#52 – CRO Strategy vs. CRO Tactics

How do you define the key goals of strategic CRO and how do these goals differ from the objectives of tactical CRO efforts?

You have to remember that CRO tactics are there to help you achieve strategy. Correct. Strategy, big words. Here is the direction you have to implement tactics. Correct. That will take you from point A to point B. They are the road that you're going to walk on. So they're completely different. I would say the first couple of months of working on a project, you are doing two different activities. the same time, you are thinking about strategy and where am I heading? And at the same time, you're probably. And people are going to hate this. You're probably very tactical in the first couple of months, two to three months on a project. My name is Kalislade and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live Hour, a show all about a B testing, experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode, Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like, it's no big deal, while pretty.

Much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we will talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh, man. I bring tough questions like, do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion fund channel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are. But we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live hour podcast today. Wherever you listen to your podcasts. Another week, another episode of CRO Live Our.

That's an interesting name. CRO Live Our.

Why?

That makes sense for a LinkedIn Live. That was the initial plan, but for a podcast, it's like, different.

That's true. The LinkedIn show came in before the podcast.

Yeah.

Although I have to say, the podcast is a lot more successful than the LinkedIn show. There's a lot more people who watch and listen to the podcast and look at the YouTube videos more than the actual people who are watching us on LinkedIn. It depends from one week to another and the next. So before we get started, Simba, how is life? How have you been?

Everything has been good. We've been fighting some SEO fires. Like what happened. We've always been speaking about this, like on the podcast? Yeah, Actually, when I was working on some updates on some of the articles that we have on the blog, I went to Google Search Console. Then I saw like, our graph was like going downwards and then it started, like, being at a constant level. But then today I saw like an uptick and lift. Yeah, an uptick. So I was excited about it. So seems like something is working. So we're just gonna try to continue and double down on whatever we are doing right now.

Yeah, that's a problem with Google and Facebook and Twitter and you're dependent on somebody else. They change their mind and it's like you're under their mercy. And Google thinks, oh, here's a new algorithm update. And it's like, oh, really? I mean, it is what it is. I think that's the reason our email list continues to be our most valuable asset. Awesome. Away from CRO or actually SEO fires, what else has been going on with.

You in terms of work stuff or just like outside?

Whatever you want, man. It's just general enough question to see if there's any highlights in your life for the listeners to see.

I think at the moment I'm just like, going with the flow. I'm enjoying being a new dad. I'm getting like, my heart broken by Manchester United on the side, but.

I.

Can say, like, everything is good, no complaints.

Yeah. I didn't mean to really ask you about Man United. We're not going to talk about Man United. We're going to skip, just to save you the pain and the misery. I'm good. Things are really busy at figpi. It's exciting time. I think this week we did about 40 demos until now, so it's a little overwhelming in all honesty, showing figpi answering questions. Some of the questions are really super smart questions. Some of the questions are not so super smart questions. We're going through the process and it's just wonderful to go through all of that. So, yeah, that's what's been keeping me busy and thinking about CRO. I think in the last two to three weeks, I've thought more strategically about CRO than I've done in the last six to eight months. So it's always wonderful when I sit back, think, okay, here's some modifications that we can do, here's enhancements that we can do. So it's been great.

That's good. That's good. Like, we're just like a few weeks, two weeks away from Black Friday. And I know Black Friday is the busiest time and invesp so how are.

The preparations at this point? The companies that we work with that are going to be launching Black Friday campaigns, they all have them ready and set. We've ran at least two rounds of quality control, quality assurance on them just to make sure that they all look good, I think, which every year we say to ourselves, we're not going to go through this. We have two clients, two companies that have not finalized their decision. And what we told them is you have until end of day tomorrow. You can still run those Black Friday campaigns but we're not going to be doing any AB testing or multi armed bandits experimentation against them. So we'll see if they decide to do some A B testing. I mean, to me AB testing during Black Friday is a no brainer because people are highly motivated. Your sales are going to shoot up anyways. If I can squeeze in 15 to 20% more in terms of sales in a period of four or five days, oh, I've done so well. That's really the conversation that we've had with the different companies. And I tell you, after doing this for so many years, I think we're a little bit more comfortable. It's not as stressful. It's not our normal working times. Correct. But it's also not as stressful as back in 2015. Things are like, okay, we're staying in the office. Everybody's going to be like awake for the next three days. It's just a lot more managed. There's a really well defined process. I think everybody's excited.

