The real C in CRO is Communication

Today, we have with us, Henk, product specialist CRO at Reprise Digital. It is one of the Netherlands leading digital marketing agencies. As Henk puts it, he loves working with customers and building products they fall in love with. Henk, if you could please turn on your camera. Thank you for doing this.

I’m sure that there will be a plethora of insights to take back from the session today. Before I pass on the mic to you, I’d just like to thank everyone for tuning in all over the world and also inform everyone that we’ll be taking questions at the end of the session. So please feel free to drop in your questions at any given point during the presentation. With that, Henk, the stage is all yours.

Henk:

Cool. Thank you very much, Shanaz, for your introduction. When we tend to look at conversion rate optimization or experimentation on the internet, we’re most likely to find articles or blog posts written about how conversion rate optimization is done, or, what are the best practices we should use, or what is conversion rate optimization? 

But from years of experience, I have done conversion rate optimization. There’s one thing I’ve learned, which is so important. And that’s communication because you can be the best experimenter or the best CRO specialist, but if you fail to communicate the importance of conversion rate optimizations or the outcomes of your A/B test teams, what success does your program have? So today, we’re going to talk about the real C in CRO, which I think stands for communications. We’re going to talk about how to optimize communication to create a testing culture. 

And the goal of this presentation is to give you all an idea of why communication is so important, within the CRO process. What is communication and why do we need it with inter-process?

I’m finally going to end with 6 lessons or tips you can use tomorrow to improve your communication. But first, a short introduction. 

My job is to help them accelerate conversion rate optimization. One of the things I believe is to have both soft skills and hard skills that make the best out of the consultants. For today, I have 4 topics on this program. So first of all, we’re going to strictly talk about why communication is just as important as conversion. Next up, we’re going to talk about how communication fits within the CRO process.

Next, I’m going to give 6 lessons on how to improve your communication. And finally, we’re going to talk a little bit about how to continuously optimize or improve your communication skills within the whole CRO process. So when we tend to look at CRO, we often say that the C stands for conversion. Or conversion rate optimization, which is nothing more than increasing amount of times this converts or does an important action we can think of conversions such as, well, purchases, adding to carts, clicking on the button, and becoming leads, But one of the things I do think is important within CRO is communication. And with communication, I mean, in this context, increasing the number of times the stakeholder understands your message and converts, that they actually say, oh, wow. This is a really important insight you gave us. We should definitely focus on this, or that you showed you a really good performing AB test set for like, boy, we need to implement this tomorrow because we’re losing a ton of money at the moment. 

Have you experienced these reactions when you’re presenting something? I know I have. People looking at your slides, going back to you, and giving us subtle numbers like, okay, where am I supposed to look at? Or people whom you know are in your audience, but still look at your slides or what you’re saying and being like, well, I’m not sure if I get it, but I’m too afraid to ask. You there’s a really big piece of audience in it, which just doesn’t dare to do it. But first, let’s take a look at communication. What do we mean by communication? We have 3 important segments.

So first of all, you have the sender, which could be and who has the message, which could be an insight. Let’s say, the conversion rate dropped last week. Let’s do something to fix it. Then you have a medium, which could be a slide deck or a short talk or a small note or an email message. And with this email and ourselves, we go to our receiver, which could be teammates, or someone else, and we bring this message to them and hope that he understands or not.

But in respect, two things we actually can influence within this process. That’s us, the sender who has the messaging insights, and it’s the medium. So, we can take more time to look at our slide deck, to look at our map, to look at our email, and think, oh, let’s not add the question, which we have at the bottom. Let’s start with it. Important one.

Or just make sure that the really important things are highlighted within the slide deck. And then there’s on the other side of the receiver. This could be a teammate where you can be really nonchalant. You say, yo, there’s something broken, we should do anything, but it could also be something to your clients. And working with clients, you have different types of functions.

People and clients will know what they’re doing. And you have clients who’ve just started beginning with conversion rates and optimization. And our job, at least what I think as a conversion rate optimization consultant, is to make sure their knowledge is up to speed and that they know what they’re talking about. And then in, in some cases, it could be a CEO or at least someone from the board. Who has to be convinced that what you’re doing is making an impact?

