Author: AB Tasty

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.

Article

Dec 4, 2020

8min read

Use Heatmaps to Uncover Areas of Improvement on your Website

AB Tasty

Website heatmaps are visual representations of attention, engagement, and interactions generated by your visitors as they navigate through your website. Free or paid tools help you generate different maps to better understand user behavior and optimize conversions.

What is a heatmap?

Heatmaps are visual representations of attention, engagement, and interactions generated by your visitors as they navigate through your site. Warm colors indicate areas that attract the most attention or engagement, whereas cool colors show overlooked spots on the page.

Let your own visitors show you the areas of improvement on your site to help you boost sales, then simply make the appropriate changes and measure how well it’s working.

Example of heat map — Source: www.pixeller.co

When to use heatmaps?

Heatmap tools measure attention, engagement and even number of clicks on your website. They are a key component to your optimization toolkit (to learn more, read our complete guide to Conversion Rate Optimization).

To give you some concrete examples, here are some of the main reasons to use these softwares:

To measure engagement. Do you write online articles, and wonder up until what point your audience stops reading? Using a heatmap can help you visualize the ‘scroll’ of a user, and where they interact with your site. If you notice that only a tiny percentage of people actually reach your CTA, it might be time to make a change.
To measure actions. Where do my visitors click? Are they clicking the right button? Heatmaps help you see if your visitors are completing your desired actions, and also highlight where they might be getting stuck.
To measure attention. What headlines attract the most attention? What images attract the most attention? What elements are distracting from the main content? Do my visitors see my form? Once you have solid answers to these questions, you can start making changes that will increase your conversion rates.

Information delivered by a heat map — Source: Unbounce

Gaining the answers to the above questions can help you answer even more nagging questions:

Where should I place my most important content?
What’s the best way to use images and videos?
Where are my visitors getting distracted?
Where should I talk about my product/service?

Most heatmap softwares will let you generate maps that show user interactions from different points of view. The idea is that you should refer to all of them in order to reveal your visitors’ behavior.

Clickmap

This type of map allows you to quantify actions. It’s a visual representation of all of the clicks visitors make on your page. This ‘map’ generates precious data since it allows you to see precisely where people interact with your site.

Each time someone clicks on a precise area on a page, the heatmap marks the spot with a light dot. If you see large areas of white, this is where the majority of visitors are clicking.

By quickly identifying the ‘hot spots’ on your site, you can immediately tell if people are clicking where you want them to click. On the above image from Sumo, we can see that the ‘SHARE’ and ‘IMAGE SHARER’ are the least popular areas.

Scroll heatmap

The scroll-map lets you see how far down a page visitors scroll, and especially: what elements attract their attention and what do they linger on?

By using a scroll-map, you can determine if users ‘see’ the right parts of your site, or if they get distracted by unimportant elements.

Scroll heat map — source: nguyenvincent.com

If we look at the above screenshot of an article that talks about SEO, we can see that the image and the two lines of text below it are the most popular: about 85% of visitors have seen these elements.

Percentage of clicks heatmap

The ‘percentage of clicks’ heatmap compliments the classic one. It lets you see, element by element, how many clicks were generated by a certain image or CTA. The ability to quantify clicks by element is extremely important.

This allows you to:

Understand how much importance users give to each element
Avoid allowing users to click on images without links

Percentage of click heatmap — Source: nguyenvincent.com

Confetti heatmap

The confetti heatmap lets you see each individual click on a page, as opposed to a view that shows a ‘density’ of clicks. It allows you to see if people are trying to click on non-clickable areas, and to fix the problem if so!

Heatmap vs. eye-tracking

If heatmaps rely mostly on tracking a user’s mouse movements and clicks, eye-tracking analyzes their gaze.

The point of eye-tracking is to see exactly how your site users look at your site, to analyze the zones where they pay the most attention.

Heat map versus eye tracking — Source: Nielsen Norman Group

As with heat mapping, the areas highlighted in warm colors show the areas where readers pay the most attention.

Although it’s certainly useful, eye-tracking relies on technology that’s a bit more difficult to put in place. It requires specific equipment that most agencies don’t have.

If you’re interested in eye-tracking, there is software based on AI, like Feng-Gui or EyeQuant, that allow you to simulate eye-tracking with the help of algorithms.

Heat mapping tool features

When looking for a heatmap tool, keep in mind the following points:

Segmentation: The tool should allow you to create heatmaps specific to certain audiences that you define using certain targeting and segmentation criteria (ex. new visitors, visitors who have converted, visitors from sponsored link campaigns…)
Map Comparison: You should be able to easily and visually compare the results of different maps from different user segments.
Page Template: Having a heatmap specific to each page can make the analysis tricky if your page is an ecommerce product page, and you have hundreds or even thousands of them. You need to be able to aggregate results for all pages of a certain type.
Responsive Heatmaps: The tool has to work on pages accessed from a mobile device. Actions specific to these devices should be recorded, such as touches, scrolls, and swipes. During the analysis, you should be able to distinguish between behaviors and navigation sessions seen on mobile vs desktop devices so that you can correctly interpret the data.
Exportable Maps: This important feature lets you easily share your results with teammates.
Dynamic Heatmaps: You should be able to see clicks on dynamic elements: drop-down menu, slider, carousel, elements loaded using AJAX or using a JavaScript framework like React.js or Angular.js.
Retroactive Heatmaps: Has your site design changed since your last analysis? Your software should be able to conserve previous results as shown on the then-current website design, and not simply superimpose the results on your new design – the results wouldn’t make any sense.

Combine heatmap and A/B testing

Let’s imagine that you’ve used a heatmap to better understand how your website users interact with your brand. You’ve identified strong and weak points on your site, and you’d like to make the appropriate changes.

Question: How can you measure how effective these changes were? There’s only one solution – A/B testing your modifications.

The idea is to create different versions of your web pages, ads, landing pages, etc. in order to compare how they perform.

By combining heatmap and experimentation, you’ve got yourself a 3-step method to:

Identify problems
Test potential solutions
Choose the highest performing solution

On this home-repair website, a preliminary heatmap reveals that users’ attention and engagement are split between too many competing elements.

Insight: attention is divided and conversion is low.

heatmap and ab testing

With the help of A/B testing, the company made a few changes to the home page in order to refocus visitor attention on one call-to-action.

A second heatmap is made after the modifications.

Insight: attention is refocused on the phone number, the main call-to-action, and conversions increase.

A/B test your heatmap

To sum up, use heatmaps and A/B testing to:

Analyze visitor behavior and engagement
Reveal strong and weak areas on certain web pages
Find specific ways of increasing conversion rates
Test these solutions until you see your conversion rates go up

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Nov 23, 2020

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The Step-by-Step Guide to Progressive Rollout

AB Tasty

You’ve heard all about the surface-level benefits of rapid product releases. They let you explore, experiment with, and test features faster. They create a more collaborative development process. And they let you run an efficient high-output team.

All of these benefits are true, but the biggest benefits you’ll enjoy from driving rapid releases lie even deeper than is commonly acknowledged…

Rapid releases do create better products. Rapid releases create a short feedback loop between you and your users. You learn very quickly what’s working and what isn’t, and you can quickly adjust.

But even more important, rapid releases get you and your team out of your own heads. Rapid releases force you to get your product and feature ideas out of the lab and into the real world. This constant contact with reality leads you to create products that simply and directly deliver the actual functions your users need most, while leaving the nice-to-have fluff on the whiteboard.

Rapid releases do create happier users. Rapid releases let you provide new features, and fix bugs, as quickly as possible. You constantly give your users a better and better product.

But on an even deeper level, rapid releases demonstrate that you care about your users. It shows them that you are listening to their feedback, and that you are taking it seriously. It tells your users that you care about them so much that you have structured the heart of your product management strategy around doing whatever it takes to make them happy and loyal.

