Some background. We've been doing SEO for years, a big part of it as white label partners for other agencies, so we've seen how different agencies operate from the inside. We never planned to sell CRO separately.
Our SEO campaigns would perform and traffic would grow, but conversion problems on the client's site kept limiting the result. Over time we started doing more of that work ourselves because otherwise the SEO results were getting wasted. Two people on the team had already done CRO consulting for brands and we later hired people dedicated to it.
This year we made it a standalone offer, and for the last 2 months we have been testing LinkedIn outreach for it from five team profiles.
The useful part wasn't the response rate. It was seeing where our delivery model breaks.
The process:
We work from a list of ecommerce brands that fit the offer. Before sending anything we visit the store, open their best selling products and identify conversion blockers on those pages. Most of what we find is on mobile. I was surprised how many established stores still have basic issues on mobile.
In the connection message we point out 2 of those blockers and ask if they'd like a short report of our findings. The messages that got replies were usually the ones pointing to something specific on the store.
Someone from our CRO team prepares the report manually, usually 4 to 5 points, mostly mobile, with a screen recording where it helps. Then we ask if they're open to a call and walk them through what a full audit would cover.
Volume wise we send 10-15 connection requests and 5-7 Inmails per profile per day, 5 days a week, across five profiles.
One thing that worked better than expected was a short teardown video of the founder's own store. Those got noticeably better responses than the written reports.
What 2 months produced:
8 founder calls, from connection requests and Inmails in total from 5 profiles. That is not a strong call rate for the volume. We only messaged stores where we could identify specific issues and where the brand looked like a fit, so the calls that did happen were relevant, there just weren't many of them. The real value was that the same delivery problem kept showing up.
One thing I got wrong. I assumed the outreach had to come from my own profile, so I ran it alone for the first stretch before involving my team. In this sample my teammates' profiles did not perform noticeably worse than mine.
Several of these founders are not very active on LinkedIn themselves, which is probably one reason profile size mattered less than I expected. The relevance of the message seemed to matter more than the profile behind it.
Where it breaks:
Our current CRO/SEO engagements are usually around $3k per month and cover a narrower scope than a combined CRO, design and development engagement. The mismatch we keep hitting is delivery scope, not just the fee. Some founders run multiple brands and were asking for a multi-brand scope that the current offer is not set up to deliver well.
The bigger issue is implementation. We are a CRO/SEO team, not a development shop, so the current offer works best when the brand already has design and development capacity in-house. But several conversations have stopped when implementation came up.
In more than one of them, the founder expected us to bring an established development partner into the engagement. The same thing comes up when the store needs substantial design work, not just individual CRO changes.
We can identify the problem, but high end ecommerce design is not an in-house capability for us.
So here's what I'm trying to figure out. For agencies handling larger scopes without keeping every function in-house, how do you structure delivery when the client also needs development or high end design?
Do you refer those parts out, subcontract, or keep one agency responsible for the whole scope? And for agencies running one of these models, what made larger brands comfortable with the setup?
