Building a Business around Your Website: Post Launch Learning for Growth

This is part of a series about best practices for website development that Market’s team follows. Our previous posts provide information on the pre-planning, creating an actionable strategy, setting up your team and project for success, managing your team through the build process, as well as how to manage go-live.

Any digital product that touches customers, be it your website or any apps that you have created, must be treated like a child and should receive constant instruction. Imagine your child having access to the three essential things they should know every day. These three things would help your child increase their chances to become an astronaut or professional athlete by 400%.

What about the three items that will reduce their risk of developing deadly diseases like diabetes and cancer by 1000%? Unfortunately, such a platform doesn’t exist. However, I’m certain many parents would pay millions to get these insights. However, with the right setup and process, you can gain this kind of insight to make the best possible plan for your child’s health.

We’ll show you how to make your website a resource for continuous learning and improvement. We will discuss tips for teams, goals and timelines as well as data, tools, insights and angles. This is a difficult topic to remember.

SCRUM Team

These are your stakeholders. This should not be any different from what stakeholders have activated for product ROI planning. There may also be other team members depending on your team size.

You should immediately fill the gap if a function or department was not represented in that initial set. A representative from each department of the company is necessary for continuous learning. For a complete picture, representatives from support and sales, marketing, content marketing, SEO, social media, training, user experience, and engineering should all be present. Each team member has their own view on the user journey, and what success or failure looks like. You will miss opportunities to increase your business’s success with your digital products if you don’t address any of these pieces.

It might seem like there are too many voices, but it is essential to have a clear view of the entire room. This many voices makes it important to set clear guidelines and schedules in order to manage them all.

Establishing an Agenda

Here’s a sample agenda with the steps to follow:

1. Introduction and reminder about the OKRs and available resources and the process to be followed. 5 minute
2. Department lead presentations: 10 minutes each
   • Learned last week: 5 Minutes
   • Want to learn/test this week and get suggestions for learning: 5 min
3. Recommendation for presentation order
   • Customer support
   • Marketing to new customers
   • Sales
4. 10 min
5. Voting 5 minutes

Managing the Agenda & Process

Presentations Each department is allowed to complete their initial presentations in a maximum time of 10 minutes. The brief presentation window helps keep things focused. All questions must be submitted for the Q&A before voting. Each member of the team should bring:

• What they discovered and how. 33% of visitors want to see demos on how the email service provider (ESP) works. The website was confusing for them and they couldn’t find any information on how the ESP works. This was revealed by tracking demo requests and surveying 10 users who requested ESP demos.
• Find out how to test and learn more. You can see how a video demonstration and a new landing site with a feature comparison can decrease support requests and increase premium sales. Our goal is reduce customer support requests by 10% while increasing premium conversions by 5.5%. These are reasonable benchmarks based on the number of visitors who submit support or more information requests regarding the ESP.

Please fill in the Planning Chart

While departments present their SCRUM leaders, the chart on the whiteboard is being filled in.

• Section for the Learned:
  • What was affected?
  • Why
  • What percentage?
• Section of Suggestions
  • Type of suggestion (Content or tool, feature, and other)
  • What percentage of the audience would it impact?
  • The size of the audience they’d like to test with
  • Expected Impact
  • Time, cost, and resources required to implement

Voting

The team will vote on each item at the end of the meeting. If there’s a tie or not enough resources available to deliver the top results on time, the team will vote on each item.

These data are also crucial in helping management to identify the ROI on expanding the team. It is hard to ask for more.

How to manage the process

Your whiteboard should be set up first. This is how I recommend it:

1. Left: The OKRs that were established for the current quarter or month in order to keep the team’s attention on the priorities of voting.
2. Below the OKRs is the critical information about the resources available to implement optimization strategies. This includes the number of hours required for design, engineering, content creation, and other factors.
3. The chart shows highlights and suggestions of each department’s presentations. It lists each department in order to let them know when their turn is.

Presentations should become a part of your planning and can be reduced to five minutes if you are able. If your presentation is taking more than 10 minutes, you have too many objectives for the week, not enough time to prepare results or allow for too much Q&A. Everyone should be aware of these guidelines: If they aren’t prepared, they won’t present.

Key Results & Objectives

Your north star is your objectives and key outcomes (OKRs). These are also known as company goals. You need to know where you’re going and why. How much profit will you need to make each month to pay your monthly expenses What number of customers must you convert each month, based on the average monthly customer profit to reach that minimum monthly income? How many new leads are you required to convert the required customers? As you can see, setting the north Star makes all the OKRs nicely aligned. It also allows for the measurement of how campaigns perform against each other.

It doesn’t matter how accurate your numbers are. It matters that your numbers are grounded in the things that matter to you business. Start with what is already known and move on from there. Do you know what your monthly overhead costs are? What is the average monthly revenue of a customer?

Timelines

You may not have heard of the term “time-based objectives” before. OKRs already have this feature. Every goal should have a defined time period. A common unit of measure is not possible if there are no time frames. How much does it cost to acquire 10 additional customers in 30 working days? You risk losing your plan. You must use time as a consistent measure of your progress towards your goals. Six months is not enough time to pay your bills. It is impossible to put off your goals of growing the business and paying your bills.

Data

What data is required to understand what’s working? Here are some examples: click-through rate, cost per click and conversion rates, average enterprise worth of a client, lifetime value of the customer. An analytics plan is built upon the identification of the various data points required to gain insight into the workings of the customer.

Tools

What tools are you using to measure the data’s quality? Google Tag Manager, tracking codes, tracking pixels and lead generation forms with built in analytics are all tools. These are the tools that you will need to organize and capture the data that will provide insights into what is working.

Consider tools as an open-ended field. Choose what suits you best. I have found that google tags to track data can yield better results than the Google API. This allows you to create custom analytics dashboards for your team to get the specific insights they need on a daily, weekly basis.

Insights

You can get solid insights (or analytics dashboards) that will help you see where you should double down or fold.

Insights can highlight certain behaviors, such as measuring time spent on the site or the bounce rate depending on who is visiting it. An example of this is that you might see a three-minute average time on the site with an 80% bouncerate for a persona. This shows that a user (persona), spent 3 minutes learning about your product before exiting on the registration page. This could be a sign that this persona is window shopping or they were searching for something specific in the pricing or features chart.

If I had a 80% bounce rate and three minutes on average, I would do the below:

1. Examine the data and identify customers who fit this persona. Maybe this persona isn’t the best customer profile.
2. To find out why customers converted and what caused frustration or made them quit, interview them.
3. You can create up to three premium registration pages options for one persona.
4. To gain insight into their reasons for not buying, you can create an exit survey. It will offer 90 days of free access.

Increase ROI with insights

Insights can help you determine which campaigns are generating the best ROI. Let’s say there are two campaigns that generate 100 new leads each.

1. 25% click through rate, $1 cost per Click, 1% conversion rates, an LTV of $100, or a = $75 loss
2. 5% click-through, $3 cost per Click, 15% conversion rate with an LTV = $1,000 = $450 Profit

If you use only the click-through rates or cost per Click to decide which campaign is more successful, you will be losing thousands of advertising dollars every month.

This insight reveals that the issue is product market fit. Although there was a lot of interest in this message in the first campaign, there was very little interest in it. The entry price for the product is $100. The reasons could be: the person conducting the research isn’t empowered with decision-making power, or they are simply window shopping. Or, the campaign may have been misleading and the user landed at the wrong page.