Online merchandising is more than just showcasing products; it’s capturing your audience’s attention, keeping them engaged, and guiding them smoothly toward a purchase. Let’s explore the essentials of online merchandising, breaking down actionable tips and strategies to elevate your e-commerce storefront.
What is Online Merchandising?
Online merchandising is the art of strategically organizing, showcasing, and promoting products on your e-commerce site to maximize engagement and conversions. Think of it as combining the precision of data analytics with the creativity of visual storytelling. Whether it’s through well-optimized product pages, eye-catching images, or personalized recommendations, the goal is the same: making shopping intuitive and enjoyable.
The Rise of Mobile-First Merchandising
Mobile is king in e-commerce. Have you ever noticed that smartphones seem to be glued to our hands? You’re not alone. According to Statista, over 54% of global website traffic now comes from mobile devices. For e-commerce, this means a mobile-first approach is non-negotiable.
How to master mobile merchandising:
Responsive Design: Online shopping is no longer linear. You have to ensure that your site is responsive across devices for a smoother shopping experience. This means making sure your design is responsive on desktop, mobile, and tablets.
More speed = more spending: According to Deloitte, a mere 0.1s change in loading time can improve the customer journey and improve conversion rates. It’s time to start minimizing code, optimizing images, and reducing redirects to speed up your mobile performance.
Streamlined Filters: Simplify searches with easy-to-use filters that don’t feel overwhelming on a smaller screen.
Mobile-Friendly CTAsand Buttons: On desktops, consumers click. On mobile, visitors tap with their fingers. A CTA (or any button) that’s too small can lead visitors to click on the wrong icon and derail their user journey. The CTA should be an optimal size (around 44×44 pixels) to avoid frustration.
Make your words worth it: With the constraints of a smaller screen, you may need to adapt your copy. Something as simple as changing your CTA button from “Contact Customer Service” to “Contact Us” can have a big impact.
Pro Tip: Dive further into mobile-first merchandising with our Smartphone Survival Guide to see how mobile impacts consumer behavior and how you can optimize your user experience to boost conversions.
Merchandising During Sales Periods
Sales periods like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Singles Day, Valentine’s Day, or other seasonal events are more than just discounts galore – they’re an opportunity to drive traffic to your website, clear inventory, and welcome new visitors.
How to maximize impact during sales
Curate Themed Landing Pages: Think “Gifts Under $25” or “Holiday Must-Haves.” Tailored pages simplify the shopping journey and give customers exactly what they’re looking for while saving them time browsing.
Urgency Tactics: Phrases like “Limited Stock” or “24-Hour Sale” pressure visitors to buy quicker by creating a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out).
Bundle Deals: Push more products in your inventory by highlighting bundles. Grouping products into bundles with a “frequently bought together” algorithm increases the average order value while offering perceived savings.
These strategies not only boost sales but also make your customers feel like they’ve struck gold on your website by finding just what they’re looking for.
The Power of Personalized Product Recommendations
Ever added a pair of shoes to your cart and instantly been tempted by a matching belt? That’s cross-selling at work. Personalized recommendations, when done right, are like having a helpful salesperson who’s available 24/7 to help you find what you need. So, how do you implement recommendations?
Implementing Recommendations:
Use AI to Analyze Behavior: With experience optimization platforms like AB Tasty, you can implement personalized recommendations by using their AI-powered recommendation engine to predict and personalize what visitors might like based on past activity.
Offer Related Products: When visitors start browsing different products, you can show complementary items to help your customers have the most complete purchase. Selling skincare? Why not recommend helpful products to help your visitors “complete their nighttime routine.”
Personalize Email Follow-ups: Abandoned carts? Send a friendly nudge with personalized email recommendations to remind your customers what’s waiting in their basket.
Want to see the results of recommendations in action? Check out Alltricks’s success story where they saw a +5% in average order value or Jacadi earning +13% more revenue per user with AB Tasty’s recommendations and merchandising solution.
Optimizing Product Pages for Search Engines
Your product pages are like magnets for customers – if they’re SEO-optimized. According to AB Tasty’s E-commerce Consumer Trends Report, nearly half of online experiences begin with a search engine. By improving your SEO and therefore visibility, you’ll make it easier for shoppers to find you.
Must-Have SEO Features:
Targeted Keywords: The more details – the better. It’s always best to use longer, search-friendly terms like “women’s waterproof hiking boots” rather than generic ones like “boots.”