That's good. Some companies you mentioned that there are two clients who still haven't decided to do Black Friday campaigns or not. Is it because of maybe they, I would say they don't want to decimate theirselves because they might think like with Black Friday A B testing things might go wrong or maybe they have like other different reasons for that.

So one of them has a really good valid reason. So until now they have not figured out what items they will have that will be in stock and which items are not going to be in stock. So they are a company that sells, that sells coffee. I can, I guess I can share that. I wasn't sure if I should share it or not. But they don't know which beans that they're going to have in stock. I mean there's just a lot of that supply chain is going to hit them really hard and they're like, hey, if we have those campaigns and what if we don't have the coffee beans and it's going to create a huge problem. So that's one understandable problem, by the way. Okay, yeah, this is a tough one and I understand where they're coming from. So that's one. The other one is interesting because I think they have not even finalized their Black Friday strategy until now because they have so many different projects and unfortunately, top management has not approved the Black Friday strategies. So everything is on hold. It's going to create. Whether they're doing AB testing or not, I think is going to create lots of stress for them over the next couple of weeks. So we'll see how that's because we're with them in the same boat.

Okay, that's good. That's good. Today we have a couple of questions that we're going to talk about. It's not really like a debate, but I've seen like, a lot of people talk about conversion rate optimization strategy and CRO tactics. What do you think is the difference between a CRO strategist and a CRO tactician? Or that's a specialist or something like that?

That's funny. On that note, everybody we've hired in the past, we call them CRO specialists and senior CRO specialist. But for us, the specialists really created the strategy and then figured out how to implement the tactics to. Or came up with the tactics to implement that strategy. What we've noticed over the last, I would say a couple of years, people want to be called CRO strategists. The name specialist does not sound as cool as specialists. They're like, oh, strategist, fancier. And the use of CRO specialist, by the way, came because I used to be an IT specialist or a development specialist when I worked in a previous Life. Back in 2000 for Sapient, they changed the titles and you became a technology specialist and a senior technology specialist, and then you became an architect. So I'm like, oh, also CRO specialist, senior CRO specialist and then a strategist. I discovered that our CRO specialists are better than many senior CRO strategists at other agencies. And I'm like, you know what? If that's the case, we're going to call them strategists now. To me, any program, by the way, and regardless of the people that you have on the project, you have to understand where the company is, where, what do you want to achieve as a result of an experimentation or CRO program, and how do you actually get to that point? But CRO strategy starts by asking the question, where are we? What's going on the website? What's going on our platform and having a really clear view of the current status quo and then saying, okay, well, here's what we aspire to get to and is it reasonable? It's not reasonable. That's a whole other question. But how do we get actually from point A to point B? What do we focus on? What are the different things that we're going to deploy as part of tactics that are supporting that overarching strategy of getting from point A to point B? One of our technology partners, Content Square, working with Content Square for a while, and one of the companies that uses Content Square deployed it on their sites and they're looking at the insights and they're like, oh, can we actually take our website from where it is right now with which is a 0.4% conversion rate and they want to get to 1% conversion rate. Now, I'm always weary by the way of saying, oh, we're going to go from 0.4 to 1% conversion rate. I think there should be a lot more sophistication correct around conversion optimization program. At the same time, looking at the different areas of the website, how they're performing, benchmarking that, even looking at the site own data, desktop versus mobile and how those are performing. You're looking at the homepage, you're looking at the search results pages, you're looking at the PDPS and the plps and the cart and the checkout and you're like, oh, okay, so I see how the site is. I see the potential for each one of those pages, one of those areas. I'm going to create a map and this map is going to be really heading towards the okay, how do I improve the user experience? How do I fix usability issues? How do I test new methods that are not deployed on the website? What I would call substantial methods. Actually, that term I think came up, the guys at Spiro came up with. And how do I come up with ideas that are absolutely disruptive, just completely different than the typical way we do business right now. And the idea is to go from the 0.4% conversion rate to 1% to 1.5, so on and so forth. Part of that strategy as well is understanding the traffic mix that's coming to the website and where they're landing. And what kind of messaging works really well for those visitors that are coming to the website. And it's fascinating because when I tell you, oh, we need to figure out the messaging that, you know, that we're using for those different traffic types, people right away think oh, messaging is very strategic. If I have changed that with, oh, what kind of web copy we're going to use for those on those different landing pages. Notice now you start thinking tactics. Really, it's the same thing. Correct. I just how I positioned it in the mind of the people who are listening, that's really to me like strategy and tactics. And there's lots of details that we can talk about. There's.

