CRO MarTech Stack Strategy for Startups

In today’s fast-paced digital-first business arena, ambitious professionals have countless opportunities to start a successful B2B operation focussed on digital services. Although launching an agency has never been easier, this new accessibility has challenges. If you’ve recently taken the plunge and started your own CRO agency, you’ll know how saturated and competitive the current CRO niche is. With the broader digital marketing industry projected to be worth $786.2 billion by 2026, you must adopt the best possible software and tools to meet changing client demands and challenges. In today’s post, we’ll look at some of the best CRO martech stack strategies, the tools characterizing the modern B2B CRO market, and how these can help your startup CRO agency grow into your dream business!

Strategy for Startup CRO Agencies to Use – 3 Main Ones

Utilize Sophisticated Personalization for Ultra-Targeted Messaging and Experiences

Every day, countless people interact with numerous digital entities to produce an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Whether your clients are big or small, they’ll have access to a wealth of information on what their prospects want from them, the kind of messaging that tends to attract them, and how they behave once they make it to their websites. Personalization has been an increasingly hot topic for marketers over the past few years, with most customers appreciating personalization as long as it uses data they’ve explicitly shared with a company. You’ll need to make personalization a core of your broader strategy for startups to delight your clients and deliver the above-and-beyond results they expect.

For each new campaign you take on, implement rules for analyzing your client data and grouping their customers based on preferences and behaviors. Starting with well-traveled and standard metrics such as the difference between desktop and mobile users and specific segments’ behavior when faced with popups, you’ll be able to make your campaigns steadily more granular and likely to succeed.

Through rigorous A/B testing and meticulous studies of your client’s audiences, you’ll soon find the optimal combination of content and experiences for each segment.

Humanize your Marketing with Open Channels of Communication

When customers have a terrible experience with a specific business, many of them won’t take the time to make it known. In most cases, they’ll walk away and resolve not to use that brand again. In a market where some 53% of shoppers believe their feedback isn’t seen by anyone who can action it, using a CRO strategy for startups that emphasizes 2-way channels of communication will be a massive help in achieving impressive results for your clients. Though a personalized marketing approach is undoubtedly important, the digital agencies that will bring home the gold are the ones who focus their energy on humanized marketing. Outbase, the leading sales software provider, defines this as marketing that “goes beyond data and requires you to get to know your customers on an individual level by interacting with them one-on-one.”

Though your approach will vary from one client account to the next, inviting end customers to voice their opinions through quick and non-intrusive communication channels can work wonders for brand loyalty, customer experience, and long-term retention. For example, SMS is a channel that many people find convenient. If you’re unsure how to go about texting customers, you can find existing samples of texts for ideas on how it can work. As you leverage available datasets and target your feedback channels on specific areas of your client’s sites, you can open more detailed discussions with customers about their experience with your clients and use this to inform CRO decisions that will supercharge your campaign results.

Don’t Let Existing Customers Fall by the Wayside

As a CRO agency, many business leaders who seek you out will focus on bringing in new customers. However, a large part of real business growth is the ability to delight prior customers enough to bring them back repeatedly. When you tailor new features and resources to more existing customers, the strategies you implement for your clients will convert existing customers into devoted fans and brand advocates, helping to compound the long-term value of your services massively.

As with our other strategies, leveraging customer-specific data is the best way to craft experiences that will enchant your clients’ returning customers and remind them of how valuable they are to your client’s brands. Use data on returning customers’ behavior to present them with recommendations and experiences specific to them, and you’ll quickly see an uptick in conversion and a tendency to checkout with additional items in their cart.

Furthermore, when you present messaging and offers based on particular audience segments, you’ll make existing customers feel like privileged insiders and highlight your clients’ appreciation for them, helping to sew the seeds for long-term brand loyalty and more excellent lifetime value.

6 Software Tools for Startup CRO Agencies to Use

Though agencies can go into optimizing their strategies with the best intentions, this has to be backed up by an array of robust tools to achieve the best possible outcomes. As you push your startup CRO agency closer and closer to your long-term vision, here are 6 of our favorite CRO tools to help you on your way.

