Digital Elite Camp – Day 2

Here you will learn the insights we got from day 2 of the Digital Elite camp. If you missed day one, click here to see the blog post and the introduction to Digital Elite Camp 2017.

Day two was another information packed day. After a wonderful dinner and party from day one, we need to be fresh again to receive the information from another group of top speakers.

Andre Morys: The Magic of Combining Neuromarketing & Data Science

Andre Morys was the first speaker on day two. He had a great presentation “The Magic of Combining Neuromarketing & Data Sciences”. We love this topic, it was all about personalisation. The best way to do personalisation is based upon personality types which are generated from behaviour people show or actions people take. Smart Data.
Getting that data to distinguish or validate the personas and speaking Their language. What do they want in life and how can we communicate our product in such a way that it reflects/ matches their needs.

He had an example of buying a car and how different personas buy a car for different reasons. The product remains the same, it doesn’t change but how we communicate is different. For example, a single man trying to build his career, he might want to demonstrate confidence and is more about power and features he can brag about. So one should communicate all the unique features that make him more powerful and items he can show off. However, a family guy is more about safety, he is a nurturer. Meaning, he want’s a car to keep his family safe.
So the same features can be communicated in a way that shows safety, durability, and comfort, which will match this person’s needs.

The last point we wanted to give regarding his presentation is that Data on itself does not have an ROI. It’s people using this data and getting insight on how to use it is what generates an ROI.

Nicolas Visiers: User Experience Testing – Practical cases

Nicolas Visiers, he had a great speech. He talked about User Experience Testing Practical cases. One takeaway that stuck was when he showed a formula to focus on when hiring people: Value = (Knowledge + Skills) * Attitude.
Attitude is the multiplier. You can teach someone to get knowledge and skills but you can’t teach a great attitude. Someone should be eager to want to learn and be self-motivated by it. This touched on a personal level. Probably totally of topic, hehe, but we as people should be really happy with what we have. Just, stop one second, and think of where you’re at and where you were some while ago and consider in which position some other people are now. This should change your attitude a bit. Keep on learning and be happy, keep smiling.
Hahaha, that’s from another talk, we are way off topic, but if you are interested. Check out Ron Gutman: https://www.ted.com/talks/ron_gutman_the_hidden_power_of_smiling

Back to Nicolas, talked about being relevant to the customer, reacting fast to their needs and by building relationships you will create a personalized experience for the users or you can build a proactive site as Nicolas calls it. The more you can tailor your message to the specific issue a client has, the better. Make sure decisions are made, and fast! Fail fast and recover even faster! this is the way to grow. This echoes the presentation by Andre.

Another thing he talked about was exchanging knowledge between agencies and exchanging people. Why not working 2 weeks for another agency, exchange company in order to share knowledge and get new insights from others and both parties can learn and grow.

Manuel da Costa: The Shocking Truth About CRO Programmes

Manuel da Costa, was the next speaker. Manuel is the founder of Effective Experiment. A tool to collaborate with everybody concerning optimization. So, it’s a way to capture ideas, research insights, prioritize them, setting up experiments, planning, and tracking. It’s a great tool for CRO teams. As a CRO expert himself he warns that optimization should not be seen as a project! it should be business as usual! It’s of paramount importance to have and use a framework/ structured process in your business.
Lot’s of businesses fail or struggle to implement Optimization thinking due to a few pitfalls. Lack of knowledge, no (structured) process, no buy-in from the rest of the company, not everyone is involved, lack of resources, wrong focus (tools instead of methodologies). By avoiding these pitfalls you can ensure that optimization will work for your business and will not be considered another “project”.

Raffaela Rein: Becoming a UX-led Company

Raffaela Rein, talked about becoming a UX-led Company. She reminded us what almost everybody within the CRO world is saying that you need to know your customer. A UX-led company is also customer-centric and is focused on getting every touchpoint right. All the touch points with the client, not only on the web. She also talked about how companies are embracing UX and design and that more and more teams are adding UX designers to create better experiences for customers. She even went as far as saying that if she was able to start all over again that one of her first hires would be an experienced UX designer.

A great read: the trillion dollar UX problem – https://s3.amazonaws.com/coach-courses-us/public/theuxschool/uploads/The_Trillion_Dollar_UX_Problem.pdf

Stephen Pavlovich: Testing Beyond User Experience

Stephen Pavlovich, had in our opinion, one of the best presentation of the whole conference.
One clear message, pretty straight forward, while activating our old reptilian brain to make his point. The other speaker stayed higher level in their presentation.
We liked how he took us way back and showed us that A/B testing already existed 2500 years ago. That’s right, A/B testing is not something that just started, it has been here for centuries. We only forgot about it or we simply gave it a new name.

He showed us how they did this back in the days and how we can apply this.
He emphasized what the implications are to just trying to implement new things without testing, without having a bit of evidence or data to back this idea up. It happens way too often that companies have a good idea they think is going to be booming. After investing a whole lot of cash, launch this idea, and it crashes and burns. The “Lean Startup” methodology is all about preventing this. Validate your market/product market fit first.

