Article

5min read

Failing Forward for Experimentation Success | Shiva Manjunath

Shiva Manjunath shares how debunking best practices, embracing failure, and fostering a culture of learning can elevate experimentation to new heights.

In this episode of The 1000 Experiments Club, guest host and AB Tasty’s Head of Marketing, John Hughes, sat down with Shiva Manjunath, Senior Web Product Manager of CRO at Motive and Host of the podcast From A to B. Shiva’s journey through roles at Gartner, Norwegian Cruise Line, Speero, Edible, and now Motive, has made him a passionate advocate for the transformative power of experimentation.

During their conversation, Shiva discussed the pitfalls of following “best practices” blindly, the importance of creating an environment where failure is seen as a step toward success, and how companies can truly build a culture of experimentation.

Here are some of the key takeaways.

The myth of ‘Best Practices’

Too often, the so-called experimentation best practices become a checkbox exercise, rather than a thoughtful strategy.

“If you’re focused on best practices, you’re likely missing the point of true optimization,” Shiva notes. 

He recounted a situation at Gartner where simplifying a form—typically hailed as a best practice—actually led to a sharp drop in conversions. His point? Understanding user motivation and context is far more important than relying on one-size-fits-all rules. It’s this deeper, more nuanced approach to experimentation that drives real results.

“If what you believe is this best practice checklist nonsense, all CRO is just a checklist of tasks to do on your site. And that’s so incorrect,” Shiva emphasized, urging practitioners to move beyond surface-level tactics and truly understand their audience.

Embracing failure in experimentation

A major theme of the discussion was the pivotal role failure plays in the journey to success. Shiva was candid about his early experiments, admitting that many didn’t go as planned. But these “failures” were crucial stepping stones in his development.

“My first ten tests were all terrible. They all sucked,” Shiva admitted, underscoring that even the most seasoned experts start with mistakes. He stressed that organizations must create an environment where employees can experiment freely, learn from their mistakes, and continue to improve.

“If you’re penalized for running a losing test, you’re not in a culture of experimentation,” Shiva insists.

Organizations that punish failure are stifling innovation. Instead, Shiva advocates for an environment where employees can test, learn, and iterate without fear. “The idea that you have the flexibility to discuss failures and focus on, ‘Well, I ran this test. It lost. Now, what do we do next?’—that’s a culture of experimentation.”

Scaling experimentation maturity

Shiva also explored the varying levels of experimentation maturity within organizations. Many companies claim to have a “culture of experimentation,” but few truly practice it at scale. Shiva emphasized the importance of making experimentation accessible to everyone in the organization, not just a select few.

Reflecting on the loss of Google Optimize, Shiva acknowledged its role as a gateway into the world of experimentation. “I got into experimentation through Google Optimize,” Shiva recalled, recognizing the tool’s importance in lowering the barrier to entry for newcomers. He urged companies to lower barriers to entry and enable more people to engage with experimentation, thereby fostering a more mature and widespread culture of testing.

The role of curiosity and data in experimentation

Another critical point Shiva raised was the importance of curiosity in experimentation. He believes that genuine curiosity drives the desire to ask “why” and dig deeper into user behavior, which is essential for effective experimentation.

“If you’re not genuinely curious about the why behind many things, I don’t know if experimentation is the field for you,” Shiva stated, underscoring curiosity as a crucial soft skill in the field.

Shiva also highlighted the foundational role of being data-driven in any experimentation strategy. However, he cautioned that having data isn’t enough—it must be effectively used to drive decisions.

“If you’re in a business setting and the business looks at your program and this is zero test wins, right? And then after two years, they would rightfully say ‘is this the way it’s supposed to go?’” Shiva remarked, pointing out that data-driven decisions are key to sustaining a culture of experimentation.

What else can you learn from our conversation with Shiva Manjunath?

  • Why it’s crucial to critically evaluate industry buzzwords and ensure they align with real practices.
  • How true personalization in experimentation goes beyond just adding a user’s name.
  • The need for thorough analysis to genuinely support data-driven decisions.
  • Shiva’s take on the future of experimentation after Google Optimize and how companies can adapt.

About Shiva Manjunath

Shiva Manjunath is the Senior Web Product Manager of CRO at Motive and Host of the podcast From A to B. His insatiable curiosity about user behavior and deep passion for digital marketing have made him a standout in the world of experimentation. With experience at top companies like Gartner, Norwegian Cruise Line, and Edible, Shiva is dedicated to demystifying CRO and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the field.

About 1,000 Experiments Club

The 1,000 Experiments Club is an AB Tasty-produced podcast hosted by John Hughes, Head of Marketing at AB Tasty. Join John as he sits down with the experts in the world of experimentation to uncover their insights on what it takes to build and run successful experimentation programs.

Article

8min read

A/B Testing: It’s Not Just About the Outcome

A/B testing is often seen as the magic bullet for improving e-commerce performance. Many believe that small tweaks—like changing the color of a “Buy Now” button—will significantly boost conversion rates. However, A/B testing is much more complex. 

Random changes without a well-thought-out plan often lead to neutral or even negative results, leaving you frustrated and wondering if your efforts were wasted. 

Success in A/B testing doesn’t have to be defined solely by immediate KPI improvements. Instead, by shifting your focus from short-term gains to long-term learnings, you can turn every test into a powerful tool for driving sustained business growth. 

This guest blog was written by Trevor Aneson, Vice President Customer Experience at 85Sixty.com, a leading digital agency specializing in data-driven marketing solutions, e-commerce optimization, and customer experience enhancement. In this blog, we’ll show you how to design A/B tests that consistently deliver value by uncovering the deeper insights that fuel continuous improvement. 

Rethinking A/B Testing: It’s Not Just About the Outcome 

Many people believe that an A/B test must directly improve core e-commerce KPIs like conversion rates, average order value (AOV), or revenue per visitor (RPV) to be considered successful. This is often due to a combination of several factors: 

1. Businesses face pressure to show immediate, tangible results, which shifts the focus toward quick wins rather than deeper learnings. 

2. Success is typically measured using straightforward metrics that are easy to quantify and communicate to stakeholders.

3. There is a widespread misunderstanding that A/B testing is a one-size-fits-all solution, which can lead to unrealistic expectations. 

However, this focus on short-term wins limits the potential of your A/B testing program. When a test fails to improve KPIs, you might be tempted to write it off as a failure and abandon further experimentation. However, this mindset can prevent you from discovering valuable insights about your users that could drive meaningful, long-term growth. 

A Shift in Perspective: Testing for Learnings, Not Just Outcomes 

To maximize the success and value of your A/B tests, it’s essential to shift from an outcome-focused approach to a learning-focused one. 

Think of A/B testing not just as a way to achieve immediate gains but as a tool for gathering insights that will fuel your business’s growth over the long term. 

The real power of A/B testing lies in the insights you gather about user behavior — insights that can inform decisions across your entire customer journey, from marketing campaigns to product design. When you test for learnings, every result — whether it moves your KPIs or not — provides you with actionable data to refine future strategies. 

Let’s take a closer look at how this shift can transform your testing approach. 

Outcome-Based Testing vs. Learning-Based Testing: A Practical Example 

Consider a simple A/B test aimed at increasing the click-through rate (CTR) of a red call-to-action (CTA) button on your website. Your analytics show that blue CTA buttons tend to perform better, so you decide to test a color change. 

Outcome-Based Approach 

Your hypothesis might look something like this: “If we change the CTA button color from red to blue, the CTR will increase because blue buttons typically receive more clicks.”

In this scenario, you’ll judge the success of the test based on two possible outcomes: 

1. Success: The blue button improves CTR, and you implement the change. 2. Failure: The blue button doesn’t improve CTR, and you abandon the test. 

While this approach might give you a short-term boost in performance, it leaves you without any understanding of why the blue button worked (or didn’t). Was it really the color, or was it something else — like contrast with the background or user preferences — that drove the change? 

Learning-Based Approach 

Now let’s reframe this test with a focus on learnings. Instead of testing just two colors, you could test multiple button colors (e.g., red, blue, green, yellow) while also considering other factors like contrast with the page background. 

Your new hypothesis might be: “The visibility of the CTA button, influenced by its contrast with the background, affects the CTR. We hypothesize that buttons with higher contrast will perform better across the board.” 

By broadening the test, you’re not only testing for an immediate outcome but also gathering insights into how users respond to various visual elements. After running the test, you discover that buttons with higher contrast consistently perform better, regardless of color. 

This insight can then be applied to other areas of your site, such as text visibility, image placement, or product page design. 

Key Takeaway: 

A learning-focused approach reveals deeper insights that can be leveraged far beyond the original test scenario. This shift turns every test into a stepping stone for future improvements. 

How to Design Hypotheses That Deliver Valuable Learnings

Learning-focused A/B testing starts with designing better hypotheses. A well-crafted hypothesis doesn’t just predict an outcome—it seeks to understand the underlying reasons for user behavior and outlines how you’ll measure it. 

Here’s how to design hypotheses that lead to more valuable insights: 1. Set Clear, Learning-Focused Goals 

Rather than aiming only for KPI improvements, set objectives that prioritize learning. For example, instead of merely trying to increase conversions, focus on understanding which elements of the checkout process create friction for users. 