Rapid releases do create better businesses. Rapid releases—when properly executed—can create a lot of excitement and enthusiasm throughout your entire organization. They create a culture of progress and forward momentum, where everyone feels that they are contributing to real outcomes and not just spinning their wheels.

But rapid releases also improve your organization’s culture through an even subtler mechanism. Each release can act as a touchpoint that connects the product team with everyone else in the organization. It gives you a common reason to celebrate, to collaborate, and to realign groups that are too often siloed.

Now, we don’t want to oversell rapid releases here. They are not a cure-all, and they are not even appropriate for every single situation. But if you are operating in a context where you can accelerate your product and feature release cycle, you’ll experience a whole lot of upside with little-to-no downside.

To help you drive rapid releases in your organization, we’ll use this piece to explore why rapid releases can be challenging to pull off (even in an agile product development framework), what is the key ingredient you can adopt to overcome all of these challenges, and how to bring that ingredient to life in your organization.

The Biggest Challenges to Driving Rapid Releases

Let’s be clear about one thing— not every organization is well set up to deliver rapid releases. Product managers at big, legacy corporations tend to have a hard time getting anything out in a timely manner. This is almost never their fault. They just have so many layers of review and approval for everything they do that it can take months to push out a small feature that a smaller, nimbler organization could release in weeks or days.

If this is your context, then the best thing you can do is attempt to establish the core principles of lean product development in your organization. This will represent a huge win, and speed things up significantly for you, all by itself.

Now for the rest of you— Let’s assume you are working at one of those smaller, nimbler organizations. And you are already following an agile product development process. And you still are not releasing new products and features as quickly as you’d like. Chances are, you’re being bottlenecked by one or more of these subtle challenges:

You are completing sprint after sprint but you never seem to get any closer to having something to release. Your entire development process feels like it’s focused on completing code, and not completing products and features.
You are getting products and features close to release, but they get trapped in the testing and QA process. This delays their release significantly—sometimes indefinitely.
You are able to complete new features and products, but release gets delayed because it’s such a miserable process. It’s always a big, chaotic scramble. And everyone—from your product team to your business stakeholders—gets stressed and worried about what’s going to happen when you publish the changes and delay the process.

None of these issues are solved by the fundamentals of agile product development. It’s easy to focus agile workflows on development and never give much thought to release. It’s easy to put off testing and QA until the last minute for the sake of velocity, and wind up with a huge backlog to deal with at the end. And agile products and features have developed a reputation (deserved or not) for being buggy, broken, and more aligned with what the product team thinks is right, and not what the customer actually wants.

It’s clear that agile in and of itself will not solve these problems, nor ensure rapid releases. But a small tweak to agile will.

How Progressive Rollouts Unlock Rapid Releases in Agile Product Development

You’ve heard of progressive rollouts before. They are considered an optional subset of agile methodology that restructure the entire release process.

Traditionally, a product manager would release a new product or feature in its full form, to every user, at the exact same time. But a product manager that follows progressive rollouts would release that same new product or feature in smaller forms, to a few user groups at a time, and in staged intervals.

Essentially, progressive rollouts let you break up “big bang” releases into smaller chunks. And along the way, you end up solving a lot of the challenges that prevent rapid releases. For example:

Progressive rollouts shift the product team’s focus off developing new code, and onto driving releases.
Progressive rollouts force you to focus on code quality, and readiness to deploy, instead of code volume.
Progressive rollouts remove most of the risks—and resulting stress—from releases by shrinking them into smaller, easier-to-control stages.

Progressive rollouts are the key ingredient that takes the solid foundation of lean product management, and ensures it’s properly lined up to deliver rapid releases. Here’s how you can bring it to life in your organization.

7 Steps to Ensuring Rapid Releases with Progressive Rollouts

Structure Your Release Phases: Don’t let them be hurried, disorganized dashes at the end of a development cycle. Give them the same time, attention, and care as you give every other element of your product management framework. Create formalized processes, and adopt the tools you need to make those processes automatic habits.
Decide Which Products and Features to Release. Review your current queue. Identify the highest impact products and features that you can drive to completion soonest. Employ feature flags to hide features in products that aren’t ready yet, and focus your users on one small subset of new functionality at a time.
Establish Your Personas and User Groups. Identify your highest-value users, and the opportunities they represent. Leverage these groups to test the new products and features they will love most. Personalize and customize their experience to let them know they’re getting early access because of just how valuable they are to you.
Plan Your Progressive Rollouts: Define the features and products you are going to release. Define who they are going to be released to. Define when they are going to be released, and what the stages look like. And then organize your sprints to deliver to these requirements.
Define the Impact of Each Rollout. Establish the exact, measurable, accountable business metrics you plan to improve with each of your rollouts. Define the hard and soft impact each release will have on every function in your business— and tell each function about the release before it happens.
Communicate Your Release. Loop your business stakeholders in on each element of your release plans that might give them pause or concern. Show them how progressive rollouts mitigate their risk around product and feature quality and alignment. And update them on the progress of each release at each stage of your rollout.
Automate as Much of Your Rollout as Possible. Remove yourself and your team as the bottleneck. Automate your QA and testing. Set your deployment intervals and parameters, and then let your software execute it for you. Monitor your release’s performance at each stage. A/B test as much as possible. And intervene ASAP when an issue is identified. But otherwise, let the right tools make rapid releases through progressive rollouts a smooth element of your agile product development process.

With a little bit of intentional planning, with a shift in the focus of your agile product development, and with the right tools, you can easily bring progressive rollouts to your organization, and rapidly increase the rate of your releases.

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Nov 16, 2020

8min read

Call to Action: A Simple Guide to More Conversions

AB Tasty

A Call to Action, also known as a CTA, refers, in marketing, to any item that will, using imperative wording, encourage an immediate action or response from the user.

Calls to Action are essential in marketing campaigns. They’re a way to lead customers to a specific action. They generally come as a button, but they also exist in many other forms. In this guide, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about CTAs, how they work and how to use them on your website.

What is a Call to Action?

Behind this mysterious name hides a very simple marketing concept you’ve all seen before. Calls to Action (CTAs) refer to any device conceived to persuade users to do a specific action.

E-commerce companies usually use them in the form of buttons to encourage buyers to add an item to their shopping cart or to complete a transaction. It is a key element to integrate playful interaction with your users and an effective means to increase conversions.

The goal of a CTA is to use a word or a sentence (most of the time containing action verbs) to push your users toward a specific action like “click here”, “subscribe”, “check out” and many others. These action words can also be used with a “now” creating a sense of urgency. Calls to Action were proven to be very effective and to optimize conversion rates.

CTAs can be used to push users down the purchase funnel, but they can also be used for any kind of action like registering, subscribing to a newsletter or adding to cart.

What makes an effective CTA? When creating a CTA for your website, every detail counts. Here are some aspects you need to pay attention to for your CTA button:

Visual aspect
Wording
Action word
Placement
Form
Color
Size

Do not underestimate the impact your CTA button can have on your conversion rate. A well-written Call to Action needs to be adapted to your audience, their age, their gender or their nationality. Remember that a CTA isn’t just a command or an invitation for your users, it is part of the full purchasing process. That’s why it needs to be discreetly integrated but obvious enough to be noticed by users.

Why do you need a clear Call to Action in your CRO strategy?

Always remember the importance of CTAs in your purchase funnel. Your customer’s path to completing a transaction is paved with CTA buttons. They are a key element in your CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) strategy, they need to be quite obvious since they are meant to lead users to the action you want them to complete.

A good and clear Call to Action comes with a nice visual, adapted to your target audience, with a clear and straightforward message. That way, and only that way, you will get the best out of your CTA and note effective results in your conversion rate AND your CTR (Click Through Rates).

An efficient CTA is nothing but a perfect compromise between your e-commerce site’s goal, which is to increase sales or to sell a specific product, and users’ needs, i.e. a smooth navigation experience while purchasing a product. That’s why your CTA needs to be neat and easy to find, and user experience always needs to be taken into account.

