Why “CRO” is an outdated term, case studies, teardown improvements

Last week, we mentioned an improvement to teardowns for store owners. Here it is: if you’re a store owner, buying a teardown also gets you a half-hour strategy call for free. That also means: if you buy a teardown on behalf of a store owner, they get a half-hour strategy call for free.

That’s it. Please clap.

This week, for paid members

• Our monthly presentation is all about how we rolled out a major free shipping test for our biggest client. It took nine months to execute, and we doubled ARPU with it! Optimization is deep, slow work. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
• Our design of the week covers one of the most intrusive and aggressive email popups we’ve ever seen. Why is it there? Does it work?
• And our monthly free lesson is why the term “CRO” should probably die a fast death. Spicy!

Want in? Join us now – now named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

Links & analysis

• Instead of creating mobile-first CSS, this week’s A List Apart issue advocates for media queries that use includes, instead. Spoiler alert: you’re still designing for mobile first.
• Buttons are the primary way by which people navigate from your home page’s body content, and the primary way that they move through your add-to-cart and checkout flows. You cannot think too much about button design.
• Since case studies represent the fundamental economic proof of the value-based designer’s skills, this post about keeping a work journal and using it for case study fodder resonated with me. This connects to the work that we put into the recent experiment that we talked about in our monthly presentation for paid members!

This month’s free lesson: Does the acronym “CRO” have any relevance or utility in 2022?

The short answer is “no,” but you aren’t here for the short answer.

Here is the long answer.

Conversion rate isn’t the only thing that you should be optimizing

Conversion rate matters, but it’s not the goal. Profit is the goal.

Businesses attain profit through one of three ways:

• Increase revenue
• Reduce expenses
• Reduce risk

Optimization can increase revenue, yes, but it can also reduce customer acquisition cost (by boosting AOV & ARPU), eliminate expenses (by de-risking a reduction in inventory or options), or eliminate risk (by providing clarity to any future design decisions).

I’m ostensibly considered a CRO expert, yet I haven’t optimized for conversion rate exclusively since 2016. In my experimentation, I most frequently optimize for ARPU. And “ARPUO” is a terrible acronym.

It’s dangerous to maximize any metric

Worse, conversion rate isn’t the only thing you should optimize. In fact, it’s dangerous to optimize anything at all possible costs.

Nothing is worth maximizing. Even profit isn’t worth maximizing, because you might be trading on future customer goodwill, jeopardizing your business’s future in the process.

Optimization requires systems thinking

Stores are a complex system of levers. Pushing one lever causes changes elsewhere. One must understand the system and its knock-on effects before optimizing it for any metric.

There is always a cost to what you’re doing.

Just call it “optimization”

The goal is to create more profit than you capture. That’s it. That’s all you’re optimizing for. If you focus more holistically on the process, conversion rate will take care of itself.

The acronym “CRO” represents an outdated way of thinking that fails to take into account the real needs of customers, or the real need for businesses to meet those needs and empower the customer.

Call it optimization. Plain & simple.