Enticing Meta Descriptions: In addition to a descriptive title, the meta description is your one opportunity to communicate key information about your product with a short, clickable summary to draw in potential buyers.
Alt text for images: Not only does alt text help you meet accessibility standards, but it also improves your chances of showing up in Google Image results.
Detailed Product Descriptions: write descriptions that are informative and keyword-rich while avoiding keyword stuffing.
Leveraging Customer Reviews and Returns Data
Did you know that the majority of consumers read reviews before buying? In fact, Gen Z considers reviews to be the most important thing to consider before making a purchase (source). Reviews help build trust and provide social proof which helps undecided shoppers feel more confident in their purchases.
Ways to Leverage Reviews:
Spotlight success stories: We all love a zero-to-hero story! Highlight top-rated reviews directly on product pages to give confidence to your potential buyers.
Encourage feedback: Be proactive in building reviews for your e-commerce site by sending a post-purchase email asking for reviews (bonus tip: offer a small discount or loyalty points as an incentive).
Feature photos: Take your reviews a step further by encouraging your buyers to upload user-generated images of your products in real life to help build trust.
Turn returns into opportunities
Returns aren’t the end of the world, they’re learning opportunities. Analyze return trends to identify products, flaws, sizing issues, or misleading descriptions. Then, tweak your strategy accordingly to reduce future returns.
Conclusion:
Online merchandising is where creativity meets strategy. By embracing mobile-first designs, leveraging AI, optimizing for SEO, and personalizing the shopping experience, you can turn casual browsers into loyal customers. In today’s competitive e-commerce world, standing out isn’t optional – it’s essential.
With these best practices, you’re not just selling products, you’re creating an experience worth remembering.
FAQs: Online Merchandising
What is online merchandising, and why is it important?
Online merchandising is the process of strategically presenting products on your website to boost sales and engagement. It’s vital because it directly impacts the customer experience and your bottom line.
2. How does mobile-first design impact online merchandising?
A mobile-friendly site ensures a seamless experience for the majority of shoppers, who browse and buy via smartphones. This boosts conversions and reduces bounce rates.
3. How can I optimize my product pages for better visibility?
Use targeted keywords, detailed descriptions, high-quality images, and SEO-friendly meta tags to improve both search rankings and user engagement.
4. Why are customer reviews crucial for online sales?
Reviews provide social proof, build trust, and influence purchasing decisions. Highlighting reviews can significantly boost conversions.
5. What tools can help with AI-driven merchandising?
Platforms like AB Tasty offer advanced AI features to personalize recommendations and enhance the overall online shopping experience.
In the vast and competitive world of e-commerce, simply having great products isn’t enough. Your online store is like a stage, and how you present your products can make or break the show. Enter e-merchandising—the art and science of guiding your customers through a shopping journey that’s as smooth as silk and as engaging as a blockbuster movie.
Whether you’re looking to captivate first-time visitors or inspire returning customers, the right merchandising strategies can transform your site from a digital storefront into an experience that keeps customers coming back for more.
Ready to dive in? Here are five e-commerce merchandising strategies, with real-world examples, to help you create a shopping experience that truly shines.
1. Branding and Homepage Messaging: Your Digital First Impression
“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is a great mantra to apply to our personal lives, however, this proverb doesn’t apply to the e-commerce world.
Your homepage is more than just a landing page—it’s the welcome mat to your online store, and it needs to speak volumes. From the moment someone lands on your site, they should know who you are, what you stand for, and how you can make their life better.
Why it matters:
First impressions count. A compelling homepage can turn curious browsers into engaged shoppers.
Returning visitors want to see something fresh and relevant, not the same old same old.
Pro tips:
Tell your story boldly: Your brand story should be front and center. Use a powerful tagline or headline that captures your essence.
Test, test, test: Use A/B testing to find out what messaging resonates most with your audience.
Show, don’t tell: Include social proof like testimonials and customer reviews to build instant credibility.
Real-world example: Homepage
JOTT, a French clothing retailer, noticed that their homepage was experiencing a higher bounce rate than expected. Realizing that first impressions were crucial, they ran a no-code A/B test using AB Tasty’s experience platform to see if rearranging the homepage layout would improve engagement.
By moving product categories to the above-the-fold section and pushing individual product displays lower down, they achieved a 17.5% increase in clicks on the product category blocks. This optimization reduced bounce rates and guided more users deeper into their shopping journey, enhancing overall engagement.
