What is CRO?
What it is about, is optimising human experiences with your brand. That’s because, today, we live in an experience economy. A good experience can make you an advocate for a brand, whereas a bad one can leave you a bloody nose and an overwhelming sense of having the moral high ground.
So, let me tell you a little bit more about what I mean by an experience economy. Back in the day, I used to have products…you’d just buy products. Like a car; you’d have a rubbish car and a less rubbish car. These weren’t very reliable cars, and if you could, you’d buy the less rubbish car. And then that changed, because all cars became good. You could buy a cheap car and get a really long warranty and they’re all reliable.
So how can you differentiate yourself from your competitors? Well you add on perks, but then all your competitors add on perks, so how do you go to the next level?
Case study: Mercedes
Well, you’ve got to turn that into an experience. Mercedes have done this. So, when with Mercedes, if you want your car serviced, they come and pick up your car no matter where you are and they give you another car, perhaps one that is better than your car, while they get it serviced. They take that car away and they service it. That’s just good customer service.
But where the experience comes in is they then get the mechanic to put it on a GoPro camera, and they walk around the car, underneath the car and they show you the whole of the car – like the brakes, the tyres, and what condition it is – and they package that up and they e-mail it to you. You are then experiencing what the mechanic sees, and it’s becoming an experience. Then they valet the car, they wash it, they drive it all the way back to you, and all together you’ve got an experience. And the key to that is the digital landscape, because that allows you to create this experience.
Okay, thanks very much. They wanted to increase in-store email sign-ups. So, they used to have a little piece of paper, and you’d sign up. The obvious thing to do there would be to improve that sign-up form, maybe put it onto an iPad, and make it look a bit more modern.
However, they partnered with an agency called Mr. President and created an entirely new experience. They laid out all 45 of their mustards in store, so when customers came in, they could taste them using one of their WiFi-connected spoons. When they found a mustard that they liked the flavour of, they could tuck it on a little sensor—positioned in front of the mustard—and store that under a guest account.
When they’d finished their tasting session, they then walked over to this like typewriter machine, which is a very tactile thing, and they could put in their details and then their personally selected mustards would be emailed to them, along with notes and suggestions on how best to use the mustard. Now that’s an experience. That’s changing something as mundane as an e-mail sign-up into an experience that created a lot more sign-ups. Why you conversion optimisation is not working.
CRO isn’t just about conversion metrics
In the digital landscape, we have all this data available and we’re transfixed by these numbers. And in CRO, specifically, we’re transfixed with this conversion rate metric. And we tend to forget that behind the numbers are real people doing real actions, like clicking on buttons or filling in their card details, and they’re all having experiences.
So, CRO isn’t just about this metric, it is also about understanding people and optimising their experience. CRO isn’t just about testing buttons and changing banner images, it’s also about understanding people’s motivations.
Instead, we need to use this data to build a picture. There are many research tools out there, such as analytics, click maps, user testing, eye tracking, user recordings, polls, and surveys, which together help us put flesh on the numbers.
And then we need to test this, we need to test our ideas. And it’s important to test because it either proves or disproves our hypothesis, but above all it helps us to learn, and it helps us to safeguard the user experience so that what we’re doing is informed and not detrimental. In other words, we’ve got to bring it back to the people and make sure the changes that we are doing help improve the customer experience.
And the thing is, our experiences or how we experience things are changing all the time, technology and the way we consume media is moving so fast. And if we don’t keep up with this, you’re in danger of having this. This is where you invest heavily at the beginning, see some growth, and then trends and technology change, requiring you to reinvest again. What we want is continuous growth. This is a process of continually iterating to try and get as close to continual growth as possible.
Why you need to optimise for people
So, what am I trying to say here? What’s the moral? We need to be optimising for people, not just metrics. We need to be giving people experiences that make them advocates of brands. And we need to be iterating constantly, so that we can stay ahead of the curve.