Meet Mike Fawcett, our fantastic new Conversion Services Director

After studying music at university, I started my career in music journalism. Then a few content manager roles led to my first proper job in digital, doing SEO for a large agency. That’s when I first heard about CRO. I was lucky enough to witness some of our clients’ A/B testing work and make recommendations for some new-build projects. This interested me so much I re-trained and moved into CRO via a brief stint in UX.

It was the right time for a new challenge. With all the recent growth at Fresh Egg and with so much experience in the CRO team already, moving here felt like a no-brainer. 

I think the variety of my experience. I’ve led an in-house CRO department and worked agency-side in both SEO and UX. I’ve optimised everything from small brochureware sites supported by one individual to huge eCommerce sites with hundreds of stakeholders across the globe. I've seen projects succeed, and I’ve seen projects fail miserably. Most importantly, I’ve learned how to overcome the sorts of challenges our clients face because I’ve been there many times myself. 

I’m really looking forward to working in some new verticals. Hopefully, I can implement some of the more adventurous ideas I could never deploy in previous roles.

Someone who’s passionate about their job and who’s easy to work with. 

I think a CRO program can only go so far without qualitative feedback from real customers, so I’d say a good qual research tool.

Being able to clearly measure the impact of my work. 

Over five years at my last company, my team and I delivered £9 revenue-per-sale growth through a series of add-on tests. I also put together the business case for re-building three of their key online sales journeys, which they did. Seeing that project come to fruition and deliver big conversion increases was massively satisfying. 

Growing businesses via well-researched and reliably tested changes.

I’m excited by all the crossovers with fields like data science and psychology. There’s just so much opportunity in both areas. 

Mostly articles on Medium.com and other tech blogs.

In the short term, I think CRO adoption among small-medium sized businesses will increase, as the post-COVID era forces many to wonder whether they could be getting more ROI from existing platforms and channels. Some businesses will have to re-evaluate their technology in the medium term, thanks to the ongoing war on cookies and Google’s new focus on page speed. A shift towards server-side testing seems logical, with more testing programs going in-house as they mature.

I'm really excited by the potential for using more data science in CRO. The wider field of causal inference offers many techniques that can improve the speed and accuracy of tests, and some can even infer the impact of changes without needing a traditional A/B test. I got a brief glimpse of this stuff in my last role, where we started building a personalisation campaign from segments identified using a technique called ‘k-means clustering’. I did a brief course on A.I. due to that, and I’d love to do more of it!

My family gave up trying to understand my job a long time ago, and I don’t blame them. My friends don’t really care. If I tried explaining, I don’t think I’d have many left. 

I don't know if I have a favourite, but I recently discovered something called Okonomiyaki, a kind of Japanese omelette/pancake. I’ve only tried it once, but I’ve dreamed of it ever since. I guess that's currently my #1 egg-related thing.