AB Tasty is a complete tool for website and conversion rate optimization. We serve as your digital lab, equipped with everything you need to create experiments that will help you to better understand your users and customer journeys so that you can create the clearest and most engaging user experience possible, ensuring your website performs well and yields the maximum results.
Statistical hypothesis testing implies that no test is ever 100% certain: that’s because we rely on probabilities to experiment.
When online marketers and scientists run hypothesis tests, they’re both looking for statistically relevant results. This means that the results of their tests have to be true within a range of probabilities (typically 95%).
Even though hypothesis tests are meant to be reliable, there are two types of errors that can still occur.
Let’s dive in and understand what type 1 and type 2 errors are and the difference between the two.
Understanding Type I Errors
Type 1 errors – often assimilated with false positives – happen in hypothesis testing when the null hypothesis is true but rejected. The null hypothesis is a general statement or default position that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena.
Simply put, type 1 errors are “false positives” – they happen when the tester validates a statistically significant difference even though there isn’t one.
Type 1 errors have a probability of “α” correlated to the level of confidence that you set. A test with a 95% confidence level means that there is a 5% chance of getting a type 1 error.
Consequences of a Type 1 Error
Why do type 1 errors occur? Type 1 errors can happen due to bad luck (the 5% chance has played against you) or because you didn’t respect the test duration and sample size initially set for your experiment.
Consequently, a type 1 error will bring in a false positive. This means that you will wrongfully assume that your hypothesis testing has worked even though it hasn’t.
In real-life situations, this could potentially mean losing possible sales due to a faulty assumption caused by the test.
Let’s say that you want to increase conversions on a banner displayed on your website. For that to work out, you’ve planned on adding an image to see if it increases conversions or not.
You start your A/B test by running a control version (A) against your variation (B) that contains the image. After 5 days, variation (B) outperforms the control version by a staggering 25% increase in conversions with an 85% level of confidence.
You stop the test and implement the image in your banner. However, after a month, you noticed that your month-to-month conversions have actually decreased.
That’s because you’ve encountered a type 1 error: your variation didn’t actually beat your control version in the long run.
Want to avoid these types of errors during your digital experiments?
AB Tasty is an a/b testing tool embedded with AI and automation that allows you to quickly set up experiments, track insights via our dashboard, and determine which route will increase your revenue.
Understanding Type II Errors
In the same way that type 1 errors are commonly referred to as “false positives”, type 2 errors are referred to as “false negatives”.
Type 2 errors happen when you inaccurately assume that no winner has been declared between a control version and a variation although there actually is a winner.
In more statistically accurate terms, type 2 errors happen when the null hypothesis is false and you subsequently fail to reject it.
If the probability of making a type 1 error is determined by “α”, the probability of a type 2 error is “β”. Beta depends on the power of the test (i.e the probability of not committing a type 2 error, which is equal to 1-β).
There are 3 parameters that can affect the power of a test:
Your sample size (n)
The significance level of your test (α)
The “true” value of your tested parameter (read more here)
Consequences of a Type 2 Error
Similarly to type 1 errors, type 2 errors can lead to false assumptions and poor decision-making that can result in lost sales or decreased profits.
Moreover, getting a false negative (without realizing it) can discredit your conversion optimization efforts even though you could have proven your hypothesis. This can be a discouraging turn of events that could happen to any CRO expert and/or digital marketer.
A Real-Life Example of a Type 2 Error
Let’s say that you run an e-commerce store that sells cosmetic products for consumers. In an attempt to increase conversions, you have the idea to implement social proof messaging on your product pages, like NYX Professional Makeup.
You launch an A/B test to see if the variation (B) could outperform your control version (A).
After a week, you do not notice any difference in conversions: both versions seem to convert at the same rate and you start questioning your assumption. Three days later, you stop the test and keep your product page as it is.
At this point, you assume that adding social proof messaging to your store didn’t have any effect on conversions.
Two weeks later, you hear that a competitor had added social proof messages at the same time and observed tangible gains in conversions. You decide to re-run the test for a month in order to get more statistically relevant results based on an increased level of confidence (say 95%).
After a month – surprise – you discover positive gains in conversions for the variation (B). Adding social proof messages under the purchase buttons on your product pages has indeed brought your company more sales than the control version.
That’s right – your first test encountered a type 2 error!
Why are Type I and Type II Errors Important?
Type one and type two errors are errors that we may encounter on a daily basis. It’s important to understand these errors and the impact that they can have on your daily life.
With type 1 errors you are making an incorrect assumption and can lose time and resources. Type 2 errors can result in a missed opportunity to change, enhance, and innovate a project.
To avoid these errors, it’s important to pay close attention to the sample size and the significance level in each experiment.
Say hello to Custom Widgets and goodbye to time-consuming back-and-forths when scaling ambitious customer experiences. With Custom Widgets, scale your best CX ideas across teams, brands and markets. AB Tasty has the largest widget library on the market, providing brands with over 25 pre-built ways to quickly engage consumers including scratch cards, NPS surveys and countdowns. But now we’re also giving you the ability to build, customize and share your own widgets! 🤩
Optimize the workflow between marketers, designers and developers
Custom Widgets are an innovation catalyst that fosters cross-team collaboration to bring ideas to life. Developers can now create highly customizable widgets following a step-by-step process. They simply code the different parts of the widgets using HTML, CSS and JavaScript and add various configuration options👩💻. This allows designers to easily tailor the widgets and ensure they meet brand guidelines 👨🎨. Marketers can then customize them for their campaign needs 🙋♀️.The new possibilities to engage with visitors are endless: wheel of fortune, carousels, lightboxes, etc. These Custom Widgets result in an optimized workflow that saves everyone time but still delivers exciting experiences. 💪
Create and scale a library of your best CX ideas
All Custom Widgets created (by developers, agencies, or AB Tasty) will be available in the widget library shared across all affiliates and accounts of a company. The library, accessible from the dashboard, is a great source of inspiration and ideationthat will speed up time to market and facilitate deployment across brands and markets ✨. The widget library will also include our existing widgets with selected use cases from AB Tasty clients to further guide you in creating the best customer journey. And, like with any other widget, marketers can easily customize the content and combine it with AB Tasty’s targeting to create powerful personalized campaigns with no coding skills and in minutes 🏃♀️.
Not sure where to start?
In our new widget library, our users can already enjoy 2 custom widgets available on the platform, a Wheel of Fortune and a gradient CTA button, that they can duplicate and modify to dive into how they work. On that same page they can click on “Create a custom widget” and follow our step-by-step process 🧐.
Why not try them now? If you’re looking for inspiration for your first Custom Widgets, check out our 30 Black Friday Tests ebook. It features successful tests from brands like Degrenne, a French cutlery and tableware retailer whose quality products are a staple in the hospitality industry. They wanted to accelerate the purchase process and provide a consistent omnichannel experience to their consumers. Using our widgets they gave their visitors the ability to see item availability in their local store 👇.
If you want to replicate this, your developers can create a Custom Widget that leverages geolocation data to create a pop-up displaying product availability in nearby stores. Your customers will be able to reserve their items and opt for in-store pickup. Once available in the widget library, other brands or countries you work with can access it, modify it and leverage it to provide their visitors with an omnichannel experience.
André Morys shares the key to a thriving business in today’s market: a fearless attitude toward innovation and experimentation
André Morys has been involved in the field of experimentation for almost three decades. The CEO and founder of konversionsKRAFT discovered the importance of the user experience upon launching his e-commerce optimization company in 1996. He followed the evolution of high-end UX measurement solutions and AB testing throughout the 2000s, turning his focus entirely to experimentation and experience optimization in 2010.
Powered by his fascination for measuring the outcomes of the customer and user experience, including the financial impact of optimizing them, André uses his expertise to guide his clients through the experimentation process in a clear and efficient manner.
AB Tasty’s VP Marketing Marylin Montoya spoke with André about cultivating an experimentation mindset – that is, how to build a culture of experimentation that embraces failure and risk-taking – in order to innovate in competitive markets as an experimentation-driven company.
