CXL Scholarship — Conversion Optimization MiniDegree — Week 1 of 12

Over the next 12 weeks, I’ll be writing an article discussing my learnings in the CXL — Conversion Optimization Minidegree. I recently applied to the scholarship application program and was accepted. Part of that process is to write a weekly article discussing what I have learned in the previous week. I am a life long learner and every opportunity that I have to expand my knowledge in an area of passion is one I grab wholeheartedly.

I discovered CXL through Chris Mercer and his Measurement Marketing classroom (an incredible resource for deep diving into analytics). Mercer also teaches at CXL and I kept seeing the Facebook Ads show up on my feed so I decided to check them out. I saw an opportunity to enhance the learning I already had around analytics and take it to the next level with optimization.

The CXL Institute Conversion Optimisation Minidegree is an online training program designed to be “the most thorough CRO training in the world”. It is taught by CXL Institute’s in-house staff (including its founder Peep Laja) as well as a collection of the leading marketing practitioners in the business.

According to CXL, the Conversion Optimization Minidegree will:

“help you become a top conversion optimizer in. The skills you gain will benefit you for years to come. You’ll learn how top conversion rate experts in the world approach conversion optimization.”

The Total time approximation for the course is 78h 59min and I have 12 weeks to complete it and pass the certification exam.

You can find more information here: https://cxl.com/institute/programs/conversion-optimization/

So this is week one and I have already gleaned lots of valuable nuggets that I’m using in my workplace.

First off, what is Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO as it’s often referred to? In the words of Brian Massey in the first Foundations course:

“These are the words that describe a way of approaching your website in which you collect data to understand how changes to your website are going to impact your visitors and thus their willingness to sign up, subscribe, or buy from you.”

Brian Massey teaches the Foundations: Intro to CRO first course. It’s a good overview of the basics of CRO, how we first need to have a hypothesis to manage our ideas. It’s not uncommon for teams to just randomly test things without really having any idea what they were trying to achieve in the first place. Having a structured way to manage your ideas and prioritize will prevent wasted resources. From there, we move on to insights, which is the research side of things. This is my favourite part as it gives you so much insight into the behaviour of people online. Using heatmaps, mouse tracking, live chat transcripts and so on are all valuable to move to the next step of A/B testing. This is an area that I have been starting to do more of in my job and a large part of what drove me to do the CXL course in the first place. I knew I wanted to become an expert in A/B testing and optimization so that I could provide great value to the company and team that I work for.

So what is an A/B test? It’s basically creating a different version of a creative and seeing which version provides the most value, ie. leads or sales. We do this in a statistically valid way so we can then make decisions to make changes in the hopes that it will increase those leads/sales as expected.

My key take away from the CRO Intro course was that we can create a culture shift within a company of understanding the value of following these steps to make efficient and product decisions versus random non data driven “let’s do this, let’s try that” that can often come from other sources in the company. Yet, the magic is that we can combine the creative with the data and can change hearts and minds.

After the intro course with Brian Massey, I then moved into the Best Practices Course with Peep Laja. Peep is the founder of the CXL Institute. His style of teaching is practical and down to earth and loaded with experience. I know as I’m watching the videos that the information I’m being given is useful and not fluff to fill out a course curriculum.

While much of the information was a refresher from my years of experience in the online space, there were definitely useful nuggets that I took note of. Peep broke down the best practices into these sub headings:

Web forms

Ecommerce category pages

Buttons and call to actions

Fold and page length

Ecommerce signups

Incoming phone leads & call tracking

Principles of persuasive design

Typography and content

Radical redesign vs. evolutionary design

Home pages

Pricing and pricing pages

Website speed optimization

Visual hierarchy

FAQs on websites

Importance of visual design

Internal search

Shopping cart pages

Ecommerce checkout pages

I won’t go into all of them but the one that I do want to address is the fold. According to Peep, the fold (the area of content seen before you scroll down the page) is still very relevant. However, I was really hoping to see it addressed from a mobile-first perspective. The fold space in a mobile device is so small, do the same rules apply or do we find that mobile users tend to quickly scroll up and down (that’s what I’ve been seeing in mouse tracking recordings). A few of the subsections addressed mobile situations but I am hoping that later on in the course, there will be more addressed from a mobile perspective. We are seeing more and more of our visitors to our sites, which seemed to increase after Covid-19 using mobile devices over desktop.