Best Call to Action examples of 2020

CTAs come in many forms. To help you with your CTA A/B testing, we listed the 5 best forms of CTAs in 2020:

1. Direct Calls to Action

Let’s say your goal is to push your customers down the purchase funnel. Then, you might opt for a direct CTA, such as:

Shop now
Buy now
Add to shopping cart

This is an Amazon product page showing CTA An Amazon product page containing an add to shopping cart and buying button CTA (Image Source).

2. “Get for Free” Calls to Action

With these CTAs, you can highlight an opportunity for the users. Generally, these come with a “subscribe” box. You can collect your users’ email addresses in exchange for a sample of a document or a free trial. These CTAs usually appear as:

Download for free
Free 30 day trial
Start free trial

This is a screen shot of Tidal's free trial

Tidal homepage enticing users to register with a free trial (Image Source).

3. Basic Calls to Action examples

CTAs can be a mere invitation. For instance, on a social media’s ad or as a shortcut to a long text. This kind of CTA is often used in blog posts or Facebooks Ads. Awakening the user’s curiosity, it is supposed to make users want to go further and learn more about a topic with messages like:

Check it out
Start here
Find out more
Learn more

This is a screen shot of Philips CTA for their newsletter Philips USA homepage with multiple CTAs (Image Source).

4. Registering Calls to Action

This kind of CTA is often found on social media or e-commerce sites. The goal is simple: encourage your visitors to create an account and register with messages such as:

Create your account
Sign up
Join us

This is a screen shot of Bose's sign up CTA Bose homepage with sign up CTA (Image Source).

5. Email Calls to Action

All of the above have one thing in common: they allow you to connect with your users by collecting their emails, which will be useful for your email marketing campaigns. According to what you are proposing, users can fill in their email to get something like a discount, a coupon or a free PDF. For these, you can use wordings such as:

Subscribe
Get coupon
Download free PDF
Sign up

This is a screen shot of Anastasia's CTA to join the emailing list

For more, read our article about “14 Examples of CTAs You Can’t Resist”.

A/B Test your CTA for better results

A/B testing

A/B testing is the most accurate technique for CRO. This digital marketing strategy consists of making changes on your website and observing the impact of this change on a segment of users.

This is the best method to improve your conversion rate, because you can try out any feature and choose the one whose results are best. It is more reliable since users are the ones determining which feature works best. With this method, you can test your idea with your target users or potential customers.

A/B testing your CTA buttons is the best way to improve your website’s UX and your conversion rate at the same time. At AB Tasty, we offer a super quick and easy way to run these kinds of tests – our drag and drop visual editor.

How to run an A/B test for your CTA?

Here are the different steps you need to follow to A/B test your Call to Action button:

Define your test’s goal and the KPIs you want to improve

Changing your button’s feature must serve a goal. It wouldn’t make sense to change your CTA’s color, to run your test and wait for random results. Your goal can be to increase the number of users that subscribe to your newsletter, for instance.

Define the original and alternative version (A and B version)

Choose the CTA you want to run your A/B test on, let’s say the red “subscribe to newsletter” button. This red button will be your A version.

What do you want to change about it? Maybe users will be more likely to click on this button if it were blue? Then, change your button’s color. (If you’re using AB Tasty, this takes two seconds with our drag and drop editor). The blue version of the CTA button will be your B version.

Run your A/B test

Worried about exposing 50% of your website visitors to this new change? If you have enough traffic, you can run your test on a smaller percentage of your entire website audience to mitigate the risk of any potential lost conversions.

Collect data and check your analytics

Usually, A/B tests take several weeks before you get reliable results. During that period, observe your A/B testing tool reporting. Did your conversion rate increase? Did it decrease?

Hard code changes (or not)

Figures don’t lie. Based on the test’s results, change what needs to be changed and keep what needs to be kept. Step by step you will find the best combination of features for the perfect CTA.

Conclusion

CTAs are essential in your conversion rate optimization strategy, but they can’t appear randomly or look like any old button. They need to be wisely thought out, otherwise they might not have the expected effect.

Thanks to A/B testing, you will be able to find the right features in order to get the best performance out of them. Remember that visual aspects (like form, color, or size), wording, the chosen action word, and placement matter in your CTA’s performance.

So, what’s the takeaway? An effective Call to Action can boost your website KPIs, and you can A/B test any of your website’s pages – the sky’s the limit.

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How to Add Continuous Deployment to Agile Product Management

AB Tasty

If you are a Product Manager, then Continuous Deployment seems like an obvious win.

When you adopt continuous deployment, you take everything that you love about Agile Product Management— the rapid iterative processes, the increased product quality and market viability, the accelerated rate of collecting and incorporating customer feedback into products—and you supercharge it.

For example: If you follow a traditional Agile framework, then you are going to aim to release new product iterations every 1-2 weeks. When you upgrade to Continuous Deployment, you will start to iterate your product a few times per day by releasing code as soon as it’s been thoroughly tested and deemed ready to commit.

This is a huge leap forward, and the benefits of evolving to Continuous Deployment for Product Managers are clear. They include:

You get to A/B test new features in real-world environments even faster than before.
You can incorporate customer feedback into your live product in near-real-time.
You are able to create reliable products with few (if any) code-level faults.

All of these benefits directly translate into the thing you care about most— releasing high-quality products and features that align tightly to your customer’s deepest needs.

Evolving Your Agile Product Management Seems Like an Easy Sell, Right?

Well, as great as Continuous Development appears for the core work of Product Managers, there is this other thing to keep in mind before you rush to try to adopt the framework…

For better or worse, there’s a lot more to your job than just creating great products for your customers. You also need to lead your Features Team to get them to actually create those great products and features. You need to get (and keep) your Business Analysts onboard with every product and feature you want to make. And you need to give Marketing a suite of products and features that they understand and know how to share with the world.

As much as Continuous Deployment can make your life easier when it comes to releasing all those great products you manage, it can also create a lot of friction between you and all of those other people who you also need to manage as a big part of your job.

So let’s take a quick look at why you will likely face some pushback from your stakeholders if you try to evolve towards a Continuous Development framework, why the conventional wisdom for disarming their concerns doesn’t really work, and how you might actually get them to adopt Continuous Deployment alongside you.

Let’s start by taking a look at each of their concerns, one at a time.

Why Your Marketing Department Might Push Back on Continuous Deployment

Marketing departments traditionally follow a Waterfall approach to collaborating with Product Managers. They like to perform a lot of market research upfront. They like to get involved in a predefined project planning phase to incorporate their single round of customer research. And then they like to have a well-defined product with static features, benefits, and value propositions that they can easily understand and push.

Continuous Deployment dissolves all of these structures, and forces Marketing departments to become nimble, responsive, and adaptable to daily changes in the products and features they are selling. It’s a big adjustment in approach, and it’s natural for Marketing departments to feel unwilling to throw out everything they know and relearn their profession.

Why Your Business Analysts Might Push Back on Continuous Deployment

Business Analysts operate pretty similar to traditional Marketing departments. BAs like to have a lengthy discovery phase upfront. They like to extract a clean set of product requirements, and to enshrine them into a fixed document that acts as a binding agreement between “the business” and the developers. This document gives them some control over the whole process, including a fixed set of outcomes to track project success against.

Continuous Deployment blows away the concepts of fixed requirements, static product descriptions, and project success being linked to checking boxes on an internal contract. It takes control of the project away from the BAs, and places it into the hands of the product team— who are themselves being directed by the direct feedback of users. It makes sense that BAs might be reluctant to give up their control over product development.

Why Your Own Features Team Might Push Back on Continuous Deployment

If anyone should embrace Continuous Deployment with open arms, it’s your Features Team. But often they will push back more than anyone else when you try to make the shift to Continuous Deployment— even if the team already operates from a traditional Agile framework!

