Website testing, analytics, user research etc. is often tackled as a marketing exercise, and when things don’t go according to plan, it is treated as a workflow issue. But the fallacy here is that one assumes that everyone is on board with the idea of website testing, and that everyone knows “clearly” what it will give them in return. That is so not true. Marketing managers will agree with me when I say that often, you’re the only person who really has a clue, while a lot of other stakeholders either don’t care because they think it’s just marketing poking their noses in their business, or they just won’t admit that they don’t know and prefer to just shoot down ideas as being “irrelevant”.

So, if you’re a marketing manager, and you’re fighting to put together a robust website testing process in place (among other things of course), you might want to look at this as an exercise in change management, a mind-game almost – rather than try to implement workflows and process diagrams at the beginning.

So, based on John Kotter’s 8-step change management model, here’s my simplified 5-step  change management guide to make website testing a systemic part of your organisation’s core activities.

Step 1: Create a burning platform

Your marketing budget has been frozen or reduced from last year. Or your targets have been increased tremendously. Or you’ve got a smaller team. Or you’re expected to do a zillion other things with the same resources. Bottom line is – you’re expected to hit bigger numbers with the same or less. You might see this, but you’d be surprised as to how many of your peers don’t! Start setting off those alarm bells – within the marketing department and elsewhere in the organisation where you think this might be an issue.

Step 2: Build a guiding coalition

Everyone’s now running around like their pants are on fire. Good job. But you can’t finish this job yourself. You’re going to need the support of influential stakeholders from around the business. Show off your spreadsheets, catch up for a coffee, talk about how your problems are the same as theirs, and how you have a win-win solution for this common problem. Some won’t agree, but others will. And these are the individuals who will go into battle with you.

Step 3: Communicate the vision

You and your guiding coalition need to be on the same page. No problem. You need to have a clear idea of what this will look like and how this will work when your work is done. No problem. BUT. You now need to start tying these visions in with different objectives and goals around the organisation (sales, marketing, IT, product development, editorial, anyone who is affected), and then….you need to talk about it. Relentlessly. Every statement related to website testing will become a PR exercise, till everyone begins to see how this process is going to benefit them. Help them get with the program.

If you’re familiar with the original model, you will see that I cheated here slightly to tweak it to suit this context.

Step 4: Remove obstacles and create shot term wins

I’m cheating here again – these are actually two steps in the original model!

I continue to see this being a problem in organisations even today; in website testing and other areas. People bite off more than they can chew, and with all the good intentions and competence, there’s either a lack of buy-in or a task that is too big to handle effectively, and that results in effort wasted and the whole initiative being shut down.

In the early stages, make some room to get buy-in for small, non-controversial plans that are not likely to raise hell or have huge negative consequences  if they are ineffective. Bulldoze through with these plans. Generate some easy wins, even if they are small. Your objective is still an exercise in PR and getting buy-in. When your “opponents” see how easily you generated a 10% improvement in conversions, they will change their minds. Maybe not straightaway, but nobody in their right minds will ignore an improvement in performance.

Step 5: Institutionalise your changes 

As your quick wins gain prominence within the company, this is where you start to fine-tune and polish processes, engage with stakeholders to discuss how they can get involved, what they need to do to support this and get more returns for their efforts. At this stage, he individuals you talk to will be in a much better position to understand the symbiotic nature of your efforts and their support.

So, that’s something I wanted to get out of the way for a long time, so there we go.

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So everyone is talking about conversion rate optimisation, and a lot of people are finally putting legs on their A/B and multivariate testing plans. And you – you’re in a position where you’re either going to have to pick up a lot of these projects yourself, or you’re thinking of hiring someone to do all this work for you. Simple.

The thing is though, that the usual metrics applicable to an email marketing professional or an online marketing professional probably don’t overlap 100% with what you need to be a really good conversion optimisation professional. So based on my experience and observations, here are the top 5 traits a good conversion rate optimisation professional needs to have.

1. A head for numbers

You can’t be scared of spreadsheets and percentages. Even if you’re not an Excel Zorro, it’s pretty important that you’re not scared off by some multiplication and division – because there’s going to be a lot of that.

2. A familiarity with IT

Sure the results of CRO are going to be felt more by the marketing guys, but when you start messing with your website design, your forms and your CMS and you’re thinking long and hard about the different ways technology can be used to improve the user journey on your site, being comfortable with the technologies out there and understanding what can or cannot be done is pretty important – even if you’re not a hardcode programmer (though from time to time I wish I hadn’t let all those years of DHTML and Javascript vapourise over the years). Plus, if you’re going to work with programmers, it helps to understand what they’re telling you as well.