So why is communication so important when talking about implementation? So we looked a bit at what communication is and why it’s so important that the CEO is communicating. But why is it so important? Well, When you look at the process of CRO there are lots of differences in processes. If you look at process CRO you get tons of models, but I always think there are 5 crucial steps.

So the first step is finding problems for research. The second step is generating a hypothesis. The third step is prioritizing these hypotheses and validating them through experimentation and then reporting learning. It always sounds so easy. But we all know it isn’t because there’s one really important factor, which none of these models include.

And that is you have stakeholders at each step of this process. So when finding problems, you need to convince stakeholders. And, well, this is something we should fix. And if you fail to do that, if you fail to show why this is an important problem to solve, if you fail to work with programmers, or if you fail to really start to share what this learning we have, what is the uplift of this experience, what is actually the essence of this?

Well, your stakeholders are going to become this. They’re going to be unhappy or even worse, they’re starting to disengage and just be like, well, Cool. Let’s do that, and we’ll see the next steps. Basically, what I’m trying to say or emphasize is to put this into practice. You can be the best analytics guru.

You can know everything Google Analytics has to offer. You can build APIs. You can build events. You can make things measurable there. But if you use these slots, let’s say, let’s say this is an example, we go a week, numbers are posted, but there’s a decline in commercials.

It will prompt you here, your client or your audience will all look like this. Like, okay. So where am I looking? What’s going on on this page? What is actually happening?

And, basically, yeah, you still have to convince them and explain the slide. You have to talk about it, okay. This is important. This is important. And then they finally go, ah, yeah.

I get it. Now I get it. But you could have prevented it. Just as we optimize websites, we should definitely optimize the way we communicate things. Basically, what I’m trying to say is, if you have a great knowledge of the things you have, but your communication is what your stakeholders are going to be like, well, let’s focus on something else.

But I promise you, if you have good knowledge and good communication, you can really make users or at least your audience engaged with your message, people are definitely going to be like, yes, we should do more of this. We want to bring people together. So what I just want to say is most optimizers, just like me, just like you, just like everyone, only focus on optimizing their business. They focus on optimizing their website, but to create a culture of experimentation, communication is key. We have the responsibility to bring people together.

So how can we actually do that? And I can talk about that for hours, for, I think, well, definitely for hours. But for today, I just want to share 6 lessons or tips I’ve learned along the way. And to give a brief summary, when presenting insights, make it interactive, which I’m definitely going to talk more about in the next slides. By presenting user test lines, which we all do, user testing is a great way to get good feedback. Use a highlight video, or at least make a highlight video.

When giving recommendations, there’s actually, for myself, a secret formula, which you should definitely follow. When working with others, be nice, and smile. When showing reports, get your data to make sure you have really clear graphs to use. And finally, when reporting starts with the most important findings, Let’s go to the first tip when presenting insights: make it interactive. What you shouldn’t do is just start off by showing data and without any context. So if we look at mobile, and compare it to the desktop, conversions.

Yeah, what do we see? So first, you have to look at it. It’s quite a clean graph, but see something going up and going down and basically the learning you can take away from this is that mobile has more than desktop. What you should be doing is to play the quiz master role by asking questions to your audience or at least when the situation allows it, because when you were talking with the CEO, well, it’s not that good of a thing to really start testing them, like, questions. But more as a playful way.

So one of the questions I ask sometimes is what’s the percentage of users that follow products in 2019 on Mobile? And just look at the items and you’re saying, like, well, 20%, 30%, 50%. And one person will be like, I think it’s 17%. They will be looked at, like, at the other states, like, well, I’m not sure about that. Okay.

We’ll see. And then you present it and say, well, it’s 16%, or, basically, 70% of all transactions derived from mobile. And then we’re gonna go, woah, that’s quite a lot. And then you actually capture their attention. And next, you’ll start showing the slides.

So the thing why it is so important to ask these questions is these are the things that stick in the mind of your audience. I’ve had many presentations. And when you do that, there’s one thing actually they can, in the end, talk about. And if you’re just one thing you want them to understand or at least to remember, that’s the thing you should ask. If their only goal is to make sure they should focus on mobile more instead of working on a desktop approach, actually start by showing it like, Hey, this is your mobile conversion rate or basically, hey, this is how much of your customers actually use a mobile device, you know, definitely going to be surprised, which you can ask if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s a good insight.

