Rohit Rayala on how he supported over 25 clients and drove an average growth rate of 154% in 12 months

Hi Rohit, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us! How have you been?

Hey Rommil, thanks for asking. Hope you’re well. I am doing ok. Recovering from covid. Had been hospitalized for a few days now. On my way to a speedy recovery.

Oh geez. Sorry to hear that. Definitely, hoping you get back to yourself soon. So, let’s start off with a bit about yourself. Could you please share with our audience what is it that you do and a bit about your career journey up to this point?

Sure! Well I'm a Conversion Strategist and Account Manager by profession. I find problems for all kinds of ecommerce and leadgen websites. My clients are mostly between small scale business owners to medium scale business owners whose average monthly overall traffic sits max at 30-40k

I started my CRO career back in 2018. I was fairly new to this stream and I was truly mesmerised to have found such a wonderful field to work in. 

My journey so far has been full of learnings and insights that I have taken from multiple experiments that I ran during my course of work. Im fortunate enough to have worked with almost all industries like fashion, health care, consumer electronics, hardware, telicom, fitness,vape, music etc

I’ve read that you’ve run tests for more than 25 clients with an average growth rate of 154% for clients over 12 months. I was wondering you could tell us about your strategy to making this happen in such a short period of time and how you juggled so many clients and stakeholders at once?

Yes, I have handled close to 25 clients over a course of 12 months due to lack of resources as i was working in a startup and that's more than fine because it's these challenges that make you strong. Also, the people you work with and the healthy environments that you maintain makes your job easier and less stressful. I went through a careful process called PSIP(Problem Solution Identification Process) to gain positive results for my clients where i analyze a website given to me on different parameters like:

1. Heuristic Approach
2. Data Driven Approach
3. Market Research
4. Best Practices
5. User Psychology 
6. Consumer Purchase Behaviour Pattern

After carefully deducting a problem, I build an hypothesis based around the problem and find multiple solutions and improvement in conversion rate that solving this problem can give. I get on weekly calls with my clients where i present a deck of problems, solutions and also the results of my running campaigns. Calls are usually fun and full of insights. I'm lucky to have such wonderful and understanding clients which makes any optimizers job easier.

Juggling between different stakeholders is never easy as i have to collaborate with 3 different teams in my work space : 

Design Team(where i explain them the the concept of how my campaign should look like in form of a wireframe and a CRD(Campaign Requirement Document))

Development Team (I have to make sure the the development team is properly catering to all the functionalities that i mentioned to them and also all the events thai i mentioned are properly working of not)

Testing Team(Here comes the challenges where i have to take some important decisions like what bugs to be avoided to save the time and fastrack the launch of the campaign because testing team raises a lot of bugs to be honest)

And dealing with follow-ups is the most stressful job ever. But you get used to it at a point.

You’ve once written about how mobile visitors differ from website visitors. Can you tell us some of the ways now and how this should influence your testing strategy?

Mobile visitors are definitely different from desktop visitors and I learnt it hardway. I used to run similar campaigns across both the devices and to my surprise 9% of the times mobile version would end up inconclusive or fail. Then i did some research and got in touch with a lot of cro experts over LinkedIn and via webinars and found out there are multiple factors that affect the conversion rate of mobile and its nowhere similar to how desktop functions and the target audience is completely different. I have jotted down all the learnings that I took into the article. I recommend you read it to understand better.

Changing gears a bit. Conversion Rate Optimization is a global industry. I was wondering if you knew of any difference between the Indian market as compared to others?

Yes, I definitely know the difference between indian industry and the foriegn industries. 90% of my clients and their businesses are from USA and UK, rest 10% account to Indian Market, Netherlands, Australia etc. Is fun to know the psychology of different users belonging to different regions and how they perceive minor changes done on the website that could actually lead to higher conversion.

Ex. German people like to have a font size bigger than your average english font.

Growing up in India for 24 years now, I definitely know a lot about indian audiences and it's fairly easier to optimize the website as per their requirements.

Finally, it’s time for the Lightning Round! Are you a Bayesian or a Frequentist?

Haha, interesting question. I Am a frequentist who works in a Bayesian dominated company.

If you couldn’t work in Experimentation, what would you do?

I would be in managerial field if i hadn't worked in experimentation 

Describe Rohit in 5 words or less.

1. Wonderful Listener
2. Logical
3. Heuristic
4. Passionate
5. Story Teller

Thanks so much for chatting with me today!

My pleasure buddy!