By aligning your goals with broader business objectives, you ensure that every test contributes to long-term growth, not just immediate wins. 

2. Craft Hypotheses That Explore User Behavior 

A strong hypothesis is specific, measurable, and centered around understanding user behavior. Here’s a step-by-step guide to crafting one: 

● Start with a Clear Objective: Define what you want to learn. For instance, “We want to understand which elements of the checkout process cause users to abandon their carts.” 

● Identify the Variables: Determine the independent variable (what you change) and the dependent variable (what you measure). For example, the independent variable might be the number of form fields, while the dependent variable could be the checkout completion rate. 

● Explain the Why: A learning-focused hypothesis should explore the “why” behind the user behavior. For example, “We hypothesize that removing fields with radio buttons will increase conversions because users find these fields confusing.” 

3. Design Methodologies That Capture Deeper Insights 

A robust methodology is crucial for gathering reliable data and drawing meaningful conclusions. Here’s how to structure your tests:

● Consider Multiple Variations: Testing multiple variations allows you to uncover broader insights. For instance, testing different combinations of form fields, layouts, or input types helps identify patterns in user behavior. 

● Ensure Sufficient Sample Size & Duration: Use tools like an A/B test calculator to determine the sample size needed for statistical significance. Run your test long enough to gather meaningful data but avoid cutting it short based on preliminary results. 

● Track Secondary Metrics: Go beyond your primary KPIs. Measure secondary metrics, such as time on page, engagement, or bounce rates, to gain a fuller understanding of how users interact with your site. 

4. Apply Learnings Across the Customer Journey 

Once you’ve gathered insights from your tests, it’s time to apply them across your entire customer journey. This is where learning-focused testing truly shines: the insights you gain can inform decisions across all touchpoints, from marketing to product development. 

For example, if your tests reveal that users struggle with radio buttons during checkout, you can apply this insight to other forms across your site, such as email sign-ups, surveys, or account creation pages. By applying your learnings broadly, you unlock opportunities to optimize every aspect of the user experience. 

5. Establish a Feedback Loop 

Establish a feedback loop to ensure that these insights continuously inform your business strategy. Share your findings with cross-functional teams and regularly review how these insights can influence broader business objectives. This approach fosters a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement, where every department benefits from the insights gained through testing. 

Conclusion: Every Test is a Win 

When you shift your focus from short-term outcomes to long-term learnings, you transform your A/B testing program into a powerful engine for growth. Every

test—whether it results in immediate KPI gains or not—offers valuable insights that drive future strategy and improvement. 

With AB Tasty’s platform, you can unlock the full potential of learning-focused testing. Our tools enable you to design tests that consistently deliver value, helping your business move toward sustainable, long-term success. 

Ready to get started? Explore how AB Tasty’s tools can help you unlock the full potential of your A/B testing efforts. Embrace the power of learning, and you’ll find that every test is a win for your business.

Article

6min read

From Clicks to Connections: How AI is Shaping the Future of Digital Optimization

Any marketer will tell you that Digital Optimization is crucial to ensure successful e-commerce operations and yield the best possible return on investment (ROI). This practice includes both A/B testing and website personalization: every website presents a unique set of features and designs, which must, in turn, be optimized through A/B testing. 

Building a great website is, unfortunately, not simply a matter of following best practices. Even within a single industry, users will hold varied expectations based on your brand, communication style, target audience, funnel, etc. And while browsing the same website, users’ expectations can vary, with some knowing exactly what they want and others needing to explore, check your returns policy, learn about your sustainability initiatives, and so on.

We have all heard the hype about how AI has been revolutionizing how marketers approach experimentation. Generative AI offers new opportunities for optimizing every aspect of the user journey, allowing marketers to:

  • streamline testing,
  • create new online experiences, 
  • and create new types of user segments for more precise personalized experiences that drive conversions.

This guest blog post was written by Rodolphe Dougoud, Project Lead at fifty-five—a leading data company that helps brands harness the potential of Generative AI and mitigate associated risks effectively with a comprehensive and pragmatic AI strategy, among other services. 

Below, we’ll explore these three perspectives in depth, with real-life examples gleaned from AB Tasty’s new algorithm, Emotions AI, and fifty-five’s work with its clients around GenAI. 

AI in Action for Experiences that Matter

  1. Streamline testing

When thinking about A/B testing, you might immediately picture creating an experiment and launching it live on a website. However, the most time-consuming phases of the A/B testing process generally come before and after that: finding new features to try out in order to create a testing roadmap and analyzing the results of these tests. Here, AI can increase test velocity by helping to reduce bottlenecks hindering both of the aforementioned stages.

Test ideation

Your roadmap must not only be top-down but also bottom-up: pay close attention to insights from your UX designers, based on benchmarks from your competitors and industry trends, and data-driven insights based on your own analytics data. Here, AI can facilitate the process by analyzing large datasets (e.g., on-site Analytics data) to find insights humans might have missed.

Result analysis

Similarly, it’s essential to analyze the results of your tests thoroughly. Looking at one KPI can sometimes be enough, but it often represents only one part of a bigger story. An aptly-calibrated AI model can find hidden insights within your testing results

While we generally know what data we want to access, the actual querying of that data can be time-consuming. Applying a GenAI model to your dataset can also allow you to query your data in natural language, letting the model pull the data for you, run the query, and create instant visualizations for major time gains.

Content creation

While not necessary for most tests, creating new content to be included in the testing phase can take a long time and impact your roadmap. While GenAI cannot produce the same quality of content as your UX team, a UX designer equipped with a GenAI tool can create more content faster. The model used can be trained with your design chart to ensure it integrates with the rest of your content. Overall, adding a GenAI tool as a complement to your design arsenal can yield substantial gains in productivity and, therefore, reinforce your testing roadmap timeline.

  1. Create new online experiences

Marketers should not hesitate to experiment with AI to create unique and interactive experiences. Generative AI can create personalized content and recommendations that can engage users more effectively. 

Consider, for instance, fifty-five’s recent work with Chronodrive, a grocery shopping and delivery app. We used AI to address a common user challenge (and, frankly, near-universal issue): deciding what to make for dinner. 

With our innovative solution, taking a picture of the inside of your fridge will allow the app to create a recipe based on the ingredients it identifies, while a photo of a dish – taken at a restaurant or even downloaded from social media – will generate a recipe for said dish and its associated shopping list. 

 Artificial Intelligence opens new creative options that weren’t available with previous LLM models. Chronodrive’s solution may not be applicable to most companies, but every business can think back on their typical user’s pain points and conceptualize how GenAI could help ease them.

  1. Create new types of user segments for more precise personalized experiences

When a customer enters a store, a salesperson can instantly personalize their experience by checking if they want to be helped or just want to browse, if they are discovering the brand or are already sold on it, if they require guidance or know precisely what they want
 A website, on the other hand, necessitates extra effort to present the user with a similarly personalized experience. 

Online, segmentation thus becomes indispensable to deliver the most satisfying user experience possible. Even during testing phases, deploying A/B tests on user segments makes achieving significant results more likely, as increased precision helps mitigate the risk of obtaining neutral results.

AI can analyze a wide array of user interactions on a given website to determine which elements drive the most conversions, or how different users respond to specific stimuli. This analysis can allow brands to classify users into new segments that could not have been available otherwise. For instance, fifty-five applied AI to split Shiseido’s website users between low and high-lifetime value segments. This allowed Shiseido to run differentiated A/B tests and personalize their website depending on the expected lifetime value of the user, resulting in a 12.6% increase in conversions.

Going even further, what if AI could read your emotions? AB Tasty’s new AI algorithm, Emotions AI, can automatically segment your audience into 10 categories based on emotional needs. 

  • If a user needs to be reassured, the website can emphasize its free return policy
  • If they need clarity, the website can highlight factual information about your product
  • And if they need immediacy, the website can hide any unnecessary information to instead focus on its main CTAs

The model estimates the needs of the user by taking into consideration all of their interactions with the website: how long they wait before clicking, whether they scroll through an entire page, where their mouse hovers, how many times they click, etc. This enables stronger personalization, both during testing phases and when deploying online features, by letting you know exactly what your users need. 

Want to Learn More?

If you would like to dive deeper into current experimentation trends, watch our webinar replay here, where fifty-five and AB Tasty explored key CRO case studies and more. And if you have any questions or insights you’d like to share, please leave a comment – we would love to hear from you! 

Article

13min read

Customization vs Personalization: What’s the Difference?

How do you grab a customer’s attention when our world has us on digital information overload?

Capturing attention and standing out in a market saturated with so many options is a challenge now more than ever. To overcome the digital noise, many businesses are aiming to enhance the customer experience with two approaches: customization vs personalization.

What’s the difference between customization and personalization? Are they two terms we can use interchangeably or are they two entirely different concepts? 

You guessed it – customization and personalization describe two very different, but not entirely unrelated, practices. Though not the same, (mass) customization and personalization strategies revolve around people’s deep-seated desires for self-expression and recognition – as well as their limited attention spans in a loud, digital world.

Let’s take a deep dive together into the sea of information we have about customization vs personalization.

What’s the difference between customization and personalization?