Some of this pushback is just inertia. Your Features Team has refined a set of workflows over the years, and they don’t see the point in adopting new tools and processes just to fix a way of doing their job that (from their perspective) isn’t broken.

But some of it runs much deeper. Continuous Deployment changes the Feature Team’s job description. Instead of building towards well-defined product milestones—and defining success by how quickly and accurately they hit those milestones—Continuous Deployment shifts Feature Teams off development and onto testing and bug fixes, while forcing them to adapt to a much more ambiguous definition of whether or not they are excelling at their jobs.

Disarming Each of These Objections (It’s Not as Simple as It Might Look)

If you’re going to adopt Continuous Deployment as a Product Manager, then you’re going to need to convince each of your stakeholder groups that it’s a worthwhile change. And—contrary to the advice you’ll find if you search through the development community’s discussions on this topic—convincing these three stakeholder groups to toss their old way of doing things and adopt Continuous Deployment is not as simple as:

“Explaining the pros-and-cons of Continuous Development.”
“Changing your organization’s culture.”
“Communicating more.”

We don’t mean to be flip here, or to poke fun at anyone who is offering genuine advice. We’d just like to point one thing out— while these actions are necessary elements of any change management program, they don’t really address the deep concerns your stakeholders feel about adopting this new Product Management methodology. No amount of pros-and-cons lists that outline why Continuous Development is great for you will address the fact that:

Your Marketing department is worried because they don’t know if they are selling a product or feature set that has already dramatically changed since you last spoke.
Your Business Analysts are worried that you are going to waste a lot of time, money, and manpower building products with no clear use case.
Your Features Team are worried that 90% of their job is going to become fixing bugs and cleaning code instead of hitting targets that they can point to during a performance review.

These are not shallow concerns that you can paper over with platitudes or educational sessions on the value of Continuous Deployment. These are deep, material issues that you need to find a way to address for your stakeholders before you can evolve your Agile Product Management with scrum and reap the benefits of Continuous Deployment.

How to Disarm Your Stakeholders’ Concerns About Continuous Deployment

The answer is simple, but not easy. You have to really dig into each of their concerns, and proactively find a way to solve their problems for them.

You need to fold Marketing into your day-to-day work so they are aware of what you are developing, what changes you have planned, and how soon you will be giving them new products and features to place their campaigns behind. You need to share the customer experience feedback that is informing your decisions, so it can inform Marketing’s messages too.

You need to bring your Business Analysts in too. You must justify the expense of adopting new tools, team members, and training protocols to develop a Continuous Deployment capability. You must then proactively quantify and report on the ways your faster iterations will create a more viable and profitable product suite that remains aligned to the business, its strategy, and its regulatory frameworks.

Most important, you need to take care of your Features Team. You must make sure they don’t miss their development milestones because they are constantly cleaning code. You must make sure they still build and deploy new features and not just new test cases. And you must give them both the training they need to adapt to Continuous Deployment methodologies, and a centralized platform that automates, streamlines, and accelerates their most critical new workflows.

Continuous Deployment represents a big leap forward in Product Management. There were growing pains when the field moved from Waterfall to Agile, and it’s wise to expect—and proactively handle—this new set of obstacles as you evolve to the next stage of Agile product lifecycle management.

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Jun 12, 2020

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Feature Branching: The Product Manager’s Key to Faster Releases

AB Tasty

You’re always looking for methods to release new features faster.

After all— the faster you release new features, the faster you get to collect real-world feedback from your real-world users, and the faster you can use that feedback to release higher and higher quality versions of your product.

Of course, you have many methods you can deploy to accelerate your feature releases. You can perform canary releases. You can test in production. You can master rollbacks. Each of these will accelerate your feature releases, and you should experiment with each of them.

But if you are really serious about accelerating your feature releases, then you have to start thinking about how to speed things up from a development perspective as well. And one of the most powerful ways to accelerate feature development is through parallel development, deployed through a dedicated feature branching strategy.

In this piece, we’ll explore parallel development, why feature branching offers an ideal form of parallel development, and how you can avoid the pitfalls of feature branching and use it to accelerate your feature releases.

Why Should Product Managers Bother with Parallel Development?

Parallel development is an easy concept to understand, but a challenging practice to master.

Essentially— when you and your team perform parallel development, some of your developers will work on one set of tasks, while your other developers work on another set of tasks.

You don’t need to split your developers into two even groups. You can have three different groups within your pool of developers working on three different sets of tasks— or four, or five, or ten, or more. The exact number doesn’t matter. All that matters is this— instead of having everyone work on the same tasks from the same code base, different groups work on different tasks within the same time period.

Establishing parallel development accelerates your feature releases in a few ways. Your teams will get to focus on smaller, laser-targeted assignments that are typically easier to knock off. You can avoid instability from one team’s code changes disrupting the working environment of the rest of your teams. And—most important—you can release each team’s work independently, which means you don’t have to wait for everyone to complete their tasks to push something new out to your users.

This last point is key. While there are many different forms of parallel development available to you, if you want to accelerate your feature releases then you must follow a form called feature branching.

How Does Feature Branching Work?

Essentially— with feature branching, you will organize your parallel development strategy around feature development. You will create a new “branch” off of your main code base that relates to a specific feature or a cluster of features, and you will assign that branch to a specific, independent team

At times, these feature-focused branches are called “user stories”, but for the sake of simplicity we are going to just refer to features and branches in this piece.

Once a feature branch is completed, tested, and reviewed, it can then be merged back onto the main code base and released to users— no matter how far along, or how stalled, the product’s other feature branches might be.

By focusing on the parallel development and release of individual features— and not on pushing large-scale releases, or monolithic trunk-based development—feature branching allows you to iterate your product as quickly as possible.

Click here to learn more about monolithic architecture and how it compares to more distributed systems (microservices approach).

What are the Potential Downsides to Feature Branching?

Now, even though feature branching can rapidly accelerate your feature releases, it is not a magic bullet. Feature branching can go wrong in a few big ways.

First, feature branching can be challenging to pull off from a purely technical perspective. You must establish some sort of easy method to release features independent of each other. If you don’t, then completed features are just going to pile up while you wait for others to wrap up, eliminating the entire point of feature branching in the first place, and reverting you to a more traditional release branching strategy.

Second, feature branching can cause painful merge conflicts. Even though your teams work independent from each other, their individual branches might all require changes to the same shared elements of the code base. When one team completes their work and merges with the code base, they might alter those shared elements and make other branches incompatible by the time they are ready to release.

Finally, feature branching can create a softer type of misalignment. When teams work in focused isolation for too long, they can lose touch with each other, and lose sight of the product as a whole. Feedback will be challenging to collect and share. Collaboration can disappear entirely. And teams can make big changes to the product’s code base or feature set without anyone else knowing it.

These are big potential problems, but they are not inevitable.

Let’s look at a few ways you can avoid them.

How to Avoid Misalignment When Feature Branching

Let’s start with the most complex problem to solve— misalignment.

When you deploy a feature branching strategy, you get caught in a paradox. On the one hand, isolating your teams is what feature branching (and parallel development as a whole) is all about. On the other hand, too much isolation destroys the unity of your team as a whole and the fundamental product you are developing.

There are some technical solutions to the misalignment that can so easily creep into teams working in parallel. One team can always pull-down changes from your other teams to see what they’re working on, to collaborate on that feature’s development, and to make sure their branch isn’t straying too far from everyone else’s.

But most of the solutions to misalignment are much subtler and “softer”. You can host daily stand ups for your entire group of developers. You can facilitate constant communication so everyone knows what everyone else is doing at all times. And you can shrink the size of each feature being developed so it has to merge back to the product (and everyone else’s work) before it has enough time to get too badly misaligned in the first place.

