I know from experience how hard setting up an optimisation program in an organisation can be. Early on most people don’t know, understand or care what it is you’re trying to do, so getting internal buy-in from stakeholders and senior management can be a thankless task.
In this post I outline seven steps that you should take to get senior management engaged and involved in digital optimisation.
1. Get an optimisation sponsor. Without doubt the first and most important thing you should do is appoint a sponsor who can own the program and take overall responsibility for it. This should be someone with enough knowledge to understand its importance to the company, but senior enough to be able to sell it in at board level, and have enough weight to negotiate and influence decisions. A role like Digital Director or CMO is usually ideal for this.
2. Sell the benefits of optimisation. You will find that embedding CRO in your organisation is as much a PR and sales exercise as anything else. For it to be a success you need to sell the benefits to all stakeholders who are going to have any involvement – not just senior management. Often this is a Catch-22 problem, as the benefits only become clear after you’ve run some successful tests, but rest assured that the selling job gets a lot easier after you’ve had a few successes, and some tangible results.
3. Get senior management involved. With busy diaries this is often easier said than done, but it’s critical that senior managers understand what you’re trying to do. You may struggle to get them involved in the more granular tasks of idea generation and result prediction, but make sure at very least that they are on a quarterly email distribution list of test results – and, if possible, pull together a high level ‘board pack’ that can be shared by the optimisation sponsor at board meetings.
4. Keep regular communication. If you and your optimisation team don’t shout about your efforts and results, you can bet that no-one else will. That’s why sending out regular updates to stakeholders is so important. Don’t be shy and keep it to your own team or immediate stakeholders, though. It’s a great opportunity to share test results, new test ideas and other news from within the Optimisation Team to senior management as well. Keeping people engaged and showing them why conversion rate optimisation matters will give your testing program the impetus to continue, and will keep you and your team motivated.
5. Show the size of the prize. Nothing tells a story better than statistics, so if you have had some good success from experiments, make sure you include metrics figures such as increases in sales and quote conversion rate, revenue increase and click-throughs. With the right volumes of traffic even small incremental lifts in conversion rate can yield huge increases in revenue and profitability, so make sure you shout about them. After all, which senior manager wouldn’t want to hear about those?
6. Show that your optimisation efforts are underpinned by a strategy. Nothing turns people in an organisation off more than a ‘fad’ that is introduced as the new big thing, and then dies out when it loses traction after a few weeks. Make sure this isn’t the case with your optimisation program. The best way to ensure that this isn’t the case is to devise a strategic plan that ties in with your organisation’s overarching business objectives. You can guarantee that this will give your senior management team (and your sponsor) much more confidence in what you’re doing, not to mention more likelihood of the program being a success.
7. Be an evangelist. This one ties in with a number of the previous points, but it is so important to believe in what you’re doing and to keep spreading the word. Just getting out ‘on the road’ and telling new stakeholders what you are doing and why can make the difference between a program that succeeds and one that fails – so make sure you are constantly talking about how optimisation can help them. At one of my former companies we created a video about ‘the value of optimisation’ and sent it out to the senior leadership team to get their buy-in.
I hope you try these tactics yourself – I’d be really interested to hear how you get on.
