I am a UX writer. Should I care about CRO?
Newsflash: Yes, you do.
I’ve been a content marketer for years before UX writing came to my mind. Marketing was responsible for making me develop my writing skills towards a better experience online. So, even though I got closer to content strategies and UX during my professional years, I have always allowed my marketing view to show up a little while creating content for SEO or discussing a user journey page. After all, in the end, no matter what you produce — a product, a webpage, or blog content — you still need to find a way to take profit from it (or, in a simple way of viewing: sell it).
The fact is that the closer I got to the UX writing field, the more I understood how marketers and UX professionals need each other — although they do not always agree on that. And the best example of an area they can work together towards the same goals is CRO.
But if you are a UX writer and never had a chance to work closely with a marketing team, you are probably asking yourself: what the hell is CRO, and why should I care about it in my UX career?
Well, I hope to answer your questions about this matter in the next paragraphs.
CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization
If you are a UX writer that works on a product team, words like conversion, optimization, and rate aren’t a part of your daily vocabulary. But if you have a marketing background, you not only know them but also get the chills when you hear them all together, right? (Marketing, I love you, but sometimes you bring me down).
CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. We can define this marketing field as responsible for increasing the conversion rate for a site, web page, or app towards a predefined goal. This goal can be a product purchase, a filled-out form, a newsletter subscription, or any other user action defined as a conversion for the business objective.
The thing is that the more the UX writer skill gets to be known and needed at the job market, the more other digital content strategies that are not product-focused will request them. E-commerce webpages, landing pages, and lead capture pages are examples where digital content expertise is needed. And that is precisely the place where UX bits of knowledge and CRO start to converge.
CRO is not only about conversion: it is user experience at its heart
As a UX writer, you probably think that although CRO strategies may benefit from your UX skills, their only focus is conversion. Working with them would seem like going against everything that we stand for — advocating for the user so he/she can have the best possible experience while navigating a site or app — right?
But it is not. And I can assure you that.
I’m not going to lie that the CRO’s primary goal is to convert. But to achieve that, the CRO team must know a lot about user experience strategies and how to apply them to the pages they optimize. And they do that by using two tools that most UX teams regularly use: user testing and user research.
CRO professionals are masters of user testing. They live for it. A/B tests and multivariate tests are applied regularly on page mockups and scenarios created by them, based on a lot of data they get from visitor screen recordings, heatmaps, surveys, and, of course, analytics tools. But I bet you’re going to tell me that UX professionals also do that — and you are correct.
The main difference is that CRO professionals don’t do random tests to try a new feature or design to enhance user experience. Their focus is to test a hypothesis based on critical points or site elements that can interfere with the user conversion. But who gets to say that this is not also about UX, right?
They are also entirely research-driven since they create hypotheses based on user research info and data analysis collected from their interaction with the app or site.
If you are a UX writer, give CRO a chance
I am an advocate for plural professionals — especially if you are from the content field. Working with the design of words is not easy for everyone, so we should valorize our writing ability for different scenarios.
Most UX writers I know already have a hybrid background — they were copywriters, technical writers, content marketers, designers, translators — and I like to say that this is what makes them able to think outside the box in many situations. Also, that’s what makes them able to apply their writing skills in different digital work scenarios — so why shouldn’t CRO be one of them?
Use some of your study time (and if you are a digital content professional, I know you have this activity on your weekly schedule) to take a look at CRO strategies. Understand what it is, how those professionals work with on-page optimization, which metrics they follow, and what tools they use. You will be surprised by how much of their job’s activities can relate to what you already know or do.
CRO teams: you can benefit from UX writers too
In a perfect work scenario, CRO teams are multi-disciplined, with professionals that have different but complementary skills. They usually have data analytics, designers, copywriters, marketers, programmers, and project managers working together in projects, squads, or even composing a company’s whole area. But what we usually see on the market reality is one professional, called a CRO manager or specialist, having to deal with it all at once: creating a hypothesis for better conversion, proposing a prototype for user testing, testing it, and analyzing the results.
The fact is that even for marketing and digital strategies, CRO is quite a new field (the first time this term came around was in 2017). The so-called CRO managers have many different backgrounds since their skills are also useful in other digital careers. But, with the web marketing field growing more and more each year, the need for those professionals and their multidisciplinary teams can also become something to keep an eye on.
And hey, UX writers have the copywriting skills — and the expertise of how the right choice of words can correctly guide your user — and they can help a lot on conversion with their user experience knowledge. Why not give them a chance to work with CRO strategies, right?
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So, if you ever hear about CRO in your work environment — or maybe at a job search — do take some time to pay attention to it. It might be worth it!