The Growth Marketing Core Secret | Week 8 | Review

Research and Testing

This is blog post #8 as part of the series of blog posts in which I will sum up my learning experience with CXL Institute attending their Growth Marketing Minidegree.

Last week I talked about the SEM/PPC, Content Marketing and Emerging channels. Today I will continue with Research and Testing summing up my learning experience and review the following key takeaways:

> Growth and CRO Process 

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing a website to increase the conversion rate which in turn leads to business growth in different ways. 
Well, How do we optimize the website? let's rephrase the question in a different way, How do we not optimize the website? simply by following the online guides; like "33 CRO Techniques for optimizing your website" it won't work, because what works on website X won't work on website Y and vice versa, Because you don't know whether best practice is optimal for you. It's probably not. And best practice is also common practice. It's what everybody is doing, not necessarily because it's based on some industry-level data. So best practice is a starting point, it's not optimization, Best practices are good, actually could be really good when you start building your website from scratch not optimizing your website. 

CRO is A process, it’s a systematic way of finding opportunities for growth. and developing data-based ideas for how to build upon those opportunities. “So if you can't describe your optimization work as a process, you don't know what you're doing. It's all random bunch of hacks from a blog post probably.” - Peep

A Good Optimization Process:

• It tells you where the problem is? Where is the money leak?
• What are these problems? 
• Why does this problem even exist?
• Why is this a problem to begin with? 
• also, Turning problems (Known issues) into test hypotheses as to “What can we do to fix these problems?”
• Prioritize tests and instant fixed
  

> Optimization Process | Research vs Testing - What Comes first?

To optimize the conversion rate, we need to make effective changes through each test we run. it all comes down to the discovery of what matters, If we actually know what matters to the users about our product, like what kind of pain point it solves, what kind of emotional needs it satisfies. If we know that stuff, we can put the right messages that resonate with them. We can highlight features that they care about and not talk about features they don’t care about. The discovery of what matters is the central piece of any optimization work. 

We can do the discovery by testing first, changing the sing up or the checkout form and then see what works. And see if our ideas make it better.  Sure we get to learn with testing but what do you test? we have no way to prioritize.  So if we are just drawing random stuff, our odds of having a high win rate are very low.
We need to start with Research first, Conversion research has to be the foundation of everything. And research is what helps us then identify where the problems are, what the problems are. 

> Research Process 

Research is not about a bunch of random data but about, we only need data that answer the business questions. Data is passive, it is up to us to interpret the data and make sense of it. 
ResearchXL is a research process developed by peep - CEO of CXL, that helps to gather six types of data to help in making great optimization decisions and come up with tests that tend to win more and have a bigger impact. it's all about identifying problems and coming up with ideas, the best possible ideas to test.

> ResearchXL Steps

1. Technical Analysis
   
   The first step of any optimization or growth work. Here we need to do QA Testing over the web/app software across different browsers and different devices, also checking load speed. The easy way to figure it out is you go to your web analytics tool and you compare your key metric revenue per visitor or conversion rate, whatever it might be per browser or device response. 
   There are probably some bugs over there draining your money. So the easiest way to make money is to fix all the technical issues that you might have. The same goes for slow pages and all that stuff. you can have the most persuasive website in the world, but I'm not going to buy from it if it doesn't work on the specific browser that I'm on right now.
   
   
2. Heuristic Analysis
   
   Going through the website, mobile and desktop separately, page by page with our team, and we critique every single screen that we see based on fixed criteria. This is called heuristic analysis.
   It's a way to super-fast identify possible problems on a website, It's just a quick way to figure out possible problems that you will now go and gather data for, to either validate or invalidate some of these assumptions. 
   The criteria we are looking at is Relevancy; how the landing page content and messages are relevant to the buying stage and mapping to the buyer journey. Clarity; everything about the webpage should be as clear as possible, clear product description, clear CTA and clear message on each page. Motivation; eliminating all fractions that long forms could cause, increasing the prospect motivation to take action, highlighting any objection point that may lower the prospect's motivation to take action. Presenting CTA when there’s a high motivation otherwise, will be a waste of time.
   So essentially in the heuristic analysis process, we need to figure out what is wrong with the picture on every single page of the website. And then, you move forward to the next phase which is digital analytics.
   
   
3. Digital Analytics
   
   Looking through the buyer journey with the lens of data to understand identify where the leaks coming from, we need to understand what is it that the users are doing on this website.
   
   
4. Mouse Tracking and Form Analytics
   
   t's essentially aggregated data of your mouse cursor movement. How far down people scroll, where do they click, where did the scroll and so on and how are the user behaviour is different between different devices, all this heat map stuff. Tools like Hotjar is extremely helpful.
   
   
5. Qualitative Research
   
   Analytics is quantified data that tells us what is happening, where and how much, but it doesn't tell us why. So qualitative research is all about the why and also it's all about our target audience, how they behave, what do they want, what are they don't want, what's their turnoff, what's their turn on?
   Understand that through surveying your customers and understanding what they think of.
   
   
6. User Testing
   
   You are probably familiar with user testing but we recruit people who represent our target audience and we can recruit them through tools like user testing or TryMuUI or if you're a general market like you sell average people, it's you can recruit from Craigslist. we want to understand what's difficult to do or where things can go wrong so we can avoid it.

I will be continuing with PXL Pritorization Framework in next's week blog post.