CRO Core Element | Week 10 | Review

Conversion Research

This is blog post #10 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 started talking about the Prioritization Framework. Today I will continue with Conversion Research summing up my learning experience and review the following key takeaways:

> What's Conversion Research and Why it is important?

You need to diagnose the patient before you know how to treat him. The same goes for Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Every optimization project has to start with conversion research. It’s where you diagnose a website, and figure out where and how it’s leaking money. Once you know where and how only then can start you with testing solutions and monitoring progress. 

Conversion Research consists of the following Main Pillars: 

• Experience-based assessment Which includes: 
• Site walkthroughs
• Heuristic analysis
• Usability analysis
  
  
• Qualitative research Which includes: 
• Online surveys with recent customers
• On-site polls
• Phone interviews
• Live chat transcripts
• Customer support insight
• User testing
  
  
• Quantitative research Which includes: 
• Web analytics analysis
  (e.g. Google Analytics and other quantified data tools like Adobe Analytics, MixPanel, Heap Analytics)
• Mouse tracking analysis

There are different frameworks that you can use to conduct conversion research but personally, I see the ResearchXL framework as more comprehensive and useful.

> TheResearchXL Model 

Site Walkthrough, Extremely important to start your research by walking through the site tracking customer journey, across different devices and browsers, identifying how the user experience is like across desktop, mobile and tablet. what's is it like for customers visiting the site from Chrome Or Safari, is there a bug on the Safri browser that's annoying the customer causing you to lose potential customers and lose potential revenue or is it the OS version?! you will get astonished with what you can find out walking through the website.

Heuristic Analysis, Heuristic analysis is an expert-based analysis that uses experience-based techniques for problem-solving, learning, and discovery. Its results are not guaranteed to be optimal because heuristic analysis serves as an input to a hypothesis that data can confirm then look for the best solution possible. 
The best way to go through heuristic analysis is in a structural way, there are different conversion frameworks that help in Heuristic Analysis, I will mention some of them which were really helpful for me and I think it would be the same for you. 

> The 7 Levels of Conversion by Web Arts

Web Arts uses 7 levels to assess each webpage as follows: 

• Relevance, Does my perception fit my expectations?
• Trust, Can I trust this provider?
• Orientation, Where should I click? What do I have to do?
• Stimulants (Motivation), Why should I do it right here and right now?
• Security, Is it secure here? What if…?
• Convenience, How complicated will it be?
• Confirmation, Did I do the right thing?
  

> Invesp Conversion Framework

Invesp has 8 principles in its conversion framework as follows: 

• Build buyer personas and focus on a few select personas when designing your layout, writing copy and so on.
• Build user confidence, make them trust you by using all kinds of trust elements.
• Engagement. Entice visitors to spend a longer time, come back to visit, bookmark it, and/or refer others to it.
• Understand the impact of buying stages. Not everybody will buy something on their first visit, so build appropriate sales funnels and capture leads instead, and sell them later.
• Deal with fears, uncertainties and doubts (FUDs). Address users concerns, hesitations, doubts.
• Calm their concerns. Incentives are a great way to counter FUDs and relieve friction.
• Test, Test, Test.
• Implement in an iterative manner. Build smaller blocks, make smaller changes, and test them and improve their performance.

> LIFT framework

A framework that has the value proposition as the vehicle that provides the potential for the conversion rate. It’s the basis of it all. Relevance and clarity boost conversions while anxiety and distraction kill them. Urgency is what propels people to take action right away.

> MarketingExperiments Methodology heuristic approach

The probability of conversion depends on the match between the offer and visitor motivation + the clarity of the value proposition + (incentives to take action now – friction) – anxiety. The numbers next to the characters signify the importance of it

Or C=4m+3V+2(i-f)-2a where: 

• C = Probability of conversion
• m = Motivation of user (when)
• v = Clarity of the value proposition (why)
• i = Incentive to take action
• f = Friction elements of the process
• a = Anxiety about entering information

> Steps ConversionXL uses for heuristic analysis

• Clarity; Going through each webpage of the website and determining how clear is? does it contain stuff that is drives user attention away? something is vague?
  
  
• Relevancy;  Does the web page relate to what the visitor thought they were going to see? Do pre-click and post-click messages and visuals align?
  
  
• Friction; is anything that slows people down or refrains people from taking action? 
  
  
• Distraction; Everything that does not contribute to people taking that particular action might serve as a distraction
  
  
• Motivation and Incentives; Are you doing a good job communicating why users should do or complete action on your website? Could we apply some persuasion principles here that would be a good match, such as social proof, urgency or scarcity?
  
  
• Buying Stages; understanding the buyer journey is extremely important, Hard selling your users will just make them leave, so instead of selling them, we should help them do their research, capture their contacts so we could bring them back. Map out areas of interest, go through all of the websites again but now with Google Analytics, survey data and other sources open in other tabs and see if you can find data to confirm or disprove your findings.
  If there doesn’t seem to be data available about something, your job is to figure out how to get that data. Always go from “I don’t know” to “I’ll find out”. That’s an important attitude to have.

> Usability Evaluation

It's all about making your websites easy to use and navigate, so people can browse them without giving them much thought. on the contrary, If your site is difficult to use or hard to understand because it got some usability problems, it will result in poor conversions. 

there are 5 main quality components of usability: 

• Learnability  
• Efficiency 
• Memorability
• Errors
• Satisfaction

You can use different guides online that will help you when navigating your website, you can use one of them and once completed, Now it's time to rank the items by the ease of implementation, from 1 to 3 where 1, is a  no-brainer, super easy to implement, 2 is easy, but can be done within 1-2 hours and 3 has lots of development and/or designer hours needed.

I will be continuing with Qualitative and Quantitative Research in next's week blog post.