Using Research XL Framework for Optimization – Review 4/12

This week’s article is on “Using Research XL Framework for Optimization”, a part of Growth Marketing from CXL Institute https://cxl.com/. Last week’s article was centered on “Identifying and Amplifying Growth Channels”. You can read it here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/identifying-amplifying-growth-channels-review-312-olawale-adeniyi ?

Introduction

Optimization is the process of making the best or extracting the most benefit or value from resources. In growth marketing, it is the process growth marketers use to achieve the most value from the company’s resources to achieve a business outcome. This means that all channels of customer acquisition are continuously optimized for us to get the most benefit from it.

For instance, ABCash gets 85% of its users through web channels. In optimizing, how can we move from 85% to 95%? Or if 85% of these users only perform 3 transactions monthly, we want to optimize for the users to perform 5 transactions monthly.

Optimization for a business is about improving key business metrics across the funnel. From awareness to action and retention.

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Optimization Objective

How can we optimize our optimization process? At the heart of every optimization process are testing and research. This is the only way to optimize the optimization process. There are three key objectives to an optimization process

1.??????Test or make more effective changes

We need to continuously make better, whatever the traffic (users or potential customers) are landing on. If your users are landing on the website, how optimized is the website to positively impact the users?

2.??????Reduce the duration and cost of optimization

During the planning phase of an optimization process, we have to be fast, quickly execute, agile and decisive. To spend a lot of time is to increase the duration and cost of optimization

3.??????Improve the speed of experimentation

Growth and optimization processes are about experimentation. The more experiments we can carry out, the faster the pace and the more benefit to the business.

What is not Optimization

-?????????Optimization is not best practices

-?????????Optimization is not design trends

-?????????Optimization is not about the latest attractions

-?????????Optimization is not copying another company’s website or ideas. (Especially for industries that have industry leaders) Do not copy!!

-?????????Optimization is not copying features off competitors’ websites or solutions

What is Optimization

Optimization is about testing what works and what does not work using a data and science-driven approach to research and experimentation. The process using a prioritization framework to identify what to test, a scientific approach for hypothesis and testing, and data-driven for results and decision making.

Good Optimization Process

A good optimization process tells us the following

-?????????It tells you where the problems are, on your website and across your customer-facing channels

-?????????It tells you what these problems are

-?????????It tells why these problems are problems

-?????????It turns known issues into test hypotheses

-?????????It prioritizes tests and solutions to fix the problems

Users at the Centre of the Optimization Process

The key criteria of an optimization process is to make our tests more effective and this comes from discovering the core of what matters. How do we discover what matters to the users about our products or solution? We do this through data and continuous understanding of the users. The discovery is usually categorized into 5 key categories

-?????????What kind of pain points?

-?????????What kind of emotional needs does it solve?

-?????????How are they making a purchasing decision?

-?????????What part of your website lowers or increases your conversion rate?

-?????????What do users do on your website?

It is useful to do this from different customer groups, segments, and personas. Your products will be solving different pain points and emotional needs for different customers groups, segments, and personas.

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The Questions

How to figure out the problem

-?????????Research: this is the foundation of all optimization process. I will talk about the Research XL framework for research and testing

-?????????Ask or list the right questions

Whose problem are we solving?

What do they need?

Why?

How are they choosing and/or making a decision?

Why?

What are they thinking when they see our offer?

How is what we sell clearly different?

Where is the site leaking money?

What is the problem

What are they doing or not on the website?

What leads more people to do “x”?

The Implementation

The implementation process is

-?????????Identify the kind of data we need to gather to answer the questions above

-?????????Test everything the users can do on the website to understand how they are using it

-?????????Use the result of the test to make hypotheses, test, and execute incremental changes for optimization

The Research XL Framework

This is a research process that serves as the foundation and criteria for any optimization process

The process helps to gather 6 types of data, to help you make great optimization decisions, and come up with tests that tend to win more often and have bigger impacts.

1.??????Technical Analysis

The customers will hardly convert if you have the most persuasive website but it doesn’t work well on all devices and across all browsers.

This is the number one step of any optimization or growth work. How does your website work across all devices? Is it seamless, is anything broken? If yes, where, which browser, which devices, which pages are slow?

The easiest step is to fix all technical issues.

2.??????Heuristic Analysis

Using our experience to know what might be relevant or not. You go through with selected people, all the pages on your website and critique them based on an agreed rubric score or criteria. An example of such is:

-?????????Relevancy: when I google what I need, does the page I am directed to speak to my need or not?

-?????????Clarity: do I have the clarity on the action I want to take?

-?????????Motivation: what is being done on the page to increase my motivation to take action? ?

-?????????Friction: what makes it difficult to take action?

3.??????Digital Analytics

-?????????Where are the leaks: If we look at customer's journeys on our website, where are the biggest leaks between these layers on our website?

-?????????Which segments: We look at data across different segments, devices, channels, browsers. Whatever is important to us

-?????????What are users doing: Users need to be at the right place, where we want them to be

-?????????Which actions correlate with higher conversions, then we need to get more people to take that action that correlates to higher conversions

4.??????Mouse Tracking & Form Analytics

-?????????Where do users click?

-?????????How far down do they scroll: this will let us know whether to make the page more compact or change the design

-?????????Differences between devices

-?????????Session replays

5.??????Qualitative Surveys

Qualitative research is all about the why? About our target audience, how they behave, what do they want, what they do not want, what is their turn off and on.

-?????????Buyer groups

-?????????Which problem are they solving?

-?????????How are they deciding

-?????????What's holding them back?

-?????????What else do they want to know?

6.??????User Testing

We recruit people who represent our target audience to test the website. We will have them perform key tasks on our website and see how successful they are.

What people say and what they do are completely different. In user testing, completely ignore what they say and focus on what they do and what they experience.

For user testing, we want to give them 3 types of tasks.

?????????????- To find some specific product if e-commerce or information if a software

?????????????- To find something broad e.g. find a product you like or sign up

?????????????- Make them go through the funnel.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Research XL framework provides a guideline for you to use in carrying out structured research for your optimization processes.

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