That's a good explanation. But I also want us to like, maybe for someone who's listening, who doesn't really know the difference and who's learning this for the first time, I just want to ask, how long does it take to come up with a CRO strategy?

Oh, that is a tough question. How long does it take you to come up with a CRO strategy? Usually. Usually CRO strategy will take us anywhere between four to six weeks. And it includes a lot of activities of really understanding what's going on on the website. What are the shortcomings? Where are we leaking visitors? What are visitors expecting that we are not providing them? Where are we falling short compared to the market space that we operate in? How is our positioning? There are a lot of questions. I would say at a minimum you have, it's an exercise that will take you anywhere between four to six weeks. Now sometimes you might be operating in a very competitive market where it's going to take longer. It might take eight to 10 weeks. Because really it's about understanding the market that you operate in, the positioning, what's being provided to people. How are you going to stand out? How do you translate those features that you're going to stand out with to the actual consumers that are coming to your website? I'll give you an example. I was talking to a company earlier today. I was talking to their VP of marketing and they sell outdoor grills. And you always tell me that's one of the features that they really pride themselves with is that it's all made of concrete in a single layer. And all the other competitors, they have multiple layers. So there's concrete and veneer and this and that. And he's like, oh, it's such an important thing. So it's a huge differentiator. This is how we're different than all of our competitors. But at the same time, he continued, he's one guy who had bought one of those outdoor kind of built in grills. He posted a review about them in Facebook and he was just saying how great they are. And then somebody asked him, are they a single layer or multi layer? Grills. And the guy responded by saying, he said, oh, it's a multi layer product. And then the guy who bought as well says, like, what difference does it make? So the VP of marketing was saying, it's such an important feature. It is so important. This is how we distinguish ourselves. And our customers don't even understand that. And what I told him, when you're trying to figure out your positioning in the market, you need to figure out, okay, how are we unique? And okay, so we are unique by, because of 1, 2, 3, 4 and of those set of things that we are unique in, which ones of those matter to our customers? You might be unique by 1, 2, 3, 4. The first three don't matter to your customers at all. It might impact their experience with your product, but at this point they don't even understand it. Yeah, you are unique, but you have to educate them about those points. Point four, you're unique. And it's, but it's also important to your customers. So maybe that's a position that you should take. Now after you understand all of that, you need to translate it into actual changes that you're going to make on the website and actual experiments. So again, yeah, take a product where this, like, you know, outdoor built in grills, you think that's very quick. Really, the amount of features that they have and how they distinguish themselves from other competitors and what matters to the consumers, it's quite a bit of work. So we're talking about six to eight weeks of sitting back, thinking and doing a lot of work at the same time. Correct. Doing deep analysis at the same time.

I know that like we have a list of questions as you're explaining. Like I'm having like some questions and that might be helpful to our listeners. Is there like a point where the CRO strategy changes or like maybe we start like a CRO project today, we come up with a strategy, then maybe in the next eight months, six months, we change the strategies. There's like a point where it changes.

We are constantly reviewing our CRO strategy. Now at the same time you have to be very careful because sometimes people are constantly changing their strategy. So I'm going to contradict myself over here to the point that you take two steps forward, two steps back and it's like you're like you're moving but you're not changing location. Two steps north, two steps south and it's okay. There's lots of movements so you don't want to confuse movements and lots of actions for strategy. Now that doesn't mean that you don't review your strategy. We actually do strategy review every six months. We started at point A. We wanted to go to point B. In order for us to get to that point, we had this plan. First question that we ask is how much we've accomplished and are we still heading towards point B? And based on all the actions that we've taken in the last five, six months, do we need to make adjustments when it comes to experimentation? When it comes to CRO strategy, you're learning. You're constantly learning. You're constantly. Because you have a strategy. If I go in this direction, If I do 1, 2, 3, 4, I am going to get closer. You might do 1, 2, 3, four, and you find out that people actually don't like anything that you've put out there. So you have to step back and say to yourself, okay, we need to change. Are we still going after the same point? And this is a little scary in strategy, but we don't operate in a vacuum. Is our target still point B or are we going after point C? Correct. Because things are constantly changing. You're working in an economy that is changing, competitors that are changing. So you need to adapt really quickly. So that's kind of the fine balance that you have to go through. I love to always say that our CRO strategies is a living process. We're constantly updating, we're constantly thinking about it, but at the same time, we don't make fast and sudden changes to it. We're not the Titanic that's moving. And at the same time, we're not a single runner that's just constantly making changes. Titanic takes forever to change. A single person running can change right away. So we're in the middle between the two.

