5 steps to kick start CRO success

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) should be part of every business digital commerce programme. The question for many is ‘where do I get started and how can I make an impact?’

Many factors influence conversion rate, and with such a broad landscape to contend with, our team of CRO specialists has put together 5 key steps it believes will get you started.

It’s important to say upfront that this answer will differ for every business, depending on scale, maturity and the processes that you have (or don’t have) in place. It’s critical that you take the time to define what questions you want to answer that align to your business goals at the beginning of your journey with CRO.

Understanding your customers and their pain points is also important and will require a lot of analysis and research in those early stages. Looking beyond your typical top-line demographics of gender, age bracket and median income, we recommend gathering as much information as you can, including:

• User testing

• Session recordings

• Customer service inputs

• Surveys

• NPS scores

• Google analytics data

Spending a decent amount of time researching and analysing will give your CRO efforts a better chance of making a good impression and yielding the right learnings and results.

Along the way, you’ll progressively construct several focus areas from a macro view into a micro view that should be looked at to create potential hypotheses.

Step 1 – get the basics covered

There are three key areas that must be covered: data integrity, investigation and analysis.

Ideally you should have someone in your team who, for a few days a week, looks closely at how common pain points reveal themselves in your data. Is this data reliable and does it give the business confidence that they are getting accurate results?

You will need someone with the right skills and space to be able to conduct deep dives into the current customer journey and shopper funnel to get accurate insights.

Step 2 – get buy in from across the business and develop frameworks

Any successful CRO and experimentation program should span across various business functions and levels of seniority with the aforementioned analysis as evidence, removing any potential HiPPO subjectivity. If you have buy in across different roles, you’ll be able to develop a holistic picture of what your objectives could and should be. And get people invested in the changes that are to come too.

To deliver on an effective CRO roadmap, here are some questions you should ask yourselves to shape your framework:

• What are our overarching business goals and objectives?

• Who are our key audiences and what do their customer journeys look like?

• What are the most common usability issues on our site?

• Have we identified our most frequent conversion issues and opportunities?

Once you have devised your framework, maintain regular reviews and iterations around the audience, metrics and focus areas depending on the goals you’re setting out to achieve.

Step 3 – consolidate and hypothesise

Now that you know what you are looking for and what goals you want to reach with your framework, it’s time to consider what you will measure first and what tools you have at your disposal to get started. This is where you should start looking at tools that measure actions taken by customers like click mapping, page analysis and merchandising.

Tools that allow you to aggregate and automate your insight are valuable time savers. This way you can scale and quickly gain momentum behind your CRO efforts and validate an ROI.

Here at Tryzens we are tool agnostic. We work with, and are certified by, some of the industry leading qualitative tooling so we can help our clients drive better digital experiences, backed by data.

Step 4 – prioritise and test

Now that you are confident in your data integrity, armed with the questions you want to answer and evidence of why customers behave a certain way, it’s time to prioritise.

We recommend involving various subject matter experts across development and design to score your tests against effort vs reward. Bringing together key stakeholders involved in your program to review hypothesises is another great exercise. You can view it as a final check point to ensure you’re exploring the right questions that will yield the best returns either from a ROI or learning standpoint.

Step 5 – presenting your findings

Analysing and presenting results in the right way is crucial to present back to the business. We will cover this in more detail in our next piece that looks at how you analyse results and implement the right initiatives to boost your online sales.

While this is a very high-level overview, we hope that it gives you some direction and guidance on what you need to run an experimentation programme. We are always here to help with any questions you might have – particularly our CRO specialists. So make sure you reach out to our team.