2. Group Merchandise into Collections: Curate Like a Pro
Ever walked into a store and felt overwhelmed by choice? The same thing can happen online. Grouping your products into well-thought-out collections can turn chaos into clarity, making it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for—and maybe even discover something they didn’t know they needed.
Why it matters:
Curated collections simplify the shopping experience, helping customers quickly find what they’re after.
They also encourage customers to explore more, potentially increasing their basket size.
Pro tips:
Get creative with collections: Don’t just stick to the basics. Think outside the box—consider seasonal themes, trending items, or even influencer picks.
Use data wisely: Analyze purchase patterns to create collections that reflect what customers are actually buying.
Spotlight special collections: Use banners or pop-ups to draw attention to limited-time offers or new arrivals.
Real-world example: Collections
Balibaris, a leading French men’s fashion brand, revamped its e-commerce strategy by intelligently reorganizing its product displays to better match customer preferences and behavior. By dynamically sorting products and emphasizing best-sellers and seasonal items, Balibaris saw a significant increase in conversion rates compared to the previous year, even without special promotions. This strategic move not only enhanced the online shopping experience but also boosted overall sales while freeing up the digital team to focus on more impactful projects.
3. Showcase Products with Visual Merchandising: Let Your Images Do the Talking
In the world of e-commerce, a picture is worth a thousand clicks. Visual merchandising isn’t just about slapping up a few product photos; it’s about creating an emotional connection that makes customers want to reach through the screen and grab that item. High-quality images, videos, and even virtual try-ons can bring your products to life and help customers see how they’ll fit into their lives.
Why it matters:
Stunning visuals can make or break a sale. They help customers imagine the product in their own lives.
Lifestyle images and videos build an emotional connection, making customers more likely to hit “Add to Cart.”
Pro tips:
Go high-def: Invest in top-notch photography that shows your products from every angle.
Tell a story: Use lifestyle images or videos to show how your products can be used in real life.
Mix it up: Consider adding videos or 360-degree views to give customers a more immersive experience.
Real-world example: Visual Merchandising
Galeries Lafayette, one of France’s most iconic department stores, sought to enhance the online shopping experience by testing the impact of different product image styles. They compared standard packshot images to premium images featuring models wearing the products.
The results were striking: the premium images not only increased clicks by 49% but also boosted the average order value (AOV) by €5.76, adding a potential €114,000 in profit. This shift towards higher-quality visuals resonated with customers, leading Galeries Lafayette to prioritize premium images across their site, significantly improving user engagement and sales.
4. Implement Effective Site Search: Help Shoppers Find Their Perfect Match
When a customer knows what they want, nothing should stand in their way—especially not a clunky search function. A well-oiled site search is like a personal shopper, helping customers find exactly what they’re looking for, faster.
Why it matters:
Customers who use search are often more ready to buy, so it’s crucial that they find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
An effective search can turn casual browsers into buyers by surfacing relevant products.
Pro tips:
Optimize filters & facets: Let customers narrow down their search results with relevant filters like size, color, and price.
Smart error detection: Make sure your search can handle typos and synonyms—because we all make mistakes.
Autocomplete magic: Help customers out by suggesting popular search terms as they type.
Never show a dead end: Avoid zero-results pages by offering suggestions or related products instead.
Real-world example: Site Search
VAN GRAAF, an international fashion retailer, recognized the need to elevate their online search functionality to meet the high standards of their physical stores. By integrating AB Tasty, VAN GRAAF significantly improved the customer journey on their e-commerce site. The results were impressive: online orders from search increased by 30%, conversion rates rose by 16%, and the average order value (AOV) saw a 5% boost. Additionally, the share of sales from search grew by 4.3%. This transformation not only enhanced the shopping experience but also reduced the time the team spent managing search functionalities, allowing them to focus on other critical optimizations.
5. Cross-Sell and Up-Sell Products in Your Shopping Cart: The Power of Suggestion
You’ve done the hard work of getting a product into a customer’s cart—now’s your chance to suggest a few more. Cross-selling and up-selling are subtle yet powerful ways to increase the value of each sale by offering customers items that complement what they’ve already chosen.
Why it matters:
Personalized recommendations can boost your average order value and make customers feel like you really “get” them.
It’s a win-win—customers discover more great products, and you see a bump in sales.