So next, when presenting user test findings, use a highlight video. And user testing is a way of research where we ask users to come and use our own websites, or a potential prototype. And we actually often record these sessions, sometimes, through the tool itself, like, for instance, look back to the IO, but through loads of other tools, and sometimes you just have your screen recorder ready so you can actually make notes afterwards. What you just shouldn’t do is just present insights from a use case without any actual visuals, you can say, like, hey, why is it a big website? What did we do? What did the user say? But what you actually should do, especially when doing a first user test or an important one, is to create a highlight.

A highlight video is nothing else than, I think, showing little pieces of videos of users that’s basically giving important opinions on your website.

For instance, when you ask them, “Oh, could you find article 8?” And if they go to the search bar, find it, and they just can’t. Or that they go to your page and say, “Wow. This is really complex.” Or the best one I still had was the user being like, “Oh, no. What did I do?” Those are the moments you want to show. I actually had one time, and I presented this, and it was actually a board of CEOs, sort of this higher upper management, and you showed them slides, and they’re like, “Yeah, Cool. Cool.”

And then you show this video of the user actually using your website and complaining why these things aren’t fixed. And the upper management stands up. “So why didn’t we fix it?” They’re looking really angry at the product. I mean, which is not my responsibility, though. But again, that’s the thing you want.

You want to have action. You need to make it actionable, and I strongly believe that this is a great way to do this. So how do you build a highlight video? Well, it’s basically three steps. I would love to say it’s simple.

It is quite simple, but it actually could take up some time because one of the tools I actually use is OpenShot Video Editor. And what I do is I go through all of the videos and I actually note down specific parts, like, for instance, at 1 minute to 10, the user says, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s something I really want to use.” Basically, make a small snippet with this video, which could be like a second or 2 for free, and just save it in the folder. And then next, I make a video where I just compile all these videos in one lengthy movie, which should not take up longer than 3 minutes. That’s quite a challenge to make it not longer than 3 minutes, but there’s definitely a lot of engagement when using a highlight video.

Next tip, when giving recommendations, for instance, when doing an experiment, you should follow the formula. So one of the things you should never do is basically just go to a website and say, “This is bad,” or “That’s bad,” or “I don’t think this is a good solution,” or “I think that’s not a good solution.” Opinions don’t really matter in that context because your colleague or your stakeholder will be like, “Well, yeah, I think it’s bad too, but yeah, what are you going to do about that?” Instead, what you should do is always follow this free step formula. So what’s the observation? What kind of consequence can this have for the user?

And what is the next step or what is basically your recommendation? For example, this is our own website and it’s hosted globally. So it’s really hard to make any changes to it. But one of the things is when planning on landing there’s no clear call to action present. Basically, you land on our page, and we play where we have strong play work partners in digital growth. But, basically, there’s nothing you can do.

If you want to have contact or learn more about how we do that, there’s no clear graduation available. So if you actually have to force people to scroll down. So that’s the consequence. You just have to scroll down to learn more about what the company does or even contact them.

And a recommendation could be like, try experimenting by adding calls to action to our websites. So the thing that is so important when giving these recommendations is that these things are built up logically. And mostly built because you’re starting with what potential users see, what the potential consequence is, and what’s the recommendation I have when what the users should be doing or at least what you recommend the company should be doing. Another example. So when auditing a full page, and I’m not saying that the expiry review gives others the best leverage, I think it’s a really important one when it actually started with the CO program, but this is how we do it.

So when you look at this slide, there are basically 3 components. So the bottom component is your proof. And what I always do is I always just show a screenshot first. I don’t show the things which you see with the right clarity. Value and clarity, but it basically always starts with the conclusion.

So what we, at the moment, see is the call to action is not very outstanding, sidewise, to address the patient’s files to use it and not to see it. And we had a recommendation concerning designing this button more probably. So in the first conclusion, or this is the first header of the page or of this slide, you already know what the biggest recommendation is. Or at least what’s the most important recommendation, and you know what you should be doing. And if you will start asking questions, then next you start with the group.

