First, let me say that I have always loved to change or optimize things. I just couldn’t leave anything alone; I HAD to study, modify, test, fail, retest, and finally get to that ‘win’. And so I’ve always been very goal oriented, asking myself what I can change and test to help me achieve and optimize the goal(s) at hand.
I grew a passion for the subject over the years through working for various companies in the IT field. CRO is highly obsessed with a goal to get the customer through the funnel as efficiently and cost-effective as possible. CRO is the practice of increasing/optimizing your conversion rate by enticing the user of the website to take specific thoughtful guided actions like buying products, or taking some specific action that we deem as a “conversion”. Speaking in the context of webpages and succinctly described; CRO is the process by which we align the visitors intent with our page purpose and to make this process as efficient, relevant, useful, and painless as possible.
Although CRO is most often used to make incremental improvements, its main goal is to optimize the whole marketing process with the customers journey and satisfaction in mind. The more optimized your marketing, the higher your percentage of conversion rate. Keep in mind that these CRO principles can be used for Email marketing, as well as for campaign landing pages and webpages, alike.
Step-by-step order to use in CRO:
1) Gather All Data
2) Careful Data Analysis (Qualify)
3) Hypothesis Creation (The most important part of the process.)
4) Design (Page, site, UX, UI, Customer Journey, User story focus and prioritization)
5) Build (inclusive of email marketing team, dev team, creative services team, QA team, production team, etc)
6) Test (Thoroughly QA everything and every step to ensure quality customer experience.)
7) Post Mortem (Learning & Improving [AKA: AAR – After Action Report])