How do you define the key goals of strategic CRO and how do these goals differ from the objectives of tactical CRO efforts?

You have to remember that CRO tactics are there to help you achieve strategy. Correct. Strategy, big words. Here is the direction you have to implement Tactics. Correct. That will take you from point A to point B. They are the road that you're going to walk on. So they're completely different. I would say the first couple of months of working on a project, you are doing two different activities. the same time, you are thinking about strategy and where am I heading? And at the same time, you're probably. And people are going to hate this. You're probably very tactical in the first couple of months, two to three months on a project. Why is that every site there, most websites that we Work with. Whenever we start working with them, we see there's a lot of opportunity of what we call quick wins. This is broke. This is not working correctly. I am just seeing just silly things that are happening on the website. Sometimes we fix those right away. I don't need to ab test it. Let's just deploy it on the website. But many times I see a problem on the website and it's not necessarily a problem where the site is broke. Correct. But we have a usability issue over there. And guess what? I can fix it by doing 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay, so great. So if I'm going to do 1, 2, 3, 4, I'm going to a B test and see which one appeals better to my visitors. So typically the first three or four, two to three months are very tactical, very focused on usability issues. And at the same time, you are building your CRO strategy now, after you finished that exercise. And I have a CRO strategy right now. I've implemented some tactics. Now you want to look and you say, okay, okay. So I'm at point A. In order for me to go to point B, what tactics do I need to deploy? What specific. Even like if you remove the word tactics, what are the specific experiments that we want to deploy on the website? What is the right mix of experimentation I need to deploy on this website to take it from a 0.4% conversion rate to a 1% conversion rate in the next maybe 10 to 12 months? Those are the tough questions that you have to ask. The more aggressive your goals are, the more it changes your tactics. Correct. You'll take bigger swings, you'll take more risks, knowing that more risks are more risky. Correct. You'll have less success rate, but you can do. Absolutely. When you hit that success, it can be absolutely amazing.

Just to try to paint a picture, we can say like maybe a CRO program, Right. Starts off with knowing the business objectives, then creating a CRO strategy, and then the tactics follow from there. Does that make sense?

Yes, that makes a lot of sense.

Okay, the next question is, what should businesses prioritize first? Developing a strategic roadmap or implementing tactical changes.

So like I said, I probably answered this question. I answered that question because I think both need to happen at the same time. And there is a reason for that. And I guess it depends also on the company that you are working with. With some companies that have not done experimentation in CRO before, I don't want to discount the importance of strategy. But guess what? You need to get them used to experimentation. You need to get them used to running A B tests. So for me, doing tactics and strategy at the same time is very important. Now, if you are working for a company that is very well established, they understand CRO, they understand what it takes to implement CRO. I might focus initially on strategy, but I would tell you in 90% of the cases that we work with, we run them parallel. We start on a project, we kick off with CRO strategy. It will take us six to eight weeks to complete. We launch our first experiment that's very tactical. Within two weeks of working on a project. That's the way we do it. Four weeks into the project, we launched a second experiment. Six weeks, then week five, work one experiment per week, if not even more. And we know and we set expectations with the stakeholders from the get go that listen, our work in the first two months is very tactical. We just want to fix a whole bunch of issues that you have on your website while we are crystallizing our full strategy.

Yep, that makes sense. So how can businesses align their overall business goals with their CRO strategies? And how do tactical decisions fit into this alignment?

