This month, CTI's Head of CRO Lee Preston is hosting a webinar on CRO for charities. So, we we thought we'd catch up with Lee and ask him some more general questions about CRO and his role.
If you'd like to attend the webinar on 23 September, register here.
CTI: How often are you surprised by your CRO work?
Lee Preston: “All the time. The typical thing I tell clients is that, if you do 10 changes on your website, typically speaking, about three of them would be positive changes, four might be neutral, three might be negative. So every A/B test we do, every change we make on a website, it's always going to go in three directions and it's always quite surprising.
“Even if you think something's an absolute no-brainer, it's still worth testing because you might find it really impacts revenue negatively. So yeah, in terms of experimentation, I’m always surprised.
“And the same with research as well. It's always really interesting to find out what real people are saying on a website. Sometimes they can absolutely dazzle you with their answers. You can find out people are struggling for reasons you didn't expect. And then sometimes you find out it's exactly what you expected - but it's good to have that validation.”
Why don’t more businesses do CRO in-house?
Lee Preston: “We are starting to see more companies are taking on CRO people, CRO teams in-house or it's been handled by their products teams. But there’s still a lot of companies, organisations, and charities that don't have CRO, because it's an extra person to employ. They don't quite see the opportunity just yet, they are already quite busy, they don't have the capacity to do it themselves.
“Or, what we see as well, is organisations start to do CRO themselves but they don't do a full enough job of it. It does tend to be a full-time job in most cases and if you give it to a marketing person, they've also got a lot of other things to do. So, it doesn't always get the full attention that it needs.”
What does the dream client look like for CRO?
Lee Preston: “The dream client for CRO would be an organisation that potentially doesn't have the capacity in house to do CRO but is keen to start making decisions based on data, to stop doing the guesswork, and to stop making decisions just based on what the C-suite and the higher-up people want to do. They should want to make some bets on the website based on data but they don't have that ability just yet.
“On the other side of things, we get clients who come in and they want us to help them with their CRO strategy. They're already doing stuff. They're great clients, too. We can then come in when they've already got the foundation set up. We help give them a strategic advantage in terms of what they're doing, scaling up, getting fewer inconclusive tests, getting better results basically, and testing bigger, too.”
What’s the difference between quantitative and qualitative research - how do you find a balance?
Lee Preston: “Quant is basically the numbers, the 'what', and qual is the detail and the 'why' things are happening. Quant is typically your analytics tools, for example. Qual is your surveys, things like that. The balance is always using both. You always need both. You can't make decisions just on one thing. You need a combination of the two.”
What advice would you give somebody looking for a CRO agency?
Lee Preston: “Have a think about what your priorities are, what your key metrics are, what your Northstar metric is that you really want to change.
“Usually, for businesses, that's revenue, for some it's conversion rate, for some it's margin. Just have a think about that - it’s a really good starting point to then start talking to agencies.
“You also want to understand your level of traffic, your budget and what kind of support you need in terms of testing. Do you have the capacity to do it yourselves? Do you want the agency to take it all on themselves? And what kind of level of involvement you want to be involved with, what kind of capacity you have to work alongside the experimentation program.”
Register for Lee's webinar on 23 September: How to grow donations - a CRO playbook for charities.
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