Conversion rate optimization is not marketing — what companies are missing by not seeing the full picture
Most of the companies I have worked with put their CRO (conversion rate optimization) team into the marketing department and did not consider it to be product department. This gives the task less responsability and power than it actually has and companies miss out on huge potentials. So why does it matter where you put your CRO team you might ask?
There is still that common misbelief that CRO is just changing button colors and pushing layouts around. CRO or conversion rate optimization is a term I don’t like using anymore. Agile product development is what it really is but I guess that term is long and can’t be shorted that nicely. Since CRO is agile product development it makes it quite obvious that the core of the work is PRODUCT. It has 2 main purposes:
1. increase the number of new customers for your service/product
2. increase the customer lifetime value of your existing customers and/or increase the average order value
1. Increasing the number of customers for your service/shop
In order to achieve this it is absolutely necessary for CRO to work closely with marketing to see that all your campaigns are aligned with the content on the individual landing pages. The teams need to make sure that the traffic you spent huge budgets on will convert and by doing so lower your cost per lead/order. Basically the better the pages converts the less you need to spend to achieve the same number of leads/orders:
The CRO team can help finding the right headlines for ads, the right pictures and claims as they will know what content performed better on the page. In the end you will want to achieve a solid message match between marketing campaigns and the content on your landing pages.
This whole accquisition topic is only one side of CRO and this is where most companies stop and miss out on the other side — getting more return on invest from your existing customers.
2. Increasing the customer lifetime value
There is only so much you can do on your pages — at one point you will have found the best content, applied several psychological patterns to make users act now and then what? This is where the optimization becomes hard, your success rate of tests will decrease and finding a winner will become rarer and rarer — as a result the team members will lose motivation and the management will stop believing that this team can still bring value.
However, this is the point where CRO can really show its potential by developing the product/service further. What is not there yet but would help the business? CRO can explore so many potentials with minimal effort to make sure your customers will keep using your service/product in the future → this is your customer lifetime value!
CRO is not just about improving what is already there but also creating a vision where the product/service needs to go.
The market is constantly changing, your competitors will always try to be one step ahead of you and have you heard of “being disruptive”? If you want to stay relevant, your product or service need to evolve, too. It needs to build new features, optimize the user experience and make sure people will stay engaged with you. What better way of developing these features is there than by testing it?
Imagine you spent weeks on developing features that are not even worth the effort in the end — so why not doing it the agile way and test your way there? There are several ways to test a feature without fully developing everything around it — for example with smoke tests or focus groups (but this will be a topic for the future).
Do user research and see what users struggle with — listen to their thoughts and how you might make the user experience even better. What are they missing on your page/product?
And this is exactly why CRO is not marketing but product because CRO will shape your product/service into a lasting product vision and make sure users stay engaged. A product team should never be a separate entity just doing their own stuff but entangled with CRO and keep developing the product by testing all the directions they want to move to.
