The Science of CRO: Methodology and Guidelines

Introduction to CRO

In many ways, a business is like a bath; if there are holes in your tub, you lose the water inside — no matter how long you run the tap! Research by the Baymard Institute suggests that eCommerce stores lose over 60% of revenue, because of a lack of optimization. Potential revenue leaks through hefty checkouts, slow page loading, clunky UX, misunderstood users, unconvincing content, obscure products, terrible SEO, and more.

CRO is more science than art and lives by the saying of what you can’t measure, you can’t manage, though that is not to say there isn’t spacious room for creativity. If, however, at some point you find yourself guessing, then you’re doing CRO wrong. It’s all about the data and there is no room for unfounded speculation, and yet, despite this fundamental importance of having good data, over 90% of supposedly data-informed decisions are based on broken Google analytics set ups. 90%!

A disconnect between data and users will hurt your CRO efforts at best, and derail them at worst.

In this article, we’d like to introduce you to Scandiweb’s CRO methodology & share our successes and case studies with you!

Scandiweb’s Conversion Rate Optimization Methodology

CRO: Data & Insights

It is crucial to understand your revenue and KPI drivers through holistic data gathering and data-driven research. Data is the difference between guessing and knowing when making decisions that affect your website, user experience or marketing.

The first step toward growing your revenues at profit (aka growth) is to make sure that you’re collecting the critical metrics, as well as making sure that the data is not corrupt. To do so, we’ve developed advanced Digital Analytics tracking frameworks, perform extensive data tracking health-checks and customize the tracking based on each business’ needs.

The next step is gaining actionable insights from the data which includes in-depth data analysis and asking the right questions from the data. Averages lie, and we need to go deeper than that — segmentation, visualizations, data regressions, correlations, session recordings, and heatmap data are combined to get in-depth insights of what’s working and what needs work.

In addition to that, it’s crucial to have a deep and empathic understanding of the customers and the goals you need to help them reach, which is usually done with the help of more qualitative research methods such as interviews, surveys, user tests, chat transcripts and more.

CRO: Scale

We start tuning your existing traffic sources for more qualified leads and testing completely new strategies for new user acquisition if prior User Acquisition Research revealed any missing opportunities or optimization possibilities.

Through a deep understanding of your visitors (especially the non-converting ones) experiencing your business as customers with “fresh eyes”, we narrow down to a set of several growth strategies to match your particular community and bring immediate impact.

CRO: Engage

We materialise all experiment ideas into an engaging and frictionless user experience. It is all about combining extensive conversion & user research, persuasive messaging and our designers’ intuitions not to kill the creative design spin.

We always seek to implement an iterative and evolutionary redesign approach. If we evaluate your site and understand that there are too many problems to fix — that’s the only case in which a complete redesign (starting from scratch) can be more effective than evolutionary improvements supported by A/B tests.

CRO: Optimize

We eliminate all biased opinions on our way and listen to the only judge that matters — the customer. Qualitative and quantitative testing allows us to validate our hypotheses early and bring new food for thought for further iterations.

Right after “low hanging fruit” improvements, we proceed with gradual, iterative optimization following 4 basic steps — Build, Measure, Learn, Iterate. Perpetual iteration naturally leads to perfection — the best possible result, squeezing the maximum out of the market.

What can Scandiweb do for your CRO efforts?

Scandiweb’s Digital Marketing department consists of a certified team of CRO, SEO and copywriting experts. With a full-stack capacity of taking a project from its infancy and preparing the first technical setups (or auditing the current ones), to collecting accurate data, to producing tailored designs and user journeys, to iteratively improving through the use of A/B/n tests, to finding unique innovative solutions to take your business above and beyond.

Scandiweb has a wealth of experience that we’re always looking to apply to new pages, new stores, new projects, making shopping online a more pleasant, more elegant and more viable option for customers world wide.

There’s so much more — from A/B tests, to content marketing, to a plethora of case studies — take a gander at our blog and portfolio and learn more about what we can do for you. Or just ask us directly at [email protected] and we’ll get back to you very soon!

You can also simply send us an email at [email protected] to get a non-binding quote on how we can recover 30% of your lost revenue. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or write us directly! We’re interested to hear about your struggles and needs, and help out if possible.

Reinis Groskops

The Science of CRO: Methodology and Guidelines

Introduction to CRO