So based on these and these and these principles, we think this should be better. And then there’s something like, ah, yeah. We should be doing that. Let’s go to our next lesson. When working with others, be nice, smile.

But this is one of the best books I’ve actually ever read and still really close to me: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. And this book can actually be summarized in two words. Which actually a colleague of mine said a couple of years ago. Be nice. And, actually, as this book sounds really commercial, it actually is, the true story of how it’s influenced people and when friends, is to be nuts.

So what you should be doing is, first of all, change your tone. Don’t always talk, don’t try to learn not to talk only in one voice or at least simple one tone, because it’s not too hard, but it’s sometimes quite poor to listen to. You have to be the energy. Show you’re enthusiastic and enthusiastic, but also don’t be overly enthusiastic. Be critical when needed.

Especially when talking to higher management or people who have really a big stakeholder. Smile or when working, more from home use emojis because smiling people get more done today. It is actually scientifically proven that smiling people really should be available or gauge it to work with. And then there’s complementing, and I strongly believe we don’t do this enough. We all have to say, yeah, I really appreciate you, but we don’t often, if we’re really honest, show it, be happy. Showed him like, oh my god.

This is perfect. This looks great. You did a good job. You’re the best. And people really like it sometimes, as you can see on it, right? The emotional approach when looking from working Like, I don’t think we should be bored.

I think we should be enthusiastic. I think we should be happy. And if we’re happy, I think I strongly believe we will have happy lives. And finally, be super clear, make sure you really design clearly what you want. I’ve had multiple ABs and sort of things where I said, “Oh, we should change it.”

And I couldn’t get it back, and I touched it. And it’s not really what it’s supposed to be. And they’re like, “Well, this is not what I thought it would be.” Well, that’s what you said it would be. And then you’re like, “Oh, here we go again.”

And basically, we’re wasting everybody’s time. So we typically take your time to design or to consider what you actually want. When showing graphs or anything regarding to date, get your data cleaned out. What you just shouldn’t do is just copy paste Google Analytics findings or basically go to Google Analytics here. “Oh, this is an interesting site.”

Slap it on there or really complex Excel sheets because people are going to ask questions such as, “What am I looking at?” And are going to ask questions like, “So what’s actually good or bad if you look at this slide on the left? Some are Dutch, but You see there’s sometimes red. You see it’s about site speeds. But there’s some red at the bottom.”

Should we address all of these things? What’s the key takeaway we should fully be doing? Because we should ask for something. Is this all relevant? What’s the real thing we should be, is it what’s the real thing we should be doing?

Is there a recommendation? Think we can all show as much data as we can. But if it’s not actionable, people won’t take action. So what you should do is make data actionable. Sometimes it is really important just to show a couple of knowledge.

Like, 40% of the sessions have less than 2:2 seconds session durations from which 60% are from page, which is quite a high load of users. Basically, what I said, 40%, track of our traffic traffic has less than 2 second system duration, 60 of which come from a paid source. Our recommended action is to investigate this issue with the marketing and try to find ways to put bots in marketing efforts if any is possible. Basically, you can apply the same rule from this book to your slots. I really think Steve Crock, don’t make me think. Basically, the book said what’s about.

Don’t make use of it. Make sure you’re clear on what you’re trying to tell. We always look from these principles to our websites, but it’s actually the same way we can look at these principles to our channels or the way we communicate things. Tip 6 or basically less than 6 start with the most important findings. Yeah.

What you shouldn’t do is end with your key takeaways and just save it all for the end. No. You should always start with them. And especially when showing AB test results, you should answer questions like what did we learn? What were the results?

What’s the conclusion? And what possible next steps can we take for this? The goal of taking things to the front instead of the back is that you want to have the discussion of, like, “oh, I don’t agree with this,” not at the end of your presentation, but at the beginning of your presentation. Because at the beginning of the presentation, you still have the power of saying, “well, we’re going to discuss this at a later stage.” And then people are like, “okay.

Cool. And if you’re starting from the end, if your bill still has questions, well, let me go back to the slides and then you have to explain it again. So it’s called the start. So that’s always where you should start with your key takeaways. As a final reminder, these were 6 lessons to create, codes for experimentation in which communication is key.

