The Experimentation Elite Conference was held on June 28th, 2023 at etc.venues St Paul’s in London. The event brought together CRO and experimentation marketers from around the world to learn from leading experts in the field.

Here is a rundown of some of my favourite talks from the day:

David Mannheim – Personalisation Squares: Choose your own Adventure

In his engaging talk, David discussed the challenges of personalisation and how to overcome them. He also shared some practical tips for implementing a personalised marketing strategy that is a truly helpful web experience for customers.

David explained that every year is meant to be the year of personalisation, yet no year is, and has written a book all about this paradox. With over 150 expert interviews, a year of his life, a few grey hairs, and nearly 80,000 words on tales of dragons, failure, and knights, he invited the audience to play personalisation jeopardy. Where us, the audience, chose from nine of the most popular head-scratchers, conflicting opinions, barriers, and examples around this unnecessarily complex marketing strategy.

Key Takeaways:

• Marketers may be looking at ‘personalisation’ in the wrong way – for example, we probably think of the Amazon or Netflix experiences with suggestions & recommendations plastered all over the page, but we don’t focus on the user intent.
• Personalisation is not just about targeting people with the right content, it’s also about understanding their intent. This benefits both the user and the brand by creating better tracking, analysis, and content that is genuinely useful.
• It’s important to use qualitative data to inform your personalisation efforts.
• Don’t be afraid to experiment with different personalisation strategies.
• Spotify as being one brand that is doing this well with active intent levels when using the platform.

Kenda Macdonald – Conscious Conversion: The art and science of banishing the cognitive bias that kill conversions

In her fantastic and fast paced talk, Kenda discussed the different cognitive biases that can affect customer decision-making. She also shared some strategies for de-biasing customers and improving conversion rates that had the audience hanging on every word.

Key Takeaways:

• Cognitive bias is a powerful force that can influence our decisions.
• There are four key strategies for de-biasing customers to aid a website’s user experience for better engagement and improved conversion. These include making content clear and easy to understand, being clear and using context, ensuring vital information is at hand and promoting yourself as the expert.
• By understanding and de-biasing cognitive bias, we can improve our conversion rates.
• These strategies aren’t just for CRO experts, but should be used by SEO and Paid teams to create effective overall strategies.

André Vieira – Optimising Key Moments in Customer Journeys: A Practical Blueprint

This fun and engaging talk certainly woke the crowd up for the penultimate session of the day. In his talk, André shared a blueprint for optimising key moments in customer journeys with his visual mapping technique. He also discussed the importance of using qualitative data to inform your optimisation efforts and get positive results.

The talk inspired me to continue to improve upon our own process of reviewing full customer journeys and enhance this by using more visuals. He also raised the importance of panning out and including the pre-landing and post-conversion experiences. Visitors don’t just land on a page from nowhere and vanish once they complete their goal, so we need to have a full understanding of the entire journey.

Key Takeaways:

• Customer journeys are complex and multi-faceted.
• It’s important to identify the key moments in a customer journey that have the biggest impact on conversion.
• Use qualitative data to understand how customers are experiencing your website or app.
• Optimise your website or app to improve the customer experience at key moments in the journey.

Overall, the Experimentation Elite Conference was a great opportunity to learn from leading experts in the field of CRO and experimentation. The speakers shared valuable insights and tips that will help me to improve my own work.

If you would like to discuss implementing any of these key areas into your business, get in touch.