Growth Marketing CXL Institute Minidegree — Review Week 3

Already three weeks into my training. This is going fast. This week, I am almost done with block 2. I’m halfway thru the A/B testing mastery class with Ton Wesseling. The good thing is that I completed all classes with Peep Laja, which were Research and Testing and Conversion Research. I also finished the class Ben Labay — Statistics fundamentals for testing. Still a lot of work for next week, but here are the highlights of what I learned this week.

As a reminder, for 12 weeks, as part of the scholarship granted to me from the CXL Institute, I will be writing a series of 12 articles looking back on my learning and practical ways to apply what I have learned in my day-to-day activities.

So, here is part 3 of my review!

What is the CXL Institute?

CXL brings you advanced level marketing training: get deep skills in growth, customer acquisition, analytics, and conversion optimization.

What you get is top-notch training from leaders and instructors within some of the fastest growing and biggest companies in the world.

Research and testing

As a reminder, in this class Peep touches on several topics related to testing. The first example that comes to mind is: when Peep illustrates the optimization of a website. He mentions that 90% of people will search on the internet: How to optimize my website? Click on the first link where a thousand and one tips are given and try anything.

Conversion Research

I didn’t touch on this class much last week because I felt it wasn’t relevant to discuss this one while I wasn’t finished. In this 4 hour block of class, Peep covers a variety of really interesting topics. Among the important statements to remember, I particularly hooked on this quote :

Consider this:

There are ALWAYS gaps in desktop / tablet / mobile experiences. What are the gaps? You can only discover it by doing walkthroughs.

Most companies don’t walk the key journeys. They assume their developers have got it right. They’re often wrong.

Desktop-only journeys often fail mobile and tablets. Just because the site works well on your laptop, doesn’t much for mobile devices.

Following this, Peep explains what he recommends we do, which is:

Walkthrough the site in question

Make note of URL structure & handling

Check page URLs when moving around (useful for measuring flows etc)

Build a picture of site navigation flows

Identify key points of interest for analytics: all the suspicious stuff should be checked later with data

Find bad / suspicious pages or parts of the site

Check if the URLs are shared/split for different flows (e.g. if the site sells 3 different products, do they have unique funnels — can each funnel be measured separately?).

There are also other steps or tasks to complete to obtain the maximum amount of information, but in the end, the most important thing is the benefit of this type of analysis:

All the findings will be very practical: you get a series of prioritized fixes

Easy wins! If you’re doing work for a client, getting quick wins early on helps you build a relationship while delivering client value

In a second part of the class block, Peep discusses the relevance and power of doing a Heuristic analysis of the situation. Among the important points to identify in this analysis is to understand the 7 Levels of Conversion by Web Arts. According to Web Arts, here are the important things to consider:

1. Relevance. Does my perception fit my expectations?
2. Trust. Can I trust this provider?
3. Orientation. Where should I click? What do I have to do?
4. Stimulance. Why should I do it right here and right now?
5. Security. Is it secure here? What if…?
6. Convenience. How complicated will it be?
7. Confirmation. Did I do the right thing?

The technique demonstrated by the MarketingExperiments Methodology heuristic approach is the use of the following formula:

Luckily you don’t need to solve the formula above, it’s actually a helpful tool to keep at arm’s length (like print it out and stick it on your cubicle office wall). This is what the characters mean:

C = Probability of conversion

m = Motivation of user (when)

v = Clarity of the value proposition (why)

i = Incentive to take action

f = Friction elements of a process

a = Anxiety about entering information

Translation: The probability of conversion depends on the match between the offer and visitor motivation + the clarity of the value proposition + (incentives to take action now — friction) — anxiety. The numbers next to the characters signify the importance of it.

Friction is defined as psychological resistance to a given element in the sales or sign-up process. Anxiety is a psychological concern stimulated by a given element in the sales or sign-up process. Reduce these as much as possible and do what you can to increase the users’ motivation and incentive and clarify the value position.

I didn’t know this formula, but I find it very interesting and I will try this one for sure.

Survey Design Theory

In a second part of the class, we will talk about Survey design theory. A very interesting part of the class where the speaker shows us the principles to follow for a well-designed survey. Among the tricks and tips he gives us, he talks about the minimum number of respondents to survey to have an interesting sample of candidates. We also discuss the subject of bias when conducting an internal survey. It is very important not to take for granted how people know the product. Very interesting, I invite you to listen to it.

Other subjects

To finish the Conversion Research class, we discuss several topics such as the Ring Model, Google Analytic Health Check, Funnels and Goals Flow, Key Audience Insights, Site Search, Content Reports, Screen Resolutions, Browsers & Devices and List of Content Reports. Each of these sections of the class was very interesting. Very technical, but very helpful in understanding how to read and interpret Google Analytics data to increase your conversion rate. I’m looking forward to the third block, as I noticed that there were two complete courses on the Google Analytics tool.

Statistics fundamentals for testing

The last block I did this week was with Ben. This course is a brief overview of important statistical concepts to know even as a marketer. Ben introduces us to the importance of Mean, variance, standard variation, confidence intervals, the p-value, etc. Although I wasn’t the most interested in statistics when I was in college. I found it very interesting to listen to. I found that it was possible to make strong links between statistics and marketing.

Next week I will write more about the A/B Testing Mastery and what I learned from block 3.

Have a great one.