Customization and personalization are often thought of as synonyms, but while some crossover certainly exists, they are very different terms referring to very different practices. They overlap in their ability to make the customer feel as if they have a unique relationship with the brand in a way that the mass marketing of the past could never achieve.

Both practices have proven particularly well suited to Millennials, the largest consumer age group, who have an instinctive mistrust of older forms of advertisement but are more influenced by both customization and personalization-based marketing. So what exactly are the differences and how do they work?

Customization Definition: Giving the power to the users

The most common form of customization comes in the form of product customization and is typically found online. Product customization is particularly popular for clothing outlets, whereby shoppers can design a piece of clothing from an online template, using different colors, fabrics, and shapes to make their own ‘unique’ product.

Customization examples:

Nike is one of the most important innovators in the field, allowing you to customize every aspect of your sneaker.

NikeCvP
Image Source

Another brand that has used product customization to great effect is Burberry, which has gone from strength to strength in recent years, partly due to being an innovator in the field of product customization.

Burberry
Image Source

This is sometimes referred to as ‘mass customization’ whereby online tools allow the customization process to produce bespoke products at mass-produced prices.

What is mass customization?

Mass customization is all about customer experience, sometimes referred to as CX, which marks an enormous shift from shopping habits that were once almost entirely about the product.

Interacting with brands and producing individual styles, or at least appearing to, is at least as important to Millennials as the functionality of a product, and there is little reason to think that subsequent generations will not have similar expectations in the future, especially with technology becoming so ubiquitous and powerful. Wherever retail goes in the near future, CX is going to be an essential part of it. While the cutting edge of customization is not a major preserve of older generations, the need to keep such platforms simple and easy to use should not be ignored.

One of the issues facing businesses offering product customization is how quickly can each purchase be produced? Convenience is also thought to be a major concern for shoppers in the 21st century, and patience is not seen as a virtue. This goes to the heart of the customer experience and will likely inform how successful the model is for each business. The more complex mass customization becomes, the larger on-demand mass production will be.

One thing is for sure, what was once the preserve of the burger joint or ice cream parlor, customization is fast spreading to all aspects of retail, and as a result, is changing everything.

Personalization Definition: Tailor your user’s entire experience

Personalization is one of the most misunderstood marketing terms of all.

Often misunderstood for customization, recommendation, and even optimization, it is instead a set of well-defined practices with an overall purpose or goal. Unlike customization, which offers a very specific set of tools for customer interaction, personalization has far-reaching methods and possibilities and is currently at the very beginnings of its potential. It also touches upon issues of privacy, politics, and generational divides.

In the broadest sense, personalization is marketing designed with the individual in mind. Obviously, there is no single human observing individual tastes to present products or services that are most relevant. This is where highly sophisticated algorithms come in.

One type of personalization is the recommendation engine, although it should be noted that personalization is not a type of recommendation. The most common of these are websites and streaming services, such as YouTube or Netflix. If you have ever used these sites you will know that certain box sets or videos are recommended based on previous viewing habits. To begin with, these were obviously connected programs.

For example, if you had watched a basketball documentary, there’s a good chance that one on baseball would interest you. So far, so simple. But, as recommendation engines become more sophisticated, seemingly unconnected content works just as well. The same type of algorithms are used in retail, most famously by Amazon, and include Email campaigns that are tailored to the individual and addressed personally. This is the beginning of personalization.

Personalization also uses segmentation, for example, individual traits, such as age, gender, or location, all of which can profoundly change how marketing information is presented. Beyond that, a person’s politics, browsing behavior, and even ethical concerns can be taken into account.

We should pause here to consider the two main versions of personalization, rule-based and machine learning.

  • Rule-based personalization relies on the previously mentioned segmentation model, whereby the audiences are broken down into both broad and granular segments, such as age or location. 
  • Machine learning personalization, on the other hand, uses algorithms. These can be those used in recommendation engines and even parts of segmentation marketing, such as behavior. 

Whereas basic algorithms can provide broad data, such as what is trending, recommendation engines, and the like, provide more in-depth information for the individual.

Personalization vs customization in e-commerce

Customization can come in many forms, from fast food restaurants that encourage customers to design their food their way, to online stores that allow visitors to design their own clothing.

Personalization, on the other hand, is a far more complex practice that takes into account customer (or potential customer) behavior in order to market the right products, to the right person, at the right time. Using big data and powerful algorithms, personalization is becoming a more powerful tool every day, with a diverse number of businesses implementing it to great success.

Getting the most out of both practices requires an understanding of how they both work and the major differences between them.

You can certainly see the similarities between customization and personalization:

  • Both aim to make consumers feel uniquely understood and marketed as individuals. 
  • Both put a high value on self-expression and personal tastes and experiences. 
  • Both create the illusion that consumers are being given white-glove treatment and have a one-on-one relationship with the brand. 
  • Both, in a way, involve the consumer as a co-producer of value – for customization, it means relying on their predilections to craft the product, and for personalization, it’s sharing their data (unbeknownst to them or not) to create personalized marketing messages.

Ultimately, through a product strategy on the part of the company, mass customization is driven by the consumer. Especially appealing to Millennials, it’s a way of validating their own sense of self through ‘build-a-bear’ style product production.

With personalization, the onus is much more on the company to bring value and deliver meaning to the consumer audience they’re targeting.

People naturally crave to be in control of their surroundings and personalization techniques create a cherry-picked environment that feeds into that need. Bargain hunting for low-priced kitchenware from your favorite outlet? If ads for the very items you’re looking for suddenly appear all over the internet, it somehow creates a feeling of empowerment, as if in some impossible way, your wishes and needs automatically manifest.

As for information overload, this is the classic argument that contemporary consumers are exposed to a dizzyingly high number of marketing messages, far too many to consciously register, remember, or act on. Personalization strategies both (hopefully) limit the number of marketing messages a consumer is exposed to in the first place, as well as stimulate the brain to recognize these stand-out strategies, as opposed to letting them sit in the background of our consciousness. This is the idea of selective attention or the fact that your brain will automatically pick up on potentially important stimuli – i.e. those most relevant to you.

Web Personalization And Privacy Concerns: Customization and Personalization

Privacy is a major concern for many consumers and personalization has sometimes seemed more like an unwelcome stalker to some as a result. With legislation being debated in various corners of the world, what is deemed as overstepping the mark should be a concern for all.

All generations have some concerns regarding personalization and privacy, not helped by various data leaks and hacks of major companies. The truth of the matter, however, is that personalization shouldn’t be “creepy.” Transparency is a great way to instil trust with customers. Personalization need not be a back-door practice, where using personal data is hidden behind jargon and misleading declarations. Most website visitors are happy to share data as long as they know how it’s being used, especially if there is some advantage in it for them.

Being able to opt-out is another great way to make customers feel as if they have some control over the process. In some cases, the personalization process itself can be customized. While most users won’t bother engaging, they will appreciate the option to.

Evolution From Mass Marketing To One-To-One Marketing

Mass marketing is where a product or service is marketed to an entire population. It essentially treats everyone the same, with the same needs. Although that is clearly not the case, the philosophy revolves around the idea that the more people who receive the message, the more likely you will reach someone who is interested. It’s essentially the practice of selling low-cost and homogenous items at high volumes. While it’s more miss than hit, mass marketing was well suited to mass media markets, such as television, which had the majority of the population engaging with it on a regular basis.

Mass marketing began in the 1920’s, with the advent of radio. The popularity of this form of media made it ripe for advertisers to market products in a way that wasn’t possible before. As attitudes shifted over the decades, mass marketing’s influence rose and fell until the 1980’s and 1990’s, when it reached its peak.

History of mass marketing timeline:

  • 1920’s – Begins with the advent of radio
  • 1930’s – The great depression reduces its influence
  • 1940’s and 1950’s – With income rising, its effectiveness becomes relevant again through the “Mad men” era
  • 1960’s and 1970’s – A rise in anti-Capitalism sees its influence wane again
  • 1980’s and 1990’s – The peak years of mass marketing during the economic boom

The history of one-to-one marketing is essentially a history of the Internet. When the first HTML dialogue occurred on Christmas Day, 1990, it set in motion the beginnings of personalization. Also in 1993, Webtrends was founded, which was essentially the first commercial web analytics program. Unfortunately, only those well-versed with the technology had any idea of how to read the data, so its effects were minimal.

Things carried on at pace, however, and log file analysis made it possible for non-tech people, most importantly marketers, to make use of the data. This was soon followed by hit counters and Javascript tagging, which became important as the Internet began to use more imagery. With few people using the Internet, however, the advances made during this time were not to be truly helpful for a few years to come.

It wasn’t until 2004 that the type of web analytics we know today began to appear and by 2005 Google had released Google Analytics. This allowed website owners to dig further into the data than had been previously possible, with concise visuals that allowed for easy reading of in-depth information. It’s at this point that personalization becomes more tangible, with conversion rate optimization becoming a particular focus.

Machine learning personalization, such as recommendation engines, soon began to be useful in a way that was not possible before, as algorithms began to exponentiate their capabilities, with Amazon and Netflix leading the way. From Email campaigns to accurate predictions of preferences, the practices of personalization became ubiquitous by 2008.

Mouse tracking and eye tracking also added profound data that improves visitor experience and thus increases interaction. With a deeper understanding of customer habits, personalization is beginning to become more accurate, focused, and effective.

