Omniconvert’s bold move: Allowing everyone to decide the future of its CRO tool

Conversion rate optimization tools are staggeringly good at what they do. By helping you make sure your mobile and desktop web properties have the very best combination of messages, images, and experiences, you can increase the number of people who buy your products or sign up for more information.

And that’s important. If you can double your conversion rate, you can halve your cost to acquire a new customer.

The CRO tool marketplace, however, hasn’t moved forward much in the last few months. New tools have appeared, but we’re still waiting for a single solution that can do everything needed in one place.

Today, Omniconvert has announced a bold new move in tandem with the product’s rebranding — it involves the product formerly known as Marketizator, already a relatively full-featured product. The company intends to allow marketers and conversion optimization tool users the ability to decide precisely what happens next.

Omniconvert calls it “the first democratic CRO software.”

Of course, for this to work, Omniconvert and its team are going to have to be completely transparent with the community, ensuring everyone is involved in what happens next to the product. Typically, market and product research is conducted behind closed doors. How will Omniconvert make sure that everyone can see the decisions being made and help keep them in line with what the users vote for?

“Everyone can publicly see the priorities of the features as they are voted for,” Valentin Radu, CEO and founder at Omniconvert, told me. “We will take into account all the new features as they come up. Every new ‘sprint’ that has new features in production will be publicly shown on our landing page. We will even video-stream all of the kick-off meetings.”

Indeed, the team has already installed cameras in the development office so that everyone can take an inside look into the process of creating the next iteration of the product.

While this is a bold move, there are some controls over what can be suggested, voted for, and ultimately implemented. After all, we all know what happens when you ask the internet for feedback (remember Boaty McBoatface?).

“We will eliminate from the very beginning any features that are not going to impact the product positively,” Radu said. “Anything unrelated to CRO, for example. Plus, in our prioritization algorithm, we will still have 50 percent of the voting rights, with criteria such as time impact, revenue impact, main point of difference, and more.”

While it is indisputable that CRO tools produce high returns — a fact that is evident from our study of 3,000 CRO tool users — there are still few people using them.

“CRO tools are nothing without data-driven and persuasive human intervention,” Radu said. “Looking at the penetration the CRO tools have in various markets and websites, we can understand why. The CRO market is still very young. Only one out of ten of the top 100,000 sites is using any CRO tool, while four out of ten from the top 10,000 websites are using a CRO tool.”

For Omniconvert, that was one of the reasons for moving to a democratic model — one where the users decide what comes next.

“Democratizing the product development has a lot to do with the fact that there are smart and frustrated marketers out there, that simply can’t find a tool to fulfill all their needs,” Radu said. “If they are happier, they are more willing to try things out, and the chance to improve results is higher.”

In tandem with the democratization of the tool itself, the team has plans to build a community of CRO experts willing to share their knowledge. That is a positive step forward in a marketplace that clearly still needs a lot of education in order to move the needle.

Omniconvert — founded in 2013 as Marketizator — now employs over 50 people based all over Europe. The company has over 15,000 users and processes more than 1 billion visits per month. It will be interesting to watch literally — not figuratively — this bold move in action, as users from around the world help decide what, in the arsenal of conversion rate optimization techniques, is important to them, and what is not.

The product and it’s feature voting mechanism are available from today, with details available via the Omniconvert website.