3. Project management skills

Testing your site to optimise it is going to require working with designers and programmers, but perhaps more importantly members of your sales team, the editorial or content team if you have one and maybe even members of the customer service team. And of course, don’t forget your boss!

Managing key stakeholders is crucial, and so is keeping everyone in the loop. Managing a project effectively is a skill that is as important as understanding the whole testing process.

4. Empathising with your users

OK, this really should have been the first point because this is the most important. If you can’t really tell a good user journey from a bad one, you’re probably not cut out for this job. At the base of it all, what optimisation and testing is about is picking apart your website, every single page, every single element and then trying to think of ways (either original or inspired) to see how you can change.improve it so that your users are more likely to convert to customers.

The ability to think creatively about user journeys and to flip back through pages in your “mental notebook of website ideas” will allow you to come up with new ideas and improvements. On the contrary, the lack of this ability will mean that you really don’t have any idea about how to improve your site.

Not complicated, is it?

5. An understanding of online marketing

This is probably something that has an indirect but crucial impact on your work. If you have – in any way – been involved in online marketing, you will understand the importance of having a nice website that works, the effectiveness of certain headlines over others, the difference between new and existing site visitors. The basics essentially. This kind of knowledge can be obtained even without specifically being in the online marketing field of work, but an appreciation of how an imporvement in performance affects email, affiliate, PPC, SEO,display advertising etc. means you can make a better optimistion plan and put forward a more effective set of results.

There we go – five simple traits you need to be a conversion optimisation rate ninja – leaping into action and bumping up conversions before your competitors know what hit them! Almost all of the above can be developed.

It goes without saying that you need to be familiar with your web analytics and understand how to read your basic analytics reports and you should have some interest in the area other than the fact that your boss told you so. 

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Before I get started with the real article, I guess I should start with a little intro. Those who know me already, know where I work and if you don’t, just look me up on LinkedIn, it ain’t no secret.

Despite a pretty dramatic change in my work environment over the last couple of months, I still sometimes fall back into marketing manager mode, and I realised that some of those thoughts might be useful to put down. So here goes – if you’re a marketing manager and you’re using your website either for lead generation or qualification or to fulfil any other kind of objective, here are my top three reasons why testing your website design to improve conversion rates should be at the top of your to-do list when planning.

1. Do more with the same amount of traffic

You can pour money into getting more traffic to youtr site, and that could end up costing a lot of money depending on how you go about it. Plus you have to deal with idenitfying good vs bad traffic, staying on top (or paying someone to stay on top) of the SEO ball etc.

On the other hand, you could channel your energy into building a more conversion-friendly website. Pick apart every single element till you feel like you’re giving your visitors no excuse to abandon your site and go elsewhere. You know your business and your competitors best, you have your audience in place – all you need is to figure out what they respond to.

2. Save money by avoiding expensive mistakes

Ever come across a situation where you’ve been part of a meeting where you sit around a table, debate whether a masthead should be green or blue, and what font to use on your soon-to-be redesigned awesome website? And then you launch the thing and your audience hate it? And you wonder if you should continue to tinker with it or go back to the old site because your conversions have dropped?

Well, problem easily avoided with some website testing. In my experience, too often I have seen people make decisions by committee, or even using “focus groups” to ask a handful of people what they think of a new design. Dangerous. Expose your audience (or a segment of your audience) to your new ideas, monitor how they convert, and you’ll have a much more accurate view of what works and what doesn’t. And chances are, you’ll be surprised by the results. Disaster averted.

3. Boost return on your other marketing activities

Chances are that your website is being used as a destination for your email campaigns, PPC, online display, affiliate, perhaps even your print ads. They’re all going to the same old pages where a lot of people come, see and puke (Thank you Avinash Kaushik). And then they go away. A little back of the envelope math should be able to tell you how much a difference a 0.5% or 1% improvement in conversion across all your channels will make to your marketing ROI – hell, even to your company’s bottomline.

Add to that the money you’d have normally spent to generate the same results without testing your website. That is your total saving. That is the figure that gets added to the return on your marketing spend. Who’s a star now?

If you’re new to website testing, some of the above might seem slightly abstract – there are bound to be a lot of hows and whys coming out of this article. But I’ll be addressing the basics of website testing in further detail in my forthcoming posts.

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