#1 CXL Institute CRO Minidegree Review

CXL Institute is a digital marketing online school. Unlike all other digital marketing online courses they promise you to find the absolute best practitioners in the world, and get them to teach their craft to you. It is a really difficult promise to be realized and for this I’m here to tell you if it is true. I will write an article each week for 12 weeks for two main reasons:

1. I took the scholarship program with CXL Institute for the CRO mini-degree. What is called mini-degree is a cluster of courses related to conversion rate optimization. I have to pay this program by writing an article each week for 12 weeks.
2. I will tell you if this program worth money you would going to pay for or if taking the scholarship program is a good idea.

CXL Institute offers many mini-degree programs:

1. Technical Content Marketing: this is focused on the technical skills to use data to identify your target audience, discover the content they need, and learn how to produce it at journalistic standards — while proving the ROI for all of it.
2. Technical Marketing: you will gain a complete picture and technical foundation of the most relevant areas in digital marketing, confidently talk shop across multiple technical disciplines with your team and in workflows and be able to implement, track, and properly show results.
3. Conversion Optimization: it is presented like the most thorough CRO training in the world. This is that I have chosen and which I will tell you about.
4. Digital Analytics: you will get strong skills in the Google’s suite of analytics tools like Google Analytics, Tag Manager, and Data Studio, learn data storytelling, presenting insights, and changing minds and master the discipline of digital analytics.
5. Digital Psychology and Persuasion: you will increase online sales by using behavioral psychology, persuasion and neuromarketing, stay ahead of the curve with expert-curated lessons backed by research and learn from the best: taught by hand-picked industry practitioners and academic scholars.
6. Growth Marketing: you will gain a holistic understanding of growth across all channels and on an organizational level and get results by implementing processes that have actually worked.

My first week with CXL Institute CRO Minidegree

The conversion rate optimization mini-degree program is made up of 33 courses. This week I have taken only one course but next week I will recovery for sure:

1. Introduction to CRO

Intro to CRO is taught by Brian Massey. Before I started learning from this course I tried to figure out who Brian Massey actually is because do you remember CXL Institute promise? “you will find the absolute best practitioners in the world”. I searched it on the web and I found out that Brian Massey is the Founder and Conversion Scientist at Conversion Sciences. He is the author of Your Customer Creation Equation (who read him book seem to found value on it). And the website Conversion Sciences describe him with these words: “his rare combination of interests, experience and neuroses were developed over almost 20 years as a computer programmer, entrepreneur, corporate marketer, international speaker and writer.”

Now that I have completed it and I have studied from it, I can tell you something: he is a really good guy! I learnt a lot of things!

What is this first course about?

This course will teach you how to build a foundation for success. This includes the skills, tools and organization needed to optimize digital content.

Why CRO?

Conversion Rate Optimization. These are the words that describe a way of approaching your website in which you collect data to understand how changes to your website are going to impact your visitors and thus their willingness to sign up, subscribe, or buy from you.

Everyday you’re launching campaigns, website redesigns, new websites, micro sites, ad campaigns, funnels, all of these things have the potential to do well for you, or surprise you with a negative impact. Your goal with this course is to make sure that you’re launching those things and knowing that they’re going to be successful. You are going to use science in serving your visitors and your customers. Why science? Because if you don’t use it you can get all the way through the launch of one of your campaigns and be surprised when it doesn’t work, is because of the three pounds of mush between your ear.

The Basics

What are the basics of conversion rate optimization?
The number one thing that you need to understand is that it’s about ideas not tests.
So the number of tests that you’re running is important. But the most important delineator, the most important unit of value for us is ideas.
And there’s a problem here,because there are lots of ideas. Your team has ideas, your boss has ideas,there’s ideas you can steal from your competitors.

Managing ideas

First of all, the sophisticated tool that you need to manage ideas is a list, and that’s really all you need. When you collect ideas, they lack of something, of specifity. So now you understand the power of writing good hypothesis: writing hypothesis is important because it makes you specific about what you’re talking about.

Sources of insight

All right, so we have all of these ideas. We’ve listed them, we’ve converted them to hypotheses,we’ve ranked them. How do we really know which of these are going to be testable and which are not? This section talks about it.

A/B testing basics

For those really important questions that you weren’t able to collect enough data on through these other means, A/B tests is the best data that you can collect. An A/B test is very simple to understand and this section explains it very well!

The bottom line of this course is that helps you to develop a excellent framework to start thinking how conversation optimization acutally works and Brian is very good to guide you through the process. I really liked this course, Brian is a real expert and I hope to see other experts on the next courses.

Do you want to know if the other guys are expert as well? Read the week #2 article!

See you soon!