Building a Successful Optimization Practice: PROGRAM GROWTH

Assuming you’ve read the first and second installments of this series, you now have a solid understanding of the people and processes necessary to stand up a rockstar optimization program within your organization. After developing a great team and putting strong processes in motion, you may think it’s now time to kick back and celebrate all your hard work. But that would be a big mistake. Without ensuring the program gains internal traction and is sustainable, this hard work could ultimately be squandered in the long run. Below we’ll review the 4 most important steps in ensuring growth and sustainability of your practice.

1. Gaining leadership buy-in

This one seems obvious, but without support from upper management the optimization program’s potential is limited from day 1. Management teams, particularly C-suite and marketing and IT leaders, essentially hold the keys to the long-term optimization practice’s potential. Buy-in from these important stakeholders is the backbone of your program and will fuel its long-term strategy and growth.

Gaining this support from leadership can be easier said than done, and is likely dependent on proven, bottom-line results. While most stakeholders understand the importance of patience in testing and optimization, real results with documented incremental dollar figures are vital to garnering investment and support. With this said, it’s imperative to not only prioritize proven testing strategies early on, such as perceived “quick wins”, but also to spend the necessary time documenting and analyzing the results in a manner that is easily shared and communicated up the chain of command.

2. Evangelizing and empowering the testing mindset

Early returns are not only beneficial to leadership’s buy-in of the optimization practice. Initial success of an optimization program functions as a built-in advertising campaign within an organization. Strong early test results naturally yield business interest and curiosity, thus demonstrating the importance of “quick wins” at the program’s onset.

In addition to proving the practice’s value, it is equally important to establish a mindset of curiosity and challenging the norm. Sometimes the best ideas are seemingly right under our nose, as it is easy to overlook practices we find “normal” in our daily behaviors and business strategies. A culture of experimentation is not developed overnight. As noted by Tzipora Elias of Data Pine, a best practice of challenging the status quo needs to be established. “Test different values that challenge your preconceived ideas of what drives conversions.”

Promoting a test-first mindset can be nearly impossible, however, without a democratic approach. Not only must the responsibility of consistently testing and optimizing reside with the entire organization, but so should the recognition and reward. Sharing in the successes will inherently fuel the ongoing energy and momentum of the program.

3. Consistently iterate

So this recommendation is probably not super exciting, but we cannot overlook the importance of constant iteration. Sure, it’s much more enthralling to design a completing new A/B test from scratch, or potentially roll out a new UI design without any components from the legacy experience. But abandoning past learnings or making wholesale changes at once, rather than methodically analyzing and progressing forward, will hurt your optimization practice in the long run.

As Andrew Capland, former Director of Growth at Wistia, notes, “Plan from the beginning to collect some learnings and then iterate. Even if it’s not perfect, this process is effective. I believe that most marketers aren’t iterating enough. Why? Because iterating isn’t as fun.”

Make sure you’ve clearly defined what your measurement of success is, and document exactly what test variables are most effective at driving that success. This information will enable your team to confidently experiment with alternate variations to the experience, without potentially sacrificing conversion wins from past tests.

4. “Stay water”

If you’ve seen the HBO show Succession, then you may remember Connor Roy’s quote from early in season 1 where he declares, “I’m water, I flow.” While he was certainly not referring to anything related to digital optimization, the quote itself is incredibly relevant to your practice’s long-term success.

Whether it’s advancing technologies and capabilities, changes to the competitive landscape and competitive strategies or fluctuations with internal goals and personnel, remaining agile is paramount to a successful optimization practice. To navigate this perpetually volatile and dynamic digital landscape, it is of utmost importance to stay flexible, stay nimble, or in the words of Connor Roy, “stay water”.