New idea: the “CRO Beast” stumbles blinking into the sunlight

22 Jan 2022

My current favourite idea – and this is not on the previous list – is a fully productised, done-for-you CRO service, sold on a subscription model, and marketed to look like a SaaS.

“Every website visitor that doesn’t convert is more money left on the table” ~me, just now

Conversion Rate Optimisation is fun. In recent years it’s been the part of running my agency that I have enjoyed the most. Like all the best projects, it has simple and achievable aims, and to meet them you need to be scientific, creative, technical, commercial and psychological.

So, the service: you would select a package and subscribe on the website; we onboard you (manually, at first) to discover your CRO goals, share our own ideas, and plan a series of experiments. You can then sit back while we run a series of tests to fine tune your website / lead gen page / app / online store / whatever for the best possible conversions.

Essentially you can relax in the knowledge that for entire time that you’re paying us, your website is going to steadily improve as time rolls on.

Pricing tiers

The tiers could be -

• Basic (or whatever) – pricing will need to be calculated but I’m hoping we can get it down to like £50 a month – this gets you sequential improvements carried out on one URL (at a time), a monthly summary showing the URL’s conversion rate before and after any changes.
• Medium ~£100/m – this would include more simultaneous improvements (e.g. an A/B test to trial new versions of home page copy AND a trialing a revamped contact form) and could include an ongoing customer survey project (ie. Hotjar or similar) to ask users & customers what they love, hate, yearn for (etc.)
• “Full Beast Mode”, maybe £250/m, would include simultaneous improvements on multiple URLs, surveys, feedback, plus a nightly back massage from the founder plus whatever else I can throw at it. Unlimited website maintenance & hosting included anyone?

Client area (later)

Eventually (beyond the MVP stage) we could develop a simple client area where customers could log in and see a list of past tests, along with results and any changes measured in the conversion rate. It could also show the line up of planned future tests, and allow the customer to change the order and annotate the plans for our reference when we come to carry out the test.

I would honestly sign up for this service. It is endlessly depressing knowing that you are responsible for a website but are always too busy to work on making it perform better, and yet even (perhaps especially) as a web designer this has been my experience for as long as I’ve had a website.

It should be an easy sell: a low conversion rate clearly represents money left on the table, and I think people can be made to see it like that.

It plays to our existing strengths, I have a dev team in place already with the skills required to carry out these improvements, and we have a long list of SME clients (and almost-clients) every one of whom has responsibility for a website and ideas for improving it.

What’s more this would be quite a simple business to launch. It would really only need a fairly simple website, a blog (topics around CRO and answering the many questions people have), and a free CRO email course (to generate leads).

I’m excited about this one: it seems to be a way of “productising” the most fun element of what I already do, it’s aimed at people who are already my customers, and it would be delivered as an ongoing, repeatable service which would bring them ever closer to “beasting” their goals.

What’s not to love?!