PRWD

Due to continued growth we are looking to increase the size of our industry respected conversion optimisation team.

Who we are looking for

Our works covers analytics, user research, heuristic evaluations, development of test hypotheses, sketching, wireframing & designing user interfaces, and planning and delivering on-going testing programmes.

We’re not daft, we know that there are currently very few people out there who will have experience in all these areas, but you should certainly have a genuine passion for understanding how online experiences can be improved and the appetite to deliver optimisation programmes with our clients. You’ll be personable, genuine and have high integrity too.

What you can expect

You can expect to be working directly alongside our team and in-house with any of our phenomenal clients which include The North Face, Speedo, Schuh, Monsoon, British Cycling, The Student Room, AllSaints and Lakeland. You’ll be continually learning what techniques and experiences affect user behaviour. You’ll become an integral part of our team and someone who our clients trust, respect and look forward to working with.

If you are interested

If you are interested and you feel you have what it takes to become an industry leading conversion optimiser, irrespective of your experiences, please email interested@prwd.co.uk and tell us why.

Last week’s Conversion Thursday saw over 40 eCommerce Managers from the country’s top brands meet up to network and hear about A/B and MVT testing techniques from two of the top experts in the field. Read more to learn about the top take-away points from the evening.

Our very own Paul Postance kicked off the evening with a talk on why a culture of testing is important and how to embed it in an organisation.

Top Tips:

• Marginal gains all add up
• “It could be done better is not an insult” – let testing take the politics out of optimisation

Matt Althauser, our testing partner from Optimizely and Head of European Sales travelled over from Holland to present an interactive talk on the importance of split testing and lessons learned from over 100,000 A/B and MVT Tests. Having worked on the Obama presidential campaign, Matt used the creative, ranging from inspirational to tear jerking to see which the audience thought would perform best to surprising results.

Top Tip:

• Small details matter. Consider adding dynamic content that builds consistency in the user experience. For example, matching your H1 header tag with the search term that brought the user to your site.

It was a great turn out and fantastic to meet so many people within the industry. The free chilli wasn’t bad either. Thanks to all who provided feedback on the event too, we’ll be putting it into practice at the next event.

Conversion Thursday is a series of free international events. The next Manchester event will be held in conjunction with this year’s Sascon on the 6^th June, with talks focused on Multi-channel attribution.

Sign up now to avoid disappointment as there are only a limited number of tickets available.

If you can’t make it along, follow the action on #CTman or follow us on Twitter

Introduction

This week I had the pleasure of moderating one of the two tables dedicated to ‘On-site Conversion Rate Optimisation’ at Econsultancy Digital Cream in London. There were over 500 delegates who attended the event from a wide range of businesses across major verticals including retail, finance, travel and publishing.

With three 1.5 hour roundtables planned with 10 attendees on each one, I was really looking forward to the variety of insights that would be shared – and I wasn’t disappointed. In just the same way as when I deliver training courses, there is a real sense of wanting to share insights and help their peers, there certainly weren’t any times when the discussions went flat.

As I expected before the event, businesses covering the full maturity spectrum for on-site optimisation were represented, which really underlined the opportunity many brands still have to move ahead of their competition by continually testing and optimising the online experience they deliver to their customers and prospects.

Common Themes

Below I have listed out some of the common themes that came out during each of the three roundtable discussions.

• A lack of resource and ownership means optimisation typically doesn’t get the attention it deserves within organisations
• On-site optimisation isn’t presented at or reported in at board level within most organisations
• In many organisations, business areas work in silos rather than being integrated, so any learning that comes from testing and optimisation doesn’t get shared to relevant departments
• Executive management teams are not always aware of the potential bottom line impact that developing an optimisation programme and strategy can deliver
• Testing isn’t being delivered in a planned, co-ordinated way
• Reporting on tests to form part of a ‘test and learn’ philosophy isn’t usually done well
• Understanding the impact for multi-channel shoppers for on-site optimisation is a major challenge for attribution
• There is a continued disparity between the amount of acquisition versus optimisation spend – more traffic = more sales is still the key driver for many businesses
• Most businesses who are testing, focus on continuous improvement (refinements to existing pages i.e. button wording or colour) rather than discontinuous improvement (more radical tests aimed at really shifting user behaviour)

Opportunities

What came out of the sessions was that for all businesses there were significant opportunities to either develop, integrate or simply improve their testing and optimisation strategy.