Misalignment is not inevitable, but it requires a lot of daily discipline to make sure all of your branches fit together.

How to Avoid Merge Conflicts When Feature Branching

Next, let’s tackle the most common pitfall of feature branching— merge conflicts.

Feature branching usually starts with great intentions. The developer group is broken into multiple teams. Each team is assigned a feature branch. And they are sent off to deliver their work quickly, and to return to merge quickly.

But often, these intentions go awry. Teams keep working on their features long after they were supposed to merge, and they keep pushing back their integrations. Usually this happens because a team gets lost in their work. They want to deliver the highest quality feature possible, and they go down perfectionist rabbit holes. But as they keep developing, they shoot far past their initial scope. And what was supposed to be a single small new feature or a simple update to an existing feature turns into a large, complex set of new features that better resemble a brand new release.

When this happens, it’s almost inevitable that a host of merge conflicts will pop up as soon as the team attempts to integrate their work with everyone else’s.

Like the solution to misalignment, the solution here is simple in concept but challenging in execution. You must maintain the discipline of keeping small feature branches that can be merged early and often. Set a minimum viable product (MVP) prior to creating the branch, and as soon as it is hit—as imperfect as it might be—you merge and release it.

How to Avoid Release Bottlenecks When Feature Branching

Finally, the simplest challenge to solve— developing the technical capability to release features independent of each other.

The solution here can be summed up in two words, “feature flags”.

Feature flags are toggles that let you release or rollback an entire feature with the click of a button. Each new feature, or each feature update, is assigned its own toggle that operates 100% independent of every other feature or update ready to be released. You can push the completed work of any team at any time, no matter how bug-ridden or half-baked the rest of your teams’ features may be at that moment.

The beauty of feature flags lies in their flexibility. If you want to release a completed feature as soon as it’s ready to go, you just toggle it on with one click. If you want to wait to release a few new features at once, then you let them stack up as they complete until the last new feature in the suite is finished, then you can release them all at once. If you release a new feature and then find a hidden merge conflict, you can toggle it off right away with just one more click.

Release Features Faster with the Right Branching Strategy

At this point, you now have a pretty clear picture of what feature branching is all about, and how to deploy it in your product management practice without falling into the strategy’s most common pitfalls.

Structure the smallest feature branches possible to minimize misalignment and merge conflicts.

Maintain the discipline to stick to these small feature branches and not get caught in endless attempts to make them perfect before release.

And streamline your independent feature release process as much as possible with the right tech.

Don’t let the simplicity of this strategy fool you. Once mastered, feature branching gives you a powerful method to accelerate your feature releases.

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May 15, 2020

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15 Practical Tips to Boost Your Call to Action Click-Through Rate (CTR)

AB Tasty

Call to actions (CTAs) count. In fact, more than 90% of consumers who read your headline will also read your CTA copy.

A well-crafted call to action will result in more click-throughs, which typically translates to more conversions.

Your CTA should inspire action, telling your audience what to do next in a way that’s clear, direct, and offers real personal value. If you fail to make an impact with your CTA messaging, then more often than not, the rest of your content will be rendered redundant (or at least become diluted).

So, to help you increase your call to action click-through rate (CTR) and boost your bottom line, here are 15 practical tips.

1) Make your CTA buttons appear ‘clickable’

While this may sound glaringly obvious (making your CTA buttons clickable is the aim of the game, after all), it’s vital.

To ensure that your CTA messaging stands out on the page and appears clickable to your audience, here are some fundamentals you must consider:

Make sure that your CTA button doesn’t clash with other visual elements on the page.

Opt for a rounded or rectangular button.
Create text and button colors that have a clear contrast. If prospects can’t see your text, it’s unlikely they will take action.

2) Put your CTA buttons in the right places

When it comes to boosting the click-through rate of CTA buttons, placing them in the right place is essential.

An eye-tracking study discovered that most users follow an F-shaped pattern when browsing web pages. That said, there are areas of a webpage where your CTA button will perform better.

Source

Placing your CTA button above the fold will often prove effective, but it’s certainly not compulsory. Providing you place your CTA button in a logical place somewhere in that ‘F browsing shape, you will entice more click-throughs.

Look at your page as if you were a consumer. Follow the browsing pattern and it should become clear (within the context of your content) where to place your CTA button.

3) Focus on your short button copy

Most effective CTAs are concise yet impactful. So, if you focus on your short button copy, you will increase your CTA click-through rate.

Your CTA button will have limited room for text, so you have to make your copy count. Here are some solid short copy examples for inspiration:

Get started
Subscribe
Try for free
Join us
Join the family
Let’s work together
The time is now
Start your journey

4) Evoke emotion or a sense of enthusiasm

Concerning your CTA click-through rate, the more urgency you create, the more influential the result.

If you create a sense of urgency or generate enthusiasm with your CTA, you will prompt people to click-through.

For instance, if your landing page is focused on selling a brand new product, then once you’ve told your story and highlighted the USPs, you could sign off with, ‘…but they’re selling like hotcakes. Order yours now before it’s too late.’

This level of urgency will prompt click-throughs.

5) Use action words

Certain words or phrases will encourage action. Known as marketing action words, these particular terms are punchy, impactful, and will encourage consumers to click-through.

This glossary of marketing action words will boost the success of your CTA click-through rate—and there are plenty to choose from.

glossary-CTA

Source

6) Utilize FOMO

FOMO (fear of missing out) is an approach that will help you boost your CTA click-through rate exponentially. If you’re running a promotion or marketing a new product, the FOMO trick will work wonders.

By producing a CTA that makes your audience feel like they’re going to miss out on something worthwhile (or be the only one left out), you will motivate them to click-though and, potentially, convert.

Phrases like ‘don’t miss out’ work well when it comes to FOMO marketing, as does letting your audience know how many people have bought your product or signed up to your service. And, considering that 69% of millennials have severe FOMO, the fear of missing out card is certainly worth trying.

7) Customize your CTA according to device

The concept here is simple: to ensure a healthy click-through rate for your CTA, you must make sure that it’s optimized for every device.

Whether you’re talking about a CTA button or a powerful text-based sign-off, you must always test your call to action across every device (desktop, mobile, tablet, etc.) to ensure that it’s functional, legible, and creates maximum impact.

If you fail to do so, your CTA click-through rate is likely to dwindle, fast.

8) Use numbers where you can

There is a science related to numerics and the human brain. It appears that we can process numbers more intuitively than words at a glance.

That said, if appropriate, use a number rather than a word as this is likely to help with your click-through rates.

For instance, rather than ‘Shop now: only two days left,’ you should try ‘Shop now: only 2 days left.’

9) Step outside the box

This is a phrase that is used so frequently it’s become a cliche. But regarding your CTA CTRs, stepping outside the box will yield positive results.

What we mean here is that when it comes to a call to action, getting a little creative will encourage more engagement.

Here are some tips that will help you step outside the (CTA) box:

Hit your reader with a hint of unexpected messaging. PointBlank SEO’s ‘Be Awesome’ CTA is an excellent example.

Experiment with conversational language or regional phrasing (tailored to your target audience).

Weave your brand name into your CTA copy. Greetings card brand, GiftRocket, did this well with the CTA copy: ‘Send a GiftRocket.’

Source

10) Build suspense and anticipation

In addition to creating a sense of urgency or taking the FOMO approach, generating suspense will also benefit your CTA CTR.

By creating an air of mystery or somewhat of a cliffhanger with your CTA messaging, you will encourage your readers to click-through and find out more.

As humans, we’re a curious bunch with an affinity for storytelling. Create suspense, sign off with a cliffhanger, and people will have no choice but to click through.

11) Add images where appropriate

Using a powerful or striking image in conjunction with your CTA will help to encourage click-throughs.

But if you want your image to boost your CTA success rather than hinder it, you should follow these best practices:

Choose an image that aligns with your call to action goal.