Here are some of the key takeaways from their conversation.
Risk and failure are integral components of innovation
Many risk-averse companies hesitate to implement experimentation due to their mindset around failure. When adopting a culture of experimentation, it’s essential to understand the fact that, despite prior research and preparation, failure is a part of the innovation and testing process. Most tests will produce negative results … but this shouldn’t be interpreted as failure.
Overcoming our personal beliefs and shame around failure and encouraging managers to lead by example will allow companies to embrace the experimentation process. This means discussing and deducing insights from failures within a team setting and allowing it to be a learning opportunity. Experimentation offers the chance for teams to evolve in how they see, feel and talk about failure and to focus on being solution-oriented rather than striving for perfectionism.
André also explains that while experimentation may seem risky, it is actually a way to control the level of risk linked to innovation. With experimentation comes feedback, allowing you to gauge the success of a particular feature or improvement, as opposed to naively rolling it out without any prior experimentation and simply hoping for the best.
Experimentation should always be linked to strategic goals and measured
The ROI of experimentation comes in many forms. André uses a “digital experimentation framework” to implement the experimentation process and measure progress. In relation to his “Iceberg Model”, while the tip of the iceberg represents the metrics that are measurable, many important factors lay beneath the surface and are difficult to measure, resulting in people underestimating the value of experimentation.
“You cannot measure the influence of experimentation towards your company’s culture and how big and…sustaining this effect will be. It will be maybe 10 times more important than the actual uplift you create,” says André.
Once discovering the process, many managers agree that a shift in culture, inventiveness and velocity is more powerful than an improvement in metrics. Meaning, there is a shift toward changing what’s below the surface (company culture) in order to have a bigger long-term impact, rather than focusing on the tip of the iceberg (metrics).
A frequent mistake that companies make is not aligning their goals of experimentation to their strategic goals, creating the possibility that their experimentation might be irrelevant. Using the experimentation framework to optimize the process with shared goals from the beginning will produce the best outcome.
Use gamification to engage teams and build a culture of experimentation
Overcoming resistance within companies to jump into experimentation doesn’t have to be difficult; in fact, it can even be fun!
Involving teams with guessing games and placing bets on which test won, for example, is a simple yet effective method to educate people and to create a pull towards experimentation. This technique also creates a sense of humility and allows people to realize that their hypotheses may fail and the customer could have a differing opinion.
Documenting the experimentation process and results is also important for encouraging cultural change. Connecting people to the outcomes enables learning and better engagement with the experimentation process, which in turn increases motivation to further improve. Rather than pushing people towards experimentation, you can create a natural attraction to it and a sense of personal investment by using metrics as feedback and creating a flywheel.
An experimentation dashboard is key to showing the health of your experimentation process. André highlights the importance of running effective tests, being sure to focus testing on the right areas, rather than striving for high velocity and volume of experiments. The goal should be experimentation quality, not quantity, and ensuring that important metrics are stored on a dashboard to facilitate cultural change.
What else can you learn from our conversation with André Morys
The three catalysts for innovation and why experimentation is a key component
How perfectionism blocks experimentation and the evolving experimentation culture in Germany
The status quo bias and why management might resist change within an organization
How the pandemic shifted companies’ focus towards digital growth
About André Morys
André Morys has almost three decades of experience in digital growth and business optimization, founding konversionsKRAFT in 1996. Today, his company is the leading business optimization consultancy in the DACH region, with more than 80 consultants, designers and conversion experts.
Specialized in research, consulting and lecturing, André combines qualitative research, consumer psychology and behavioral economics with data and experimentation to deliver the most effective growth programs for enterprise clients.
André’s reading recommendations:
“Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments” by Stefan H. Thomke
The 1,000 Experiments Club is an AB Tasty-produced podcast hosted by Marylin Montoya, VP of Marketing at AB Tasty. Join Marylin and the Marketing team as they sit down with the most knowledgeable experts in the world of experimentation to uncover their insights on what it takes to build and run successful experimentation programs.
Customer centricity might be one of the buzzwords of business today, but the demand for good service is hardly new. So why does it suddenly matter so much nowadays?
In our rapidly-changing, technology-driven, multichannel society, the product itself is no longer the sole reason for a customer to interact with your brand. The entirety of the purchasing process is crucial, as it shapes repeat purchases and customer loyalty, lifetime customer value and broader engagement with your brand. As we’ve seen when discussing the experience economy, experience matters – and if you can create this layer of value beyond the mere acquisition of your product, you can get ahead of the game.
Multichannel means both digital and physical touchpoints: e-commerce stores alongside physical stores, AI-driven service tools alongside customer call centers. Mastering all of these is essential, but where in-person experiences can be managed on an individual and human-controlled basis, digital experiences rely on technology in the back end and the user journey mapping your team has established when building your website and mobile app.
Given the autonomy with which customers approach digital interactions with your brand, ensuring your online channels are operating smoothly, the transaction and checkout process is clear and bug-free, the page load times are imperceptible, and key information like shipping and returns policies are readily available builds the bare-minimum experience that customers now expect. The next step is to ramp it up and add the “wow” factor.
Customers now expect “wow” experiences when shopping both online and in-person (Source)
A great way to knock the socks off your customers is by personalizing their experience, leveraging the power of data to curate an exclusive and relevant interaction for them each time they visit your site. Think about tailored product recommendations and discount offers or content that’s targeted to each visitor’s unique desires. If you nail personalization, you’ll also go a long way to nailing retention and repeat business: according to a report by Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to buy from companies that remember them and provide relevant offers. Not convinced? On the flip side, 74% of customers get frustrated when content has nothing to do with them. Is that a risk you’re willing to run when it comes to how your brand is perceived? Bottom line, bring the “wow” or your customers will go elsewhere.
How to go from functional to “wow” customer experiences
In previous posts, we’ve explored the notion of experience optimization, and that’s your starting point when it comes to customer experience. Here we’re referring to smooth, glitch-free transactions on functional websites with clear CTAs that drive conversion. It’s the bare minimum required in the e-commerce space today, and it’s driven by a continuous feedback loop founded on A/B testing and leveraging customer data to ensure your platform is always optimized.
The bare minimum might keep your business viable, but if you want to go to the next level, experience innovation is the next step toward CX that makes your consumers go wow. Competition in the online shopping space is intense and the leaders secure their advantage by investing in innovation and going beyond the basic transactional elements of product acquisition.
Experience innovation is key for wowing your customers (Source)
Put optimization and innovation together and what do you get? That “wow” experience that puts you ahead of your the competition and keeps customers coming back for more. It’s an improve, adapt, anticipate process flow that typifies this dynamic:
Improve: Start with basic UX improvements to your website to increase your conversions.
Adapt: Learn and streamline your process so that the team can focus on efficiency and what drives value.
Anticipate: Surpass your customers’ expectations by creating agility in your optimization, experimentation and innovation approaches that enable creativity and sparkling results.
Being meaningful and memorable seems like a no-brainer of a strategy, right? Personalize, optimize and innovate, and you’ll be top of mind in your category and driving conversion and revenue all the way to the bank.
Three keys for ramping up your customer experience
1. Data-powered customer insights
Knowing and understanding your customers is essential to recognizing – and eventually anticipating – their needs. The best approach to building this understanding is through a solid data foundation that will allow you to collect and analyze data about customer behaviors and trends. Customers trust brands that protect their personal data, so being transparent about data collection and use, and setting up a robust approach to collating and processing that data, will ensure that you retain that all-important trust factor while building a workable infrastructure that serves your optimization and experimentation roadmap. From here, you can understand customer intent: what they’re looking for, what their needs and wants are, and how you can tailor your offering to meet and exceed these expectations. When you get to the point where you know what your customers want before they realize it themselves, you’ll be poised to deliver that next-level experience.