With the advent of multiple devices using the Internet, Google released Universal Tracker in 2012. With more profound data at its fingertips, demographics, behavior, and lifestyle began to be segmented more accurately, further categorizing customers for more predictable results. App personalization becomes more and more important as phone use begins to outstrip laptops/desktops for online use. Machine learning on mobile soon improves.

Soon after, personalization magnifies the effectiveness of CRM (Customer Relation Management), which focuses on user experience and customer retention. This only becomes possible as big data is collected at ever higher rates, allowing companies to truly understand their customer’s needs.

With the use of A/B testing, the future of personalization is now highly managed from beginning to end. No longer is trial and error at the forefront of designers of websites or marketing campaigns. Behavior on site is monitored to a level thought unimaginable just a few years ago and personalization is becoming truly individualized. User experience is now at the heart of personalization, and with the likelihood of more powerful algorithms and customer understanding to come, personalization seems to be very much in its infancy.

 

Optimize to find your better.

Good things come to those who change.

How to start your personalization strategy

Website personalization shouldn’t be a complicated undertaking. In fact, it is becoming easier, and therefore more widespread, every day. With several tools at a business’s disposal, there are many ways to go about creating personalization that works for each business. In other words, personalization should be personal for each business using it.

The first place to begin is getting to know an audience. Too many start with the concept that the product is key and then try to persuade an audience that they are right. This is similar to a waiter insisting that the customer has made the wrong order when they chose the duck and bringing them beef instead. As should be clear now, customer experience has become one of the most important aspects of personalization, and that cannot be achieved without getting to know exactly what it is your customer expects from the interaction with your website.

Want more on personalization? Read our E-book: Your Guide to Personalization

What’s Better: Personalization or Customization?

You want your customers to feel unique and have a positive experience with your brand. For you, this could mean implementing personalization tactics or dabbling into the world of product customization. Bettering your customers’ experience could mean focusing on customization, personalization, or a mixture of both. If you design your roadmap with your customers in mind, you’ll find customer loyalty and satisfaction along the way.

Article

16min read

5 Behavioral Targeting Tactics to Boost Conversions (with Examples)

We’re in an era of banner blindness.

People increasingly ignore irrelevant ads while being more receptive to tailored online experiences that speak to their needs and wants. To keep a competitive edge, marketers need to focus on crafting personalized content and user experiences to increase their ad engagement and boost revenue.

Welcome to the world of behavioral targeting.

Let’s talk about how behavioral targeting is done, what data it involves, six examples of brands that are killing it with behavioral targeting, and some best practices to follow.

What is behavioral targeting?

Behavioral targeting is a marketing technique that segments audiences based on behaviors rather than just demographic parameters.

Simply put, website owners can use the data collected from user behavior to create profiles and hyper-target future advertising for specific groups of customers. Behavioral targeting allows brands and marketers to engage customers and rise above more traditional strategies.

Modern marketers use behavioral targeting to achieve greater engagement in an era where more and more online shoppers have developed strong avoidance habits toward most ad formats.

What data do you need for behavioral targeting in marketing and advertisement?

Behavioral targeting campaigns are data-driven. Behavioral data is often collected with:

  • Your company’s web analytics tools
  • Collected cookies
  • Customers’ browsing history
  • Collected IP addresses

The most common metrics collected for behavioral targeting are:

  • Geographic location
  • Type of devices used
  • Visit data
  • Transactional data
  • Purchase history
  • Browsing history

Basically, marketers use any type of data—provided that it delivers actionable insights—that can be used to increase engagement and conversions during a campaign.

The benefits of behavioral marketing and behavioral advertising

  • Relevancy: By analyzing a customer’s past behavior, you can create more relevant ads to give users a better (and less spammy) experience.
  • Efficiency: Targeting users who’ve shown an interest in your products/services ensures you spend your budget more efficiently. 
  • Improved ROI: Increasing the relevancy and efficiency of ads will, in turn, lead to a better ROI. 

Behavioral targeting examples

Retargeting ads examples

You can use retargeting advertisements to show advertisements to your website users that are tailored to their actions on your website. Both Facebook and Google offer retargeting adverts. Retargeting adverts are an excellent way to encourage a website visitor to return to your website by showing the relevant ad based on their past behavior. Here’s how a couple of large brands use retargeting adverts to increase sales:

Neutrogena, a well-known beauty brand, used customers’ past shopping cart behavior to increase sales. Knowing that 75% of its customers were purchasing products from one segment of its range, Neutrogena decided to take action to increase the number of products purchased by existing customers.

The company used historic shopping cart data to create product pairings: products that went well together and also reflected historic customer buying patterns — think mascara and eye makeup remover, for example.

neutrogena-behavioral

Armed with customers’ purchase behaviors, Neutrogena created banner advertisements and videos displaying product pairing, product information, and – last but not least – coupons to encourage sales.

Finally, these product pairing adverts were displayed to customers based on their past purchasing patterns. The results speak for themselves. Neutrogena got a ÂŁ5.84 return on behavioral advertising spend (ROAS) and exceeded its own benchmark by 289%.

This luxury male watch brand used its users’ website behaviors and Facebook retargeting advertisements to increase sales and brand awareness.

The campaign segmented the company’s existing website users into three groups: 

  • People who had added an item to their baskets
  • People who had viewed specific items
  • People who had visited the website

As well as designing specific adverts for each group, Aurum Brothers tested different ad settings such as bid options and ad objectives.

aurum-brothers-targeting

Facebook retargeting based on customer behavior was highly successful for the company. They reported 100% increases month on month and an increase of 50% in revenue.

Behavioral Email Marketing

One example of behavioral marketing is behaviorally targeted email campaigns. Email campaigns can be triggered by actions taken on a website, such as subscribing to a newsletter, adding an item to the cart, or viewing the sales page.

Here’s an example of behavioral email marketing in real life:

A clever way to use behavioral targeting is to segment your customers based on their stage in the buying cycle, and then retarget them with email campaigns specific to their shopping journey.  

And that’s exactly what clothing brand Closet London did. 

The company split its customer base into four groups based on their past purchases and implemented email marketing workflows specific to each group. The groups were:

  • one-time purchases
  • repeat purchases
  • loyal customers
  • dormant customers

If a customer is categorized as a dormant customer, they will be sent an email about the latest collection. Then, if no conversion takes place within two weeks, the brand encourages the user to re-engage by emailing them a discount offer. 

closet-london-targeting

But Closet London doesn’t stop there. The clever clothing brand also sends a variety of other email campaigns tailored to both new users (e.g. a welcome email campaign) and past customers (e.g. an email workflow based on the items they’ve purchased in the past).

If you’re concerned that too many emails may annoy your customers, don’t be. 

By segmenting customers based on their actions on your website, you ensure that you’re sending well-timed, relevant, and useful emails to the correct segmentation of your customers. Do it successfully and you might get results like Closet London — an increase in revenue of 2900%.

Location-Based Advertising

By using location-based advertising (LBA) you can adapt your marketing message based on where your target consumers are geographically. 

It even allows you to tailor your message based on the proximity to stores, the weather, transport routes, and so on. This means that you can create messages that make sense, given the location or the weather they are experiencing. 

Here are some examples of brands using location-based advertising to generate sales and build brand awareness:

Timberland wanted to drive a younger demographic of customers to visit its physical stores and stockists. 

Timberland used a combination of data, including whether a user had recently visited a brick-and-mortar store and how close they were to a store at the time.

timberland-targeting

The brand used technology to draw polygons around Timberland stores to target people in the “mindset to purchase footwear.” 

The campaign results showed an increase in-store visits by 6.2%, with, notably, 20% of these visits within 24 hours of the user viewing the advertising campaign. 

We’ve already discussed how Neutrogena used customers’ past shopping cart behaviors to increase its sales, so we know that the beauty brand is no stranger to behavioral targeting. 

However, its next strategy – to advertise a new sunscreen – was rather ingenious. 

Not happy to only target customers based on weather forecast apps, Neutrogena used real-time UV conditions, the time of day, and the proximity to shops selling Neutrogena to target potential customers. 

Imagine browsing your phone on an unexpectedly hot summer’s day. You flick through Facebook and see a Neutrogena advert. You head to your nearest store and, surprise, surprise, it sells Neutrogena.

Which sunscreen will you purchase? I’m going to bet it’s Neutrogena. 

Again, the results are stellar. Within a couple of months, the campaign increased awareness of the sunscreen from zero to 63% and increased purchase intent to more than 40%. 

Suggested Selling Examples

Suggested selling is simply offering choices based on items that customers have already purchased. Suggested selling can come in the form of upselling or cross-selling, neither of which are new to the retail world. 

No article about suggested selling would be complete without discussing Amazon, arguably the Godfather of this technique. 

According to this source, more than a third of Amazon’s revenue comes from its recommendation engine. That’s massive, but how does it work? Well, in a handful of ways. 

amazon-targeting

Recommended for You

On Amazon’s home page, you can click on a “Your Recommendations” link. This directs you to a page full of products recommended just for you. By suggesting a selection of products from the categories you’ve already viewed, Amazon aims to encourage you to click and buy additional items. 

Frequently Bought Together

By adding a ‘frequently bought together’ section below your cart, Amazon successfully manages to increase your order value.