Pro tips:
Personalize everything: Use AI to suggest products based on what’s already in the cart or what similar customers have bought.
Bundle it up: Show products that are frequently bought together as a bundle to encourage more sales.
Test placement: Experiment with where you place these suggestions—product pages, the shopping cart, or even during checkout.
Real-world example: Cross-sell and Up-sell
Figaret, a high-end French shirtmaker, significantly boosted its online sales by integrating personalized product recommendations. By strategically placing recommendation blocks on product pages and in the shopping cart, Figaret achieved remarkable results: 6% of visitors used these recommendations, contributing to 10% of the site’s total revenue. Additionally, these users spent on average 1.8 times more than those who didn’t engage with the recommendations. This approach not only enhanced customer engagement but also drove substantial revenue growth.
Measuring Success in E-merchandising: Are You Hitting the Mark?
You’ve put in the work, but how do you know if your e-merchandising strategies are actually working? Measuring success isn’t just about looking at sales numbers; it’s about understanding how each element of your strategy contributes to the bigger picture.
Key Metrics to Watch:
Website traffic: Keep an eye on where your visitors are coming from and what they’re doing on your site.
Conversion rate: This is the percentage of visitors who actually make a purchase—one of your most important metrics.
Sales data: Analyze overall sales, average order value, and revenue from specific merchandising strategies.
Average basket size: Track how many items customers are purchasing per transaction to gauge the effectiveness of your cross-selling and up-selling efforts.
Pro tips:
Set benchmarks: Compare your metrics against industry standards to see where you stand.
Use analytics tools: Platforms like Google Analytics or Matomo can give you insights into how visitors interact with your site.
Keep iterating: Don’t settle for good—strive for better. Regularly review your data and tweak your strategies to keep improving.
Conclusion: Trial and Better—The Heart of E-Merchandising Strategies
E-commerce merchandising isn’t a “set it and forget it” task—it’s a continuous journey of trial, error, and improvement. The best strategies evolve over time as you learn more about your customers and the market. So don’t be afraid to experiment, take risks, and, most importantly, keep pushing for better. Every tweak, test, and change you make is a step towards creating an online store that not only meets but exceeds customer expectations.
Ready to take your e-commerce merchandising to the next level? Download our comprehensive guide on e-merchandising best practices or schedule a free demo with AB Tasty today. Your journey to better starts now.
In a highly competitive digital marketplace, optimizing your website for a unique and seamless digital customer journey is no longer just a competitive advantage — it’s a necessity.
It’s important to remember that the digital customer journey does not begin and end with a purchase – it’s a web of all customer interactions and touchpoints with your brand.
AB Tasty has mapped out seven customer phases that we consider crucial in the journey. To craft unique experiences, you’ll need to differentiate these seven phases customers pass through and understand how to animate their digital journey.
Once you have a better understanding of these phases, you will be better equipped to set your business goals and properly optimize your website for growth and impact.
Click to view the full-sized infographic in a new tab
How exactly can you optimize each phase of the digital customer journey? Let’s dive right in and take a look at some examples.
Phase 1: Awareness
When visitors land on your website for the first time, a great first impression is crucial. Your page needs to be both visually appealing and intuitive. A dynamic above the fold design is a great place to start.
In this first phase, it’s important to let your best ideas shine to capture and keep your visitors’ attention. You can accomplish this by creating personalized welcome messages for first-time visitors, displaying your value proposition and organizing high-impact elements for better visibility.
Let’s take a look at Just Over The Top’s experiment to modify the layout of their homepage. They used AB Tasty’s experience optimization platform to test if their users responded better seeing a layout with product categories rather than individual products.
Original:
Variation:
After creating a test variation to run against the original layout, they saw a 17.5% click increase on the three blocks below the hero image. This brought many more users into the second phase of their customer journey.
Phase 2: Discovery
When consumers reach the second phase, they’ve already discovered your brand and they’re getting curious.
To accommodate visitors during this phase, your website should be optimized for an excellent browsing experience. Whether this means making your search bar more visible, creating dynamic filters while searching, or using a virtual assistant to get to know your visitors’ interests with a series of questions, an easy browsing experience with intelligent search is key.
In this example, Claudie Pierlot focused on optimizing the customer browsing experience by testing the search bar visibility. In their variation, the small search icon was made more visible by adding the word “recherche” (or search in English) in the top right-hand corner.