2. Create a personalized experience
Your data foundation will also drive your personalization efforts and help you go far beyond that name in a direct email. Given 48% of consumers spend more when their experience is personalized, this is another sure-fire strategy to knock your CX out of the park and deliver returns to your business as well. UK-based beauty retailer Fragrance Direct used personalization to great effect during the holiday period, designing a “Fragrance Finder” tool that provided tailored product suggestions in response to a series of questions about the user’s needs. By then targeting site visitors with a “Searching for a gift?” CTA, the brand leveraged high-traffic shopping periods to both fulfill their customers needs and optimize their experience. This personalized approach delivered a 10% increase in user conversion during peak shopping periods alongside an exceptional experience for Fragrance Direct’s customers.
3. Deliver superior interactions through omnichannel coverage
Omnichannel strategy comprises brand touchpoints that cover both in-person, in-store interactions and online web, mobile and social retailing and exchanges that are powered by data, tools and AI. According to Harvard Business Review (HBR), this strategy is built on the notion that shopping experiences across multiple touchpoints – both brick-and-mortar and online stores – not only differentiates retailers from their peers but gives them an advantage over single-channel businesses. Enabling your customers to engage with you whenever and however they feel like delivers better returns. By powering these experiences with tools like chatbots, self-service and human-driven help centers, you can keep customers coming back again and again.
Fuel customer loyalty by optimizing shopping experiences across multiple touchpoints (Source)
Take the example of OUI.sncf, the European distribution channel of the French railway network, whose team used the AI-powered exploration assistant to support travelers’ itinerary planning and provide personalized suggestions for those with high interest scores. The tool not only delivered support to site users when ticket counters were closed, it also drove a 61% increase in web responsive and a 33% increase in desktop conversion rates for online shoppers.
Innovate and optimize your omnichannel strategy
To be completely blunt: Customers don’t care about the tiny details of your digital process and platform until those details impact their experience. It’s the experience that wows them and keeps them coming back again and again, so building out an omnichannel strategy around brand interactions should be the core of your focus. A study from HBR found that omnichannel customers represent more value for businesses: they spend 4% more in-store and 10% more online than single-channel shoppers. From website to mobile and social engagements, to your customer support centers and in-store, in-person connections, seamlessness and continuous “wow” moments will be what sets you apart from others in your category.
Consistency also relies on constant optimization of your digital interfaces – website, mobile app, social touch points – by adopting a continuous testing approach driven by your experimentation roadmap. This perspective ensures that nothing gets left on the table from a conversion standpoint and also that customers are consistently blown away by their time spent engaging with your brand. What do you get when you put together experience optimization and experience innovation? Digital experience mastery.
Looking for more on delivering impactful brand experiences that will wow your customers? Check out AB Tasty’s digital customer journey, a roadmap to driving optimization and innovation that will take customer experience for your brand to the next level.
In today’s world of fickle attention spans and abundant choice for consumers, building your brand experience is no longer something that companies could consider doing. Nowadays, it has become a must-have for anyone that wants to stay in the game.
Establishing a relationship with your customers by adding value to each touchpoint – be it via services that go beyond what they’d expect, special rewards that inspire and entice, or personal touches that address their direct needs – will be what keeps them coming back. It will also play an integral role in building your brand’s very reputation by delivering the ‘wow’ experiences that put you ahead of your competition and at the top of the class.
In recent weeks we’ve discussed the importance of customer experience optimization (that is, maximizing conversion and delivering against KPIs, as well as leveraging responsive and quick-win experimentation to ensure nothing gets left on the table). When it comes to customer experience innovation, it’s about taking that to the next level. If optimization is the bare minimum that you should be doing,innovation is maximizing the long-term value of your brand and building a competitive edge to set you apart from the other brands in your category.
In this article, we’ll cover:
[toc]
Why customer experience innovation matters
Here at AB Tasty, customer experience innovation means going beyond the product to create an exchange that delights your customers, cements their loyalty and sets the bar so high that you’re the standard they come to expect from every company they encounter. It’s also more than just optimizing to ensure you have a high-performing, functional website. When it comes to innovation, the goal is to stand out from the pack, staying ahead of your competition, to create a signature brand experience that distinguishes your business from others.
Think of Spotify. At a basic level, they’re a streaming service that offers a huge library of content that is easy to access, and simple to subscribe to with seamless payment that makes for uninterrupted listening. But Spotify is more than just an optimized service, they’re also about innovation that delivers experiences that go beyond. One example is their user recaps, which leverage data to create a personalized experience to help listeners celebrate who they are (based on what they’ve listened to) and give each individual their own story to tell. (It’s also a nifty way for Spotify to get their users to advertise on their behalf!) Spotify is also making it clear that they’re more than a streaming service: they’re the embodiment of their users’ wishes brought to life.
Spotify leverages data to create a personalized experience for its listeners (Source)
Companies that wrap an immersive experience around their product (as Spotify does with its year-end recaps) create a more engaging environment for their consumers that goes beyond the mere items they sell and delivers an experience that’s more than just a transaction. From Nike creating a community of fitness to Tim Horton’s gamifying its loyalty program and Oui.SNCF leveraging AI to elevate trip planning, these companies are using customer experience innovation to drive sales.
The key components of experience innovation
In 2020, Accenture’s Business of Experience report found that 77% of CEOs believe their company will fundamentally change the way it connects and interacts with its customers, and that leading companies are twice as likely to have the agility to pivot towards new models that deliver value than their competitors. Not sure on which side you fall? Let’s take a look at the key elements for customer experience innovation.
In the current environment of fast-moving technological change marked by devices and services which are never far out of reach (and thus never truly off), your brand is accessible at all times; long gone are the days when shops would close and your customers would have to wait for them to reopen the following morning. This presents a multitude of opportunities to drive meaningful interactions and engagements with your consumers alongside added value to your business. And to get there, you need to leverage experimentation.
Companies need to leverage experimentation in order to drive meaningful interactions with their consumers (Source)
Experimentation can be run client-side (front-facing, on the website’s interface) and server-side (on the back-end, across all digital touchpoints if necessary). Client-side testing runs in your visitors’ browsers and is limited in scope to largely aesthetic and layout measures. To dive deeper into experience innovation, you’ll need to get into server-side.
Server-side experimentation
Server-side experimentation allows for more sophisticated experiments, tests features that go beyond the surface level and is platform- and language-agnostic. It’s also a heavier lift and needs developer and tech team input; as it’s run using a website’s source code, this testing relies upon coding skills. To implement server-side experimentation, you’ll need buy-in from both marketing and product teams, and a willingness to invest developer resources into running your experiments. But you’ll also achieve more flexible and sophisticated testing, such as price sensitivity and elasticity testing, as well as testing across multiple channels.
Feature management
Feature management is a process by which developers release updates gradually, through the use of feature flags, to allow platform updates to be tested while minimizing the risk of major site crashes or performance issues when rolling out new software releases. Using progressive deployment and rollbacks, where parts of the code are removed to allow features to be toggled off and on, feature management can test multiple versions of an update to determine which yields the best result – optimizing against set KPIs – and should thus be adopted permanently. Using this approach also ensures that you nail the transition to an updated platform with existing users, delivering an elevated experience that guarantees they never look back.
Each experimentation method has strengths and challenges, but it is in their combination that their greatest power lies. By leveraging both client- and server-side testing, you are able to go beyond optimization to build total brand experiences.
Get the most out of experimentation by leveraging both client- and server-side testing (Source)
Three innovative companies that are taking up the challenge
1. Zwift
Zwift is a multiplayer online game and fitness platform that leverages virtual reality to transport its players’ running and cycling workouts to various iconic locations around the world. Ever wanted to tackle the famous Alpe d’Huez stage of the Tour de France or the bone-jamming cobblestones of Paris-Roubaix? This is the kind of platform that can make that happen. Users connect their turbo trainer or treadmill to the Zwift app and the in-game avatars bring workouts to more than 240 miles of virtual terrain, and permit group sessions and participatory events such as the Virtual Tour de France. The pandemic saw a considerable upswing in at-home fitness, but Zwift’s innovation takes the experience of working out at home to another level.
