CRO is all about growth. Growth through optimization and innovation. CRO as a discipline itself is also growing and is in full development. But which innovations should you keep an eye on? Maurice Beerthuyzen did an interview for the DDMA about new CRO developments prior to the CRO Awards. Below is a summary of this interview with 5 innovations that can also be important to you.

You innovate in a targeted way together with your stakeholders

“You have to innovate together. This is the only way to make all those involved understand what you are working towards and what kind of innovation is intended. Innovations should be a logical part of your business objectives. We do this within ClickValue by means of ‘Change OKRs’. Our discipline leads draw up OKRs and present them to the team. The underlying initiatives can be taken up by all team members. In this way, they ensure a clear course and realize involvement and commitment within our teams. They ensure that everyone in the team is responsible for something within the innovation process.’

CRO is a method

“CRO as a concept does not exist within our organization because for us it outlines a too generalistic perspective of the field and does not do justice to other essential specializations within the profession. Think of specializations such as research, design analysis, design, psychology, copywriting, project management, etc. Innovations also take place within these disciplines.

We embrace multiple validation methods

CRO is more than just A/B testing. More and more validation methods are being embraced.

Some examples:

Attitude or qualitative validation: depending on the hypothesis, you can, for example, help brand teams assess which change contributes to their goals. You can also set this up as a pre-validation tool to increase the chances of success of a subsequent quantitative experiment.

Fast & Slow track validation: by defining different types of experiments in your CRO Pipeline, you can run multiple types of experiments side by side and ensure continuous program output.

Behavioral validation: if you are only interested in the behavior, in addition to your analytics stack, you can also consider using customer experience tools that often give you richer insights into behavior.

Weighing LEARN and EARN in your experiment design: experiment to learn from or experiment to earn? By making this trade-off more often, you can serve a wider variety of CRO goals.

This way you can weigh up per situation which type of validation is most suitable, which can sometimes yield you a profit, lower costs, faster learning, more output, etc.’

Collect your customer insights through a workflow

Everyone is talking about collecting your customer insights. And everyone has the same difficulty in finding the right methods and tools for that. But if knowledge building does not happen through a workflow, it becomes difficult to turn this into a successful project. So figuring out a tool is not enough. You need to set up a clear, simple workflow. Of course, we have preferences for tools, but we can also implement our knowledge base workflow on software that customers already use.

It’s about the idea behind it. What the tool is, is less exciting.

We can automate more than we might already be

Many activities within CRO can easily be automated. For example:

• Automatic monitoring of tests
• Automatic evaluation of tests
• Automatic running, pausing and re-running of tests
• The automatic sending of “decision supporting” insights
• The automatic launch and release.

That way you have more time for the content and the people work that makes CRO so much fun.’