Possession of this card does not guarantee eligibility. It’s the CRO Roundtable Roundup!
Thanks to Matt Beischel, Iqbal Ali, Slobodan Manić, Syed Nizamuddin, Debanjana Saha, Sandip Shah, Craig Sullivan, and Marcella Sullivan for joining us. Want to get in on the action and talk with other cool GRO people? Then you should probably…
One Sentence Takeaway
I’m a busy person; give me the TL:DR
Personalization in digital experiences requires careful testing and infrastructure to truly enhance user engagement and conversion rates.
The Notes
What we discussed this week
- Defining and Applying Personalization
- Personalization spans from simple localization to complex individualized experiences
- Audience segmentation often suffers from overlap or underrepresentation
- Product recommendations can backfire if audiences are not carefully siloed
- Duplicating entire pages for different audiences
- AI can help scale content personalization, but can cause problems with content quality and targeting
- Measuring personalization success depends heavily on the question being asked
- Personalization isn’t a substitute for solid UX principles
- Challenges in Testing Personalization
- Segment size can be too small for statistically significant results
- A/B testing is difficult when personalization is based on rare or narrow user traits
- GeoIP-based personalization is useful but limited due to VPN use and IP inaccuracies
- Tooling and Infrastructure Limitations
- Adobe Target and BlueConic often underutilized and overly complex
- Poor implementation leads to issues like layout shift and SEO damage
- Many tools demand significant UX writing and content creation capacity
- Companies struggle to justify the ROI of expensive personalization platforms
- It’s an error to skip testing when UX improvement is presumed obvious
- Applications of UX Writing in Personalization
- Tailoring copy to context (e.g., login flows) is often more impactful than dynamic tools
- Good messaging can be more effective than technical personalization
- Emotional relevance often wins over flashy personalization tech
- Content Authenticity on LinkedIn
- Emotional posts often outperform well-researched professional ones
- Users are disillusioned by algorithmic timelines and lack of authenticity
- AI-generated posts contribute to “The Great Flattening” of online voices
- Dark Patterns and Legal Risks
- UK regulators are cracking down on misleading pricing practices
- Shady practices like adding hidden fees, fake countdowns, and misleading “from” pricing are now under government scrutiny
- Companies must adapt pricing strategies to remain compliant
- Dynamic and Personalized Pricing
- Experimenting with charging individuals based on perceived willingness to pay
- Risks of alienating consumers if pricing is perceived as unfair or opaque
- Transparent pricing strategies are often more effective in building trust
- AI’s Role and Limitations in CRO
- AI struggles with nuance and moral reasoning
- Current models lack the real-world grounding necessary for true intelligence
- Overreliance on AI risks ignoring fundamental UX and human-centered design
The Quotes
Standout quips from this week
“Infinite growth on finite resources cannot end well.”
“Personalization is an arbitrary term with a wide gap between theory and practicality.”
“They confuse intelligence with having the skill to solve a problem.”
Book Club
Relevant reads recommended this week
The Person in Personalization
As both practitioners of personalisation and victims of it, it is the person in personalisation that has been lost. The titans of the personalisation industry have commercially defined what personalisation should be for us all without realising what it takes to make a relationship work – a personal touch.
Empire of AI
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
CRO Link Digest
Useful and thought-provoking content shared this week
- CMA launches court action against Emma to protect UK consumers – press release from the Competition and Markets Authority of the UK Government
- Mattress supplier Emma Sleep admits misleading statements about sale prices – press release from the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission
- Ethical design isn’t optional – it’s the law! – LinkedIn post by Craig Sullivan
- Harvard and MIT Study: AI Models Are Not Ready to Make Scientific Discoveries – Substack blog article by Alberto Romero
- Conversion Stash – The World’s Largest Resource Directory for CRO & Experimentation Practitioners
- The Great Flattening – Why Truly Creative People Should Not Freak Out About AI – LinkedIn post and comic by Justin Oberman
Off-Topic Sidebars
Experimentation isn’t the only thing we talk about at the CRO Roundtable. There’s often a healthy dose of discussion on shared interests, personal passions, and hobbies.
- Environmental Impact of AI
- Training large models consumes energy equivalent to powering 120 homes
- Water for cooling data centers taken from drought-stricken communities
- Fossil fuels required to meet AI infrastructure energy needs
- Conformist Beauty Standards
- Twilight Zone episode “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”
- North Korea’s “15 allowed hairstyles”
- Philosophy and Consciousness
- Discussion of AGI’s impossibility without real-world experience
- Critique of materialist views on consciousness
- AI as Pinocchio trying to become a real boy
- Driving distances in the US versus Europe
- Planned Obsolescence in Consumer Products
Sidebar Shareables
Amusing sidebar content shared this week
- Number 12 Looks Just Like You – Wikipedia article about an episode of The Twilight Zone TV series
- The Salton Sea – Wikipedia article about a highly contaminated, evaporating lake in southern California
- As the Salton Sea shrinks, it leaves behind a toxic reminder of the cost of making a desert bloom – article for the Food & Environment Reporting Network by Lindsay Fendt
- Boots Theory – Wikipedia article about the Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness