Path to Growth Series: CXL Institute, Certified Optimizer Minidegree Review (Part 1)
I had applied for the scholarship at CXL Institute following the recommendations and reviews of CEOs, Product Managers, and top growth marketers both within my network and the industry in general. Much to my delight I was accepted within a week and am now kicking of this blog series with the two-fold aim of retaining what I have learned and taking action on my personal goal of writing my blog. Here I review the Conversion Rate Optimization mini-degree that I had enrolled in and offer an overview of what I have managed to learn on a weekly basis.
The mini-degree is comprised of 6 primary tracks:-
- Foundations
- Conversion Research
- Testing
- Optimization Strategies
- Conversion Optimization Program Management
- The CXL Certificate Exam (unlocked only once you complete tracks 2–5)
The total course duration is 82h 09min. Each track is divided into several courses that are further divided into individual topics for better focus. Every topic is accompanied by a slide deck of the presentation, links to additional tools, resources, spreadsheets, checklists, best practices, and everything else you could possibly need to execute like the top 1%.
I began my week by diving into, “Intro to CRO” and “Best Practices”, the first 2 of 11 courses within the Foundations track
Intro to CRO
Delivered by: Brian Massey, Managing Partner at Conversion Sciences
Course length: 44 min, delivered across 6 topics
Brian, in his trademark scientist's lab coat, kicks off the course by talking about why CRO is important and how a fundamental understanding of the process of CRO & adopting an experimental mindset can save you time, money, and effort at the very least. He provides real-life examples of brands that launched all the “right stuff” which promised a high potential of success-releasing campaigns, website redesigns, new websites, micro-sites, ad campaigns, funnels, etc. only to find that they ended up being failures; and in some cases having their brand or organization as a whole suffer major setbacks. A key point he delivers here, something I’m guilty of having done myself in the past, is to stop launching ideas by cherry-picking from competitors and/or other websites without testing it out yourself. He reinforces that the scientific approach of CRO empowered by data-backed decision-making is proven to lead towards bigger wins that begin to compound over time.
CRO is about ideas, not tests. Most companies optimize for the velocity of tests rather than ideas themselves.
I have condensed the key takeaways on ideas into 5 principles:-
- No idea makes it to launch based on political will, forced opinions, or worst of all, with no reason at all
- What you don’t test and what doesn't make into an A/B testing is just as important as what you do the test
- Develop good ideas by capturing ALL ideas and thoughts as they come into a “To Be Researched” list
- Improve the quality of ideas by increasing the sample size of inputs
- Improve the quality of ideas
Managing ideas then becomes a key aspect of CRO. Begin by asking better questions and start thinking early on about what a related hypothesis would look like. CRO provides the following framing to develop good hypotheses:-
If I ___,
I expect_____,
to happen, as measured by______
Based on my prior experience while working as a Product Manager, building hypotheses is a skill that you keep getting better at. When creating experiments you will notice that each hypothesis could be more efficiently segrated into one or more hypotheses. When faced with a laundry list of hypotheses, I’d start prioritizing them, and a popular approach I generally use in this scenario is the ICE framework. An interesting practice I learned from the course content is to start converting existing data(dumps) to reverse engineer a hypothesis statement and add it to your growing the database of ideas. A good portion of the rest of the course dives into analytics and on leveraging different kinds of data mining methods(user research, feedback, heatmaps, etc.) and A/B testing to validate the big questions were sufficient data collection wasn’t possible early on*.
*I will be doing an in-depth series diving into analytics with recommended tools, how to set them up, when to use them, best practices, etc. following this 12-part series.
Best Practices
Delivered by: Peep Laja, CEO at CXL Institute & Copytesting
Course length: 1hr 30min, delivered across 18 topics
Peep begins the course by pointing out that best practices have their place primarily as a starting point to begin building out your initial idea. The course goes in-depth into best practices with excercises, casestudies, and real-life examples to back it up. Below, I have highlighted some of the best practices that I found unique and helpful.
For Webforms reducing friction is the key goal and this applies to sign up, checkout, payment, quote generation, lead generation forms, and so on. A couple tactics to achieve that are by preselecting fields whenever possible eg:- location-based IP, and reducing steps taken eg:- adding a show password option instead of a confirm password field. A caveat here is when intentionally increasing friction to improve lead quality.
Feedback & Error validation is a huge aspect of webforms and responsible for a high number of dropoffs. Recording error messages displayed on the website by recording it in Google Analytics(via event tracking) is a good practice to stay proactive on figuring out what has to be fixed. Another tactic provided here is the use of help texts and real-time in-line validation to reduce dropoffs.
For E-commerce Category Pages, narrow down product choices by using filters by identifying decision making criteria. While left-hand filters are the go-to, top filters work better in some cases. Using product badges(“Popular”, “New”, “On Sale”) is a recommended strategy when used sparingly. A collaborative team exercise I have now borrowed from the course is auditing the page and identifying elements on the page that does not necessarily help people find what they like, and testing the page without it. Recommended solution: Run a distraction reduction test.
Trigger words and copy are huge for Buttons and Call to Actions(CTA). Conduct qualitivate research like surveys and user testing to understand how they communicate and find the right messaging. Don’t use “Submit” as CTA.
When testing Fold and page length use different scroll maps and different heat maps(eg: Sessioncam, Hotjar) based on the insights you can get out of them. Peep mentions that the ideal page length for any page should be prioritized by the amount of content people need to take a particular action and only following that should it be optimized for load speed
When working on Price & Pricing pages, the golden rule is that proof and the amount of copy required increases in proportion to the pricepoint. Come up with new formulas constantly for prices and test regularly with traffic as opposed to actually asking them. Revealing prices as much as you can and addressing FUDs(fears, uncertainties, doubts) is proven to give far more wins.
When working on the visual aspects i.e. Visual Hierarchy and Visual Design, clearly categorize the hierarchy before hand and conduct tests to assess whether others are able to identify the same hierarchy. Simple design wins every single time and while innovation and testing is encouraged, prototypicality is a key factor to be analyzed.
Final Thoughts: At this point, I have completed about 6% of the course. This review in particular covered a very small aspect of the 6% and does not do justice to the masterstroke that CXL was able to deliver with their curriculum.
This is part 1/12 of my review on the CXL Institute CRO Minidegree. I will be posting a new part every week. Please feel free to comment with any questions you may have or connect with me on LinkedIn.
