CXL Scholarship — 10th Week Review

So, we have come all the way to week number 10. Against all of the other weeks, this one was very quick and productive. It wasn’t very hard and evey course was more theoretical than the previous one. You might know that I like practical knowledge more than anything else. Anyways, we need to start reviewing.

20- Optimizing for B2B by Bill Leake

• What do you think is the difference between B2B and B2C when it comes to optimization? I have no clue and think it should be something with regard to lead generation.
• Bill says that the sales cycle in B2B is generally longer than those in B2C. and of course products are fewer and pricier than B2C products. In these cases, you need to focus more on persona and the stage of the journey that the prospect is currently in.
• Great points were discussed. One was that B2B is heavily based on the lead generation which is pretty obvious. But the other things are Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and Attribution.
• Suppose that a prospect became a customer after a year and a half. During this period, you used SEO, Paid Search, Display Advertising, Social Media, Email marketing and other stuff. Who gets the credit in the end? You should have thought about this.
• Now we are talking about leads. You have to make a tradeoff: do you want high-quality leads or just the more number of them? This is a question you have to have an answer to.
• If you have a small team, you need to allocate the time and resources to chase the biggest ones. But if you have a large sales team at your disposal, every single lead should matter to you.

• And once again, we are talking about persona. Bill says you’d better start with the low hanging fruit (bottom of the funnel) and try to address those contents.
• You can take MBTI and DISC tests to understand who your customers are. You need to know what kind people are your major buyers and try to name them to better understand them.
• CTAs in B2B can be something different from well-known online CTAs. you can ask people to sign-up, leave their contact or call you. It is actually important to measure those calls because in B2B calls are important.
• People have very short attention spans these days. Instead of merely focusing on creating long-form content, you can give them short, bite-sized content that is easily consumable.
• Do people want the video? Give them a video. Same applies to other types of content.
• B2B content should focus on relations between you and your customer because you need to prepare them in the long term to become a paying customer.
• As they say, you should focus on your customers and not on your organization. Don’t talk about what you have prepared, but instead talk about how the customer will be benefited by those things.

21- Customer Value Optimization by Justin Rondeau

• This course is by a guy that I know from Digital Marketer. He is about to talk about a framework that is named Customer Value Optimization and is the key driver at DM.
• Justin says that the goal of this framework isn’t just getting more conversion, but to increase the value of each conversion.
• He talks about lead magnets, tripwires and splinters. And by chance, I know what these terms mean. Good for me.
• First, you have to know your market and find out if the people you want to acquire actually want your products or not. This is generally the longest step in the process.
• You need to use lead magnets to earn leads. But when you are trying to generate leads, don’t always think about making an ebook. But instead, think about something that is easily consumable and is relevant to the customer.
• Think about the checklist, quizzes, video, product sample or anything like that which brings immediate value.

• A tripwire is kind of a small chunk of your core offer. Something that is a part of the bigger product and can be sold at a cheap price. By using tripwire, you are trying to change the state of the prospect to the customer. Somebody who has actually paid you something.
• A profit maximizer is something that you try to sell after the core offer has been sold. You can do it by using upsell, cross-sell and slack adjuster.
• After the cycle has been completed, you need to use a return path to make the users come back. It is usual to use exit offers, automated follow-ups and remarketing (retargeting) to get the users back on site.

22- Digital psychology and digital design thinking by Brian Cugelman

• This seems to be another course of behavioral habits and the psychology behind it.
• This guy is a neuroscientist and behavioral psychologist. This is actually great to learn from him. He claims he teaches very easily and in an understandable manner and I think he is right.
• So far, I have understood that we need to use some persuasion techniques and some media to publish the messages in. but I still don’t know what is about to be published.
• I think it is the second lesson of the course and Brian is still talking about his method of teaching. Come on man! Start the thing.
• When we are trying to use psychology, we have intended and unintended results as well as positive and negative results. Combinations of these two dimensions would be good or bad for us.
• You might have heard about habit-forming periods. People like to say that if you do an act for 21 or 30 days, it will become a habit for you. But do you think this is true? Brain says it is total junk!
• The next lesson was a big one on the 4 emotional drivers that can be used in any business. This list consisted of loss aversion, loyalty, incentive and powerlessness. People respond differently to each one of these emotional triggers.
• The doctor used the example of Netflix to describe practically what behavioral triggers actually are. It was very instructive and taught me the concept in action.
• Next, it was time to talk about behavioral media. Brain talked about some propositions and the way they are used in different languages. But it wasn’t clear to me what he wanted to talk about. Was it really necessary to sit on the desk? What was going on in those 7 minutes?

