Four Ways To Boost CRO

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We saw three hurdles blocking the mainstream adoption of CRO in Three Inhibitors Of CRO.

To do a quick recap, they are:

  1. Pushback from ad agencies. Since CRO crimps ad spend, it threatens loss of ad agency revenues.
  2. Lack of adjective. “Companies need CRO when their websites are frictional, frictionful… or what?“
  3. Pedantic practitioners. With their obsession for data quality, CRO professionals come across as too academic.

In this post, we will discuss four ways to overcome these hurdles, thus expanding the footprint of CRO in the digital marketing value chain.

#1. TARGET COMPANIES CHANGING AD AGENCIES

Many companies announce their search for new agencies publicly.

According to AdWeek, Sony has started the hunt for a new ad agency for its PlayStation business to replace its existing ad agency MediaCom (H/T @NextGenPlayer).

It’s quite likely that the advertiser is pi**ed off with its existing ad agency and will ignore its pushback against CRO. Therefore, this might be a good time for CRO firms to slide into the radar of the advertiser’s C-Suite before a new ad agency enters the scene and begins to exert fresh pushback against CRO.

#2. TARGET ORGANIC CONTENT

Landing pages and microsites are directly tied to ad campaigns. Any optimization of conversion rate of forms, CTA buttons and other elements on those pages will inevitably trigger turf war with ad agencies.

To avoid going head on against ad agencies, CRO firms could target organic content that do not draw traffic from digital ads e.g. screens and workflows in SAAS software, non-product and non-sales pages on websites, etc.

As we did with the online banking portal of a leading private sector bank for which we helped to multiply the conversion rate of website visitors to Aadhaar seeders. Click Leading Universal Bank Cuts Compliance Cost for more details of this CRO success story. The Card Activation Wizard described in Communications – Low Hanging Fruit For Enhancing CX is another example.

#3. CAPITALIZE ON BEAR MARKETS

In bull markets, companies spend money without asking too many questions. In bear markets, they cut down spend, especially in marketing and advertising.

It’s hard for CRO to fight the hegemony of ad agencies when there’s exuberance in the air but there’s a decent chance of winning the battle when dark clouds gather on the horizon. Like they are in the West now (and might in India after a phase lag.)

#4. SHOW BIAS FOR ACTION

By declaring “Half my advertising works; I don’t know which half”, John Wanamaker dunked on the advertising industry. Since then, millions of people and companies have used this quote to cast aspersions on the industry’s effectiveness. Despite that, advertising has managed to grow by leaps and bounds in the following century.

Likewise, the CRO industry should find ways to grow despite data quality challenges.

Good news is CRO practitioners can show bias for action by working with whatever data customers have.

According to McKinsey, almost all companies have good-enough quality of data to create MVPs.

@s_ketharaman: While GIGO is a valid concern, almost all companies have good-enough data that can be put to use immediately in a data lake MVP.

CRO should grab the opportunity to enter new accounts with both hands instead of exhibiting too much academic rigor around data quality.

While this may sound like a canonical example of “drunk under lamp post effect”, McKinsey points out that this is exactly the sort of behavior demonstrated by B2B analytics outperformers as against laggards who got stuck in endless debates about data quality.

I can vouch for this practice with my personal experience of a large industrial conglomerate that’s known for its exceptional project management skills.

While buying Business Intelligence software, most companies set up a committee to evaluate different products, which presents the findings to another executive committee, which then approves the business case, which then leads to order placement with the selected vendor, and so on. Unlike them, the said conglomerate buys all the products, gives them to their respective champions, tells them to develop a pilot project, and keeps the product that resulted in the most sensible pilot project, and returns the others.

While this approach may not work for all companies, it illustrates how it’s possible even for mega corporations to demonstrate bias for action.

Also, if it’s any consolation, even academic professionals are increasingly going down this path lately.

@s_ketharaman: Example of “Drunk Under Lamp Post” behavior: Study on Impact of Investment Banks’ “Protected Weekend” Policy. Key impact is on Investment Bankers. But their work product is not available in public domain. So researchers make do with the impact on Analysts who do have public-facing work product.

Closer home, a friend recently completed a master’s degree in behavioral economics from a leading university in UK. His thesis required mystery shopping to be carried out by a representative sample of UK population, in which immigrants form around 15%. However, the university’s budget was limited, so he had to go with 100% immigrants who charged less to participate in the study.

CRO needs to make use of rudimentary data that’s readily available with the customer and deliver early wins. It should leverage the resultant tail winds to propose AI and ML technologies to finesse larger datasets so that it can up its game and deliver gamechanging CRO work that will negate pushback from ad agencies at a later date.

By using the above tactics, CRO can elevate its appeal to advertisers’ C Suites and thereby succeed in grabbing a greater share of the customer’s wallet for digital marketing.

On the other hand, if CRO continues with its pedantic behavior, it will risk fading into the woodwork within the forseeable future.