Now finally, how to further improve yourself? So first of all, ask for feedback. Especially when doing slide decks or, for instance, talking to participants, make sure people are on there. People are listening to what you’re doing and asking for feedback. Ask if what I’m saying is clear to them, and watch someone who you didn’t even know yesterday. I actually showed this presentation to my girlfriend, and she’s in the music industry.

So she has this completely different view of things than I have. And she’s one of my most critical listeners, so I was really afraid of her. The second is to listen to your audience. So what response do you get when showing x, when showing this slide? What are they looking at?

What comments are they making? Or are they squinting that in eyes that they really start to focus on? Those are the small key things you can observe. And being like, “okay, I think we should do this better.” One of the things which helped me a lot is to collect slides.

I often also visit webinars because I think there are really interesting ways of learning more and becoming a better consultant. And one of the things I sometimes see is like, “Hey, that’s an interesting way of how you’re doing that.” And I basically copy-paste it in a really big, Google slides file, and that’s basically my swipe file. And finally, but not least, always keep optimizing your cell. Because it will help you become better, optimize, and achieve your goals.

And with that, we’re slowly coming to the end of this short, but I think truly a powerful presentation. And I wonder if there are any questions, if not, feel free to follow-up on LinkedIn. I strongly believe it could always, not sometimes it’s not possible to answer all questions, but if any, please go ahead.

Shanaz:

Awesome. Thanks. That was a very insightful presentation. Some things are often very easily overlooked yet play a very important role in the entire process and the entire journey. That CRO is.

Yeah. So we have a few questions. I would love to look at them together just to save time. Yeah. 

Will we get copies of the recording and the slides? 

So, yes, in the next 24 to 48 hours, we’ll be uploading the webinar recording as well as the presentation deck onto our website. We’ll also be emailing all the attendees as well as non attendees. The link to the link to the deck and the and the recording. So that’s there.

Cool. The 2nd question is directed toward you, and this again, is a combination of a couple of questions. How can we ensure the right data communication? Are there any tips that you could share?

Henk:

Yes. Definitely. So when showing data, less is more. So there are 2 tips I would love to share. 

So first of all, Dark Horse Analytics, they make GIFs. I’m not sure how you pronounce them correctly on how to make data more clear. Secondly, I think it’s an HBR, our business review book. It’s called, good graphs. And it’s a book that really goes in-depth on how to present data. So a couple of things I just said in the presentation were to make sure data is actionable.

If you’re just showing them a slide where you’re just basically saying, this is not going well. You’re not doing the job. You should always add recommendations, but you need to make data actions, what is the recommended action we should take based on this data? And it’s also the thing about how we should look at data. We should also always answer questions by answering data, by looking at data.

So for instance, if I want to know what is the conversion rate on mobile and how does that differ on other devices? It’s a legit question. And we can answer that. But there’s also a thing we should do next so that is make sure we add recommendations.

We are dependent on actions. So I do hope that answers this question. So first of all, Dark Horse Analytics. Google that stuff.

Shanaz:

Thanks. We have a question related to this question. So, Bethany Guinee is asking if you could keep the name of the first resources that you mentioned.

Henk:

Sure. Dark Horse Analytics is the first one, and Good Graphs, HBR, book, is the second one. Those two resources you should look up or investigate.

Shanaz:

Yep. Thank you. We have another question from Alvar Marquez. Alvar says we submit weekly reports to our supervisors in an email format. How do we know that we are not presenting too much information or too little detail?

Henk:

So one of the two tips I could give you is, first of all, sometimes we tend to work so much in our bubble that we tend to forget. What is important? So one of the things could be like asking someone externally, like, a colleague, like, hey, if you look at this email, ask them two questions. What is this? What data do you see here?

And, what’s the recommended age you should take on this? So first of all, ask colleagues in terms of, like, what’s in this email, long email, its meaning. In my own experience, often when I get long emails, I just scroll down, just look at the important things, and then go away. So what I always would recommend is adding, again, what I just said, a summary of one of the most important findings. So what are the things we should look at?