Zwift takes the experience of working out at home to another level with virtual reality (Source)
2. Uber
Ride-sharing phenomenon Uber identified that 60% of trips in Sydney, Australia, begin or end in areas with limited access to frequent public transport. Leveraging that user insight, they launched the Uber and Transit feature in September 2020, enabling riders to identify the best combination of public transit and UberX rides to complete their journey. The feature gives passengers the ability to compare the cost and time for their trips depending on the constellation of transport methods they adopt, an approach that prioritizes customer needs without driving users away from their core service.
Uber prioritizes customer needs to offer them a better experience (Source)
3. On
Consumers are increasingly conscious of the sustainability commitments of the brands with which they engage. Swiss sporting goods manufacturer On adopted a subscriber approach to support a business model which encourages circularity without stymying both the desire and the necessity to consume products (in this company’s case, shoes). Customers pay a US29.99 subscription fee which allows them to swap out their current shoes for new ones as often as they’d like, and also delivers On sufficient sneaker returns to make circularity feasible. The shoes are made from castor beans and can be completely recycled, giving that growing consumer base of sustainability-focused customers peace of mind whilst still serving their performance needs.
On offers its sustainability-focused customers a product that caters to their needs (Source)
Want even more best-practice examples of brands hitting it out of the park? Check out AB Tasty’s guide to optimization trends. Get your copy of the “50 Tests You Should Know for Your Website” E-book now!
Collaborate across teams for continual evolution and development
We’ve already established that experience optimization is the bare minimum when approaching your brand’s online presence and commercial activities, and that experience innovation is what takes you to the next level in your category. To innovate is to experiment – exploring different configurations, layouts, price thresholds and incentives, as Jonny Longden of Journey Further told us on the “1000 Experiments Club” podcast. Your experimentation roadmap is essential to retaining your customers, recruiting new ones and growing your business.
Experience innovation is not owned by one team: It takes multiple divisions collaborating toward the common goal that is established by your roadmap. Setting up your internal organization to anticipate customer demands requires investment in your tech stack, alignment and cooperation between product, tech and marketing teams, and allocation of resources in accordance with your agreed-upon experimentation plan.
Experience innovation requires alignment between product, tech and marketing teams (Source)
To maximize customer experience innovation, your teams should be empowered to be the innovators. Allocate resources and responsibilities fairly and toward efforts that the individual teams can influence, simplify the tech processes for implementation and rollout, and drive innovation around business priorities so that everyone is paddling in the same direction and the outcomes from experimentation efforts find success.
Jeremy Epperson explains why startups should leverage conversion rate optimization to maximize growth.
Jeremy Epperson is about to change the way you approach growth in your business. The chief growth officer at ConversionAdvocates, a top-ranking CRO agency specialized in data analysis, takes a data-driven approach to identify the roadblocks in testing and optimize these processes for maximum effectiveness.
Over the past decade, he has launched CRO programs for 150+ growth-stage startups, creating a repeatable proven process for conversion rate optimization that can be implemented across different verticals and business sizes. By collating the insights gained from the different businesses, notably the common mistakes, Jeremy has gathered the expertise to facilitate CRO programs and avoid the steep learning curve that comes with launches.
In his conversation with AB Tasty’s VP Marketing Marylin Montoya, Jeremy delves into the granular level of data analysis and takes on topics that most people in CRO steer clear of.
Focus on customer experience optimization to catapult business growth
In today’s digital landscape, the old-school ideology of branding and push marketing is no longer an effective strategy. These days, customers have easy access to online reviews, forums and price comparison websites to inform their purchasing decision.
Rather than trying to control the customer journey, Jeremy recommends optimizing the experience of each of its four phases, using a data-driven, scientific-testing approach. This leads to the creation of different processes and reshapes the idea of optimization: The game-changing idea is that agility (allowing companies to move, learn and improve faster) can trump exorbitant budgets, thus allowing smaller companies to take market share from giants.
Passionate about being involved with teams on the ground level to “iteratively work through the entire process,” Jeremy touts CRO as the best mechanism and catalyst for growth, which challenges teams to rethink and rebuild processes and workflows, break down silos and build communication. Jeremy says this team-building aspect is more valuable from a CRO perspective than any individual winning test.
All data is equal: the value of wins, losses and flat tests in post-test analysis
When it comes to testing, certain results are deemed more “sexy” by marketers, and others are often swept under the carpet. However, Jeremy explains the utility of all test results, be that a win, a loss or a flat result, for informing how testing should evolve.
A string of inconclusive tests means that the testing has not been focused on what is actually blocking the conversion. “If we’re not targeted in on the things that are blocking them (users) from converting then we’re not going to see big movement in the conversion rates, so that’s really important,” says Jeremy.
When test results show big changes in the conversion rate, positive or negative, this indicates that an important part of the customer experience has been impacted. While winning tests are celebrated and losing tests shied away from, Jeremy advises that in both cases, the next step should be to double down on test variations to fully resolve the problem, creating at least three variations for each of those hypotheses.
Understand your customer and remove their purchasing roadblocks
Oftentimes, marketers, especially in smaller businesses, are reluctant to spend their budget on research and insights, opting for customer acquisition strategies involving ads and content. However, according to Jeremy, investing in research to better understand the customer can bring us closer to answering one question that’s key to creating the right growth strategy for your business: Why does your customer buy or not buy your product?
Research and testing can offer 360-degree insights into customer behavior such as their buying criteria, decision-making and their buying process in order to remove any conversion roadblocks. It could be as simple as creating an FAQ page to clarify primary questions, resulting in a 23% lift in lead conversion, as Jeremy exemplified.
Jeremy explains that businesses will naturally experience growth when they focus on offering a better customer experience, eliminating customer frustrations and roadblocks, which would otherwise cause them to abandon their purchase. This customer-centric mindset will actually have a direct positive impact on revenue and growth.
What else can you learn from our conversation with Jeremy Epperson
How to combine research and testing in CRO to double the average validated win rate
How to encourage teams to embrace the CRO process and cooperate across verticals
The inutility of customer personas and how to replace them
How to implement CRO for the first time
About Jeremy Epperson
Jeremy Epperson, chief growth officer at ConversionAdvocates, has worked in the field of startup growth and conversion rate optimization (CRO) for 14 years, as a consultant in his own businesses as well as part of digital agencies. Jeremy is passionate about researching, building and implementing processes to generate growth and has launched CRO processes within more than 155 growth-stage startups. He also specializes in customer journey mapping, CRO maturity assessments and marketing and customer research.
About 1,000 Experiments Club
The 1,000 Experiments Club is an AB Tasty-produced podcast hosted by Marylin Montoya, VP of Marketing at AB Tasty. Join Marylin and the Marketing team as they sit down with the most knowledgeable experts in the world of experimentation to uncover their insights on what it takes to build and run successful experimentation programs.
Once upon a time, driving digital customer experience optimization (EXO) meant having a competitive edge. You went the extra mile, you won. Nowadays, everyone is focused on EXO to the point where it’s the minimum necessary to stay in the game.
“Experience” encompasses the entire user journey across all touchpoints that a consumer encounters when interacting with your brand. Be it website, app, tablet, mobile, bot-generated or in-store, the quality of these interactions will impact your customers’ purchasing decisions and their loyalty.
Customer experience optimization can greatly influence buyers’ purchasing decisions and loyalty (Source)
Deliver solid experiences and it will shape your brand reputation and increase your conversion rates – the key is to never stop moving. Remain stagnant, and you’ll be overtaken; but if you can figure out what your customers want, find the line between what they’re looking for and what you can offer, and then evolve your interactions on an ongoing basis, you can deliver superior experiences and business success.
Here at AB Tasty we believe that optimization is the bare minimum you should be delivering. In order to stay competitive and stay ahead, the work should never stop. Establishing a continuous feedback loop through experimentation and data gathering and analysis are what it takes to maximize customer experience and keep your competitive edge.
In this article, we’ll cover:
[toc]
Why is customer experience optimization so relevant?