Here are a few more of the key opportunities that surfaced:

• For brands not yet doing any testing and learning to improve site performance, carry out a ‘proof of concept’ trial optimisation project to sell in the commercial benefits to senior management
• Conduct bolder testing to move from continuous to discontinuous testing
• Exploit testing targeting and personalisation much more to drive better revenues from their most profitable customers
• Better understand the impact each test has on segmented visitor data
• Start testing with a tool such as Optimizely to remove the technical barriers that stop many businesses from undertaking split and MV testing

Summary

It has to be said there is very much a long and winding road ahead for almost all businesses when it comes to reaching the promised land of having a robust, integrated, process driven on-site optimisation strategy.

What this does mean is that there are still huge opportunities for brands to steal a march on their competitors by truly embracing the potential that on-site optimisation can deliver commercially – but I doubt I’ll be saying this after Digital Cream 2014!

Conversion Thursday Manchester is back, and we’re really excited about our first event on the 14th March 2013.

PRWD have teamed up with Founder Dan Croxen-John team from AWA and Jonathan Kay and co. at 120 Feet to work together to take CTManc to another level in 2013. There have been a few changes, for example we’ll be focussing on quality not quantity, so CTManc will now run quarterly, and we’re planning further in advance to give you guys plenty of warning.

Our Speakers

We’re really excited to announce our first speaker, Matt Althauser of Optimizely who will be presenting:

“Best Practices and Lessons Learned from over 100,000 A/B and MVT Tests”

His talk will highlight use cases of current clients and highlight some general guiding principals for testing.

Our second speaker is Colin McFarland, the UX Experiments Manager at Shop Direct Group, who will be presenting:

“Designing Experiments – moving beyond optimisation to using A/B and MVT as a serious design approach”

Brands already signed up include

Agenices and service providers who have signed up include

Sign-up Now Before Tickets Run Out

We’re expecting to sell out so make sure that you sign up for your ticket now.

Please follow our new Twitter account @CTManc and keep an eye on #CTManc too.

In early 2012 Manchester Central came to us with ambitious visions for developing a new best in class website which would become central to their worldwide marketing strategy. It was an extremely exciting project to be a part of and it became one of our favourite projects of 2012. At the time of writing there are still very few businesses who truly embrace the concept of adopting a user-centered design approach when embarking on a redesign.

PRWD were brought in to deliver the first crucial phase of business and customer analysis and establish the foundation of the user-centered design process. This included evaluating the online user experience of other leading venues from across the world and spending considerable time with event organisers and planners.

Engagement, Personality and Persuasion

A key question that we aimed to answer was “how can we captivate, engage and persuade new visitors arriving at the website to make contact with us?”.

The primary deliverables from this initial phase of business analysis and consumer understanding were an in-depth website redesign blueprint and critical buyer personas. Following this we worked closely with Manchester Central to appoint the most appropriate design and build agency who would best  follow through on the user-centered process that we had initiated.

The appointed agency were the exceptional team over at CTI Digital for final creative and build. Underpinned by fantastic support from the team at Manchester Central, the new website is now live and we’re really proud – to put it mildly. The website is packed with persuasion and built specifically with key users needs in mind.

On go live, Angie Robinson, Chief Executive at Manchester Central, had this to say:

“We believe we now have one of the best websites in the conference and events industry. Our approach to redeveloping the website has been entirely client-led and this is the way we will continue to work going forward. Our mission to deliver a five-star service in all that we do should transcend all our offline and online activities. We’re incredibly proud of our new website and we’re determined to lead the way with new innovations and developments.”

Louise Jones, Head of marketing & communications at Manchester Central added:

“This has been an incredibly interesting and exciting journey for us. The detailed research, testing and subsequent planning that we undertook has allowed us to develop the first phase of what we believe is a truly groundbreaking website for the industry. We’re committed to delivering an online experience that will absolutely deliver what our audiences need and working with the team at PRWD allows us to do just that.”

A press release has been published since the launch which provides further information on the project.

Case study

This project deserves far more explanation than what we have provided here and if and when we get time (our Q1 and Q2 of 2013 are looking exceptionally busy so you could be waiting a while) we do plan on developing an in-depth case study. But for now, please do provide a comment on what you think about the website and general user experience it provides.

That’s what I’ve been saying since 2011 and looking ahead in to 2013 I still very much see this as being the case. More and more businessess will invest continuously each month on optimising their digital experiences, knowing that they can reduce their growing acqusition costs and increase their customer lifetime value (CLV).

At the end of 2012 myself and two of our team Paul Postance and Craig Sullivan provided a range of predictions for the conversion rate (or more specifically profit) optimisation industry in 2013.

