How to start a CRO programme
Getting Buy-In From Key Stakeholders
You want to start an optimisation programme, but you need to get buy-in from senior stakeholders. You know this way of working is the best way to get results and learn more about your customers. But you need to convince the business that an ongoing continuous cycle approach is better than a project to protect method. It's time to show the benefits of an optimisation programme.
One of the best ways I've found to demonstrate the potential of an optimisation programme is with a quick-win example. Don't ask for permission; illustrate the benefit. In this post, I'll talk through the steps I've been through to get a CRO programme up and running.
The groundwork
It all starts with a bit of planning. Aligning the CRO plan with business objectives will make it easier for senior stakeholders to get on board. This is where a goal tree comes in. A goal tree shows the top business objective and how your other metrics contribute to moving it.
The tree is useful for showing how smaller metrics change the more significant business objectives. To create yours, start with your overall business objective. The next level down is the metrics which affect the top metric. For example, if your main goal is revenue, the next level down could be the average order value and the number of purchases per customer.
Once you have this, it's time to look for optimisation opportunities. Identifying opportunities starts with the data. Make sure you have a solid foundation of analytics. It helps in the beginning, and it's vital for proving your experiments when you run them.
Breaking your customer's journey into funnel sections can help in a couple of ways. You can benchmark the conversation rates for each step in the funnel, and it can focus your ideas on a specific area. For example, once you have broken the journey into funnel sections, you may notice that lots of customers don't move from the top of your funnel to the middle. Now you have an area to focus on and a benchmark you can monitor to see if the optimisation improves this benchmark.
Get creative
Based on the area you need to improve, start to list out your ideas for optimisation experiments. At this stage, no idea is a bad idea.
Once you have this, it's time to start prioritising your ideas. Each idea will have different levels of technical requirements, expected outcomes and confidence in results. It's essential to start your programme with the experiments that are most likely to get results and are quick to implement. Optimizely has an excellent template for this. You can download it here | Optimizely template
Start by getting your ideas into the spreadsheet. Then you can start to add the details for each experiment with areas such as:
Technical difficulty
Funnel impact
Resource needed
Once you have your score for each area, add them up and sort by highest overall score. The completed sheet is your list of experiments in the order you will run them.
Now is where the quick win experiment comes in. Identify one experiment that can be run quickly, which doesn't need lots of technical setup or resources to run. This will be the first experiment that you run first.
Experiment card
Now, for each experiment, you will want to record the results. I've found a good way to do this is experiment cards. Each card consists of the hypothesis, metric to measure, base conversions rate or base metric, experiment description, results and learnings.
The experiment card is your guide and overview of each experiment. It's going to be your evidence once the experiment is complete.
Here is an example test and results card:
You will fill out the card with the results each time you run an experiment. The 'experiment card' and 'results card' form part of the learning for the overall program.
Present your plan
All of the above can now be used as your optimisation plan. It's important to remember that it's not all set in stone. As you start to run experiments and learn from them, your scouring might change, or you might think of other more important experiments to run. Using this basic plan should hopefully give you the foundation to get buy-in from your stakeholders. The deck you present should now consist of the following:
Background - what you want to do and why
Goal tree - show how the programme will align with the overall business objective.
A prioritised list of experiments - showing the details of each experiment in the order you plan to run them.
Experiment cards - for each experiment you plan to run, fill out an experiment card.
Having a structure to your CRO plan should help you get the buy-in you need to get the ball rolling. Showing your planning and that you have put some thought behind your programme will stand you in good ground for gaining momentum.
Here is a presentation template that covers all the points above. Feel free to download this and use it, change it and amend it to fit your needs. | Optimisation program template slide deck