Avoid imagery that is too bright or busy as this will detract from your CTA message.

Select images that are likely to evoke the emotion you want your reader to feel. For instance, if you’re a wellness service provider, looking to make people feel uplifted, then using a more animated image of smiling faces might work well.

12) Experiment with colors

When it comes to CTA buttons or text, experimenting with colors will help you increase your click-through rate.

Studies suggest that bold, bright colors are effective for CTAs, so start experimenting with a vibrant palette and see what fits best with your blog post, landing page, or product page.

13) Use white space

Another click-through rate-boosting design tip comes in the form of white space.

By placing a healthy amount of white space around your call to action text or button, you will grab the reader’s attention on the page.

As a result, your readers will focus more on your messaging, in turn prompting them to click through. This approach will prove especially effective for mobile screens.

14) Follow a natural progression

As we touched on earlier, the human brain responds well to storytelling. To give your CTA a click-worthy punch, your page elements should follow a natural progression or narrative.

When you’re creating your page content, consider the F-shaped scanning pattern, using this logic to tell a story that ultimately flows towards your CTA.

But whatever you do, make sure that this natural progression doesn’t jar the reader and make them bounce off the page. For example, you wouldn’t put a ‘register now’ CTA button above your event or webinar details.

Follow a natural progression that focuses on strong storytelling and the rest will follow.

15) Don’t forget to A/B test

If you want to optimize your CTA performance and maintain consistently high click-through rates, then A/B testing is essential.

By testing two versions of a web or landing page, you can gain a wealth of performance-related insights that will help you make the best possible decisions based on CTA design, copy, and placement.

If you know which elements best resonate with your audience, you will be empowered to create CTAs that will boost your click-through rate time after time.

Regardless of your niche or industry, creating a strong call to action is essential to your ongoing business success. Follow these tips, test your choices, and you will boost your click-through rate sooner than you think. You can do it!

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May 12, 2020

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Drive Digital Transformation With Client-Side and Server-Side Optimization

AB Tasty

The further your company is on its digital transformation journey, the more critical experience optimization (EXO) becomes. After all, you want your digital products to deliver the best customer experience to meet your business goals and stay competitive. Marketing and product teams can use a variety of tools to conduct and measure EXO experiments. Most of these solutions fall into two categories: server-side and client-side experimentation tools.

But which is the right solution for your use cases? How do they differ, and what can they do? Let’s find out in this blog post!

What’s the difference between client-side and server-side?

You may already be familiar with the technical concepts behind client-side and server-side tools. In short, client-side solutions operate in your users’ browsers, while server-side tools run on a physical or virtual server.

Client-side tools allow you to test visual or structural variants of your website or web app to optimize the customer experience. In most cases, these tools use JavaScript – a programming language that runs in the browser – to put a new UI layer over your existing website.

Client-side solutions usually don’t require programming skills since they generate the experiment code themselves and don’t modify your site’s code. Instead, they often offer a visual editor in the admin interface, which lets you comfortably alter your website’s look and feel. This makes client-side EXO solutions particularly popular with marketing teams who use them for conversion rate optimization.

Server-side testing require technical expertise and coding skills as you need to incorporate experiments into your code and deploy it. For example, you can use server-side EXO solutions to test business transactions, algorithms, and new functional variants. They’re also incredibly valuable when you want to conduct experiments that shouldn’t be influenced by browser quirks or user devices.

Yet, these solutions aren’t only relevant to tech teams. Often, non-technical staff team up with product teams to define experiments, which are then executed by the engineers. Once implemented, an experiment can usually be controlled, monitored, and analyzed via a dashboard (if provided by the solution).

The pros and cons of client-side and server-side tools

Now that we’ve covered the two variants in more detail, let’s look at their general advantages and disadvantages.

Client-side pros:

Technical independence. Marketing teams can create and edit experiments as they see fit without relying on development and IT resources.
Available to everyone. Non-technical teams can quickly and effortlessly set up, modify, and analyze experiments using visual editors.
Efficiency. Gain valuable insights and streamline your product’s or service’s customer experience while investing little time and money.

Client-side cons:

Flicker effects. Users may notice a brief flicker while the webpage loads. This happens when the experiment’s UI layer is placed on the original website, and the user sees it.
Performance. The more JavaScript you load, the slower your website can become. Also, the generated experimentation code’s quality can harm the user interface’s loading speed and responsiveness.
Security and secrecy. Everything a browser can read is public and can be read by anyone – if it’s not encrypted. If you want to keep experiments or their logic a secret, it’s usually safer to opt for a server-side solution.

Server-side pros:

Flexibility. Tech teams have full control over their server-side code, so they can build experiments precisely as needed without being constrained by the tool.
Robustness. Code that runs through deployment processes and QA should meet your company’s quality standards. Experiments cannot be influenced by browsers or devices used and are therefore stable.
Omnichannel experiments. You’re not limited to testing websites and web apps in a browser. Conduct experiments on any channel, be it native mobile apps, email, IoT devices, etc.

Server-side cons:

Long implementation time. Server-side experiments require code releases. Depending on your deployment and QA strategy, you need to involve different teams and processes, increasing implementation time.
Demanding. If the use cases for server-side tools are unclear, you may be using them for the wrong ones. Hence, you may waste time and money implementing and running tests that would have been much easier with a client-side tool.
Expensive. Because server-side experiments require many resources to implement, edit and remove, the cost is typically higher than client-side experiments.

As you could see, each solution has drawbacks that you need to consider before choosing the one fit for your use cases. However, should you choose one over the other at all? We believe that the advantages and disadvantages of the tools complement each other well and, if used correctly, can result in significant benefits.

Let’s find out how you can get the best out of both worlds!

How you can benefit from both methods with AB Tasty

Using client-side and server-side functionalities for experience optimization gives your company the needed agility to meet your consumers’ changing and demanding expectations. Yet, to set up productive workflows, you need to determine when and how which experiments should be utilized by whom.

We recommend splitting up tests and experiments between your marketing and product teams. AB Tasty‘s client-side feature helps your marketers optimize conversions and increase user satisfaction. Product teams use our server-side feature to enhance the functionality of digital products and services. It relies on features flags that could be used in many different ways.

Client-Side vs. Server-Side Experiments [Infographic]

Ultimately, knowing who is responsible for which experiments can save your teams a lot of time and headaches. Let’s paint a clearer picture by talking about how our customers use AB Tasty’s client- and sever-side functionalities to optimize customer experiences.

Temporary changes to your website’s UI

Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and Black Friday provide the perfect opportunity to pamper customers with sales and specials. For the occasion, you may want to give your website the proper festive look or display banners and other new UI elements. However, these events are time-limited, and you want your website to return to its usual look and feel at midnight sharp.

Temporary changes to your website’s UI are the ideal job for client-side experimentation solutions. Marketers and designers can make changes themselves without consuming development resources. As a result, they can put their strategies into practice exactly as they imagined and have full control over what is displayed when.

Experimentation

Experimentation is a big subject and involves many different methods and strategies for client-side and server-side tools. In theory, you can utilize some of these techniques using both solutions, such as A/B tests. As a result, it may not always be clear how you should proceed. Here are a few tips:

Use client-side experiments for anything that focuses on user experience, user engagement, conversion rates, and content personalization. AB Tasty’s client-side experiments offer a quick way to test your ideas to ensure they are getting the ROIs you expect. Conduct A/B tests, Multivariate tests, Split tests, and Multipage tests, and analyze their impact in your ROI dashboard.

Our server-side experimentation feature is primarily used by product and engineering teams. It helps you conduct robust and secure experiments that focus on modifying your products’ functions. For example, you can use it to test a new payment method with a subset of users and see how they adapt. Introduce new features to a specific user group and take the appropriate next steps based on live user feedback and selected KPIs in your dashboard.

Keep reading: how to run sophisticated experiments using feature flags.