Original:
Variation:
This clear above the fold design made it easier for visitors to identify the search bar to begin their browsing experience. With this simple A/B test, they saw a 47% increase in search bar clicks and a 7% increase in conversion rates coming directly from the search bar.
In another example, Villeroy & Boch, a ceramic manufacturing company, wanted to leverage intelligent search on their website. With the help of AB Tasty, they implemented an AI search algorithm to navigate online shoppers.
With our solution, they designed a new and intuitive navigation complete with filters and a comprehensive autosuggestion feature.
By changing their search functions, Villeroy & Boch saw a 33% increase in search results clicks and a 20% increase in sales through the search function.
Phase 3: Consideration
Now is the time when your visitors are considering your brand and which products they are interested in. Showcasing your product pages in their best light during the consideration phase might be exactly what your visitor needs to continue moving down the funnel.
Let’s look at how Hanna Anderson optimized their product pages during this phase.
The clothing retail company wanted to experiment with the images on their product listing pages. Previously, their toddler line had only images of clothing sizes for an older child. They were convinced there was room for improvement and decided to run a test by changing their images to include toddler sizes.
Original:
Variation:
After implementing age-appropriate clothing images, the results were clear. During this test, the clicks on PLPs increased by almost 8% and the purchase rate on those items skyrocketed by 22%.
Phase 4: Intent
During the intent phase, your visitors are on the verge of becoming customers but need to be convinced to make a purchase.
Social proof, urgency messaging, and bundling algorithms are a few ideas to lightly nudge visitors to add to cart or add more to cart.
Let’s take a look at the impact that urgency messaging can have: IZIPIZI, an eyewear retailer, decided to add a special message flag next to their product description to show viewers how many people have purchased this product. The idea of this message is to show viewers that this product is popular and to encourage them to take action.
With this simple sentence of social proof to validate a product’s desirability, they saw a 36% increase in add-to-basket rate.
In another scenario, you can see that adding a progress bar is a simple way to upsell. With a progress par, you are showing your customer how close they are to earning free shipping, which entices them to add more to their cart.
Vanessa Bruno experimented with this additive with the help of AB Tasty and saw a 3.15% increase in transactions and a €6 AOV uplift.
Phase 5: Purchase
Purchase frustration is real. If customers experience friction during checkout, you risk losing money.
Friction refers to any issues the visitors may encounter such as unclear messaging during the payment (did the payment actually go through?), confusing or expensive shipping options, discounts not working, double authentication check-in delays, difficult sign-in, and more.
Optimizing your checkout sequence for your audience with rollouts and KPI-triggered rollbacks can help you find a seamless fit for your website.
Let’s look at an example for this phase: Galeries Lafayette, the French luxury department store, saw an opportunity to optimize their checkout by displaying default payment methods that do not require double authentication.
During this test, they saw a €113,661 increase in profit, a €5 uplift in average order value, and a 38% increase in the conversion rate by adding the CB (bank card) option for a quicker checkout.
Phase 6: Experience
Optimizing the buyer experience doesn’t end after the purchase. Now is the time to grow your customer base and stop churn in its tracks. So, how do you keep your customers interested? By maintaining the same level of quality in your messages and personalization.
Let’s look at how Envie de Fraise, a French boutique, leveraged their user information to transform a normal post-purchase encounter into a personalized experience.
One of their customers had just purchased a maternity dress and had been browsing multiple maternity dresses prior to their purchase. By knowing this information, they experimented with using the “you will love these products” algorithm to gently nudge their customer to continue shopping.
With a customized recommendation like this, Envie de Fraise saw a €127K increase in their potential profit. As your customer spends more time with your brand, you will learn more about their habits and interests. The more time they spend with you, the more personalized you can make their experience.
Phase 7: Loyalty
In the final step of your customer’s journey, they move into the loyalty phase. To turn customers into champions of your brand, it’s important to remind them that you value their loyalty.
This can be done by sending emails with individual offers, social proof, product suggestions, or incentives for joining a loyalty program to earn rewards or complete product reviews.
Another example of this is sending a personalized email displaying items that are frequently bought together that align with their purchase. This will remind the customer about your brand and give them recommendations for future purchases.
Why Optimizing the Digital Customer Journey is Essential to Boost Conversions
The fierce competition in the e-commerce marketplace is undeniable. In order to attract and retain customers, you have to focus on crafting personalized user experiences to turn passive visitors into active buyers.
Understanding their needs in each phase and optimizing your digital space is your best solution to nudge visitors down the purchasing funnel.