Browsing History

Amazon also shows you a history of the items you’ve purchased on Amazon. The fact that you’ve already viewed it signals that you’ve previously been interested in purchasing it, so it’s an easy way for Amazon to remind you of the product. 

Sunuva may be a less well-known brand on the list, but its use of behavioral targeting has generated excellent results. 

This UK-based kid’s clothing company wanted to increase sales, but with a small team, whatever the solution, it needed to be automated and easy to implement. 

One of the core elements to increase sales was to focus on and reduce cart abandonment rates. 

sunuva-targeting

After a website redesign, Sunuva was able to use browsing behavior and real-time crowd-sourced data from other visitors.  

This enabled the company to present its website visitors with relevant product recommendations, as well as email campaigns with content tailored to the customer, instead of generic offers. 

Remarkably, the changes increased turnover by nearly 9% from the very first day. 

Why is behavioral targeting slowly replacing demographic targeting?

Demographic data is limited.

Age, location, and income are all great factors in helping marketers create targeted messages. However, demographic data is fairly restricted when it comes to understanding the needs, wants, habits, and pain points of your customers.

Demographic data won’t tell you much about your customers’ behavior. Using strictly demographic data is often a hit-or-miss game.

Using behavioral data, marketers can target their own visitors by knowing which pages they’ve visited and what they’ve left in their carts. It allows for extremely precise targeting that cannot be achieved using demographic data.

Getting customers’ attention is harder than ever.

With more and more people ignoring generic ad formats, marketers worry that traditional PPC advertising and display ads are losing momentum.

Demographic data is used by everyone

Most demographic data can be accessed by anyone, including your competitors.

To keep their edge, marketers should use their own customer’s data to create more personalized online experiences. That way, marketers can achieve greater ROAS and ROI while ensuring their customers are exposed to the right ads, at the right time.

The next step of behavioral marketing: emotional personalization

Emotions play a pivotal role in every step of the buying process. To truly connect with consumers, brands must decode not just their behaviors, but also the emotional motivations behind their decisions. Purchasing decisions are not always rational, and not everyone reacts in the same way.

With AB Tasty’s new hyper personalization software, EmotionsAI, you can craft tailored messages for each visitor type, analyze data to discern their desires, conduct experiments to refine messaging and design personalized journeys that cater to specific emotional triggers.

Stay ahead of the curve in experience optimization with EmotionsAI – the ultimate tool for mastering emotional personalization. Dive into emotional personalization with sophisticated algorithms to anticipate buying patterns and tailor experiences accordingly.

5 Behavioral targeting marketing and advertisement tactics

  1. Leverage upselling & cross-selling

Knowing what your customers love and how they interact with your business is a massively powerful tool to suggest additional products to them.

Take Spotify. They track the music we listen to and the frequency at which we do it, and then craft personal ads based on our preferences to sell concert tickets and bring us back to their app. Behavioral marketing is that powerful.

Spotify uses customer data

If your company has any e-commerce activities, then you’re likely already familiar with cross-selling and suggested products: techniques that are also powered by behavioral marketing.

Macy uses product recommendations

As an example, Macy’s uses product recommendations to promote related products based on customers’ data, to increase basket value.

2. Use behavioral email marketing campaigns

According to FPS research insights, email marketing still delivers the highest conversion rates when it comes to selling products and services.

FPS research insights

Knowing this, marketers can strengthen their email marketing campaigns by using behavioral targeting tactics.

Basically, behavioral email marketing consists of sending targeted emails to users based on their past actions on a website (cart abandonment, pages visited, newsletter subscription, etc.).

Take this example: Quora’s goal is for you to return to their website as much as possible.

Quora uses behavioral marketing to draw back users

By knowing which pages you’ve read in the past, Quora is able to send personalized emails highlighting similar topics to pique your interest and draw you back to their site.

This is behavioral targeting on an individual scale.

3. Leverage Facebook, Google, and other retargeting services

Retargeting and remarketing are common tactics used to target potential customers who’ve previously visited your website by showing them ads on other websites (like online publications, social networks, or even game sites).

There are several ad networks that support retargeting.

Among them, Facebook and Google are the most common options because they reach large audiences and provide accurate data and analysis on the generated sales. They also boast a lot of integrations with third-party data analysis tools.

Nowadays, the number of factors that can be tracked is impressive:

  • Which pages have been visited?
  • How long were the sessions?
  • Which products were bought?
  • What was the average order value?
  • How many products were purchased?
  • How long has it been since a visitor’s last session?
  • Which customers have added a product to the cart and then abandoned it?

Once marketers have gathered enough behavioral data, they can proceed to create user segments based on behavioral traits and show them highly relevant ads.

Here’s an example of retargeting:

Let’s say your e-commerce generates high cart abandonment rates.

You can create a user segment based on people who have abandoned a specific product (say, your best seller) in their cart and create an ad that will target these users. To increase its efficiency, you can create a sense of urgency by offering them a discount provided that they buy the item now.

If you successfully target the right people, your ad’s audience is now exclusively composed of potential customers who already know your product, thus generating much higher conversion rates.

Although we’ve talked a lot about Facebook and Google’s retargeting features, do not forget that other advertising platforms (like Outbrain or Criteo) can also provide remarketing services.

A retargeted ad appears on Forbes

Your retargeted ads can appear on many websites, including major online publications such as Forbes or WSJ, depending on your audience’s habits and digital media consumption.

4. Go granular with precise geographic targeting

Whether you’re selling products or services, knowing the precise geolocation of your visitors (thanks to their IP addresses) can make a huge difference in your campaign’s success.

Let’s pretend that you run a clothing company that sells year-round fashion. Using your data analytics tool, you could create user segments based on their geolocation to advertise clothes that are relevant to them, given their current browsing location.

Geo-targeted ads can also be served at a city level, meaning that marketers can tailor ads to reach a restricted but qualified audience. This can be especially useful for companies that rely on their respective offices to carry out their business activities.

Using geo-targeted advertising, marketers are able to create specific, tailored audiences that leverage both behavioral and demographic parameters to ensure their campaign’s success.

5. Experiment with personalized coupons, offers, and discounts

Website personalization consists of crafting customized experiences based on consumers’ wants, needs, and past actions as opposed to offering a single, generic experience to all consumers regardless of their preferences.

Retail and tech giants like Amazon have long started to implement some level of website personalization (like wishlists and recommended products). Displaying different content based on a visitor’s personal preferences has become an essential marketing technique.

People don’t hate ads, they hate irrelevant ads.

Knowing this, marketers can create segment-based ads to increase relevancy and boost engagement.

targeted popup ad

This targeted pop-up ad has an offer enclosed to deter users from leaving the site. By using an all-in-one CRO solution (like AB Tasty) you can implement customized content on any page you want and craft your own display rules based on your consumers’ data.

How to create a personalized experience

Our team at AB Tasty knows how much of an impact customized experiences can make on our clients’ online revenue. So, we implemented a loyalty overlay pop-up for one of our French fashion retailers. This overlay pop-up would only appear for loyal customers and reward them with a limited discount.

Our goal was to increase customer retention while maximizing revenue from returning customers, boosting brand loyalty in the very competitive French fashion environment.

popup image

Getting Started with Behavioral Marketing

Behavioral marketing is a powerful way to carry out your marketing strategy. It uses the behaviors of your website visitors and customers to create highly relevant content that encourages them to make a purchase at your website or even in your online store.

This article has discussed some examples of brands successfully using behavioral marketing, but now it’s over to you to try it out for yourself.

Start by choosing one of the tactics shown in this article and see how it can make your advertising more relevant and successful.

Article

3min read

AB Tasty is now available on the Shopify App Store

We’re excited to share that AB Tasty is now available on the Shopify app store. This means it’s easier to use AB Tasty’s leading experimentation and personalization solutions directly on Shopify sites.

The launch marks an important milestone for the partnership between AB Tasty and Shopify, providing a more seamless user experience and keeping experience optimization accessible with easy-to-use solutions.

What this means for Shopify merchants

Brands using Shopify can enhance their commerce sites with AB Tasty to boost conversions and optimize experiences. Set-up is simple: search for AB Tasty in the Shopify App Store and install the tag in just three steps.

Once a site is equipped with AB Tasty, you can easily access your favorite features, run tests, and personalize content throughout the shopping funnel from homepage to cart page.

Building better experiences on your Shopify sites is also easy with AB Tasty’s ready-to-use widget library including interactive features like the scratch card. Or you can create your own custom widget.

When it’s time to check on how your campaigns are performing, track your success with analytics that automatically link Shopify transactions(transaction rate, total number of transactions, average basket, items per transaction, average item price per transaction, etc.) and other transaction data (like currency, coupons, payment method, etc.) to your AB Tasty campaigns. Quickly identify what campaigns work for your audience and where you can make adjustments.

How does it work?

When you are ready to get started, connect AB Tasty with your Shopify site in three steps.

  1. Install the AB Tasty app directly from the Shopify app store.
  2. Enable the extension with your AB Tasty identifier.
  3. Hit save.

Now you can get to work building better experiences for your visitors. Really, that’s it.

Over 100 brands already use AB Tasty & Shopify to optimize their sites

Learn more about how Embark Veterinary’s e-commerce teams use AB Tasty’s experimentation solution to test product copy and increase revenue per session and conversion rate. 