Personalization

Personalization is a powerful way to improve user satisfaction – and something that your consumers may already take for granted. You can utilize personalization on the client and server-side, with each option presenting different possibilities and challenges.

Client-side personalization is based on non-identifiable user data, data segmentation, and data processing by the AB Tasty AI. Put simply, our AI enables marketing teams to create general personalizations based on user group clusters, such as users’ browsing behavior. Let’s say you want to generate personalization campaigns in your electronics web store for users who are interested in Android or Apple. With client-side personalization, you can find and address the right groups of people with ease.

Server-side tools are usually more powerful for 1-to-1 personalization (also known as individualization). The goal is to create unique omnichannel experiences for each user group or even each individual user. For this, however, you need to collect, store, and process assignable user data, e.g., from a logged-in customer. Hence, you need to keep up to date with the latest data protection regulations in your country, such as the GDPR, and make sure that your website or app complies with them.

Wrapping up

Server-side and client-side experimentation are really two sides of the same coin. They are strategically important as they allow marketing and product teams to focus on their core competency for maximum impact. Use both AB Tasty’s client- and server-side functionalities to empower teams to develop a common approach to experimenting, personalizing, and continuously optimizing digital assets.

Want to learn more about how you can effectively use client-side and server-side experience optimization tools together? Send us a message – we’re happy to help.

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Mar 11, 2020

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Everything You Need to Know About the Freemium Business Model

AB Tasty

“Freemium is like a Samurai sword: unless you’re a master at using it, you can cut your arm off.” – Rob Walling

Scary as this may sound, you’re in the right place to learn what it takes to work the freemium business model in your favor.

Definition of a Freemium Business Model

A freemium business model is an extremely popular customer acquisition strategy among SaaS business owners. Think Dropbox, Spotify, Venngage, Trello, MailChimp, Buffer, Grammarly, etc. Without spending a penny subscribers can experience the product and test out basic features.

Basically, a freemium offering helps companies not only amplify their reach and popularity (Network Effect), but also create conversion opportunities. How? By activating cognitive biases.

Let’s say you’re a steadily growing small business subscribed to a freemium plan of ‘product X.’ Owing to free plan limitations you agree to upgrade. But there’s more to this than meets the eye. You pay willingly, because thanks to the Endowment Effect, you want to avoid loss of any kind and continue owning the product you’ve become familiar with.

That said, not every business successfully converts prospects into paying customers. There are some inherent challenges, but more on that later. For now, let’s cover the basics.

Differences Between Freemium and Free Trial

Unlike the freemium business model, the free trial plans give prospects complete or partial access to the product—free of charge, but for a limited amount of time.

The idea is to get people to experience the product completely and eliminate doubts within a reasonable time frame. A classic example is Netflix.

When to Opt for the Freemium Business Model

Freemium might seem like a good fit for your product, but only if:

#1 You have a problem-solving product with a huge market

Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote once said: “The easiest way to get 1 million people paying is to get 1 billion people using.”

Certainly makes sense. For viral adoption of your product, it should have a huge market and address freemium users’ pain points. This combination will generate positive word-of-mouth marketing, resulting in engaged customers and improved conversions.

#2 If your product is easy-to-use

The easier it is for users to get around, the less intervention on your part. Besides that, users should understand what they’re getting for free as well as the advantages of upgrading. This essentially means you can spend more time and resources on other important aspects of your business.

#3 If your product isn’t way too expensive

Consumers are price sensitive. To motivate them to upgrade from freemium to a paid plan, your product has to be within an affordable range, justifying the fee and the value you’re delivering. At the same time, it shouldn’t cost you a lot to support a large, non-paying user base.

What Should Your Target Conversion Rate Be?

Generally speaking, freemium conversion rates are low and hover between 2-5%. But that’s not to say that anything lower than that is bad. In fact, you’re better off as long as you’re consistently improving month on month.

Problem is if your conversion rates are either too low or too high. Here’s why:

A low conversion rate means you’re offering way too many features for free and giving prospects no reason to convert. Conversely, high conversion means your freemium offer isn’t exciting which then threatens future customer acquisitions. So ideally, go after a number that’s neither too low nor too high.

How to Increase Your Freemium Conversion Rate

Convinced that the freemium model is good for your business? Great. Though for it to work, understand that it doesn’t deliver on its own. Put simply, freemium subscribers don’t magically convert into paid users. Yeah, sorry, but someone had to burst your bubble.

So draft a solid plan to compel prospects to open their wallets and also passionately endorse you. 😉

Let’s see how you can position yourself better and maximize freemium conversions.

#1 Review your freemium limitations

To let users test out your product completely and get a taste of exclusive features of the premium plan, get rid of the limited features restriction. Instead, limit the users or usage.

On Slack, for example, there’s a limit placed on the number of users, messages, and app installations. Then there’s Dropbox where users are given only a certain amount of storage before they’re asked to pay to upgrade.

Slack freemium - limitations on usage and features — Slack’s a perfect example of how to make paid plans enticing.

#2 Send subtle reminders

Stop bombarding freemium users with pushy sales emails and in-app pop-ups to upgrade. This ‘money talk’ can wait, especially if they’re still new to using your product.

On the contrary, go the subtle, non-aggressive route. Integrate your upgrade message intelligently into the product. Sure, it could take longer for users to really consider upgrading, but your subtle hints won’t go unnoticed.

Spotify does this well, allowing freemium users to skip only 6 songs every hour. The seventh time users are nudged to slow down or get premium.

Spotify Freemium — Spotify’s message prompt is simple yet packs a punch.

#3 Conduct thorough customer research

Products are created with users in mind. The only way yours will be noticed is if you understand who your customer is and what they want. So as step one, conduct solid customer research. Think customer interviews, email surveys, analytics, social listening, discussion forums, heatmap tools, etc.

Finally, let your findings guide you to create and/or improve your product that immediately addresses users’ problems. Not only will they engage better, but they’ll also provide a plethora of insights on how to keep innovating, show value, and stay relevant.

For instance, if you notice a consistent spike in demand for certain features, test those to statistically determine which results in maximum conversions.

#4 Personalize freemium users’ journey

When freemium users are left to their own devices they don’t learn a lot about the product features. To fix this, tailor your potential customer’s journey because each one of them walks a distinct conversion path and has different reasons for why they sign up.

Using a marketing automation platform, contact them early and often so they learn how the product can add value to their professional lives. And when they complete a task, send them encouraging emails and cross-promote other useful features to help them get more work done.

Also, personalize the journey of inactive users and stop them from churning. Trace their previous activity and motivate them to get back in action.

Before you know it, you’ll have helped them build muscle memory, a new habit of using your product. Let’s say your prospect used your product to create a quiz. Congratulate them and get them to explore other offerings, such as creating a poll.

#5 Create product/feature-focused content

Make self-learning easy. Produce a vault of content, including blog posts, videos, tutorials, and FAQs. Your efforts to educate your prospects will be appreciated and result in quick adoption of your product.

Besides, as mentioned earlier, the more they get used to using your product, the stronger the Endowment Effect and the possibility of them becoming paid users will be.

Freemium Buffer email updates to engage users — Buffer sends product updates over email to engage users and set them on the path to feature discovery.

#6 Create a sense of urgency

Urgency triggers fear-of-missing-out or FOMO which makes it a powerful conversion tactic.

One of the ways to create urgency is by giving your highly engaged users an attractive, time-limited upgrade discount. Make sure you highlight what they’re going to miss if they don’t go premium. It’s bound to work since they know their way around the product and might want to keep using it.

Grammarly freemium plan - create urgency with discounts (1)

#7 Make way for friction-free payment

This one’s a no-brainer. Get rid of every possible barrier on the payment page and make it easier for your customers to start using the product right away. It’ll create an excellent customer experience (hopefully resulting in more referrals), reduce payment abandonment rates, and increase your revenue.

