How to gain executive buy-in for digital experimentation

Securing executive buy-in is crucial for your digital experimentation strategy. Without it, you’ll find yourself running into barriers that obstruct the success of your marketing efforts and the ability to deliver true customer personalization, at scale with speed. With it, you gain access to the budgets, internal stakeholders and technology infrastructure you need to optimize experiences, reduce risk associated with product features or costly campaigns and drive business results that maximize your marketing return-on-investment (ROI).

To gain executive buy-in, you must be ready to:

• Share digital experimentation ideas and results with confidence
• Prove that your experimentation technology solution is safe, fast and cost-effective

Sharing digital experimentation ideas and results with confidence: The Results Sharing Presentation Template

Confidently communicating measurable results is vital to building a culture of experimentation and securing executive buy-in. This includes showing how experimentation accelerates data-driven decisions and outcomes that align with overarching business goals. Key performance metrics often relate to things such as:

• Increasing monthly recurring revenue generation (with better-performing digital content)
• Improving customer retention/conversions
• Decreasing customer acquisition costs
• Accelerating product release cycles and feature roll-outs
• Building a culture of collaborative innovation

In the “How to build a winning experimentation program” guide, Optimizely shares multiple worksheets and templates across the experiment lifecycle to simplify a science-led experimentation process. These best practice guides range from generating ideas to prioritizing and launching tests and sharing outcomes with stakeholders and executives. The Results Sharing Presentation Template provides a clean, concise framework to communicate why you created an experiment hypothesis, how you defined your key metrics and audiences and what impact it had on the business.

Using the Results Sharing Presentation Template, you can intelligently walk executives through experimentation objectives and goals, the test results and what data-driven decisions have been made. Critical information is broken down by:

• Experiment Description – What problem are you trying to solve for the customer? Was your rationale based on qualitative data such as customer surveys and reviews, or quantitative data such as web analytics and conversions?
• Experiment Hypothesis – What do you think the outcome of your experiment will be?
• Experiment Overview – What are the key performance metrics being measured? Who is the audience? What are the variations being tested (i.e.: the original homepage versus a homepage with the featured products algorithm)?
• Objectives and Goals – What metric or customer behavior are you trying to change?
• Key Results – What percentage did the experiment match your hypothesis? Why did the experiment reach this outcome? What impact will this result have on ROI and top line revenue?
• Next Steps – What needs to be done next? What are the key dates in the implementation process?

Proving your experimentation technology platform is secure, fast and cost-effective

In addition to aligning your digital experimentation with overarching business goals, securing executive buy-in often requires assurance that your experimentation technology platform is safe, fast and cost-effective. With Optimizely’s experimentation platform on Google Cloud’s trusted, secure and scalable infrastructure, you can unleash the potential of your digital marketing – market better together and build a culture of experimentation.

Are you ready to unleash the potential of your digital marketing?

Gaining your executive team’s buy-in to test ideas, validate assumptions, predict results and ultimately offer high-performing digital experiences – faster and with minimal risk – is essential to your marketing success. Utilizing worksheets and templates that incorporate best practices gathered across millions of experiments will help you make a strong case around the values of an experimentation program, prepare you to market smarter and supercharge your marketing results.

Get started today! Download the “How to build a winning experimentation program” ebook to access valuable worksheets and templates.