CXL Growth-Marketing Mini-Degree Week 6 Review
This is the sixth installation (part 6) in my series reviewing the CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree.
CXL Institute offers a wide variety of courses, industry-recognized certifications and mini degrees for those seeking to learn updated marketing skills that sit at an intersection of user-centric design, product management, growth strategy, customer acquisition and retention, digital management and analytics.
I will be writing and posting a new knowledge area that I learn every week as I keep progressing and will be sharing my insights with you
This week’s module on Landing Page Optimization was an overall very informative and extremely fun as I got to better understand how a veteran growth-hacker conducts Conversion Optimization Audits for his clients.
It was priceless and I don’t think I can find this anywhere else.
In this series, I started studying the Landing Page Optimization which has a few components such as
- Understanding Landing Page Experience,
- Psychology and Neuroscience Fundamentals,
- Information hierarchy,
- Wireframing,
- Quantitative research and Qualitative research,
- Copywriting
- Design
The courses are taught by Michael Aagard who is a veteran in CRO and is quite experienced. Michael has 12 years of Conversion Optimization Experience and has consulted for companies like Shopify, CopyHackers and Unbounce.
He gives great insights into optimizing landing page projects and trends.
The session starts off by explaining the science behind a successful landing page.
Then he goes into the complexities and multiple aspects that impacts the user experience.
We also explore the psychology behind a landing page that works. It is remarkably interesting as he shares about what a landing page is, what are the good and bad landing page experiences.
In the next course, the speaker talks about how the brain works and how humans make decisions are two important aspects of creating a good landing page experience. He talks about neuroscience concepts like framing, serotonin, dopamine and cortisol, etc.
He takes a clean example of framing such as how he changed a button’s content from “order information and prices” to “get information and prices” and this saw an increase in leads.
Throughout the course, Michael offers such real-life, practical, and fun examples that make us understand the concepts better.
Another example is where he talks about how Dopamine plays a central role in habit formation, reward mechanism, habituation, and motivation. He also talks about key concepts like violating expectations, dark patterns, stops words, ambiguity etc.
He elaborates on each of these topics well. For example, he talks about how dark patterns are something like disguised ads, scammy design patterns with hidden costs.
He categorizes into them intuitive vs analytical thinking system one and two. At the end of course 1, he offered few priceless takeaways that we readers could think about going down the line and some of them are:
· Learning to manage the expectations of your users.
· Be clear and transparent with your users.
· Do not disappoint your users
· Create a conversion experience that minimizes cortisol and facilitates cognitive ease
The speaker was enough nice enough to provide his e-mail address in case students had any questions. I found the content and the takeaways of this course to be priceless.
The next topic he covers is an information hierarchy.
He starts talking about what a wireframe is, what are the kinds (lead gen, landing page, click through, etc.).
He emphasizes that wireframes are important for various reasons:
- It helps the user visualize the page early on.
- It helps prioritize content and build a structure.
- It makes it easier to align copy and design.
Throughout the course, he offers great suggestions like how having a lot of information on the landing page is fine if it is produced in a logical, relevant, and concise manner.
He then compares various good and bad information hierarchy examples from his experience.
A topic that I found interesting personally was the awareness level topic where different awareness is included such as problem aware, solution aware, product aware and most aware. One great advice I liked was companies need to answer questions, address barriers, and reinforce motivation.
Later, he dives into the topics of qualitative vs quantitative research.
He outlines the research process as walk-through, then quantitative research to understand what and where followed by qualitative research to understand The Why.
He tells how quantitative research is better looking for insight on a specific landing page.
Later in the course, metrics like users, sessions, page views are discussed in detail.
He also provides caution on how to use those metrics correctly.
For example, the landing page report is sessions based while all pages report is page view based.
He then talks about the step drop analysis where some of the steps involved are subject line, email, product overview, product page, cart, checkout step 1, step 2, step 3 and confirmation.
As in the previous courses, many insightful and practical examples were offered for us to understand the content better.
From this course what I have learnt is that gathering quantitative data is a very essential step in landing page optimization. This insight gives an overview of what users are doing and where things are going wrong. It also provides you with important insight on who your target audience is and how they interact with your landing page.
The next course is about qualitative research and it starts off with a real-world example and dives into how it is important to understand why customers distrust a landing page because it does not seem correct or legit.
The lesson talked in detail about usability testing, customer review sites, session recordings, feedback polls, interviews, and heat maps.
He highlights how there are remote and non-remote, moderated, and non-moderated testing techniques.
He also talks about 5-second test, click-test, preference tests and all their applications.
Overall, this module is a must-read if you’re completely new to optimizing landing pages because it will give you a complete holistic overview to become a conversions expert.
In my next review, I’ll talk more about Google Analytics. See you and stay tuned to my next blogpost!