CRO strategy doesn't happen in a vacuum. I need to understand your business goals. If we are working with a VP of marketing for working with the CEO, first question that we ask them and then this happens on quarterly basis. By the way, what are your business objectives this quarter? We need to understand those really well because CRO is one of the tools, one of the pathways to help you achieve your objectives. If your objective is to focus on customer retention, it's a lot different as a goal than I want to increase my revenue. Both of them help increase revenue. But retention, if I'm focused on retention, I'm probably not going to be running lots of experiments around incentives or discounts or anything like that. If I'm on the other hand want to increase revenue. Okay, so what's the analysis that we need to do? Are we relying on incentives, which I really don't like, or are we going to do something a little bit more complicated? We usually like to look at our portfolio of experiments that we can run on a website and then we classify those into a mix or different groups. One group is what we call UX iteration. I have a UX issue, I'm going to fix it. Or it's an iteration on an experiment that I have. So that's one set of experiments that we run. Another group of experiments that we're going to run is what we call major or substantial experiments. We notice, for example, that social Proof is missing on the website. We notice that you're not using the right promotions. We notice that there is lots of fears, uncertainties and doubts that you have on the websites. That's an issue. We notice continuity issues. So those are major issues that we're going to run. And the last group of experiments that we're going to run is what we call disruptive experiments. Perfect example of that. We're working with a brand that sells eyeglasses. All the eyeglasses are about the same price, $120 at this point. And a couple of experiments that we are looking at doing one experiment is just price testing. Hey, what is the price elasticity? Can we increase the price and is that going to impact the conversion rate? So that's an interesting experiment. Or can we reduce the price and we're going to get more orders? So it's an interesting experiment that's going to make us think that's one experiment. And then the other experiment, looking at the average order value and the cart abandonment rates, we've noticed that for example, people who are placing an average order value less than $50, they have lower abandonment rate. Their abandonment rate is close to 42% versus another group that's between 50 to 100 where their abandonment rate shoots up and between 100. Between 50 to 100, their abandonment rate is closer to 55%, 100 to 100. We see that the abandonment rate drops. That's an interesting correct problem. Why I understand when the average order value is low that the abandonment rate is low. What I don't understand is why when the average order value is really high, the abandonment rate is also low. And in the middle that segments over there, there's an issue there. And how does that impact us giving free shipping and how does that impact us trying to do upsells and cross sells? Those are what I would call disruptive experiments. Those are experiments that you're like, huh? Really? We're going to test this? Yes, we are going to test this. So I think having the mix there of those CRO strategies that support the business goals makes sense. Correct. And then now I've defined, okay, here's your business goal, here's the strategy. Now let me run a whole bunch of tactics to implement the strategy which helps you implement the goal.

I like the example that you just used. It makes it clear. And you also, like in your explanation, you also touched on the relationship between business objectives, the CRO strategy and also the tactics. But what if, let's say like an E commerce company, that you're working with, right. They have like more than three objectives, of course. Like the main objective is to try to increase conversions revenue and also they want to like maybe improve their customer retention rate. Right. And maybe they want to reduce churn or something like that or cut abandonment. So they have like maybe let's just say three objectives. How then do you come up with a strategy there? Do you come up with a strategy for each and every objective or you create one strategy that kind of covers all this?

Depends to a good extent on how many experiments you're going to be running. A quarter or six months, if all that you are going to be doing, let's say in a quarter. So three months is 12 experiments. It is really difficult to focus on three objectives because let's say you have three objectives, that means I'm going to be running four experiments per objective. And with a success rate, let's say, okay, your success rate is great, just at 35%. That means one successful experiment to help you achieve that objective. You see the issue there. You're not going to be able to look, yeah, you are running experimentation, but because the volume of experiments that you've done, you've diluted the effectiveness of your program. It's a lot different conversation. If in those three months you are going to be running 60 experiments, I'm like okay, yeah, in that case I can be running 20 experiments on this objective. 20 experiments on this objective, 20 experiments on this objective. And yes, with a 30% success rate, six successful experiments in a quarter per objective. Yes, that will help me get there. So the volume in this case determines how many objectives I can go after. And you hear me talk about this by the way Simba, a way even. And I think this is more kind of a strategy question with our marketing. We always have so many goals that we want to achieve. We can do 1, 2, 3, 4 and we can be successful. But if we're going after all these goals and because our team is small, guess what? We're running here, we're running there, we're running and then a year finishes. Nothing happened. We've done a lot of work. Not to take away from the amount of work that we've done, but because we lack the focus. You know what if I have limited resources, I need to be laser sharp focused on what I'm going to achieve. Last thing I would finish with what I found. And again, this is maybe for the SMBs, not for the large organizations. Correct. Let's talk about the small to medium sized businesses. Lots of times when you have multiple objectives because you don't have clear priorities. Correct. I was like, oh, we'll just throw another objective. What is your topmost priority? What's the most important thing for you? What is the one thing that you're going to bet the success of the marketing department or the experimentation program on? Give me that one thing and let me work on that and deliver results for you when it comes to that.

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. I think those are the questions that I had. Unless you have something to add.

No, no, I think that's it. I think, by the way, we might want to have Ayat join us next week. We'll see if we can pull her if she doesn't have any client calls, because it relates to, by the way, to strategy. We'll talk about prioritization and creating that roadmap and some of the exercises that they go through. And when it comes to their creating a strategy document for a company that we're working with. Awesome. Thank you, everyone. And until next time, happy testing.