Here is a quick snapshot in case you’d rather stick around on our blog rather than heading over to Econsultancy to get the full lowdown…

• The growth of low cost and DIY testing solutions (e.g. Visual Website Optimiser and Optimizely) will accelerate as more brands take the plunge and start testing
• More brands will start to talk about the concept of ‘putting it to the test’ as a way of challenging assumptions, perceptions and perceived best practice
• More brands embarking on full redesign processes will truly adopt an agile, iterative, user-centered design approach and bring the voice of the customer in at the very start of the process. User research will be less of an afterthought when redesigning
• More brands will realise that on-site conversion improvement is the way to build on a saturated acquisition strategy. If you haven’t read this before then here goes… “For every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them.” – Bryan Eisenberg, Conversion Conference London 2011
• 2013 will be the year that CRO becomes a competitive advantage for companies

You’d like a quote to use?

Go on then, here are some quotes from me, Craig and Paul as featured on the original post “Will 2013 be the year of conversion optimisation?“…

Craig Sullivan

2013 is when more companies will start to deliver on the promise of conversion rate optimisation, by investing in the tools, techniques and staff to execute a conversion optimization strategy. Whether you are a startup or an established business, the maths is pretty simple; if you convert 10% of your site visitors and your nearest competitor only converts 5%, you’re going to grow faster, spend less and kill their ability to compete with you.

Paul Rouke

CRO will become the new SEO. Businesses will eventually understand that the likes of ‘voice of the customer’ and ‘testing and optimisation’ aren’t just name checked or for the select few.

On-site optimisation will become an on-going, integrated strategy for brands alongside their acquisition and retention strategy. 2013 will certainly see a continued progression towards this promised land, although there may still be years to go.

Paul Postance

Organisational understanding and maturity will start to bring optimisation out of the shadows. It will be increasingly seen as a highly cost-effective way to increase performance while reducing acquisition spend – so it becomes a requirement not a ‘nice to have’.

Here is one of the ways we are preparing for CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) becoming the new SEO with our recent appointment to our highly experienced optimisation team at PRWD.

Press Release

The former Head of E-commerce Conversion at Shop Direct Group, Paul Postance, has joined PRWD as they continue to increase their expertise and capacity.

At Shop Direct Group, Paul was responsible for generating additional sales revenue exceeding £50 million through optimisation of desktop, tablet and mobile websites. He built and led a talented team to ensure maximum conversion was consistently being delivered across the brand portfolio. During his time he developed, implemented and enjoyed the results of a unique operating model, whilst working closely with brand directors across the group to ensure customer experience was as vibrant as the conversion figures.

Prior to working in multi-channel retail with Shop Direct, Paul worked at both Royal Bank of Scotland and Thomas Cook in senior optimisation and customer experience roles, and these experiences contribute to Paul’s wealth of commercial, data driven expertise. During the last 7 years Paul has regularly presented at boardroom level, allowing for stronger business cases to be developed to invest in testing tools, user research projects and on-going optimisation strategies.

PRWD are a usability and conversion rate optimisation consultancy who work with multi-channel retailers including AllSaints, Molton Brown, Footasylum, Monsoon Accessorize, Speedo and Lakeland. Paul’s addition to the team has strengthened their ability to provide strategic services to new and existing clients. This involves establishing a robust research, testing and optimisation strategy to provide a platform on which to continually increase on-site conversion whilst reducing acquisition costs. Paul’s appointment perfectly complements PRWD’s existing skills and experiences in understanding consumer behaviour and site performance. This combination of customer research, data and on-going testing allows them to deliver improved commercial impact for clients.

This, Head of Usability & Conversion at PRWD Paul Rouke explains, is the future:

“When the opportunity arose to bring Paul in to our team, we were absolutely delighted and moved very quickly. What Paul was responsible for at Shop Direct in planning and implementing their optimisation strategy is exactly what our clients are starting to ask us to help them with. Combining this with both customer insights and analytics, I genuinely see as being the future for brands in sectors such as retail, banking and travel and tourism. On-site optimisation will be the new search engine optimisation.”

“Our clients, including our latest multi-channel retailer Footasylum, are already starting to harness our teams enhanced skills and experiences to become more customer centric and data driven businesses. We are working closely with brands to optimise the performance of their website, mobile and tablet experiences to increase conversion and most importantly profit.”

“Taking on Paul also continues our approach of only enhancing our team with the most respected people working in our industry. What you see is what you get with PRWD – our team all have a wealth of commercial experience which clients begin harnessing from the moment they begin working with us.”