To wrap up

At AB Tasty, we’re your optimization partners helping ignite change from the inside out. That’s why we’re continuously improving the experience of our customers, from new integrations to strengthened partnerships and beyond.

To connect AB Tasty to your Shopify site, get started here.

Article

4min read

The Future of Fashion

5 Pillars to Reshape Customer Experience

In the ever-evolving landscape of fashion and e-commerce, digital innovation has become a driving force behind transforming the customer experience. The intersection of technology and fashion has given rise to new opportunities for brands to connect with their customers in more meaningful and engaging ways. 

In this guest blog post from Conversio, a leading UK-based optimization and analytics agency, we explore key trends in fashion e-commerce and how brands can leverage digital strategies to enhance the customer experience.

1. The Mobile Customer: Shopping on the Go

The mobile customer has become a dominant force in the fashion industry. Today’s consumers expect a seamless and intuitive mobile experience when browsing, shopping, and making purchases. Brands must prioritize mobile optimization, ensuring their websites and apps are responsive, fast-loading, and user-friendly. By providing a frictionless mobile experience, fashion brands can capture the attention and loyalty of the on-the-go consumer.

2. The Rise of Social: Influencing Fashion Choices

Social media platforms have revolutionized the way we discover, engage with, and purchase fashion items. From influencers showcasing the latest trends to shoppable posts and personalized recommendations, social media has become an integral part of the customer journey. Fashion brands must embrace social commerce and leverage these platforms to connect with their audience, build brand awareness, and drive conversions. By actively engaging with customers on social media, brands can create a community around their products and foster brand loyalty.

3. Increasing Returns Rates: The Challenge of Fit and Expectations

One of the ongoing challenges in fashion e-commerce is the issue of increasing returns rates. Customers want convenience and flexibility when it comes to trying on and returning items. Brands must address this challenge by providing accurate size guides, detailed product descriptions, and visual representations. Additionally, incorporating virtual try-on technologies and utilizing user-generated content can help improve the customer’s confidence in their purchase decisions and reduce returns rates.

4. Measuring the Customer Experience

To truly enhance the customer experience, brands must measure and analyze key metrics to gain insights into their customers’ behaviors and preferences. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a crucial aspect of this process. By A/B testing, tracking and optimizing conversion rates, brands can identify areas for improvement and implement strategies to increase conversions. Additionally, measuring customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty through surveys, feedback, and data analytics can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of the customer experience.

5. Improving the Fashion CX through Experimentation

To stay ahead in the competitive fashion industry, brands must embrace a culture of experimentation. A/B testing different elements of the customer experience, such as website layout, product recommendations, and personalized messaging, can help identify what resonates best with customers. By continuously iterating and refining their digital strategies, fashion brands can deliver a more tailored and enjoyable experience for their customers.

Our Key Takeaways

As fashion brands navigate the digital landscape, there are several key takeaways to keep in mind:

  • Brand Perception: Recognise that 90% of new customers won’t see your homepage. Focus on delivering a consistent and compelling brand experience across all touchpoints.
  • Post-Purchase: Extend your focus beyond the conversion. Invest in post-purchase experiences, such as order tracking, personalised recommendations, and exceptional customer service, to foster customer loyalty and encourage repeat purchases.
  • Measure Everything: Establish a robust measurement framework to track and validate the value of your content, campaigns, and overall customer experience. Leverage data to make data-driven decisions and continuously optimize your strategies.

In conclusion, digital fashion has reshaped the customer experience, offering new avenues for engagement, personalization, and convenience. By understanding and embracing key trends, testing and measuring customer experience, and experimenting with innovative strategies, fashion brands can successfully navigate the digital landscape and deliver exceptional experiences that resonate with their target audience.

Want to get more detail? Watch the webinar below:

Article

8min read

How to Rebrand Your Site Using Experimentation in 5 Easy Steps

 

We invited Holly Ingram from our partner REO Digital, an agency dedicated to customer experience, to talk us through the practical ways you can use experimentation when doing a website redesign.

 

Testing entire site redesigns at once is a huge risk. You can throw away years of incremental gains in UX and site performance if executed incorrectly. Not only do they commonly fail to achieve their goals, but they even fail to achieve parity with the old design. That’s why an incremental approach, where you can isolate changes and accurately measure their impact, is most commonly recommended. That being said, some scenarios warrant an entire redesign, in which case, you need a robust evidence-driven process to reduce this risk. 

Step 1 – Generative research to inform your redesign 

With the level of collaboration involved in a redesign, changes must be based on evidence over opinion. There’s usually a range of stakeholders who all have their own ideas about how the website should be improved and despite their best intentions, this process often leads to prioritizing what they feel is important, which doesn’t always align with customers goals. The first step in this process is to carry out research to see your site as your customers do and identify areas of struggle. 

It’s important here to use a combination of quantitative research (to understand how your users behave) and qualitative research (to understand why). Start off broad using quantitative research to identify areas of the site that are performing the worst, looking for high drop-off rates and poor conversion. Now you have your areas of focus you can look at more granular metrics to gather more context on the points of friction. 

  • Scroll maps: Are users missing key information as it’s placed below the fold?  
  • Click maps: Where are people clicking? Where are they not clicking? 
  • Traffic analysis: What traffic source(s) are driving users to that page? What is the split between new and returning? 
  • Usability testing: What do users that fit your target audience think of these pages? What helps them? What doesn’t help? 
  • Competitor analysis: How do your competitors present themselves? How do they tackle the same issues you face?

Each research method has its pros and cons. Keep in mind the hierarchy of evidence. The hierarchy is visually depicted as a pyramid, with the lowest-quality research methods (having the highest risk of bias) at the bottom of the pyramid and the highest-quality methods (with the lowest risk of bias) at the top. When reviewing your findings place more importance on findings that come from research methods at the top of the pyramid, e.g. previous A/B test findings, than research methods that come at the bottom (e.g. competitor analysis).

Step 2 – Prioritise areas that should be redesigned 

Once you have gathered your data and prioritised your findings based on quality of evidence you should be able to see which areas you should focus on first. You should also have an idea of how you might want to improve them. This is where the fun part comes in, and you can start brainstorming ideas. Collaboration is key here to ensure a range of potential solutions are considered. Try and get the perspective of designers, developers, and key stakeholders. Not only will you discover more ideas, but you will also save time as everyone will have context on the changes. 

 It’s not only about design. A common mistake people make when doing a redesign is purely focussing on design and making the page look ‘prettier’, and not changing the content. Through research, you should have identified content that performs well and content that could do with an update. Make sure you consider this when brainstorming.

Step 3 – Pilot your redesign through a prototype 

It can be tempting once you’ve come up with great ideas to go ahead and launch it. Even if you are certain this new page will perform miles better than the original, you’d be surprised how often you’re wrong. Before you go ahead and invest a lot of time and money into building your new page,  it’s a good idea to get some outside opinions from your target audience. The quickest way to do this is to build a prototype and get users to feedback on it through user testing. See what their attention is drawn to, if there’s anything on the page they don’t like or think is missing. It’s much quicker to make these changes before launching than after. 

Step 4 – A/B test your redesign to know with statistical certainty whether your redesign performs better

Now you have done all this work conducting research, defining problem statements, coming up with hypotheses, ideating solutions and getting feedback, you want to see if your solution actually works better!

However, do not make the mistake of jumping straight into launching on your website. Yes it will be quicker, but you will never be able to quantify the difference all of that work has made to your key metrics. You may see conversion rate increase, but how do you know that is due to the redesign and nothing else (e.g. a marketing campaign or special offer deployed around the same time)? Or worse, you see conversion rate decrease and automatically assume it must be down to the redesign when in fact it’s not.  

With an A/B test you can rule out outside noise. For simplicity, imagine the scenario where you have launched your redesign, in reality it made no difference, but due to a successful marketing campaign around the same time you saw an increase in conversion rate. If you had launched your redesign as an A/B test, you would see no difference between the control and the variant, as both would have been equally affected by the marketing campaign. 

This is why it is crucial you A/B test your redesign. Not only will you be able to quantify the difference your redesign has made, you will be able to tell whether that change is statistically significant. This means you will know the probability that the change you have seen is due to the test rather than random chance. This can help minimize the risk that redesigns often bring.  

Once you have your results you can then choose whether you want to launch the redesign to 100% of users, which you can do through the testing tool whilst you wait for the changes to be hardcoded. As the redesign has already been built for the A/B test, hardcoding it should be a lot quicker!

Step 5 – Evaluative research to validate how your redesign performs 

Research shouldn’t stop once the redesign has been launched. We recommend conducting post-launch analysis to evaluate how it performs over time. This especially helps measure metrics that have a longer lead time, such as returns or cancellations.

Redesigns are susceptible to visitor bias, as rolling out a completely different experience can be shocking and uncomfortable for your returning visitors. They are also susceptible to novelty effects, where users can react more positively just because something looks new and shiny. In either case, these effects will wear off with time. That’s why it’s important to monitor performance after it’s deployment.

