Happy International Womens’ Day! A moment to celebrate female achievement, spotlight role models and inspire the next generation of female change makers to fulfill their potential and passions – whatever those may be!

We thought it would be great to catch up with Lydia Wright, our Head of CRO to talk about her Life In Digital. What brought her to a career in digital marketing? What does she love about her job and how did she get to where she is today?

Here is Lydia’s story, designed to inspire a new generation of females to explore a career in CRO.

How it all started?

“I’ve had a non conventional route into my career” starts Lydia. “I studied for a bio medical sciences degree but realised in my final year that hard core science was not for me. It was quite an isolating experience and I realised that I was better working in a collaborative team”

From student to intern

In my final degree year, I was lucky to get a Summer internship at Centrica (British Gas). The following year I was accepted on to their Marketing Graduate Scheme. I had the opportunity to trial different types of marketing every 6 months which is a great way to test what you like, where you perform well and may want to specialise. My last placement was in conversion rate optimisation and I really enjoyed this. I was lucky to have a team of very experienced CRO professionals who I learned a lot from.

At the end of the scheme, I could apply for a role in the business and I was lucky to be appointed Assistant CRO Manager. I stayed there for 18 months and it was great to have that solid in-house experience but I was keen to get some agency experience and move to London!

The appeal of agency life

I moved to an agency called GTB. I was brought in to lead CRO for their client, Ford of Europe which gave me that European perspective, working for different localities and the complexities and learnings that come with that. I was there for about 2 years and then moved to Camelot. I looked after the Instant Win Games product, finding that fine balance between fun gambling and safe play. For the past 3.5 years, I’ve been at Somebody Digital. Its been great helping build the CRO team, agency expertise and working on current clients and new business”.

What is CRO? What exactly do I do?

Not many people know what CRO means so a simple explanation is basically related to your online shopping behaviour. As you browse, without realising it you’ll return to a site where you’ve previously had a good shopping experience. This is what CRO is about. Creating great website experiences and optimising websites to improve, retaining current customers and attracting new customers.

CRO is led by analysing customer data and unlocking any challenges in the user experience.. We explore what’s harming and helping the customer experience so we can build a clear picture about what website users are doing and why. This analysis builds to a hypothesis roadmap designed to improve the website performance, improve the customer experience and create an opportunity for even more customers.

Could it be a career for you?

A career in CRO will likely suit someone interested in science, data analysis, number crunching as well as design, brand and copy – so a blend of data and creativity. I don’t think you need to do a marketing degree or marketing relevant degree for CRO. You could equally come from a science background.

The future

CRO is constantly evolving. There are so many new tools we can use. One I found this morning is an AI copy robot. It gives you 4 or 5 different copy versions to help you optimise your content!

I think its a great space to be in right now. E-commerce is ever evolving so as a career its full of exciting growth and change.

Follow us for internship opportunities at Somebody Digital this year. We love what we do and want to inspire new career starters to share our passion!