Convert

Though we may be slightly biased with this choice, our own Convert platform has capabilities and features perfect for small CRO agencies with big ambitions. The Convert platform allows smaller agencies to leverage enterprise-grade analysis and testing features, including A/B, multivariate, and multipage experiments.

With an accessible visual editor and a blink-free code editor, our platform allows startup CRO agencies to plan and execute technical and granular tests, empowering you to make more incremental changes to your clients’ sites for the best possible optimization results. Convert also features a range of project management and reporting tools designed explicitly for agencies managing several client accounts, giving you total visibility and control over your CRO efforts.

Outbase

Outbase is designed with startups in mind, offering quick setup and seamless integration into your existing MarTech stack to help scale your startup operation through personalized sales campaigns.

Incorporating Outbase into your MarTech stack equips your startups with the tools needed to navigate the challenges of a competitive landscape. Offering streamlined customer insights, data-driven decision-making, holistic campaign management, and collaborative workflow, this tool helps empower teams to optimize their sales pipeline and achieve sustainable success.

Dynamic Yield

Dynamic Yield is a self-service CRO platform with a plethora of features to help businesses create personalized browsing experiences, with an emphasis on dynamic ecommerce shopping experiences. Some of its stand-out features include product recommendation features, which leverage the platform’s own AdaptML™ deep learning system to predict the following best products to show each individual customer. This sophisticated A/B testing platform can be used for experiments across all your digital media for more cohesive touchpoints and omnichannel personalization for CRO work across mobile, web, email, and ads.

Though some of the more complex A/B testing features can be a little hard to leverage if you don’t have in-house coding expertise, Dynamic Yield offers fantastic customer support. It is built to help users embrace the emerging personalization obsession.

FullStory

Perfect for agencies that require a more in-depth picture of how site users are behaving, FullStory is a digital experience intelligence tool that takes your user analytics far past the standard engagement metrics you and your clients may be used to.

Utilizing full-session recordings (strictly protected to ensure compliance with data protection laws), FullStory will automatically collate its findings in scroll and heat maps to visually represent how users interact with your clients’ sites. The platform’s sophisticated analytics are set up to identify common frustration signals such as dead clicks and rage clicks, helping you keep on top of any new issues with your clients’ UX as they arise.

With its huge range of features, FullStory has a reasonably steep learning curve, but the vast potential it can offer your UX and UI projects makes the teething problems well worth the payoff.

Qualaroo

As personalization and humanized marketing take center stage in the modern marketing industry, collating feedback straight from the horse’s mouth is poised to become more and more critical for truly successful CRO initiatives.

Qualaroo allows you to collect customer or user feedback via nudge surveys which can be calibrated to appear at different touchpoints throughout any customer journey. Once integrated into your CRO projects, the reams of data it gathers can be run through AI sentiment analysis, enabling you to search through responses for patterns and inform optimizations automatically. With an exceptionally user-friendly UI and a range of out-of-the-box templates, Qualaroo is quick and easy to set up and an excellent option for startups with a limited budget for their tech stack.

ChatBot

Conversational chatbot technology is more sophisticated than ever, but the coding expertise required to harness it can make many startups feel like this tech isn’t for them.

The AI chatbot provider, aptly named ChatBot, will allow you to instantly improve your clients’ site experience by expanding their capacity to deal with customer support queries. One of ChatBot’s biggest USPs is its emphasis on machine learning and the fact that it constantly gathers insights on customer behavior to inform future interactions and improve the quality of its responses. It also boasts one-click integration, allowing you to use it across Facebook Messenger, Slack, Shopify, and more.

With an easy-to-use UI and 24-hour customer support, ChatBot is a hugely invaluable tool for ambitious startup CRO agencies.

Strategy for Startups – Final Thoughts

The next few years will significantly shift CRO practices as customers demand more personalization and new digital marketers compete to deliver it. As you weather the challenges ahead, we hope the strategy for startups and tools you choose help you provide an above-and-beyond service that will delight and surprise your clients!