Hardwiring experimentation into your business’ growth process — Review

In my third instalment featuring my learnings from the Growth Marketing minidegree program by CXL Institute, I’ll be talking about growth experiments including its importance, how to run such experiments and what takes place during the research and testing stages.

Now that we’ve got a firm understanding of the role growth marketing plays in your business’ machine, it’s time we optimise optimisation. Before we get into it, I want to highlight the key difference between conversion rate optimisation (CRO) and search engine optimisation (SEO). According to Rapidboost, CRO is focused on improving the conversions on your website leading to more lead or sales whereas SEO focuses on getting your page listed on search engine results to gain organic traffic. Though both elements are important, the purpose it serves is different yet complementary to the success of scaling your business. Founder of CXL Peep Laja is of the belief that e-marketers care more about traffic acquisition than traffic generation, website optimisation, customer experience and retention which personally, can be seen as a shortsighted view because as important as it is to acquire new customers through various methods including throwing your business name out there through channels like Google Ads, the pot of gold is to be able to retain the acquired customers by delivering a compelling value proposition that assures them with success which leads to building long term value for your business.

So, how do we do then go about optimising optimisation? Here are three considerations:

1. Test (or make) more effective changes
2. Reduce the duration (and cost) of optimisation
3. Improve the speed of experimentation

The key is the discovery of what matters which is can be an arduous task but well worth the effort. Businesses need to take the time to figure out what their real problems are which can be done through research and testing. It’s about asking the right questions instead of just asking an endless barrage of questions so as to guide the kind of data that needs to be collected in order to challenge one’s assumptions. Throughout this process, it can be a challenge to go against your biases and readily admit that your ideas may not be all that it’s cracked up to be, which means that it’s absolutely necessary that you work on through this with a partner or team in place.

After decades in the optimisation space, Peep has come up with his own process called the ResearchXL Process which gathers six types of data to make great optimisation decisions and come up with tests that tend to win more often and have a bigger impact. The objective of this process is to gather data that we can read, analyse and act on. The question you need to ask yourself as you go through this is “what will I do differently based on this data?”.

The ResearchXL Framework created by founder of CXL Peep Laja

The six-step framework is as follows:

(1) Technical Analysis

Identify your low hanging fruits so that you can tackle those first and get immediate small wins. The easiest ways you can do this is to conduct cross-browser testing, cross-device testing and speed analysis. You’d be surprised at what you can discover just by checking how your website responds on different browsers, devices and its speed across all.

(2) Heuristic Analysis

This is an experience-based analysis on techniques for problem solving, learning and discovery. In this process, it is highly recommended that you walk through and audit each and every page of your website during which you put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Some of the features that you need to look into as you do this exercise is the clarity of your website, identify any friction that may exist, the anxiety that customers may face as they dig for information and pin point distractions. Be wary of your confirmation and blind spot biases here — there is no such thing as an objective point of view.

There is no single best approach but there are some established frameworks that you can use as your starting point to refine your own process including:

a) 7 Levels of Conversion by Web Arts

b) Invesp Conversion Frameworks

c) Marketing Experiments Methodology Heuristic Approach

d) LIFT Framework

Here’s CXL’s tried and tested methodology:

(a) Start by conducting thorough walkthroughs of your website with all the top browsers and each device category (desktop, tablet, mobile). Pay attention to the site structure, go through the checkout / form filling process. The goal here is to familiarise yourself with the site and its structure, and to identify any cross-browser and cross-device issues (both UX and technical issues).

(b) When evaluating a site, keep below in mind:

- Clarity: Is it perfectly clear and understandable what’s being offered and how it works? This is not just about the value proposition — it applies to all pages (pricing, featured, product pages etc).

- Relevancy: Does the web page relate to what the visitor thought they were going to see?

- Assess incentives to take action: Is it clear what people are getting for their money?

- Evaluate all sources of friction: This includes difficult long and difficult processes, insufficient information, poor readability and user experience (UX), bad error validation, fears about privacy and security to name a few.

- Identify distracting elements: Are there any blinking banners or automatic sliders stealing attention? Is there too much information unrelated to the main call to action?

- Understand buying phases: See if visitors are rushed into too big of a commitment too soon. Are there paths in place for visitors in different stages i.e. research, evaluation, etc.?

Once you’ve done this, map out “areas of interest” which are all the items that you noticed along the way.

(3) Web Analytics Analysis

A health check is one of the very first things you should do with web analytics such as Google Analytics. It’s incredibly vital for any analytics or CRO work. Ideally, it should be run before the main project work commences as everything needs to be measured (goals, funnels, e-commerce and event tracking setup) and to also ensure that data is not corrupted.

(4) Mouse Tracking and Form Analysis

As the name implies, you need to track mouse and track pad movements and clicks on your website. This is to identify where people click and where they don’t (otherwise known as click maps) and how far down one scrolls on any given page (scroll maps). There are also mouse hover heat maps, however where people look and where they move their mouse cursor are not exactly correlated. Most tools can also conduct user session recordings so you can watch videos of real visitors using your website which can be very insightful. Some of the more popular tools to track this include Hotjar , SessionCam, Contentsquare and CrazyEgg.

(5) Qualitative Surveys

Customer surveys can provide a treasure trove of insight for optimisers and marketers alike. Surveys allow businesses to look at attitudes towards brands, awareness of other competitors, to evaluate new products, to evaluate products that may be coming down in the market and to find out who their customers are. The danger is in collecting misleading data which lacks insights leads to a tremendous amount of time wasted.

In order to increase conversions, conducting qualitative research such as surveys enables you to learn who your customers are, what they really want and the language or lingo that they use. This becomes critical for effective copywriting.

Once you’ve collected the data, the next step is to analyse the responses you receive which can include:

1. Being clear about the goals and what you are looking for
2. Conducting an initial review of all the information to gain an initial sense of the data
3. Coding the date by organising it into some manageable form — this is often described as ‘reducing the data’, and usually involves developing codes or categories while still keeping the raw data
4. Interpreting the data
5. Writing a summary report of the findings

The process of qualitative analysis is in no way linear but rather continuous and iterative, constantly learning along the way. So don’t be surprised to find yourself jumping in between these steps.

(6) User Testing

This is when you get insights into your user’s mind and usability. The main benefit of user testing is to identify bottlenecks and understanding what stops people from doing something. There are three ways to run testing including over the shoulder testing, unmoderated remote testing and moderated remote testing.

With so many companies adopting similar strategies in aims of outcompeting each other in the pursuit of being better, the real win is in becoming meaningfully different.