A great example was when McDonalds tried to sell pizzas. Curious about how that ended? Go to McDonalds and order a pizza, you’ll have your answer. He also explained that A/B testing does not have to be sophisticated. Like Pepsodent in the early 1900’s doing simple a/b tests with text ads in the paper or even just doing “smoke tests” to see if there is any demand. Selling a product you don’t have yet to see if people want it. It’s all about having a good hypothesis. https://conversion.com/hypothesis/. Experimentation lets us challenge assumptions with radical concepts

Another resource that will help you form your hypothesis right:
https://medium.com/@optimiseordie/hypothesis-kit-2-eff0446e09fc
We know that _____.
We believe that ____ for ___ will result in ____
We’ll know by testing __test concept___ on __area___ and observing __KPI_ for __duration__.

Unn Swanstron: News Media CRO

Unn Swanstron uses a framework that is similar to ours. There is a bit more to it, but basically, in the first phase, at the beginning of a project, you start open, curious and humble. You try to get all the information needed for the project. Once you captured everything you move to the next phase, bold innovators, and experts. This is what we call the think, doing, creating mode. Close all the doors and give yourself room to go to work.

One other tip that really stuck with us is a very simple “hack”, or “smart solution” as she calls it, for an instant mobile phone newsletter subscribe. By using the “mailto:” code people can easily subscribe on mobile by sending you an email. No need for typing your email address in any field, just an easy signup button with a “mailto:” code, it opens up the email client and they can sign up with just a few easy clicks.

Guido Jansen: How to Involve the Whole Team in the Optimization Process

Guido Jansen, our fellow Dutchy, talked about how getting everyone in a company involved in growth is a tough process. When starting out, it does not need to be perfect, but you just need to find a way to show value for the company. He shared great knowledge on what worked for them and what not. Things like: having to explain all research findings and learnings over and over again. Using a good workflow tool, like Effective Experiment (One that we also use), having shared cross-team KPI’s (creating a shared North Star) or Calculating ROI in Money i.e. we made €150.000 more revenue instead of calling it a 10% uplift.

In his opinion, companies that want to grow or at least survive in the future will need to cultivate a successful optimization culture.

Another takeaway was that you as an individual need to want to learn, keep learning from your mistakes and optimize and iterate fast. If you, like Nicolas Visiers mentioned, have a good attitude, you’ll have a bright future ahead of you. Also, it’s important to have and take care of your “shit umbrella”.The one person who keeps the managers/investors away long enough and takes the heat, so you can continue to work and get results for the company.

A Book Recommendation: Daniel Kahneman – Thinking Fast and Slow
For a more next level tip: Take the persuasion course by Online Dialogue.

Erin Weigel: Failing to success at Booking.com

Erin Weigel from booking.
Mind blowing to see what big numbers booking.com is working with, but also how difficult it is to find experiments that work. 90% of their experiments fail. Only 10% seem to provide a statistically significant uplift.

Important to note again is that failing is not a bad thing, it should be seen as learning. Keep testing, don’t assume that older tests that failed will never work, it could simply be that the timing was not right.Your experiments could’ve been ahead of its time. Get them back into the backlog, challenge each other and test it again. Test, test, test. Always be testing, learning and moving forward. The more experiments you run the faster you will learn. With lower traffic, simply test more radical stuff. When creating tests look at traffic, user needs, business needs and ease of implementation.

Pauline Marol: Startup? Low Traffic? No Problem.

Pauline talked about that even if you can’t do proper A/B test there is still a lot you can do. Talking to customers (get out of the building) is an important research tool to get qualitative insights so you can iterate. Another method is doing sequential testing.
Small companies also need to invest in cheaper / free tools.

Angie Schottmuller: Hybrid Hacks – Deep Growth Insights for Multiple Disciplines

She had a great talk about using various hacks to improve life. If there is a problem, find a hack for it. She also mentioned the T-Shape model for knowledge. You don’t need to master all fields, but it is essential to know a bit from everything. What makes you unique and extremely valuable is to master two skills and know how to combine them.

We also loved the analogy how she made the comparison between the Ferrari F1 Pit Stop with site speed. The Ferrari Pitstop takes about 3 seconds. The average site loads at about 5 seconds. Just to put the thing in perspective!

Another great tip is to make sure you have a / (trailing slash) at the end of each URL. This not only keeps your data clean but also helps with SEO (duplicate content) and site speed. For Seo purposes, Google registers ever Url as unique if you have one with the / at the end and one without.

Do you want to improve the company culture?
By using the Team Strength posters you can build trust within a team and help people feel good about themselves. The method is to create a drawing or sketch of all people in the group and let everyone on the team write 3 positive things on each team member’s drawing/picture. The result is that each individual will have multiples of 3 positive comments on her drawing and you will start to notice a pattern where someone is good at. This is also a really good boost for team morale.

To finished, she asked the question: What is the first thing you should as when starting any marketing campaign? Do you know it? The answer is: What is the problem you are trying to solve? Shen went on to complete the formula by adding the other two questions. Who is the person that has this problem (Who is my customer) and How does my product solve this problem? She made it clear that if your company/ product is not solving a problem it does not have a valid reason to exist.

The Party

After the last talk, we went for dinner again and went to the closing party. Peep got us an awesome venue for this. The Seaplane Harbour (Estonian Maritime Museum)

Yes, that is an actual WW2 submarine. See the Video

And not to forget the after party

Conclusion

We had some great talks, an awesome time and some crazy dancing :-)
We definitely recommend anybody who is a bit interested in this topic to go to the event next year and maybe even meet with us.

If you have any question about anything mentioned in this post, leave it in the comment below or reach out to us.