At the base, no matter what the product or sales channel, any business will try to satisfy their customers. Customer centricity has been around longer than we might think, but customer experience optimization really started to take flight as technology advanced and brand touchpoints and interactions diversified.
Throw in the fact that data is more readily available, collectible and collected, and suddenly the means to understand your customers better than they understand themselves is out there for the taking.
Use the data you collect to take your customer experience to the next level (Source)
Not convinced that it really matters? Think again. PwC’s Future of CX report found that one in three consumers will walk away from a brand after just one negative experience. Furthermore, 73% of consumers nominate their experience in brand interactions as an important factor in making purchasing decisions.
Is customer experience optimization truly essential?
Think about your own experiences when shopping online. How does it feel? Which brands do you gravitate towards and which ones just don’t seem to tickle your fancy? Do they see you as an individual, a real person, or are you just another transaction to them? It only takes a moment’s pause to consider your own experiences to understand why optimizing customer experiences is not just important, but essential.
As consumers, we make decisions about where to shop, which products to buy and which ones to keep buying based on our past experience of acquiring and consuming them. What’s more: the aforementioned Future of CX report from PwC found that customers are more likely to try additional products and services from a brand they trust, and that they’re even willing to pay more, too – up to 16% more depending on the product category. It’s also less expensive to encourage repeat business (customer loyalty) than to acquire new customers, so leveraging customer experience optimization to drive long-term brand affinity and customer lifetime value will pay for itself.
The three key ingredients to supercharge your customer experience optimization
When a customer arrives on your site – whether they’re searching for products, comparing different options or just looking to learn more about your products – there are a number of steps they’ll go through to achieve their end goal. All of these add up to a path that they’ve taken through your website, and one that presents both opportunities and pitfalls when it comes to optimizing your site and meeting your customers’ needs. The more you can understand your user journey and implement improvements while removing frictions along the purchase funnel, the better your site will perform.
Gathering data about your customers’ behavior and preferences will give you the information you need to run experiments to discern the optimal setup using A/B testing. Not sure if your CTAs have the best wording? Test them! Trying to understand the best configuration for your landing page? Run an experiment! Have doubts about whether product images should be cropped or full body? We can examine that too!
Ultimately, you’re aiming to ensure that all roads lead to an increase in conversions – and driving UX optimization on an ever-changing customer pathway is necessary to keep you ahead of the game.
Continuously optimizing your user experience is essential for staying ahead of the curve (Source)
2. Improve your personalization efforts
Know your customers and tailor to their needs!
Tailoring a digital brand interaction to the unique needs of the person behind the screen builds customer loyalty and drives repeat business. In the experience economy, you’re selling your product plus the interaction with the brand and the purchase itself alongside it. The user experience when acquiring and consuming the product is just as important as the utility it performs. Accordingly, personalizing these digital exchanges with your consumers is key to long-term customer retention.
To better understand your customers on a personal level, building a solid data foundation allows you to best understand your users, identify their needs and deliver personalized experiences that will keep your shoppers returning again and again. After all, personalization is about getting to the root of what customers have shown you that they want and delivering against that.
Use the data you gather to tailor each user’s experience on your site (Source)
As with your customer journey, responding to ever-changing desires can be challenging, so knowing your customers intimately is crucial for personalization success. Get it right and the impact is high so don’t leave any stone unturned when exploring improvement opportunities.
3. Implement server-side testing and feature management
Bring in the tech teams to expand your optimization activities!
Server-side testing is where we bring in the heavy hitters. While A/B testing can be rapidly implemented by marketing teams, server-side experimentation requires the buy-in and expertise of tech teams and developers.
Collaboration between the two groups is essential to deliver seamless customer experiences where the front-end (client-side) lures in your customers and the back-end (server-side) runs smoothly to ensure an effortless shopping experience. For instance, presenting a promotional offer (front-end) will only deliver results if the payment gateway runs glitch-free and the page loading times are fast (back-end).
Lukas Vermeer, director of experimentation at Vista, champions the value of testing both sides. “A lot of the value from experimentation…comes from two things: One is not shipping the bad stuff – a huge value point for experimentation. The other amount of value [comes from] figuring out strategically, going forward, what you should invest in.”
Lukas Vermeer, a guest speaker in the “1000 Experiments Club” podcast, champions the value of testing both sides (Source)
If your business has reached a certain level of maturity and sophistication, maximizing both client- and server-side testing will ensure that your optimization approaches are working the hardest they possibly can to deliver improved business outcomes.
How can customer experience optimization apply to different sectors?
E-commerce
Delivering digital customer experience optimization through experimentation can drive transactions, increase conversion rates and optimize user experience as you test your site in an effort to offer a smoother purchasing experience that caters to your users’ every need.
B2B
Not every website is for purchasing then and there; sometimes site visits are an initial step on a longer journey. You can drive lead generation for purchases in areas like automotive, bedroom furniture or holiday rentals by optimizing site layout, CTAs, and access to product and store information.
Travel
Offering a range of solutions, from individual products (like hotel or transport bookings) right up to comprehensive packages that take care of every step of a holiday, is a particularity of the travel industry. When bundling items together into packages, finding that pricing sweet spot is especially key. Server-side testing is particularly relevant in this field and can give you the tools to both curate your product offering and increase bookings as well.
Conclusion
When it comes to digital customer experience optimization, improving continuously is essential to your strategy; here at AB Tasty, we can’t stress that enough!
With both technology and customer attitudes evolving every second, the only way to keep the pace is by continuously adapting your company’s own optimization practices to respond to customer demands and unlock increased value and continuing loyalty.
Living and breathing such an approach means setting up your marketing, product and technical teams for smooth cross-collaboration and a shared mission and objectives. Ensuring that they’re also sharing the same experimentation and development roadmap to unlock resources and roll out improvements at the right time will keep your business on the road to success.
Staying ahead of the game to deliver seamless brand experiences for your customers is crucial in today’s experience economy. Today we’ll dip our toe into the “how” by looking at the underlying foundation upon which all of your experiences, optimization and experimentation efforts will be built: data.
Data is the foundation experimentation is built on (Source)
Data is the technology that can power the experiences you build for your customers by first understanding what they want and how it’ll best serve your business to deliver this. It’s the special sauce that helps connect the dots between your interpretation of existing information and trends, and the outcomes that you hypothesize will address customer needs (and grow revenue).
If you’ve ever wondered whether the benefits of a special offer are sufficiently enticing for your customer or why you have so many page hits and so few purchases, then you’ve asked the questions the marketing teams of your competitors are both asking and actively working to answer. Data and experimentation will help you take your website to the next level, better understand your customers’ preferences, and optimize their purchasing journey to drive stronger business outcomes.
So, the question remains: Where do you start? In the case of e-commerce, A/B testing is a great way to use data to test hypotheses and make decisions based on information rather than opinions.
A/B testing helps brands make decisions based on data (Source)
“The idea behind experimentation is that you should be testing things and proving the value of things before seriously investing in them,” says Jonny Longden, head of the conversion division at agency Journey Further. “By experimenting…you only do the things that work and so you’ve already proven [what] will deliver value.”
Knowing and understanding your data foundation is the platform upon which you’ll build your knowledge base and your experimentation roadmap. Read on to discover the key considerations to bear in mind when establishing this foundation.
Five things to consider when building your data foundation
Know what data you’re collecting and why
Knowing what you’re dealing with when it comes to slicing and dicing your data also requires that you understand the basic types and properties of the information to which you have access. Firstly, let’s look at the different types of data:
First-party data is collected directly from customers, site visitors and followers, making it specific to your products, consumers and operations.
Second-party data is collected by a secondary party outside of your company or your customers. It’s usually obtained through data-sharing agreements between companies willing to collaborate.
Third-party data is collected by entirely separate organizations with no consideration for your market or customers; however, it does allow you to draw on increased data points to broaden general understanding.
Data also has different properties or defining characteristics: demographic data tells you who, behavioral data tells you how, transactional data tells you what, and psychographic data tells you why. Want to learn more? Download our e-book, “The Ultimate Personalization Guide”!
