What's CRO all about? Deep Dive Into Invesp's Course

How to know if your website is at full conversion potential? What clues to look for? What tests to run?

I mean, I’m in your shoes right now. In FIgPii, we’re just starting our marketing activities and building up our flows.

I enrolled in Invesp’s course to learn more about CRO from the experts, learn more about their framework, strategies, tips, and tricks.

In this course, there are eight major sections. In each blog, I’ll be covering two out of the eight sections.

Ready? Okay, then let’s start with the Introduction then.

Introduction

In this section, Ayat gives us an introduction to what CRO? Who is it for? And where do you start?

So this course won’t be a theoretical one; you’re not going to observe and do nothing! 

You’ll be applying some tactics and changing and tinkering a lot, so be ready.

One of the biggest mistakes you’ll fall into is thinking that CRO is easy to do, and you can change the headline or the color of a button easily. What’s the big deal?

But your experiment fails, and so does the next one and the next one, so on and so forth.

Failure means mean that you’re on the right track; failure will tell you what doesn’t work and what does.

Ayat tackles such an important issue which is that you need to define a customer persona. 

You need to know your customer very well to know what experiments to run and how do you optimize for that specific customer.

Once you’ve got your customer persona defined, you need to make your customer convert. Yes, but you need to make your customer do some small tasks first to prepare him for that “BIG YES.”

The CRO process is fundamental; it’s based on numbers and data, so make sure that you’ve got a robust analytics system installed so you can see what works and what doesn’t.

Ayat talks more about the SHIP framework, which is Scrutinize, Hypothesize, Implement, Propagate. 

Jobs To Be Done

In this section, Ayat talks more about how Invesp figure out what makes their customer *tick*; they want to know everything about why they come to this website, why they are considering your product or service, etc.

The JTBD theory will help you realize the social and emotional needs that drove you to make a purchase.

In this section, Ayat discusses implementing the JTBD theory in a CRO program and the tips you should use whenever you intend to use this concept.

I’d recommend checking out Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice by Anthony Ulwick to figure out more about what JTBD is all about and how you make it work for you! 

So you need to start with a simple poll to kick things off and start the JTBD machine.

Don’t ask some easy questions that don’t help you figure anything out; ask questions that unlock your customers’ subconscious so you can know more about what makes them tick.

I have to say I loved the Holes and Drills example that Ayat gave. She talks about a person who drilled a hole; why did they drill that hole? I answered in my mind to hang a picture and that what the cause, yes.

But why do they need to hang a picture? Then you start going deeper and deeper to why they drill that hole. You discover the reason in the subconscious! It’s an emotional need that drives them to drill that hole, so it’s not just a hole to hang a picture; it’s a need to satisfy an emotion.

 The following section talks about the JTBD interviews, what to look for, and how do you execute an interview that gives you the results you’re looking for.

Job-to-be-done interviews allow you to drill down into the minds of consumers in a way that can’t be done using polls and surveys. You get to know that exact feeling and need that pushed customers into making a purchase. It is those same feelings and needs expressed in sentences and words that we capture and include in Value Propositions.

#JTBD is a framework that explains why customers hire a product or service. But how do you implement that framework to drive marketing insights and business strategy? We do that through a series of #JTBD interviews and an analysis process. The goal of these interviews to uncover:

1- Functional aspect of why customers buy a product

2- Social/emotional aspect of why customers buy a product

3- Process map: the different steps users following when hiring for a job

The first step after collecting the interviews and doing the analysis is looking for patterns. What are standard pulls, struggling moments, first thoughts, pushes, anxieties, and existing habits? What's essential is to plot this data in an excel file or Google sheet and extract commonalities. 

The data should be aggregated and then plotted to determine where the opportunities are? 

Where is the product or service for hire overserved or underserved?

You can use the aggregate data to create very targeted and specific polls or surveys to see if the same trends are available on the broader market.

What’s left in this section is a trade secret lol, I can’t put it in words even if I wanted, but I’ll give you a sneak peek.

The following section has two examples of real customers doing the JTBD framework, interviewing, and analyzing. One is an excerpt from Christensen, Clayton M. Competing Against Luck, it’s about a mattress store interviewing a customer in a JTBD fashion, and it’s full of gems.

The 2nd example is Khalid’s interview with a client of Invesp, again in the JTBD framework, but this time it’s in an audio format, so you get to hear not just read how a customer responds to the different questions and how his tone changes.

With that said, that concludes our first blog about the CRO course by Invesp, talking about the CRO process and the first part of the JTBD framework.

I’m looking forward to sharing more about what to do and look for when doing conversion rate optimization for your business!