Key insights from our CRO ‘Ask Me Anything’ event with Contentsquare

We recently hosted retailers and brands for an intimate roundtable discussion on CRO and experimentation. Joined by CRO specialists Sara Berrada (Hush Homewear), Aimée Hart (Tryzens), and Ines Esteves, (Contentsquare), we continued the conversation that all began in our recent virtual panel session.

Armed with insights based on their own experiences, our panellists talked about the challenges with embedding CRO strategies & practical steps to overcome them.

Kickstarting your programme

CRO programmes can seem daunting at the outset so it’s important that you take the time to define what your goals are, gather user analytics & insights to pinpoint painpoints, and prioritise areas of focus based on the projected impact of your programme. It’s also important to remember that your CRO journey will pivot based on your ongoing learnings.

Getting stakeholder buy-in and building trust

It may come as no surprise for many CRO specialists that getting buy-in from stakeholders across the business can be challenging. Some teams may not be as invested in the programme due to a lack of understanding, are resistant to change or simply don’t see the value in experimentation.

The key is to develop culture where teams across the business are aligned and committed to testing. Steps in this direction include:

1. Take your stakeholders on the journey with you and educate them on the benefits of an experimentation programme at the outset. Share your vision and long term goals.

2. Put in place group ideation sessions with teams across the organisation to showcase key customer problems from your analysis and encourage them to contribute their ideas on how to solve the problem.

3. Send out regular comms to update your teams on the progress of each test. Ensure you embed a system where you’re consistently asking for them to feed in to the process.

4. While it may not be applicable to all retailers, some have started building conversion into wider team objectives to increase accountability amongst their peers

5. Be transparent; this mean sharing key successes to demonstrate the power of experimentation but also be clear on what tests may not have been as successful. Help your stakeholders understand that it’s not just about the winning tests but the key insights you gain when a test hasn’t delivered the results you might have expected it to.

A major issue comes into play when there is an internal conflict of opinions. Different levels of bias can impact how teams decide what their sticking points are and what tests should be prioritised in their experimentation programme. This is where it helps bringing in an external party to help look at the data and customer problems agnostically.

The ever-evolving customer

Your customer base and their expectations are changing constantly so it’s important that you stay on top of your customer analytics and retest when you need to. Just because a test has delivered a specific result at one point in time, it doesn’t mean that you will see the same result a few months or a year down the line.

Making sure you have the right skills and teams in place

To spearhead a CRO programme, you and your team will need to wear different hats on a daily basis. You will require practical skills and knowledge that will help with analysing data and analytics, developing creative solutions, project managing the lifecycle of multiple tests and reporting back on efficacy.

You also need to be able to build stakeholder relationships to get their buy-in and support. You’ll need strong communications skills too, particularly if you’re working closely with other teams to implement tests (including designers or developers).

On the softer side, you’ll need to be resilient, flexible and innovative. Someone who isn’t afraid to fail if it means you’ve learnt something key.

If you don’t have all the experience and skill in-house, you’ll need to consider what external support you can bring in to help you shape your experiments and optimise your pre-click investments or performance marketing budgets.

At Tryzens, we support retailers like Hush homewear, Whittard of Chelsea and Orlebar Brown throughout their CRO lifecycle. Through our expert-led framework approach, we can help brands develop a full CRO programme incrementally. Our programme covers insight & strategy, A/B testing, design, development and reporting.  Keen to learn more?  Talk to our team of CRO specialists.