Five ways to embed experimentation into your organisation

Experimentation is nothing new in the digital marketing world, but the way it's now being applied in experience design holds the potential to drive innovation, enhance efficiency, improve customer retention, and deliver ROI.

So, is it time to take a modern, embedded approach to experimentation?

To discuss this, we held a recent event in London, bringing together a panel of industry experts to share their experimentation experiences, challenges, and whether it should form part of your core business strategy.

Our panel consisted of:

• Adam Powers, Chief Experience Officer at 26
• Sara Caselli, Head of Digital Product at Community Fibre
• David Priestly, Chief Product Officer at Vitality
• Nina Bayatti, Director of Conversion Rate Optimisation at ClassPass
• Mark Wakelin, Senior Strategy & Value Consultant at Optimizely

Here are the key takeaways from this thought-provoking event:

Collaboration is key

Experimentation requires a team effort to be successful.

Collaborative, agile working ensures you are as efficient and effective as possible in your approach.

Combining the research and innovation of experience design - the insight and technical knowledge of data science and analytics - and the experience of CRO, allows different skill sets, knowledge, and ideas to come together to create holistic, innovative experiments that deliver the boldest and most valuable results.

Focus on optimising the customer experience, not just conversions

Modern experimentation focuses on the customer experience at every step of the web journey.

A good experiment should always try to solve a real user problem and take a human-centred approach to find the solution.

Analysing customer behaviours and using this to better understand and deliver their wants and needs will positively impact conversion rates.

To do this effectively, you need to set clear KPIs and understand how these could be affected by your audience. You will also need to analyse where along the customer journey holds the greatest impact and identify triggers that affect customer behaviour. These steps will enable you to design an experiment that efficiently tests your hypothesis and provides valuable insights to help inform decision-making.

Securing stakeholder buy-in is essential

Despite helping companies make better decisions faster, securing top-level management and stakeholder buy-in remains one of the biggest challenges for experimentation.

Involving key stakeholders in the process from the beginning - sharing ideas, explaining the test strategy, and demonstrating how it will directly impact the business can help make the proposition more appealing. 

Put simply, experimentation could be the difference between the brand making and losing revenue. With experimentation, there are no losses, only lessons learned, which can be an attractive offer in a financially squeezed market.

Embedding experimentation within your digital marketing strategy

Although it might be a while until it becomes a part of BAU, embedding experimentation into roadmaps should form a fundamental part of your business strategy.

Experimentation is an efficient and cost-effective tool that allows you to build on existing knowledge and forecast what will happen next, so you can always be one step ahead.

From the start, businesses should be clear about where experimentation fits within their roadmap and how it will be used to identify new revenue opportunities, minimise process inefficiencies, maximise customer value and improve customer retention.

Experimentation as a way of thinking

To unlock the potential of experimentation, we need to change how we view it. Rather than seeing experimentation as just a task to complete, we need to see it as a way of thinking - a tool we can use throughout the entire build process to drive innovation.

Cultivating a company culture built on curiosity, imagination, and intelligence provides the fundamental qualities needed for effective experimentation to take place, helping you get ahead of potential challenges, identify new opportunities, and optimise the customer experience to give you the competitive edge.

Interested to find out more about how experimentation can work for your organisation? Download our latest whitepaper here.