Wednesday 12 October 2016

Improve your Optimization Program

We know sometimes it gets difficult to reach a point where you can say you are satisfied fully with your testing activities. But the struggle is real, getting good results is not trivial. It is planned and it requires a mature conversion model to be able to optimize the programs you have.

The question now is, how do you do that?

Lucky you, we actually have components for a successful optimization program. Scroll for more!

1. Culture arround CRO

While Spiderman said, ‘with great power comes great responsibility,’ we say, ‘with great culture, comes great process and result’. To do this, you will need an executive sponsor who believes in testing. The internal sharing of results, sharing of success and failures also helps in creating a healthy working culture in the company and the people working for it.

The organizational culture of an organization is one important part that brings profitable results. Every company/organization/multinational, call it however you want, is first born by having an idendity. This identity goes on and gets developed and evoluates in such way that every person who works in the same place has similar behaviors and beliefs.

The key in making people have similar attitudes is by engaging them. As a leader it’s a very big task which needs to be done and it needs to be done correctly.

How? Find your own culture and how you want to be represented and recognised as an entity. We all know that Apple is known for innovating constantly. Or Nike supports you to have your horizons open. It’s what this is all about. Create a culture that represents you as persons and that represents your product also. Find similarities between you and the product. Make it personal. People like emotional advertising.

Your next steps should be:

  • Have an identity.
  • Have a plan on how you want to use that identity.
  • Have an engagement plan.
  • Create a culture and make people believe in it.
  • Invest emotionally and financially in your team.

2. Team

There isn’t just one man behind every successful result, but a number of them. You will need a dedicated developer, one who knows the ins and outs of the program. You will then create a custom testing team, a group of experts doing different methodologies and processes to ensure excellent testing.’

Teamwork is one of the greatest tools any kind of organization can have. Individuals are very great at their job. But individuals who work together can be excellent. You know what they say, “Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.” In any process of your work, you must have in mind team work.

What you need is actually easy. To have people in your team who are great at what they do, and then find ways of making them work together.

We can give you some examples in this situation:

  • Have weekly meetings with everyone from each department and discuss what happened so far and what has to happen next. You never know when the developer guy will give some great inputs to the seller guy.
  • Have task force meetings weekly. Take two or three people from different areas (that complete each other and are essential to each other at the same time), and have them work in a structured way and by objectives. Having an objective in mind every week and knowing that you need to accomplish it because your  teammates depend on that is really good for increasing the responsibility in people and also increasing the conversion rates for the upcoming results of the company.
  • Have feedback sessions. Actually, you don’t even need special “sessions” for that. What you need is to create this culture, that feedbacks are very important. And they are. How will you know if you are doing the correct job? How do you know if you are evolving? How will you know if you are helping your team evaluate? And so on.

We just gave you a few small tips to start with, but now you can implement in your team whatever feel right and helps with the CRO because every team has different needs and need to be approached differently.

3. Tools and Systems

There are many many tools that you can use in order to view, verify, learn about clients etc. What is next for you is to find the best way possible to do this. What is the methodology you want to use? Why is that one the good one for you? How can you put into practice what you have acknowledged?

Always start with the data, the analytics. Remember the mantra, the more data you have, the better results you get. But never isolate data, some companies make this grave mistake of not integrating their data, the voice of the customers, the offline system they get.

The cross-disciplinary teams will do brainstorming in order to come with assumptions and solutions to the assumptions. For example, who are the target customers? What are their needs? What problems could arise from these needs? How do we solve these problems?

For qualitative testing, some tools that can help are Click Tale, User Testing and others that are data driven.

4. Process

Processes are one of the best parts of the entire activity. Now you can put into practice what you’ve learnt, work together as a team according to the organization values and see your results.

The steps are actually easy when you come down to it. First is to gather the data and to develop it. There are three documents that you will need to every test:

  • experiment design
  • a concept
  • final results.

What you can do is to put together the test idea, create a concept out of it and build the code for it. Essentially, you will need the QA script. You do this prelaunch and post-launch.

5. Strategy

There are varying strategies in optimization results.

  1. Validating the results of the test.
  2. Buckshot Approach, which is simply saying blind testing. Some are just oblivious to the testing tools so what they do is they test it to all the features.
  3. Some others are focused on winning; they are not into the needs of the customers.
  4. Know the customers. This approach is among the ones you can use. Having an insight into the needs of the customers is important. It helps in building trust, it helps in improving results.

Remember, getting good results depends on the data and how the data are being processed. Make sure that you have a great team working for you. Make it data driven for better testing!

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