The next course was “Intro to Conversion Copywriting”. This is something I have not personally done much of in my experience. However, I am very fortunate to work with and have been surrounded by amazing copywriters. Through that process, I have picked up some key elements to think of in terms of copywriting, but I knew I had gaps and looked forward to this course.

Here are the six steps of effective copywriting process:

1. Research: customer, product and competition.
2. Outline and guideposts.
3. Draft copy.
4. Conversion boost.
5. Revise, rearrange.
6. Test.

The course was broken down into:

Value Propositions — A value proposition is is a promise of value to be delivered. It explains how the product will solve the customer’s problem, the benefits and why they should buy from you and not the competition.

How to Review and Improve Copy — Everything is connected together with optimization. According to CXL:

“Optimizers don’t have to be copywriters, necessarily. But you do have to be able to recognize bad copy, and be able to point out what exactly is wrong with it — how to improve it.”

I found the idea of approaching optimizing copy fascinating as I often witnessed a lot of critiquing of copy which can lead to hurt feelings and doesn’t lead to improved optimization of the copy.

Two strategies recommended to review copy:

• Round 1: “Would you read more?” test. Peer review.
• Round 2: Value, clarity, credibility (VCC) test.

The “Would you read more” is Michael Masteron’s peer-reviewed method AWAI that rates the copies effectiveness by simply asking, “if you were a customer, would you read more?”

Peer Review asks 4–6 people (who understand copywriting) to rate copy on a scale of 1–4

1. You absolutely would not read beyond the headline
2. You probably won’t read on.
3. You will read on, but with some skepticism or doubt
4. A score of 4.0 means you definitely would read on with a high level of interest

Commentary & criticism are not welcome. Reviewers measure their gut response after reading the copy. The group then rates the headline on a sale with decimal points. The final ratings are collecting and an average is presented. Depending on the average scores, next steps are taken for the copy.

The next method is the the VCC (Value, clarity, credibility) test. This provides a good framework when reviewing copy.

Value

What’s in it for me? Is there a benefit to the user? (My CEO always has us ask us to look and see if we can say “so what” for any of the written copy to evaluate if there’s is value.

In order to get people to pay money, they need to understand the value.

Clarity

Is this sentence simple and clear? Can we make it shorter? Improve clarity?

Clarity is more important than persuasion. We want to reduce friction, eliminate confusion, complicated words and jargon, and make sentences as short as possible. Brené Brown says that “Clarity is Kind”. When we look at copy from that perspective, not only are we optimizing it, we are providing our audience a better experience and ultimately serving them.

Credibility

Is this believable?

Change superlatives and vagueness into specific statements, back up all claims with proof. It’s not about you being the biggest, the best, the greatest unless you can back it up and make it about them.

Microcopy

Microcopy is all the things on a site we take for granted and often don’t give much thought. The error messages, the fine print, instructions, details in forms, carts, search bars. However, these can often be barriers and impact conversion if there are issues with them.

Effective microcopy should provide clarity, confirm the user experience and keep promises.

There are 2 ways to identify this:

1. User testing — observe users interacting with your site, pay attention to every question and hesitation. We discovered in our user testing that we had a challenge with our forms where the descriptive word in the form disappeared when the person typed so if they went back to re-do, they sometimes forgot what the field was for.
2. Analysis of the interface. This is a great opportunity for team collaboration. Our customer support team saw a challenge with an optin form from the received tickets and relayed that to the tech team. This led to adding specific details to the error message and ultimately reducing friction.

Using video

Shorter is better.

There are 3 things that you want to measure.

1. Unique visitor / play ratio.
2. Audience retention rate. Out of those who play video, how many watch it until the end or how may drop off within 15 seconds.
3. Impact on conversion rate. Will video convert better than no video?

There are several aspects that can be tested with video.

1. Put the video above the fold, and make it big.
2. Test adding a call to action above the video that tells people why they should watch it.
3. Test video thumbnails.

So that ends the first week of learning. I have started the course “Product Messaging” with Momoko Price on how to Improve your messaging strategy through customer research and analysis. I will dive into that course and others and come back and provide some of the takeaways, observations and learnings for week 2.

On a side note, I found some interesting podcast episodes of interviews with Peep Laja. I like listening to podcasts while walking the dogs and found these particular episodes added to the course material. If you’re interested:

https://www.ecommerceinfluence.com/134-conversion-rate-optimization-101-peep-laja/