ㅤ
Gathering and collating a mix of this data will then allow you to segment your audience and flesh out a picture of who your customers are and how to meet their needs, joining the dots between customer behavior and preferences, website UX and the buyer journey.
Chad Sanderson, head of product – data platform at Convoy, recommends making metrics your allies to ensure data collection and analysis are synchronized. Knowing what your business leaders care about, and which metrics will move the business forward, will ensure that your data foundation is relevant and set up for success.
ㅤ
Invest in your data infrastructure
Data is everywhere, in its myriad of forms and gathered from a multitude of sources. Even so, if you’re going to make use of it, you need a robust system for gathering, storing and analyzing it in order to best put it to work. Start by understanding how much first-party data you have the capacity to gather by evaluating your current digital traffic levels. How many people are visiting your site or your app? You can get this information using Google Analytics or a similar platform, and this will help you understand how sophisticated your data-leveraging practices can be and identify gaps where you might need to source supplementary data (second- and third-party).
Next, you’ll need to evaluate your infrastructure. Companies that are further on their data analytics journey will invest in customer data platforms (CDPs) that allow them to collect and analyze data – gathered from a variety of sources and consolidated into a central database – at a more granular level. Stitching together this data via a CDP helps you bring all the pieces together to form a complete picture of your customers and identify any gaps. This is a critical step before you leap into action. Chad Sanderson concurs. “[Start] with the business and what the business needs,” he advises. “Tailoring your… solution to that – whatever that is – is going to be a lot more effective.”
ㅤ
Get consent to build consumer trust
Data security is rightly of foremost concern to consumers. The very users from whom you want to gather that first-party data want to ensure that their private information remains secure. Getting their consent and being transparent about the inherent benefit to them if they agree to your request – be it through giveaways, exclusive offers, additional information or services – will give you the best chance of success. Demonstrating that you adhere to, and take seriously, various data compliance laws (such as GDPR) and good governance will also build trust in your brand and give you the opportunity to make it worth their while through improved UX and personalized experiences.
Build trust in your brand by respecting your users’ private information (Source)
ㅤ
Collect and discover insights to upgrade your customer strategy
We’ve already covered the fact that data is everywhere. As Chad Sanderson highlighted above, identifying immediate business needs and priorities – as well as focusing on quick wins and low-lift changes that can have a quick and high-level impact – can help you navigate through this minefield. It’s best to think of this section as a four-step process:
ㅤㅤ•Collect data as it flows into your CDP ㅤㅤ• Transform or calibrate your data so that it can be compared in a
ㅤ ㅤlogical manner ㅤㅤ• Analyze the data by grouping and categorizing it according to
ㅤ ㅤthe customer segments you’ve identified and benchmarking ㅤ ㅤagainst business priorities ㅤㅤ• Activate your insights by pushing the learnings back into
ㅤ ㅤyour platforms and/or your experimentation roadmap and really ㅤ ㅤput this data to work
ㅤ
Turn your data into actions
It’s crunch time (no pun about numbers intended)! We’ve examined the different types of data and where to source them, how to be responsible with data collection and how to set up the infrastructure needed to consolidate data and generate insights. We’ve also covered the need to understand business priorities and core strategy to drive data collection, analysis and activation in the same direction. Now we need to put that data and those insights to work.
In the experience economy, where constant evolution is the name of the game, innovation and optimization are the key drivers of experimentation. Taking the data foundation that you’ve built and using it to fuel and nourish your experimentation roadmap will ensure that none of the hard work of your tech, marketing and product teams is in vain. Testing allows you to evaluate alternatives in real time and make data-driven decisions about website UX. It also ensures that business metrics are never far from reach, where conversion and revenue growth take center stage. Use the data you’ve gathered to fuel your experimentation roadmap (Source)
Invest in a solid data foundation to maximize and scale
At AB Tasty, we apply the Bayesian approach to interpreting data and test results because in A/B testing, this method not only shows whether there is a difference between the tested options but also goes beyond that by calculating a measure of that difference. Being able to identify what that variance is allows you to best understand what you will gain by adopting a permanent change.
Collecting and analyzing data, and then leveraging the insights that you glean, are key to unlocking the next level of experience optimization for your customers and your business. An experimentation roadmap grounded in real-time responsiveness and long-term, server-side improvements will have a solid data foundation approach at its core, where understanding who you want to target and how to act drives success. Furthermore, if you invest in your data foundation – and the five core drivers we’ve explored above – you’ll be equipped to scale your experimentation and allow optimization to become a key business maximizer.
Let’s say you have an online shop and in that online shop you have a product. Your product is designer eyewear and prescription glasses. A customer visits your online shop to learn about your product. That customer needs to determine which frames will suit their face and what size to order. A similar shop that sells similar products to yours offers free shipping and free returns of up to 3 pairs at no charge, or the use of a virtual reality assistant, via their mobile app, to help their customers make purchasing decisions without needing to visit a store. Your shop, though well-intentioned and bug-free, does not. The customer’s experience researching and selecting their product is what ultimately drives their decision-making process, and they purchase from the other shop. And the next time they need glasses, they purchase from that other shop again. That’s the experience economy.
In the experience economy, finding a differentiating edge is crucial for brands (Source)
Expressed in more academic terms, the experience economy is the packaging of goods and services into a bundle such that the experience of acquiring or consuming is the key selling point – it’s the reason the customer came into your shop in the first place.
In 1998, two Harvard researchers published an article detailing the concept of the experience economy for the first time, using a birthday cake analogy to eventually draw out the definition we see above. These days, the concept is more important than ever, as the rapidly evolving digital transformation of the way we consume information and goods creates a never-ending, multi-channel interaction between brands and consumers. And it’s key to your overall business success.
How e-commerce brands can succeed in the experience economy
In the age of digitalization, not only do all brands have websites, incorporating an e-commerce platform for online sales, but they also have Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat accounts, more than likely a YouTube channel, a web browser adapted to mobile devices and an app to sit alongside it. In short, multiple channels and touchpoints for their customers to interact and engage with them, and multiple opportunities to create experiences to acquire new customers and drive sales. This all makes for a non-linear shopping experience, and requires careful examination of what customers expect on which channel and at which time.
A customer-first mindset is crucial for businesses that are looking to win the digital CX game (Source)
How can brands adapt to shifting consumer preferences
At AB Tasty, we’re convinced that the brands opting for a “business as usual” approach will quickly be left in the dust. Customers expect better servicing, more meaningful interactions and suggest that they’ll spend more when brands deliver. This means having a strategy that considers multiple channels, across physical, digital and social touch points, and adapts to the preferences of each individual so that interactions remain authentic and personal. If you’re engaging with customers without being able to have in-person contact, experience matters even more, because consumers still want to be seen as individuals with their own unique needs. Ultimately, their experience will influence their buying decisions and according to Salesforce, 66% of consumers expect companies to understand their unique needs and preferences.
Create a personalized, relevant shopping experience for each customer (Source)
Figuring out what your customers want doesn’t just need to be a guessing game, experimentation is standard practice for the experience economy. In B2C environments, marketing teams test website performance using a range of experiments that examine layout, colors, purchase journeys, product information and visual features to ensure no stone is left unturned in maximizing transactions and revenue. And adopting an experimentation mindset really is a win-win. On the one hand, you’re identifying the best way to interact with your customers – identifying what they respond to and what they want – and on the other, you’re maximizing every opportunity to drive purchases and serve your bottom line.
Why prioritizing customer experiences matters
That’s all very well and good, you might say, but what difference does it really make? Plenty, in fact. Relevant and personalized consumer experiences are key to keeping your brand ahead of its competitors. Let’s explore some of the reasons for this.
Loyalty is hard-earned and easily lost
PWC’s 2021 Global Consumer Insights Survey found that 84% of shoppers trust brands that provide exceptional customer service, but one in three will walk away after just one negative shopping experience. In a similar vein, Qualtrics’ 2022 Global Consumer Trends survey reported that 60% of consumers would buy more if businesses treated them better, and also determined that 9.5% of your overall revenue is at risk from negative shopping experiences. These statistics still haven’t convinced you? Read on!
