Welcome to Briefly Experimental
Every two weeks we'll deliver the best experimentation content and commentary, curated by a member of the Speero team. We'll break things down into the four key pillars needed for any successful experimentation program.
This edition was written by Emma Travis, Senior Experimentation Strategist at Speero. If you'd like to geek out with Emma on any topic mentioned in this newsletter, just hit reply and you'll reach her directly.
Edition 15, November
Strategy & Culture
☕ A free cup of coffee isn’t going to cut it anymore
Econsultancy spoke to Charlie Casey, co-founder of Loyalty Lion to dig into the topic of loyalty schemes and their use in ecommerce.
Consumer behavior has changed since the pandemic and many retailers have focused on building emotional loyalty over discount-based loyalty (or the magic of combining the two).
Charlie gives a great example of meal delivery service "Cook" that gave him a discount for 6 months following the birth of his first child. "They understood that I needed them more now, but also knew I’d have plenty of expenses so they offered me a little help. By acting on this insight Cook moved our interactions from transactional to emotional."
These types of strategies help create powerful, emotional brand loyalty which is much harder to break than standard discount-based loyalty.
Is there a way you could offer your customers a perk that would tap into their emotions?
Process & Methodology
🏷️ Price experimentation - walking on thin ice?
Earlier this month I took part in a webinar hosted by Kameleoon along with John Trimble from TalkTalk, on the topic of price experimentation. It's a topic that can get quite cloudy both in terms of the technicalities as well as the ethics.
As an advocate for doing right by the user, I have some reservations about price testing. Simply showing one price to one user and a different price to another seems like dangerous ground. That said, when I started unpicking this topic I realized that this is not necessarily dissimilar to the dynamic pricing algorithms used in industries such as travel.
For me, price testing is about much more than just testing price. There are so many opportunities to test around the topic of price, e.g. the order you show pricing, how you display discounts and how you communicate value.
Catch up on the discussion by watching the webinar here.
💯 How advanced is your experimentation program?
Wouldn't it be great if you could systematically evaluate your experimentation efforts? Find the gaps and opportunities across strategy, process, people, and data? Even better, have a document to share internally, to help get buy-in and internal alignment. How about a benchmark to assess your own efforts compared with other businesses' experimentation programs?
Enter, our Experimentation Program Maturity Audit. It's free and will help you evaluate your current performance, measure your gains over time, and allow you to compare your efforts with other businesses.
Get your free experimentation program audit
People & Skills
🗣️ 4 Key principles in verbal and written communication
David Mannheim writes passionately about how we should speak to our users and customers and how his four key principles can help us optimize experiences, write effective copy and answer users' questions. This article got me thinking about how these four principles are important when it comes to working in the CRO industry itself.
Context: This relates to many aspects of CRO, from the importance of qualitative research in identifying the why, to communicating insights and writing hypotheses (why are we testing this.)
Expectation, transparency, and authenticity: These are also important when setting expectations around test impact (and the fact we can’t predict this), test development time, communicating results with transparency, and being authentic rather than driven by ego.
These traits are useful things to think about both for yourself in your day-to-day work, as well as when hiring new people into your team.
🎰 Why Ladbrokes is decentralizing their CRO operations
In the world of experimentation, it’s common to hear of teams who are seeking to centralize their team structures. That’s why the approach of Jessica James’ team at the gambling and gaming company Ladbrokes is so fascinating, as they are actively engaged in the opposite approach.
In a special Notable Minds interview with Haley Carpenter, Jessica explained why and how Ladbrokes is distributing the power of experimentation into the hands of individual teams.
👀 Job opportunities
Here are a few interesting roles that have been posted in the past week.
- Senior Experimentation Strategist at Speero (Remote, US/UK)
- CRO Manager at MANSCAPED (San Diego, US)
- Web Optimization Manager at Amazon (Seattle, US)
- Conversion Rate Optimization Specialist at Pineapple (Remote, US)
- Analytics & Optimization Manager at Jellyfish (Baltimore, MD)
- Head of Ecommerce at Natoora (London, UK)
- UX Optimisation Manager at Matalan (Liverpool, UK)
- CRO Expert at Accenture (Dublin, Ireland)
Data & Tools
Data & T
👍 Do you have a good conversion rate?
We often have clients ask what ‘good’ looks like in terms of conversion rates and thinking about the topic I came across Littledata which provides you with averages for a range of metrics; from add-to-cart to the usage of internal search.
But there are so many factors at play, making "good" highly contextual and any averages pretty useless. But let's say these figures are contextually similar to your business, and you discover your site is above average, now what?
To quote Peep Laja, "a good conversion rate is better than what you had last month."
News & Events
📅 Panel session on Behavioural Data Science
30th November (online)
The Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics will host a panel session chaired by Paul Adams on the emerging field of behavioral data science. This session is part of the Behavioural Science and Wider World Seminar Series.
Register here
📅 CROshop Live
1st of December (online)
VWO is running "CROshop" a live virtual, and interactive workshop (NOT your typical webinar) aimed at getting you up and running in CRO. There are workshops for North America, Europe, and APAC focusing on different verticals, spanning the next two months.
You can catch Speero MD, Ben Labay, on the 1st of December in his interactive workshop. Learn how Codecademy strategically aligned their testing program to a central goal and doubled down on that goal to get 5X growth within a year. Ben will use Miro as a collaboration tool to work with participants on their own metric taxonomies for growth, program driver metrics (SaaS specific), and program guardrail metrics.
Find out more about the speakers and dates here
📅 How to build a successful experimentation program
2nd December (online)
Ben Labay and Shiva Manjunath walk you through some tips and tricks they've learned in building experimentation programs to help you remove roadblocks and optimize not just your website, but your program. In the workshop they will cover;
- What are the pros/cons for different experimentation models (e.g. de-centralized vs. centralized)
- How to approach an experimentation operating system
- How to incorporate research into your experimentation program
📅 CJAM Session - Growing your user insights landscape
2nd December (online)
Terry Pierelli & Erin Weigel look at two new and fairly unknown strategies for increasing the number of ways that you can gather critical user insights.
Tickets are free - get them here
📅 Etsy Experimentation Virtual Event
7-8th December (online)
This event will focus on the following themes:
- Building experimentation platforms that scale
- Increasing the pace of innovation through non-traditional experimentation methods (e.g. offline experimentation)
- Running sophisticated statistical or machine learning methodologies for experiments
- Measuring the value of experimentation.
Request your ticket here
📅 How banks use data and experimentation for 3.2x faster growth
10th December (online)
Eight out of ten financial services say they will improve the use of data and analytics to create better digital experiences for their customers. But only two out of ten do so.
Join Segment, Kameleoon, Speero, and Forrester to learn:
- New benchmarks on data and experimentation by financial companies.
- How leading banks stay compliant while optimizing their digital products and marketing channels.
- What data and optimization techniques are the easiest and offer the highest reward.
- How to cross-sell and up-sell customers with relevant banking offers and services
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