A call-to-action for investing in conversion rate optimisation

A case study of how an international company manages conversion-rate-optimisation

I think all digital marketers know we should be testing and improving our sites, but the reality is that often we’re focused on day-to-day activities like getting new content live and setting-up campaigns. This means that not enough or more commonly, no time at all, is devoted to structured improvement programmes.

One company which certainly does put the time into testing is Belron. They're a multi-channel business with sites operating in thirty-three countries with 19 languages with online revenue of over £400 million. You may know them as Autoglass or Safeglass in the Major markets such as the UK and US. Here Craig Sullivan, Group Ebusiness Manager explains why they invest in structured experiments on their site and some of the benefits they’ve seen.

I always enjoy listening to Craig speaking at events because he’s generous in sharing his learnings and tools that they use. This is an interesting case too since the testing has been scaled internationally.

Here’s what I found interesting from Craig’s talk - these are great arguments for investing in conversion rate optimisation - a call-to-action!

My instincts as a marketing person would give me a pretty good idea of what works… I find that the higher you go up in an organisation, the less chance there is of people guessing right. I tend to do slightly better than average, but even the best user experience and testing professionals the success rate might be 60 or 70 percent.

Testing removes ego and opinion from the design process. The important thing to learn is that the site is not for you, so it shouldn’t be tested by you. So you should put the decision making in the hands of the visitors themselves.

This is a real sea-change for organisations which get behind this since it will mean they stop making silly decisions and start making decisions based on cold, hard fact so removing ego and opinion from the process. This will be a continuing theme for Belron in the next couple of years as we look to massively ramp up our testing programme.

If you want to learn more, you can hear Craig speaking at Jump or view his Slideshares.