ㅤ
Seamlessness is synonymous with success
You can design any number of gimmicks to attract attention, but it’s the seamless ones that stick. Take the Clarins Singles Day Wheel of Fortune promotion, where any customer landing on the brand’s desktop or mobile site in EMEA saw a pop-up to spin the wheel. They were then rewarded with one of six special offers, which was automatically added to their basket via a promo code at the checkout. This automatic add proved crucial: Results were strong across all key territories, with Ireland particularly notable, seeing a 495% increase in orders and a 585% increase in revenue. Clarins uncovered a clever, engaging offer and coupled it with a seamless UX process for their shoppers, delivering simply stunning results.Clarins delivered a customer experience on par with their clients’ expectations (Source)
ㅤ
Stagnate and you’ll be left behind
To innovate or not to innovate, is it even a question? If you’re thinking about it, then your competitors almost certainly are too. And if you’re not trying something new, you almost certainly risk falling behind. While bug-free websites and a smooth journey through the purchase funnel is great, it’s also the bare minimum that you should be doing. Salesforce found that 91% of customers are more likely to make a repeat purchase from a company after a positive customer experience. Delivering a seamless, multichannel experience across all business interactions is integral to staying ahead and it’s clear there is still scope for brands to optimize.
4 examples of brands that are excelling in the experience economy
As we’ve seen in the above section, brands that embrace the experience economy are best-positioned to see increased loyalty, repeat business, and convert their customers into advocates for their products. Pushing beyond experiences into memorable interactions for their consumers has allowed some of the best-known brands in the world to gain further ground on their direct competitors, all while staying true to their core values. Let’s take a look at the best-in-class trends and examples of the experience economy model.
Nike
Nike is driven by delivering innovative products, services and experiences to inspire athletes. One such experience is their Nike Fit solution: an AI-driven app that allows you to virtually measure and fit your foot to ensure you choose the right pair of Nike shoes, no matter the style nor the shape of your foot, and without having to leave your living room.
Nike introduces innovative solutions to their clients’ biggest point of friction (Source)
Sephora
In 2019, Sephora pioneered their intelligent digital mirror in the brand’s Madrid flagship, using the power of AI to deliver hyper-personalized experiences and product recommendations to shoppers. The mirror not only allows consumers to “test” products by displaying how they’ll render when applied, it also provides personalized product recommendations and suggestions based on an analysis of the customer’s features.
Sephora develops new ways to offer their customers personalized recommendations (Source)
Starbucks
Starbucks has revolutionized their physical footprint by opening pickup-only stores in key, high-traffic locations where rental space is at a premium and busy lives mean in-and-out transactions are the order of the day. This store concept allows coffee lovers to order and pay ahead of time, via the Starbucks mobile app, and nominate the pickup location, for a speedy service that saves tedious, peak-hour queues. Not to mention a boost to sales per square foot, a key metric in the brick-and-mortar retail space.
Starbucks identifies their customers’ needs and delivers an optimal shopping experience (Source)
Asos
This online fashion retailer was founded in London in 2000, and now sells over 850 brands around the world. In identifying one of the key barriers to online shopping for clothes – choosing the correct size – Asos developed their Fit Assistant tool to ensure customers could navigate the online shopping experience hassle-free. Available on both desktop and mobile, Fit Assistant delivers personalized recommendations according to shoppers’ individual shapes and sizes.
Asos optimizes their customers’ online shopping experience (Source)
Why the experience economy is here to stay
Through a combination of rapid digital transformation, technological innovation of smart devices (phones, tablets, watches and more), and the increasing pace of our daily lives, the manner in which we consume products has evolved beyond mere acquisition. How we consume the product matters. How we feel about how we consume the product matters. How the brand ensures we enjoy our consumption of the product matters. And if your brand is not up for the challenge and staying ahead of the game, consumers will find one that is. It’s as simple as that. Evolve, innovate, and deliver seamless brand experiences, and you’ll lead the competition, win market share and generate growth.
If you’re looking for some guidance on how to deliver impactful brand experiences that will “wow” your customers, draw inspiration from the first-ever digital customer journey that maps out how to drive optimization and innovation to take your customer experience to the next level.
You’ve spent months building your brand and getting your website just right, but it’s all for nothing if you can’t turn your hard work into sales. And landing pages are one of the best resources you can use to optimize your conversions. Well-designed landing pages can lead customers to specific products or services, encourage them to take immediate action and capture contact details to build your customer base.
Landing pages are highly effective conversion tools (Source)
Landing pages have conversion rates ranging from 3% to 11.45% and higher, depending on the features they include. How well your page performs depends entirely on how well you’ve designed it and running tests on your page can help you continuously find the winning formula.
What is a landing page?
Landing pages are website pages designed to target a specific visitor according to a particular demographic, interest, or buying behavior. Your landing page should attract leads in the most effective way possible and then convert your visitors into buyers or nudge them towards taking another kind of action.
Landing pages are designed to encourage exploration and could have a number of goals. Technically, any page on your website can become a landing page for a campaign, but this could distract your customers and send them down a rabbit hole instead of focusing on the action you want them to take. Good landing pages have a singular focus or call to action (CTA), making them excellent marketing and lead generation tools.
Why is landing page design so important?
Landing pages let you nudge your leads straight towards a conversion through strategically placed call to action elements like links, forms, buttons, and others. A well-designed landing page lures visitors through a message that piques their interest, like a discount, a piece of content they’d like to read, or a free trial to test a product.
Landing pages target customers based on specific demographics, like browsing behavior (Source)
While it doesn’t fully show off your brand’s personality, it does lay the groundwork for getting to know it better. When a customer clicks on a call to action, they want to find more information about whatever has caught their eye, and that’s when you’ll convert them from a visitor to a solid lead or even a paying customer.
Aside from optimizing your users’ actions, landing pages make it easy to track visitors and modify your pages as required. Through A/B testing, one item on your landing page is changed on the variation to determine the impact of the change.
The importance of lead capture landing pages
Lead capture landing pages (sometimes called squeeze pages) can also gather important customer details (such as names, email, phone numbers). Lead capture landing pages offer your customers something of interest (e.g., a free trial or e-book) in exchange for completing a short form that collects their personal information.
You can use these personal details to target them in the future, with email campaigns, social media advertising, or follow-up calls by your sales representatives. Targeting potential customers strengthens the likelihood of a conversion down the line.
The essential elements of a landing page
A landing page should always have one conversion goal. From headlines to images to buttons, every element should bring you closer to that objective.
Clear and effective copywriting
An excellent landing page needs punchy, clear copywriting to convert. You should describe the benefits of your product/service and what your company does as concisely as possible. Don’t overstuff your landing page with copy that doesn’t add value!
A few copywriting tips to bear in mind:
Always direct your visitors to the primary call to action with your copy.
Keep sentences short and to the point.
Avoid using too many adverbs (quickly, obviously, actually).
Instead of passive voice, use active voice to inspire action.
Edit your work to delete anything that adds more detail than necessary.
Visually attractive and clear CTAs
Your call to action (CTA) is the most important element on your landing page. When you create your CTA, use copy that inspires the visitor to continue along their journey with you. Compare generic calls to action like “Click Here” or “Submit” to powerful statements like “Yes, I want to save money” or “Update my wardrobe.” The latter sounds better!
Always make sure that your CTA button stands out from the other elements on the page. Follow the example set by the Dutch watch brand Cluse: When their team noticed the bounce rate for their landing pages was high and that not many users advanced to the product display pages, it became evident that the CTA on the page wasn’t clear enough.
By changing the call to action used in their landing page design to best match practice guidelines, they instantly saw an uplift in conversions and sales. The winning variation increased the click-through rate to their product display page by 2.39% and realized a 1.12% uplift in transactions.