On joining the PRWD team, Paul Postance commented:

“Having followed PRWD’s usability and research work over time, I saw a unique opportunity to combine these mature skills with the newer disciplines of conversion optimisation and am very happy to be collaborating with Paul and the wider team.

“What’s it all about? Well, data driven improvements alone will take your progress to a certain level by shifting performance measures and levers, and research led improvements give benefits but the specific measurement of these is problematic. So, by linking these two areas we have a far more valuable and useful toolset to offer. What this essentially gives clients is a synergistic value-add where we understand the business proposition, advise improvements, then follow through with a strategic programme to measure, monitor, and monetise the customer interactions.”

“It’s far easier to increase conversion than to increase the number of customers but many sites have not embraced this yet (‘For every $92 spent acquiring visitors, only $1 is spent on converting them’ – Econsultancy 2012). We have a multi-disciplinary and robust system that we can apply to both large and small businesses, to help them increase their value without increasing acquisition cost.”

About PRWD
http://www.prwd.co.uk
PRWD was established in 2006 by usability and optimisation specialist Paul Rouke, and they specialise in web usability, persuasion and on-site optimisation. Paul Postance joins PRWD’s highly experienced optimisation team.

Clients include:

• AllSaints
• Lakeland
• Molton Brown
• Hitachi
• Speedo
• Monsoon Accessorize
• Molton Brown
• Manchester Tourist Board
• Stella McCartney
• Bank of America
• Oxfam
• Footasylum
• Pentland Brands
• British Cycling

For more information please contact:
Paul Rouke at PRWD
Tel: 0161 228 0585
Email: paulrouke@prwd.co.uk

Fresh from 2 of the most productive conference days I’ve had in recent memory, at Conversion Conference London, here are the things I loved and the things I didn’t have quite so much affection for.

If you attended please share your favourite or worse bits in the comments.

Loved

• The conference brought together all the leading optimisers in the UK
• There were a diverse range of presentation styles on show to keep the audience engaged
• Seeing some of the people I respect in the optimisation industry in the flesh for the 1st time
• There was quite simply tons & tons of shared learnings being provided (see a write up of day 1 and day 2 from Koozai)
• There were enough genuinely useful links to sink a battle ship
• I was surrounded by very, very intelligent people
• Conversion Conference isn’t about the sponsors or exhibitors, but the attendees & presenters
• Seeing Mr Dark Patterns in the flesh
• Being on the advisory board of a conference that was around double the size of 2011
• Getting away with playing a 40 second video clip of an eccentric karaoke singer

Loathed

To be honest loathed is a bit strong – this is what I didn’t enjoy as much or could be improved for 2013…

• Having a guy fall asleep in my presentation – a first, that I’ve seen anyway
• Some of the short talks deserved more time to deliver their message
• Having 2 tracks which meant I missed out on some other great talks
• The general subdued nature of the audience and lack of participation
• The timing of the conference meant that it simply wasn’t feasible to attend for our multi-channel retail clients who are currently in the Christmas madness

If you attended please do share the stuff you liked and didn’t like, as I can take this on-board for when we are planning next years.

A quick round-up of our speaker highlights from conversion conference.

1. Paul Postance (@deepconversion)

Paul distilled his years of experience in blue-chip brands to share coal-face lessons and tips on creating a conversion team capable of making and demonstrating massive sales improvements. A must see for anyone looking to build an optimisation programme across mobile and desktop, and a team to carry it out.

2. Natalie Nahai (@TheWebPsych)

In the final session of the first day Natalie introduced us to some gems from her fantastic new book that’s storming up the charts nationwide. Natalie moved on to discuss and show examples of how cultural differences affect users’ behaviour and expectations online with a dive into some academic theory that will be fascinating to anyone selling internationally.

3. Harry Brignull (@harrybr & @darkpatterns)

A highlight of Day two for us, Harry introduced us to the murky world of Dark Patterns. Showing us some new examples of companies that flout usability best practices in order to meet business objectives, but hugely compromising their user experience in the process. See examples of companies named and shamed here: http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/Home/

4. Rich Page (@richpage)

Rich offered some great practical advice on how to structure a conversion team. If you’re looking to develop your team his slides are definitely worth digging out.

5. Dr Karl Blanks (LinkedIn)

Karl delivered two excellent sessions brimming with practical tips full of common sense. Techniques that are not always orthodox, but are tried and tested left the audience lots to take away.

6. Stephen Pavlovich (@conversionfac)

Stephen delivered an engaging presentation covering strong persuasive techniques and how these can be scaled up to impact the full business proposition rather being limited to fiddling with small website tweaks.

