King & McGaw Developers

I’ve spent this weekend at Digital Elite Camp in beautiful Tallinn, Estonia. Peep, Ants and Priit have built a brilliant conference, and I was privileged to share ideas (and many beers) with smart, interesting people from all over the world. Here are some of the the themes that stood out for me.

Optimisation is people-driven

A common theme amongst the speakers was the importance of engaging with your customers as humans, in order to better understand their needs and motivations. Attempting to infer user needs from quantitative data can lead us to believe “what you see is all there is”, and hide important truths.

“The most important thing in conversion optimisation is the discovery of what matters” – Peep Laja

Getting away from data and speaking with the actual humans who pay your bills generates insights that help us design better hypotheses for improving user experience.

Conversion rate optimisation lies at an intersection between psychology, statistics and other fields, so there were many interesting discussions on cognitive biases, limbic mapping and persuasion.

Your conversion problems are highly contextual

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for improving your conversion rate. Beware of generic advice on conversion rate optimisation, or conversion rates in general. It’s a process.

“Don’t copy your competitors, they don’t know what they are doing either” – Peep Laja

There was someone at the camp who had a 14% e-commerce conversion rate (he pulled out his Analytics app on his phone to prove it to me!), which is very impressive but completely non-comparable to our type of product (he sold contact lenses which are both necessary and need to be replenished).

“I’m not an expert, there are no experts” – Craig Sullivan

Process and culture should be created to maximise learning and discovery of what matters. It’s gruelling, unglamorous work, and in my experience it takes a number of cycles before the insights can start feeding back into hypothesis development.

Test planning and culture are vital

Too many A/B test “successes” are not statistically significant, therefore won’t translate to actual revenue when exposed to the real world. This was certainly the case for us in our early experimentations, but we are now disciplined about calculating sample sizes upfront and typically focus on specific funnel goals, rather than the e-commerce conversion rate.

I learned from Craig Sullivan that we need to make sure that we run the tests in full business cycles. Our customers follow a clear pattern which leads to Sundays and Mondays becoming our busiest days, so we should run tests in full weeks only.

Another great tip from Ton Wesseling is that you should slow down your control version so that each variation runs at the same speed.

There is also a lot that goes into building a testing culture. Test ideas come from qualitative and quantitative insights, not random marketing brainstorms. Outcomes from the tests create further insights and the cycle begins again. The more you know, the more you can know.

Email is a powerful channel

Your email database is one of the few channels you are in complete control of, and one I am guilty of not fully appreciating in the past. Noah Kagan, Brian Dean and Chris Hexton set me straight on that.

An effective strategy for transactional emails can lead to great results if they solve problems for the customer at the right point in their lifecycle. Airbnb and TripAdvisor have some killer executions in this area.

Re-sending to those who did not open will often get you a lot more people opening your mail (but you might piss some people off).

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about when it’s OK not to convert. I’m happy to hear from most of the companies who market to me, yet most of the time I delete their emails without opening them (until I decide the time is right). I’m still happy to be reminded those companies exist.

CROs know to to drink!

Every night my head was full of ideas and my belly full of beer. I even won a bottle of mysterious Estonian liquor for asking the most questions!

I’ll definitely be back.