CXL Institute Conversion Optimization Mini-Degree Scholarship Program WEEK 1 Review

I was recently admitted into the Conversion XL (CXL) institute scholarship program and I will document my journey here as I blog summaries and review some of the concepts and lessons that I learn from the various courses in my program.

I enrolled as a scholarship student into CXL’s Conversion Optimization program. I chose to enroll in this program because I have run some of my own small e-commerce stores in the past and continue to do so to this day with my focus on a newer store that I anticipate building out as a long-term brand. A huge component of making paid advertising work and to get a new product or e-commerce business off the ground is being able to find the right product-market fit while also maximizing the return on advertising spend (ROAS) from paid ads.

One way to maximize the return on paid advertising is to focus on improving and iterating on the various aspects of an e-commerce business’s sales funnel, landing pages, overall website, and user experience. Conversion rate optimization is at the heart of this process.

So far, in Week 1, I am going through the Intro to CRO course. It appears that CRO confirms much of what I anticipated its purpose would be. It is ultimately about using data and science, not beliefs or assumptions alone, to improve the overall experience for clients, customers, users, and website visitors to help a business or website launch more stuff that works and helps to improve the stuff we already have.

In the basics of CRO module, I learned that conversion rate optimization is all about ideas and not just testing for the sake of testing. CRO is not about testing every idea you have since it is not possible to do so. Instead, it is more about managing and filtering for the most relevant and test-worthy ideas that could make a difference in conversion optimization and would be worthy of A/B testing. Fundamentally, in CRO, we operate as behavioral scientists and experimenters. We want to focus on asking good questions, having big sample sizes to run tests with, and improving the quality of our sample sizes.

When it comes to managing our ideas for CRO, it is important that we have a database or list that is organized to allow us to systematically test our creative ideas that solve problems and improve people’s lives. We need to make sure that our ideas that we test are specific and not just broad hypotheses. For example, in copywriting, if our goal with a test is to see if having a more emotional headline would improve conversion rate, we would need something more specific than that broad goal to effectively test that. One way to do this would be to change the hypotheses of “changing the headline to be more emotional will generate more sales” to “If we change headline x to headline y by changing one word, we expect an increase in sales as measured by Google Analytics average transactions”. Furthermore, when it comes to filtering out hypotheses that are worthy of testing, it is good to look at it from the ICE framework: impact, confidence, and effort. What impact do we think the idea will have? What is the confidence (or proof) we have in the idea? And what is the effort needed to test the idea? We want high impact and low effort ideas to be near the top of our list of ideas to test. For example, it would be much easier for us to test a different headline versus testing having a video on a landing page versus not having a video on a landing page.

It is important that we collect sources of insight for our CRO tests. Data is all around us. There is no such thing as best practices since every situation is dependent on the audience and context. Marketing studies, surveys, Google. Google Analytics and user tests are some examples of sources we can pool data from. One method for collecting data for a website is to use heatmaps. This is applicable to e-commerce as HotJar is a tool I can use on my e-commerce website to use heatmaps and collect surveys and other data points about website visitors and customers.

As far as A/B testing goes, it is important to do this over time and test just one variable while doing this. The important characteristics and rules to follow for A/B tests are: significant sample size, data collected over time, data collected on recent website traffic, quantitative, tested with prospects and customers, and double-blind.

The above paragraphs outlined the Intro to CRO course, and I will now cover some of the modules in the next course in the program: Best Practices (CRO).

Web forms are an important component of every website’s conversion rate. In e-commerce, it is where we collect customer email addresses, phone numbers, credit card information, shipping information, and whatever else is required as part of the sales funnel to consumer purchase on a website. Objectively, we want to reduce friction, and typically it is more effective to only require the necessary form fields to complete a conversion to optimize the conversion process. Fundamentally, form fields are contextual. Some ways to reduce the friction of form fields include multi-step forms (to reduce the perception of steps required to complete a conversion and not overwhelm a website visitor or potential buyer or lead), addressing fears for sensitive information (telling a user why you want their email or phone number for example), or starting with easier form fields (takes advantage of the consistency bias).

When it comes to E-commerce category pages, the primary goal is to design them to help people find what they like, want, or need. There are four things to help us accomplish this. First, we want to narrow down their choice based on preferences or key criteria. Second, we want to let them sort products in a way that makes sense for them and makes the search experience more seamless and effective. Third, we want to understand whether a product in the list of products on a category page is right for them. And finally, we want to focus the category page on helping them find the right product. The irony of category pages in my opinion though, is that this can play into the paradox of choice and add friction to the sales process. I experience this myself on websites with a large number of SKUs in different categories, and this is something that is not as applicable for a niche e-commerce website like mine that currently only sells one product. But I will pay attention to category pages when I expand my product line.

I will continue my summaries and reviews of the material in this Conversion Optimization program in Week 2 where we leave off on the Best Practices course.

-David