Things to look out for: 

  • Bounce rate 
  • On-page metrics (scroll rate, click-throughs, heatmap, mouse tracking) 
  • Conversion rate 
  • Funnel progression 
  • Difference in performance for new vs. returning users 

Redesigns are all about preparation. It may seem thorough, but it should be with such a big change. If you follow the right process you could dramatically increase sales and conversions, but if done wrong you may have wasted some serious time, effort and money. Don’t skimp on the research and keep a user-centred approach and you could create a website your audience loves.

If you want to find out more about how a redesign worked with a real customer of AB Tasty’s and REO – take a look at this webinar where La Redoute details how they tested the new redesign of their site and sought continuous improvement.

Article

10min read

Overcoming the Challenges of Customer Experience Optimization (EXO): Strategies and Tips

The combination of intense competition and rapidly evolving technology requires businesses to prioritize customer experience optimization (EXO) to stay ahead.

The fact is, the cost of poor customer experience is high. According to a PWC survey, a third of consumers would stop using a brand they love after just one negative interaction.

In this article, we look at some common EXO challenges businesses face and strategies to overcome them, including practical insights for enhancing the digital customer experience. By implementing these strategies, you can ensure your business takes a customer-centric approach to optimizing the customer experience and building brand loyalty.

What is customer experience optimization?

Customer experience optimization refers to everything your business does to improve the customer’s experience at every touchpoint of their journey. It entails deeply understanding your customer’s needs and preferences and leveraging these insights to develop strategies to improve their interactions with your brand.

In today’s digital landscape, customers are flooded with choices across most categories of products and services. As a result, if you fail to deliver a positive experience, your customers will simply switch to a competing brand. EXO strategies are designed to keep customers satisfied and engaged, build brand loyalty, and reduce churn.

With EXO, it’s essential to deliver an experience that surpasses customers’ expectations and provides them with a seamless experience across all touchpoints and channels, including websites, mobile apps, social media accounts, and email.

Why customer experience optimization is important for business growth

First and foremost, EXO streamlines the customer’s path to purchase. Offering customers a frictionless, positive journey that makes it easy for them to get the information they need to make their purchase decision increases the likelihood of a successful transaction.

Customer EXO is also an ideal way to foster brand loyalty. Customers who have a superior experience with your brand are more likely to become repeat buyers. In fact, Deloitte research shows that a high-quality customer experience makes a customer 2.7 times more likely to keep buying from a business than a low-quality experience. Not only are customers likely to return, but they will also pay up to 16% more for an optimized experience, depending on the product category.

Positive experiences also trigger word-of-mouth recommendations, enhancing your brand’s reputation. Recommendations don’t entail the same acquisition costs as traditional marketing methods, making EXO a comparatively cost-effective way to boost sales and expand your customer base.

Challenges and solutions to customer experience optimization

We recognize there are challenges associated with EXO that may prevent you from delivering the best possible experience to your customers. Here are some strategies for tackling these challenges.

Compiling the right data for accurate measurements

Thanks to the various technologies available, we can now access a wealth of customer data. If interpreted and applied correctly, this data offers invaluable insights into the customer experience and ways of enhancing it. However, the sheer volume of these metrics can lead to information overload. It’s easy to get distracted or focus on the wrong metrics, including pitfall metrics that result in misinformed conclusions when considered in isolation. Some metrics, like cost of sale or cross-sell, don’t offer any meaningful insights into EXO.

The solution is to prioritize the metrics that matter. These include:

  • Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
  • Churn rates
  • Bounce rates
  • Customer retention rates
  • Trust ratings, conversion rates
  • Customer journey analytics
  • Repeat purchases
  • Customer segmentation
  • Buyer personas
  • Customer lifetime value (CLV)
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Keep in mind that this data may reside in various departments across your organization, extending beyond sales, marketing and customer service teams. Consolidating this disparate data is essential to gaining a complete and accurate picture of customer experience in your organization.

Developing the right hypothesis

Experimentation is a powerful tool for delivering an optimal customer experience. However, randomly choosing hypotheses to test is a quick route to overlooking optimization opportunities. For example, simply changing the location of the checkout button in response to low conversion rates may not address the underlying issue.

Effective experimentation requires a considered approach to develop the correct hypothesis to test. The first step is identifying the genuine problem that needs addressing. You can then formulate a hypothesis to test to uncover the root cause of the issue and identify a concrete solution.

This second step requires a critical analysis of your current site and potential improvements from the customers’ perspective. Sourcing a range of data, including web analytics, user tests, and customer feedback, can help guide your analysis. You should also consider the psychology of the prospective customer. Getting in their mindset can guide you toward potential solutions.

If we continue with our checkout button example, the core issue may extend beyond conversion rates to a more specific concern: high cart abandonment rates. A hypothesis with a potential solution to this issue may be: “Many customers exit the checkout process at step 5. Reducing the number of steps in our checkout process will reduce cart abandonment rates.” Crafting the right hypothesis is a crucial step in optimizing customer experience.

Resource constraints

Ideally, businesses would have unlimited resources to optimize customer experiences. However, in reality, EXO usually competes with numerous other business priorities, all vying for time, human, and financial resources. Investing in the infrastructure and technology for EXO can be costly. Hiring and retaining people with the necessary skills to implement effective optimization strategies can also be challenging. Data availability is another common resource issue, especially for businesses with lower website traffic who feel they need more information for optimization.

The good news is you can tailor your approach to EXO to align with your business’s circumstances. This includes starting with smaller-scale initiatives and expanding your efforts as your optimization strategies gain traction or more resources become available. Another option is to outsource EXO by engaging the services of a specialist customer optimization agency.

It’s also important to note that high-volume website traffic isn’t a prerequisite for identifying and implementing effective EXO strategies. While a 95% confidence level is often cited as the magic number for drawing meaningful conclusions from your data, you can still optimize websites with less traffic by lowering the threshold. Focusing on optimizing the top of the funnel, where there may be greater opportunities for EXO, is another useful strategy for low-traffic websites.

Related: How to Deal with Low Traffic in CRO

ROI tunnel vision

When a company works on improving EXO, its main focus is often on immediate ROI in experimentation, sometimes at the expense of other important metrics. While the bottom line is relevant to any business strategy, focusing solely on the financial outcomes of EXO can lead to short-sighted decision-making, jeopardizing longer-term sustainability.

Prioritizing immediate revenue gain above all else can negatively impact the customer experience. It makes it almost impossible for an organization to adopt a customer-centric approach, a fundamental requirement for EXO.

Experimentation isn’t always neatly quantifiable. Experiments are typically run within complex contexts and are influenced by various factors. While measuring ROI may be a criterion when assessing the success of your EXO strategies, it should never be the primary or sole one. Instead, shift your focus to the broader impacts of experimentation, like its contribution to better, more informed decision-making.

Not knowing what your customers want

A customer-centric approach is vital to delivering an optimal customer experience. This requires an in-depth understanding of who your customers are, their needs and preferences, and precisely how they interact with your business. Without these insights, you’re in the dark about what your customers want and when they want it. Meeting—let alone exceeding—customers’ expectations is impossible.

Customer wants and needs are as diverse as your customer base. They may include a desire for higher levels of personalization, seamless online interactions, flexible payment methods, faster customer support, better pricing, transparency or increased mobile responsiveness. What customers want also evolves as their journey progresses. If your EXO strategies fail to align with your customers’ desires at the right time, they are unlikely to succeed.

While there are several ways to uncover customer needs and wants, one of the most effective methods is to go directly to the source. Collecting customer feedback at each stage of their journey—via surveys, feedback management systems, voice of customers, and user interviews—lets you tailor your EXO strategies and deliver the improvements your customers truly want.

Lack of customer experience optimization tools

Successful EXO relies on quality data for insights into your customers’ journeys, needs, and preferences. To achieve this, you need the right tools to capture and analyze accurate data in real-time across multiple channels.

These tools include:

  • CRM systems to track historical customer behavior and relationships
  • Customer feedback and survey software to collect individual feedback for deep insights into what your customers want
  • Behavior analytics tools to interpret your customers’ interactions and identify opportunities to improve their experience
  • Experience optimization platforms, like AB Tasty, to design and deliver digital omnichannel customer experiences via experimentation

It’s important to review the needs of your EXO strategy and the available tools to choose the ones that best align with your customers’ and business’s needs.

How to improve the digital customer experience

  • Observe user behavior patterns

A robust data foundation lets you observe and understand customer behavior individually and identify broader trends. This information serves as a compass, guiding your EXO efforts.

Customer insights may reveal common pain points. For example, a frequently searched term may highlight a topic customers want more information on. These insights also help you understand how users interact with your site, how that impacts their journey, and potential improvements. Is there a particular page where customers spend a lot of time? Do they have to navigate back and forth between pages to find the details they need?

Behavior patterns also reveal customer preferences, allowing you to personalize touchpoints within their journey and identify what triggers customers to complete their purchases. These insights serve as a powerful foundation for developing EXO strategies and hypotheses for A/B testing.

  • Create a journey map to understand the user flow

EXO involves optimizing every customer interaction with your business. A common pitfall to avoid when addressing EXO is approaching it narrowly from a specific touchpoint rather than considering the entire customer journey. A holistic approach delivers more impactful insights that help you manage the root causes of negative or neutral customer experiences.