And what is triggering me to scroll down more? A long list and things with emails. We get a ton of emails, especially these days, when looking at COVID. I think things should be concise, and clear. If people want to dive into them even more, they definitely will.

Shanaz:

Yeah. Alright. I hope that answers your question, Alvir. Now moving on to a combination of a couple more questions, which you can answer at once.

You got it in the names of resources that our audience can refer to for conveying data. But is there any book or podcast or article or any other thing like a video that you would recommend personally or professionally to whatever you’re reading now? In your time, it’s a professional time that you think the audience is good.

Henk:

Oh, wow! That’s a really good question. At the moment, I’m reading ‘Rework’ by the founders of Basecamp. I think it’s a really good book because it’s nice and concise, but the two books mentioned in this presentation are always in my old top 5 grid.

So, first of all, Steve Crockt’s ‘Don’t Make Me Think’—I don’t know, maybe because I still think I read this book, I think, 10 years ago. No, that’s a long time ago. At least 6 or 7 years ago, when I started college, I actually read it again. And again. And it’s still, like, such a simple book, and it just helps you understand things so clearly.

And secondly, if you really want to shift from the way you do things now to a way where you help people, who people want to start working with you, I would still say, currently, ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ by Dale Carnegie. Although it sounds really commercial, it’s not. I think it’s a really easy and friendly approach on how to get people towards you.

Let me think if there’s anything else that skips my mind now. I think those 3 would be the most interesting. So ‘Rework’, Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’, and Steve Crocs’ ‘Don’t Make Me Think’. Those would definitely be the three I would agree with and would actually be the most helpful for my own personal career.

Shanaz:

Alright. Awesome. Thank you, Henk, for answering that. We have another question. We’ll make this the last question of the evening.

It is by Brend. How can you make sure you align communication between marketing and product teams?

Henk:

Yeah, that’s also a really good one. So one of the things I tend to experience, and where I know I’m also not that good, is when you have product teams and marketing teams, and there’s just one giant wall between them. They’re not communicating with each other. They’re doing their own thing, and marketing says, ‘We’re doing a huge campaign on this landing page,’ and development teams are like, ‘Well, we’re just gonna work on adding a huge cat gif on the thank you page.’

I strongly believe that this is a thing which requires a change in upper management. Actually, from experience, in a previous company, I saw that Marketing was doing its own thing, Development was doing their own thing, and it cost the company a lot of money. What I would recommend, although I’m not sure if this is the best way to do this, is first of all, create attention that this is a problem.

So, from then on, we have marketing people going left, and on the other end, part of people going right. Secondly, you need to show what the pain is. And I think that’s so important. You need to really make it heard, saying, ‘Yeah, we’re losing tons of money because people are just not aligned with each other.’

That will help you get attention from your key stakeholders or at least your upper management. And first, you have to recommend, how can we move together? I would never just throw everyone in one room and say, ‘Let’s brainstorm something and hope something magical comes out.’ It doesn’t, though. But I would come up with a plan, like, ‘Okay, what would be, from my end, the best way to make this happen, to make sure people start working together?’

And then, I think it’s important to have one stakeholder for marketing, one for product, whom you can rely on. Okay. Are you guys or girls, whatever, agreeing with what I think, do you have any additional things to add? And they’re like, ‘Yes,’ and then step 4 is present to work together. And from then on, make sure you have a simple agreement. So first, it would be like, ‘Okay, let’s make sure we have a meeting each week.’

So we discuss what are the biggest pain points. And finally, by really adding up by having KPIs, which should be aligned each time. So with KPIs, the marketing team should be the same KPIs to some extent as what the product team has so that you really are relying upon each other.

Shanaz:

I think, until the product team, marketing team, and every other team involved in the CRO program is aligned with the team-level goals as well as the overall organizational or company-level goals, it should be fairly easy to prioritize what to pick up first and what to test first.

Alright. That was awesome. Hang on. This was an absolutely information-packed and insightful session. I am so thankful that you agreed to do this with us.

Henk:

Sure.

Shanaz:

I really do hope that we get another opportunity in the future to do something like this again.

Henk:

Oh, definitely.

Shanaz:

Yeah. Alright. Thank you so much, everyone, for tuning in for today’s session with Henk. And, we’ll see you again soon.