reasons customers will abandon their journey are;

• They don’t trust the process
• Can’t find the information they need quickly
• Have technical issues (website speed, 404s)
• Do not like the copy or look of the website

An example of easing friction with technical features of a website such as form building, is to set clear expectations — state what’s going to happen at the beginning e.g. ‘Takes 20 seconds” “fill out this form and get instant access to X”. Then minimise the number of form fields — only collect what you absolutely need. Important to have form analytics to test where people are dropping off so you can eliminate unnecessary fields. The phrase — “Don’t make me think!” should be your mantra when building a website. Do the pages help the user to find what they need? For example on category pages, does your approach allow people to;

• Narrow down their choice based on criteria with filters
• Sort products in a way that makes sense for them and helps then choose
• Understand whether a product in the list is the right one for them
• Focus the page on finding the right product.

From a design point of view, easing friction can mean making your website look visually appealing, because most people make judgments about a site unconsciously and instantly. Four principles of persuasive design where outlined as;

1. Clarity of design — visuals need to tell us quickly what the site does
2. Visual appeal — colours, design, images with low visual complexity and familiar layout
3. Visual hierarchy — the size and placement of things, colour of buttons and have an appropriate amount of white space
4. Maintaining attention at all costs — keep important things within or above the fold, use large engaging images, no big walls of text
5. Have one action per screen — use CTAs but not too early and pay attention to the language and triggers used by your costumes.

Testing

Research and testing can sometimes share the same methods. Using Google Analytics and user testing is as important at this point as it is in the research phase. Methods more unique to the testing phase include;

• Split testing — for pricing for example (Amazon has been known to do this). Or split testing two versions of a landing page or piece of copy.
• A/B testing

This phase is where you can take what you have spent months implementing and start to measure it. Once you have data, you have solid information you can present to people about what is actually happening on a site. I am not going to dive too deeply into GA here as I know it is covered in more detail later in the course, but this will be very important to understand and utilise during the testing phase.

Course 3: Intro to Conversion Copywriting

Unsurprisingly this course also vaguely fits in the research — ease tension — and test model. It outlined the two types of copy; regular text to inform or entertain, and sales copy with the goal of inciting an action. The process of copywriting is as follows;

1. Research: customer, product and competition
2. Outline and guidepost
3. Draft copy
4. Conversion boost
5. Revise, rearrange
6. Test

I really enjoyed this course and it has given me a lot to think about in terms of reviewing my own copy. I particularly enjoyed the lessons about the importance of the value proposition.

A value proposition needs to answer these questions:

• What product or service is your company selling?
• What is the end-benefit of using it?
• Who is your target customer for this product or service?
• What makes your offering unique and different?

The marketing process can really help a new or existing business to properly nail down its values and ethics. Becoming better at marketing makes you a better company. I am excited that through this process of questioning and defining what a company really stands for, I might be able to help fledgling entrepreneurs really hone in on what they stand for and how they are unique, ultimately making their business more successful. That really is one of the greatest pleasures of being a marketer for me.

Written by Amy Stenner