A great way to understand your user flow and how it affects customer experience is to create a journey map, setting out every touchpoint during the buying process. Navigate your website like a potential customer, systematically stepping through the user journey and noting your findings.

Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes ensures you don’t overlook opportunities to optimize customer experience. This approach can also help you prioritize measures that make the user journey frictionless, improving customer experience and your site’s performance.

  • Develop a roadmap and set parameters to measure success

The list of available EXO measures is endless. Aligning your strategy with your business objectives requires a considered approach to implementation. To do this, develop a roadmap that outlines your goals, priorities and milestones.

A well-structured roadmap gives your team clear direction and deadlines while guiding decision-making to ensure the greatest impact on customer experience. Everyone understands their role, guaranteeing accountability in the execution of your EXO strategy. It also helps you prioritize initiatives and allocate the necessary resources, including EXO tools.

In your roadmap, you can list the specific metrics and KPIs to measure and track your progress. Doing this allows you to evaluate your EXO measures, readjust those not delivering results, and build on particularly effective ones.

  • Experiment and re-challenge your past experiments

You’re unlikely to unlock the secret to EXO in your organization on the first try. Instead, you’ll need to run continuous experiments using different hypotheses to find the right combination of strategies that work for your business.

The customer experience is dynamic and your EXO strategies should be equally adaptable. Continue to review your previous experiments to see what more you can learn from them, especially in terms of customer preferences. This process enables you to identify emerging opportunities for improvement and further refine the measures with the most impact to deliver an optimal customer experience.

Customer-centric EXO

Acknowledging that your business must prioritize customer EXO is just the beginning. By understanding the customer experience definition, common EXO challenges, and practical strategies to overcome them, you have the tools to deliver a consistently superior customer experience. By integrating a customer-centric ethos with your EXO strategies, you’ll not only strengthen current customer relationships but also cultivate enduring brand loyalty.

Article

8min read

Best Practice for Optimizing Mobile vs. Desktop Experiences

Best Practice for Optimizing Mobile vs Desktop Experiences

For product and web teams, the prospect of mobile is both wonderful and terrifying. The wonderful: your product or website is available all the time! The terrifying: you now have to create and develop two (or three, or four) user experiences, all at once.

While your customers probably walk around with their phones all the time, they may also spend the majority of their workday on a desktop computer. They might browse your mobile website or app during sporadic free moments throughout the day, then finish their customer journey later, when they’re not limited by small screen sizes and thumb-based typing.

The bottom line? Your entire product experience needs to be seamless, and combined across all platforms and devices. When you’re building an app, chances are you’re building a desktop version for web browsers, and at least two versions for mobile: iOS and Android. Given that people might also use the app on their phone’s web browser—a different experience than on a desktop but not quite the same as a native phone app—it’s easy to wonder where to start with the design process!

Below we’ve outlined some key tips for doing just that.

Plan an Entire Digital Experience

Regardless, your designs across both desktop and mobile have two requirements right out of the gate: they must be intuitive, and they must be accessible for people with disabilities.

You’ll also want to consider the fact that designing apps with a “mobile first” mindset is now a standard, because 1) users will expect to be able to access your digital ecosystem from their phones, and 2) web apps that are optimized for mobile rank higher on Google, which can lead to more conversions.

Before you start designing your app, make sure you plan to accommodate the key differences between desktop and mobile:

Both desktop and mobile experiences are crucial for customer conversion and retention, but often in different ways and in different circumstances. Below, we’ll take a look at best practices for keeping your mobile and desktop experiences updated and healthy for your sales funnel.

Best Practice for the Mobile Digital Experience

Whether your mobile experience exists within a dedicated iOS or Android app or simply as a responsive web-based app, there are some key best practices to be aware of when building your design strategy to maximize conversions and retention.

1. Keep it accessible, always

If your website or app is used by the public, it legally must comply with accessibility standards. These include:

  • Text size options
  • Large, easy-to-use buttons and CTAs
  • Minimum color contrast ratios
  • Simple touchscreen gestures
  • Adjustable screen orientation
  • Compatibility with screen readers
  • Content translation ability

2. Make sure your mobile content is consistent with desktop

If your users regularly hop between their computer and phones, it’s important that they can easily and consistently find what they need. This can include information, tools, actions, products, and more. If they’re available on desktop, they should also be available on mobile!

For example, if you have a menu on your desktop app that offers users different ways to contact customer service but it’s missing on mobile, it will likely cause frustration when users are trying to get help on the go.

3. Consider your mobile users’ needs

Ask yourself: What data, tools, or functions will your users be accessing? Make everything easy to find, navigate, and use. This might start with an intuitive navigation system that lets users easily:

  • Make purchases
  • Find specific tools they love to use
  • Manage their account or subscription
  • Get help from your support team

You’ll also want to consider what your different users will be trying to do and from where. Will they be using cellular data (slow) or wi-fi (fast)? Will they be reserving certain actions for mobile vs. desktop? Will tasks that may have started on a processor-heavy desktop app later migrate to mobile (or vice versa)?

For example, a video editor might need to use a desktop app to edit terabytes’ worth of cinema-quality video before switching to mobile to share the final piece on social media. Personal workflows might vary, but it all gets down to having the right tools on hand at all times.

4. Check how your site and app perform across different devices

You’ve built your iOS app. You’ve built your Android app. Your responsive website’s parameters are set so they’ll adjust responsively for users accessing from phones and tablets.

Now comes the testing. App Store or Google Play installations should work seamlessly. Each button, form, menu, and action must work flawlessly. Load times should be fast, and there should be little to no latency between screens (though this can vary with web-based apps, depending on how they’re constructed).

For responsive sites, each element will have CSS parameters that dictate how it will appear on a phone, tablet, or desktop computer. You don’t need separate versions of your website, but each element must be tagged correctly so it renders properly on each device.

5. Make UX choices that encourage conversion and retention

Good UX (user experience) comes from good user research and robust product analytics, but it’s customer conversion and retention that will keep your app alive. If users buy items or services through your app, you’ll want to keep these top UX tips in mind:

  • Never hide menus and navigation options.
  • Make search bars easy to find.
  • Make product browsing simple.
  • Choose familiar, suitable icons for cart checkout processes.
  • Label all icons, buttons, and navigation items.
  • Make checkout funnels easy (including credit card selection/adding), or incorporate simple payment options like Apple Pay or Google Pay.
  • Consider adding a subscription option so users can set it once and forget it!

Don’t forget that there are product analytics tools available to analyze the particular actions your users take, including Session Replays. These help you identify which parts of your UX design are working and which parts are causing friction.

Best Practice for Desktop Optimization

Desktop apps (many of which are web-based) are also commonly used and have more screen real estate to work with. Here are five tips to optimize your desktop experience to convert (and retain) new customers:

1. Create an engaging homepage

A great UX on your homepage can make or break conversion rates. When you’ve spent time and resources optimizing SEO, you’ll want to give potential customers a good first impression with a strong design. Here’s what we recommend to maximize conversion and retention:

  • Keep your design simple with a single, clear CTA.
  • Make sure it meets accessibility standards.
  • Use a catchy headline and simple buzzwords to make your value proposition clear and concise.
  • Choose the right colors by employing and understanding color psychology.
  • Differentiate hyperlinked text with an accent color.
  • Embrace white space! Space around your text can keep people reading it.
  • Use well-lit, professional images and videos where they fit organically.
  • Again, make sure your site is responsive to serve mobile users!

2. Improve website speed

Nothing deflects a website visitor faster than a glacially slow load time. To avoid losing possible customers, you can:

  • Optimize your images by saving compressed versions at 72dpi.
  • Limit the number of assets needed to load your page correctly—this can help reduce HTTP requests, which speeds up load times.
  • Limit the use of external scripts.
  • Remove unnecessary text, white space, and comments from CSS and Javascript files.
  • Use browser HTTP caching—this can offer faster load times for users who frequently visit your site.

3. Develop intuitive site navigation

Site navigation—typically in the form of a top menu, side-bar menu, or organized icons—shows users what to do once they reach your site. Use descriptive labels for each item, and simplify drop-down menu structures so users won’t get overwhelmed.

4. Make it easy to search for terms

Adding a search bar to your top menu can be a great way to give users a way to search your site for any term (or action) they want. This gives them a shortcut to find exactly what they need!

5. Ready your desktop site for final steps of conversion and retention

Often, consumers are more likely to say that desktop offers a more “convenient” shopping experience than mobile, and a majority of people complete purchases on a desktop.

As such, desktop websites are still used and still valuable, particularly for final conversation and ongoing retention. Whether it’s because customers are making complex purchases or simply seeing your checkout funnel more clearly on desktop, it’s essential to make sure every step of your experience is seamless.

Once you’ve converted customers, it can also help to keep track of their preferences so you can personalize their experience going forward.

Gain Valuable Insights with Heap

This is a guest blog written by Ben Lempert, Head of Content and Web at Heap.

Heap And AB Tasty provide businesses with the ability to collect and analyze user data efficiently, leading to more informed decisions and higher conversion rates. This dynamic combination offers a comprehensive solution for optimizing web experiences and increasing revenue through data-driven strategies.

Curious how you can find out what your users are doing across both desktop and mobile? Heap offers tools to help you track, measure, and ultimately optimize every touchpoint of users’ journeys across your entire digital experience.