What you can do:

Auto-fill data you already have in your database.
Do not kill their buzz with hidden fees.
Give multiple/preferred payment options.
Recap what’s included in the paid subscription.
Mention when the renewal is due.

Dropbox freemium strategy - easy transition to paid plan — Dropbox’s no-nonsense payment page.

However, despite this, if you notice users step away multiple times from signing-up, reach out to them and discuss why they’re hesitant in coming onboard. You’ll surprise yourself with the kind of customer intelligence you might uncover.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this guide has helped you get a handle on the freemium business model.

Now to sum it up and before you wrap your SaaS product as a freemium offering, make sure it has a huge demand, is easy-to-use, and doesn’t burn a hole in either your or your customers’ pockets. Aside from that, implement the best practices discussed in this post to run a sustainable business.

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Article

Feb 6, 2020

8min read

What Exactly Does Customer Experience (CX) Mean? And How Can We Measure It?

AB Tasty

It’s a competitive world online. In order to beat your competition, you need world-class customer experience (CX).

But what exactly does customer experience mean, anyway?

This is a non-technical guide to customer experience; we’ll cover what CX is, why it’s important, how it benefits your business, and how you can measure it.

By the end of the article, you’ll have everything you need to start measuring, improving, and delivering an exceptional experience for your customers.

The Definition of Customer Experience

Customer experience is a big deal.

So much so that a study by Econsultancy found that the number one priority for more than 2,000 marketers was customer experience when asked the question:

“Over the next five years, what is the primary way your organization will seek to differentiate itself from competitors?”

So what is customer experience?

Customer experience (CX for short) is the perception of your customers’ experience with your business or brand.

Every time a customer interacts with your brand and everything your business does, it has an impact on how your customers perceive your business.

Customer experience is the culmination of all of these experiences and interactions, impacting your decision whether to return to the business or make a purchase.

Simply put, the key to your success is epic customer experience.

The Importance of Customer Experience for Your Business

The core benefits of improving your customer experience include the following:

Increase the loyalty of your customers
Increase the happiness and satisfaction of your customers
Increase positive reviews and recommendations
Reduce returns
Reduce complaints
Reduce churn

There is no doubt that to be a successful business, you need to put your customers first. If you do, it’s not only good for them, but it’s also good for your business.

The Customer Journey and Customer Experience

As we’ve seen, customer experience is concerned with the holistic experience of your customers with your brand.

This means that every step of the customer journey has the potential to impact on your customer’s experience.

In terms of customer experience, the stages of a customer’s journey include discovery, research, purchase, and post-purchase customer support.

It should go without saying, but in terms of customer experience, there’s one extremely important caveat to the customer journey.

Instead of considering each stage of the journey from the business’s perspective, it’s imperative to consider these touchpoints from the perspective of the customer.

To improve customer experience at each stage, we need to understand how and why they are different, and what we can do to improve the experiences of your customers.

To better understand customer experience, let’s break down the customer journey into stages.

Stage One: Consideration

When a customer changes from an observer to a potential customer, they enter the “Consideration” phase.

It’s at this stage that a customer is making a choice whether to consider your brand or exclude it from their buying journey.

nike brand

At this point, branding is hugely important. Well-known brands have the upper hand at this point, but if you own a smaller company, the best way you can make an impact is by having a clear message that solves a customer’s problem.

Stage Two: Evaluation

There are two ways in which a potential customer can enter the evaluation stage.

First, they may have “selected” your brand during the consideration stage or, interestingly, they may enter the cycle fresh in the evaluation stage.

While this may seem odd, it’s common sense. As a potential customer researches products similar to yours, it’s likely that they stumble across new brands, as well as the brands they’ve previously considered.

The way you advertise to customers at this stage of the cycle should, therefore, reflect both of these types of customers and you should take into account the fact that many people have not yet interacted with your brand at all.

Stage Three: Buying

Hooray! This is the stage we’ve all been waiting for. And it’s more than likely the stage that most marketers focus on.

Everything from the text on the ‘Buy’ button to the copy on the product page is A/B tested, iterated, and scrutinized.

Of course, this is highly important, but by placing too much emphasis on this one stage of the cycle, it could be detrimental to the customer experience overall.

Stage Four: Post-Purchase

Often overlooked, the post-purchase stage is an equally important part of the customer experience journey.

How you treat your customers after they have bought from you will affect whether they choose to repeat the process…or not.

The effect of customer satisfaction after a purchase can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Consider these statistics:

It can cost up to 25 times as much to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one
If you increase retention rates by 5%, then you can increase profits by 25% to 95%

And here’s the punch line: only 18% of businesses focus on customer retention.

This represents a huge opportunity for you to beat your competition, increase your profits, and improve your customer experience. Win, win, win.

The Importance of Website Personalization

“Website personalization is the real-time individualization of a website to suit each visitor’s unique needs and guide them through a custom conversion funnel.”

And it goes hand in hand with customer experience.

Personalization can be done at any stage of the funnel, from personalized email marketing to exit-intent popups and discount offers.

A well-targeted personalized message evokes an emotional response and creates a stronger, more memorable connection with your brand.

How to Measure Customer Experience

Instead of measuring the ROI of customer experience, which will likely take the focus off customer satisfaction, you should use one or more of the following industry-specific metrics:

NPS (Net Promoter Score)

The Net Promoter Score, or NPS, measures customer experience and can also predict business growth.

It’s a simple measurement, but it’s been adopted around the world and is seen as one of the best ways to measure your customer’s experience.

To run the test, ask your customers on a scale of one to ten whether or not they would recommend your brand or business to a friend.

Respondents are then grouped into “Promoters” (score 9-10), “Passives” (score 7-8), or “Dectractors” (0-6).

Once you’ve collected your responses, subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, and you have your Net Promoter Score.

It’s simple, straightforward, and it works.

CES (Customer Effort Score)

Like the NPS, CES is another way to measure customer experience.

Also using a survey, it asks customers to rank their experience with the business ranging from “Very Difficult” to “Very Easy.”

The theory is, if you make it easy for your customers to make a purchase or solve their problem, then it’s more likely that they will continue to pay for your product or service.

The easiest way to increase customer loyalty is not through “wowing your customers,” but rather through making it easier to get their job done.

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)

The final customer service metric is the Customer Satisfaction Score.

It’s a basic test and, due to the difference in opinion over what is classed as “satisfactory,” its validity can be questioned.

Nevertheless, it’s simple to do and can offer insight into how well your customers experience your brand.

The survey asks the question “How satisfied were you with your experience?” in order to gauge customer satisfaction with their purchase or interaction with your business.

The response should be on a scale from 1–3, 1–5, or 1–10.

TTR (Time to Resolution)

Time to Resolution, or TTR, is the average time it takes for your customer service team to resolve an issue raised by a customer.

One of the best ways to reduce customer frustration is to ensure the timely resolution of their issues.

Unfortunately, if you don’t measure your response times, it’s impossible to know whether or not you’re hitting the mark.

To test your TTR, simply add up all of the time it takes to resolve issues and divide the total by the number of tickets addressed.

TTR is the average length of time it takes for customer service teams to resolve an issue.

Conclusion

In a digital world, customer expectations are higher than ever, and word of good (or bad) service travels at the speed of light. Customer experience requires constant care and attention. Focus on a long-term customer experience strategy and always offer a customer-centric strategy.

By understanding your customer experience journey and testing your customers’ satisfaction levels, you can improve your customers’ perceptions of your brand and, in turn, improve brand loyalty, increase retention, and achieve higher profits.

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2) Put your CTA buttons in the right places

3) Focus on your short button copy

4) Evoke emotion or a sense of enthusiasm

5) Use action words

6) Utilize FOMO

7) Customize your CTA according to device

8) Use numbers where you can

9) Step outside the box

10) Build suspense and anticipation

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#1 You have a problem-solving product with a huge market