Eye-catching headers
Good landing pages have simple, compelling and uncluttered headers. If you include an image, make sure it’s related to your product or service. Keep all the action above the fold and use directional cues to steer visitors to that all-important CTA button. Additionally, you should avoid including distracting elements like links or phone numbers.
Social proof
People will conform to the majority in order to be accepted or liked. This is known as social proof. If a prospect sees that another person likes a product or has had a positive experience with your company, your odds of conversion go up.
When you’re browsing a landing page and see a testimonial from an industry expert you respect, that’s social proof. When you’re cruising a pricing page and you see that an industry giant is already using the tool, that’s social proof. When you sign up for a demo because you know the tool solved the exact problem you have for a similar company, that’s social proof.
Think of it as borrowing third-party influence to sway potential customers. Brightlocal found that the average consumer reads at least ten reviews before trusting a business. Your odds of converting goes up when you see that others had used the product before them and were happy with the end result.
Social proof may include customer reviews, a list of existing customers, user testimonials and awards you may have earned. Take a page from Decathlon’s playbook: By testing different options, you can also identify which works best for winning over your customers!
A unique selling proposition (USP)
What makes you different from everyone else? You don’t need to be more advanced or offer huge discounts; you just need a convincing brand promise. Are you the fastest? Most reliable? Most knowledgeable? You only have a few lines of copy and limited visuals to get your point across, so be short and sharp.
Hero images
First impressions are essential — and when it comes to website optimization, they’re more important than ever! A hero image is a large banner that appears at the top of your page, usually occupying the full length of the screen. Look for an image that represents (or is relevant) to your product or company. You can even include a call to action and/or a text overlay to guide your users down the conversion funnel.
Additional information in the footer
Remember that even though you never want to distract customers from the call to action, you’ll still want them to find more information about your company if they don’t convert immediately.
Keep your calls to action and more compelling arguments above the fold, but include additional information like newsletter sign-ups, links to your social media pages, or ‘About us’ pages in the footer for customers that need to know a little more about you before proceeding.
Landing pages should be simple and focus on the call to action (Source)
How to design and optimize your landing pages
Now that you understand some of the best practices for designing high-converting landing pages, let’s dig into the nitty-gritty of your landing pages’ design. Here are ten best practices to design a landing page that converts successfully:
1. Identify your target audience and their needs
Designing a visually stunning landing page doesn’t necessarily mean it’s effective. Truly great landing pages understand what visitors are looking for and provide quality content tailored to your target audience. Before designing your page, establish who it’s for and what they would like to know. Keep testing variations of the page to see which elements resonate the most with your audience and your landing page can become a powerful conversion tool.
2. Use strategic and relevant hero images
There should be a clear connection between your brand and the hero image you display on your landing page. Misplaced images can confuse visitors or create a poor impression of the brand. Make sure that the image you use fosters an instant connection between you and your users by either answering a question, nudging them to advance down the conversion funnel, or just encouraging them to find out more about you.
3. Refine your headlines
We’ve already spoken about the role copywriting plays in conversion, so make sure that you continually test and refine your headlines. Landing page headlines promote your value proposition, while the subheadings provide further explanations. Keep these short, sharp and to the point. If you aren’t sure which value proposition to promote, try testing different versions to see which version resonates the most with visitors and results in the most click-throughs.
4. Keep navigation simple
Landing pages have to be optimized to create the best user experience possible. Keeping navigation simple, intuitive and straightforward will boost user retention and lead generation while driving your core message home. ECCO Shoes are a great example of this: By making their call to action button larger and repositioning it above the fold, cutting a few visual distractions and adding icons highlighting special offers like free delivery, their new landing page was able to outperform the original by over 17%!
5. Harmonize your colors
Colors can evoke powerful emotions or cause confusion. Use color strategically and sparingly on your landing page so it highlights the most important elements like your call to action, add-to-cart button or contact forms. You can also use negative space to break up the page and make it easier to digest the most important information.
6. Place your important elements above the fold
The ‘above the fold’ section is the part of your website that’s visible in the browser without scrolling down. It’s the first thing people see, so make sure you grab their attention with compelling imagery, copy and headers.
7. Make sure it displays properly across devices
Today’s consumers are using a host of different devices and operating systems. This means your website has to display properly across all of them if you want their business. Ensure that your landing pages are optimized to display correctly on all available platforms.
8. Optimize your site’s load times
Your site’s loading time affects your user experience and your Google ranking. Slow websites contribute to high bounce rates and cart abandonment. You can optimize your load times by enabling compression, using web-friendly imagery and keeping redirects to a minimum.
9. Improve your SEO to increase traffic and conversions
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a complex subject, but anyone can make small tweaks to their landing page to improve their ranking. Ensure that your title tags and meta-descriptions are accurate and relevant to what visitors will find on your page. Always include the main keywords you want to rank for, but don’t overstuff your page with them; it will negatively affect your user experience and Google may penalize you for it.
Effective landing pages can lead to increased sales (Source)
10. Perform testing on your landing pages
A/B testing allows you to compare two versions of the same page to see which version resonates the most with your users. By changing an element on one page, you can compare the two to see which changes will increase conversions. You can learn more about testing on your landing page in this article, or try our A/B testing tool.
A/B testing has numerous benefits for your landing pages and your business because it reveals incredible insights that can be used to:
Improve user engagement by learning which messages/images resonate with customers;
Present more relevant messages and content that customers actively respond to;
Reduce bounce rates by improving relevance;
Increase conversion rates;
Deliver quick results and improvements that provide a return on investment.
Common landing page mistakes
We’ve covered what you should do when you are designing your landing page, but there are also a few things you should avoid doing:
Multiple CTAs: Too many calls to action dilute your message and decrease the likelihood of performing a conversion.
Broken CTAs: If your call to action doesn’t link to the right page or function properly, all of your efforts are wasted.
Low-resolution images/no images: Copy alone won’t sell your product or service. Use high-resolution, web-optimized images to boost your brand and convey your message visually.
Poorly written copy: Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors impact the trust that consumers have in your brand.
Lengthy forms: If your lead capture forms are too long, your customers will get frustrated and may give up halfway through. You’ll lose the information — and their business.
Examples of great landing page design
While landing page design is an ongoing process and you need to keep constantly optimizing it, there are a few brands with really great landing pages to inspire your own.
Coinbase uses a stylish and focused lead generation page with a clear message and unique value proposition. While trading cryptocurrency is a complex topic, the landing page simply asks you to enter your email address to get started. This example works because the call to action is clear, the copy is straightforward and the design is uncluttered.
Xero uses negative space and compelling copy to get its message across. There are two call to action buttons (with the same message) to steer visitors in the right direction. Xero’s page is attractive and colorful, uncluttered and emphasizes the call to action button, making it highly effective.
Monday.com uses colorful buttons to encourage visitors to create their free account. They’ve also added compelling social proof messages by mentioning the number of visitors to the site. This use of social proof and a clear, uncluttered layout — coupled with direct, pointed copy — increases their landing page’s ability to convert.
Astra uses compelling copy in their click-through button that assures users that they can secure your website against hackers in just three minutes. They’ve also added some big-name logos in their footer to build trust in the brand. The tagline, ‘Are you next?’ is compelling, with a solid and distinct call to action leading prospects to the sign-up page.
Take your landing pages to the next level
These tips provide a great starting point for designing a high-converting landing page, but no one gets it right the first time. Building an effective landing page requires ongoing optimization and innovation to determine what resonates with your audience.
Continuously testing your pages leads to new insights and continual improvements (Source)
Experimentation can help your brand improve the performance of your landing pages. Continuously testing your pages leads to new insights and improvements that’ll help you constantly adapt to new customer preferences even as they are being formed.
Looking for inspiration to take your landing pages to the next level? Check out our e-book, “50 Tests You Should Know For Website Optimization”: It contains 50 successful experiments from e-commerce businesses who have continuously optimized their websites to offer relevant and personalized experiences.
You launch an A/B test to see if the variation (B) could outperform your control version (A).
Clarins delivered a customer experience on par with their clients’ expectations (