• After that, I heard something about digital product places. He used a structure as an example and resembled a website (product) to it. It was very clear what he wanted to show us and the theory of information architecture came clear to me, but not that much. What was the purpose of this lesson? I don’t know.
• All of the menu items, breadcrumbs, modals, wizards, CTAs and the rest are part of your website’s navigation system. They locate things around and facilitate the navigation for your users.
• When you are designing CTAs, you have to know that the user is supposed to get something valuable at the other side of clicking it. So you’d better under promise and over deliver to keep the users motivated and keep him/her coming back to you.
• The other thing was announced to be about UI, but in the end, it turned out to be about branding concepts.
• It was about being consistent in all the media that you are actively participating in. it needs to follow a certain set of rules in looks, tone and feel that the user will encounter.
• In order for people to understand what you are selling them, you need to give them a true story. You have to paint a picture in their minds so that they can feel and experience what you have that might be appealing to them.
• The other part of the course was focused on the motivation and things that motivate us to take action. Brian attributed the motivations to incentives, benefits and loss aversion.
• He talked about a pyramid like the one that we know as the Maslow pyramid. Then he described our basic needs as human beings and counted the motivators we have or might have for those needs.
• People need to be relaxed to be able to make decisions. If we pressure them to make decisions, it will make their brains out of focus and this thing makes them anxious.
• But if people don’t feel the urge to make action, they simply won’t. This is exactly what we need to use in order to make them do the things we want them to do for us.
• Using genuine and authentic techniques like urgency and scarcity will actually force people to take action. They are afraid of losing things they have or not having the things the could have!
• The other things that doctor Cugelman talked about was a concept named Social Influence. I think it is the same as Social Proof that doctor Cialdini has used in his book, Influence.
• Social Influence focuses on the fact that people need to understand that they are being watched by others or they need to watch others in certain situations. For example if they want to purchase something that they don’t know about, they need to know if other people have trusted it and if it is credible. This is basic humanity.
• You as a business owner have to help people make better decisions, actually the ones that you desire the most. This is basically doable using a comparison system. Human beings are always comparing things which each other to be able to make the best decisions. So why won’t you make this decision-making a game?
• You can make a game and in that game, make your desired winner more attractive than the other ones. This will simply lead the users the way you want them to go!
• And then, we have something called trust. It consists of trust and credibility at the same time. Your UI elements should have signs of trust in them in order to persuade people that they can put their trust in your brand.
• Expectation management is another thing that is part of trust. People need to know what is expecting them on the other side of the button they are clicking. Give them the feeling that they are in control.
• If your users acted the way you asked them to, you can simply thank them or give them incentives for their good did. This will increase the chance that they will repeat the work in the future again.
• The next thing to have is stages and funnel. These two terms are quite different, cause one is abstract and the other is practical. Brian talked about a number of examples which was very good to know as real-life examples.

23- Applied Neuromarketing by Andre Morys

• In the beginning, Andre says that we don’t optimize websites, but we change people’s behavior. This sentence is a bit promising for me, because it means that the course is going to talk about something exciting.
• Andre talked about how the brain works and again, I had to hear about the old brain and the new brain, about system one and system two. Isn’t there any other ways to talk about the brain working mechanism?
• Hw then talked about explicit and implicit coding. It basically means that people don’t buy the products because of the features that they can see, but they buy because of the impact it will give them afterwards. It is the experience that matters the most, not the product itself.
• You know what? I kinda feel that Andre is talking about the things he had previously talked about. He is simply repeating the old stuff.
• The next lesson was about controlling people’s attention. That they have very short attention spans and we need to have an impact on them in a very short amount of time.
• Andre then talked about the implicit visual cues that control attention. He said that there are countless of these items that can simply control how people react to your requests. It was called a limbic map.
• Emotional resonance is about what drives people to act the way you want. You can use the same limbic map system or as an alternative, use the buyer persona of your brand.

• Whether you like it or not, people will make an assumption about you and your website in the first 50 milliseconds. This is something that they personally don’t want to do, but it is naturally happening in their minds.
• It is based on ease of use, rationality or many other stuff that I think nobody knows.
• The next big thing that I learned from Andre was that an optimizer’s job can be measured by three things: how fast he can test different things, how many good tests has he run and finally how much of an impact has he had on the bottom line. This is a great thing to know.
• So I think this course is over, too.

24- How to Design, Roll Out, & Scale an Optimization Program by Merritt Aho

• When it comes to CRO teams, we have two approaches: centralized team and distributed team. The first one is more common among companies.
• You can do the job of CRO both in-house and outsourced. Each one comes with their own pros and cons.
• An insource CRO is very in-demand these days and he/she is able to do the job at a very limited scale. When you want to go big, you have to grow the CRO team as well.
• You might need a designer, an analyst or maybe some body who is well versed in statistics in a mature CRO team.

• A CRO program can be based on a change in revenue, lead generation or advertising.
• When you start to do CRO for an organization, you need to get quick wins. Besides, you need to educate the company staff about this whole notion. They need to know what you are doing.
• Don’t fall for the temptation to do a total website redesign. Instead, try iterating and take small steps.
• Merritt said speed of execution is very important in CRO. you need to do it quickly rather than doing it perfectly.
• Besides, you need to be able to attribute success to the root idea. It doesn’t really matter who suggested that idea in the first place.
• If you are scaling, you need to to document whatever you are doing. After that, you have to beware of not going for quantity over quality. Then you have to stay agile while growing. This is very difficult.

Final Thoughts

It is going to be very odd. You know why? Because I am having a very good pace in progressing through the course. So far, I have completed 88% of the course and this is against my expectations. I hope to finalize the course even sooner.