7. Rob Jackson (@conversion_guru)

Short and sweet from Rob Jackson on the final day with a compelling round up of some of the most important tools and some more innovative new tools that had people scribbling in their notebooks. Hat tip too, for great moderation on day two and insightful questions asked when the audience were a bit shy.

8. Craig Sullivan (@optimiseordie)

Engaging as ever, Craig invited us into his world of optimisation, sharing his most helpful hints, tips and hacks. And on the final day, jumped in to join Rob to share a huge number of tops conversion tools to help conversion optimisers.

This list could go on and on, and unfortunately we weren’t able to be at every session, but we hope you enjoyed this post!

If you have a favourite speaker let us know who and why in the comments.

This years Conversion Conference London is almost upon us (27-28th November to be precise), and once again I have had the privalidge of being on the advisory board. OK so you could say that I’m biased, but this years 2 day conference is genuinely shaping up to be a must attend for anyone either already working in conversion optimisation, or those looking to get a much better understanding of what its all about.

Below I have provided 5 damn good reasons why you should consider attending, not to mention a 15% off promo code which I’ve provided further down the page.

5 reasons to attend Conversion Conference London 2012

1) Nathalie Nahai

Nathalie Nahai is an award-winning speaker, Web Psychologist, and author of Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion. She is one of the conference keynote speakers and her talk is titled Web Psychology: The future of online influence.

With a background in psychology and digital strategy, she is one of the few leading voices in this field to have both academic and hands-on experience in engineering online persuasion.

Nathalie helps businesses to psychologically optimise for better engagement online, and lectures internationally on the subject of Web Psychology and Online Influence (audiences include Goldman Sachs and Southampton University).

She is also a member of #OgilvyChange, you’ll find her tweets @TheWebPsych and her blog at TheWebPsychologist.com.

2) Dr. Harry Brignull

Harry Brignull is a User Experience Consultant. He designs experiences at Clearleft, blogs at 90percentofeverything.com, and curates Darkpatterns.org — a site dedicated to understanding deceptive user interfaces, with the aim of stamping them out and improving the web for everyone.

Harry’s roll off the tongue session title is ‘Don’t be evil! The slippery slope of black hat CRO, Dark Patterns and Manipulative Interface Design.’

Harry has has provided consultancy services for clients such as The Guardian, Dennis Publishing, Haymarket, Sainsbury’s, Cadbury, Vodafone, O2 and many others. Prior to his UX consultancy career, Harry was an academic cognitive scientist and researcher.

3) Paul Postance

Paul was most recently Head of Conversion at my old stomping ground Shop Direct Group. I have already had the pleasure of taking a look at some of Paul’s slides, and lets just say that although he made not be a well known figure in the conversion optimisation field, the work he has been doing over the last 10 years is exceptional. He is full of enthusiasm too which is very infectious.

Paul is doing a couple of sessions with one of them titled ‘Conversion Optimisers, where are you and where is your place in the organisation?‘. This session is particularly important as through our experience brands have a long way to go really see the potential of embedding conversion optimisation and tesing within their company strategy and, importantlly, culture.

4) Craig Sullivan

With a twitter name of @optimiseordie you don’t need many guesses as to what Craig is passionate about. He is one of my trusted industry associates and is certainly a veteran of the conference circuit. What I love about Craig’s sessions is that he is one of most of open speakers I have watched, and the amount of insights he provides from his work at Belron (aka Autoglass) is exceptional. Take a look at Craig’s slideshare page for examples of some of his previous presentation sessions.

In summary if you haven’t watched Craig speak you are missing out, and for those that have, come along for the ride as you can be guaranteed to be entertained and engaged.

5) Darrell Benetar

Darrell is the founder and CEO of Usertesting.com, and with a session title of ‘Top Usability Mistakes: Lessons Learned From More Than 100,000 Usability Tests’ what is there not to look forward to.

At PRWD we spend alot of time either with users either during moderated test sessions or through remote user testing, but we’ve got a few more tests to watch before we reach the 100,000 milestone. I reckon this will be a superb session packed full of insights, cringeworthy moments and a host of user comments which you wouldn’t expect to hear.

Conference Links

If you’d like to read more about Conversion Conference London 2012, why not take a look at the full agenda, the full list of speakers, and see who else along with me is on the advisory board.

So, the Call to Action! (with 15% off too…)

Hopefully you’ve read enough for you to consider registering to attend this event. Matt will also be in attendance so you’ll have chance to speak to both of during the course of the 2 days, just in case you need a bit more persuasion! Oh and did I say I was speaking too on persuasive design techniques?