By personalizing the experience of your customers during each phase of the digital customer journey, you can ensure an optimal shopping experience, boost purchases, increase customer satisfaction, and see more repeat customers.
AB Tasty is the best-in-class experience optimization platform that empowers you to create a richer digital experience – fast. From experimentation to personalization, this solution can help you activate and engage your audience to boost your conversions.
Using personalization to enhance your customer journey
With the vast array of products and brands to choose from, customer loyalty has become more important than ever. By focusing on personalizing the digital customer journey, you can reduce the chances of your customer abandoning their purchase or opting for another brand.
An individualized customer journey is beneficial for the following reasons:
Option overload: As online brands fight for the attention of consumers, it’s important to set your brand apart from the rest, with a customer journey that is tailored to their needs.
Analysis paralysis: With a plethora of information now readily available to customers who are researching and comparing potential purchases, your digital customer journey can help to deliver the information they need with ease and offer them the best shopping experience, thereby tipping the scale in your favor.
Lack of loyalty: The ease with which a customer can change service providers has increased the pressure and importance of meeting their needs during the entirety of the digital customer journey. Every interaction matters.
Offering a personalized experience elevates the customer journey and helps to ensure customer satisfaction. By leveraging the power of personalization, you can adapt the individual phases of the customer journey to each customer’s needs for an optimal e-commerce experience.
Personalization is the key to customer satisfaction
There is no way to deny the intense competition in the e-commerce space. Attracting and retaining customers is more difficult now than it has ever been. To advance ahead of the competition, you must understand customer needs and personalize each user journey with the help of a customer journey model.
By personalizing each experience your customers have with your brand, you can be sure to give your customers an optimal shopping experience, guarantee customer satisfaction, and encourage customer loyalty.
The future of digital experience optimization has arrived and it’s driven by AI.
Are you ready for it?
AI can often be a sensitive subject, as loud voices in the room will boast how AI can replace people, careers, or even entire sectors of society. We’re scaling back the dystopian imagery and instead finding ways where AI can be your sidekick, not a supervillain.
There are two sides to the coin with AI: it can help optimize your time and boost conversions, but it can also be risky if not used properly. We’ll dig into the ways AI can be a helpful tool, as well as some considerations to take.
The positive impact of AI on your customer experience roadmap
In one of our last pieces about AI in the CRO world, we discussed 10 generative AI ideas for your experimentation roadmap. Since the publication of this article, we’re back with even more ideas and concrete examples of successful campaigns.
1. Display reassurance messages to visitors who value it
Some shoppers value their privacy and data safety above all else. How can you comfort these visitors while they’re shopping on your website without interfering with other visitors’ journeys? While salespeople can easily gauge these preferences in face-to-face interactions, online shoppers deserve the same personalized experience when they shop independently.
Let’s see an example below of how you can enhance the digital customer experience for different shoppers at the same time:
MAAF, a French insurance provider, knows just how complex buying auto insurance can be for visitors. Some shoppers prioritize safety and reassurance messages, while others don’t. With AI systems that segment visitors based on emotional buying preferences, you can detect and cater to this type of profile without deferring to other shoppers. “Intuitive” profiles are receptive to reassurance messages, while “rational” profiles tend to see these extra messages as a distraction.
The team at MAAF used advanced AI technology to overcome this exact challenge. Once the “intuitive profiles” were identified, they were able to implement personalized messages ensuring their commitment to their customers’ data protection. As a result, they saw an increase of 4% in quote rates for those directed to the intuitive segmentation, and other profiles continued on their journey without extra messaging.
2. Segment your audience based on their shopping behavior
With so many online shoppers, how can you possibly personalize your website to give each shopper the best user experience? With AI-powered personalization software.
Some online shoppers have a need for competition. Don’t we all know someone who loves to turn everything into a competition? These “competitive” shoppers are susceptible to social-proof messaging and are influenced by the opinions of other customers while searching for the best product. One of the best ways to personalize a listing page for competitive shoppers is to show ratings from their peers.
Meanwhile, what works for competitive shoppers, will not work effectively for speedy shoppers. Shoppers with a need for immediacy will appreciate a clear, no-frills browsing experience. In other words, they don’t want to get distracted. Let’s look at the example below.
This website implemented two different segments targeting online shoppers with a need for “competition” and “immediacy.” These two segments brought in a 9% increase in conversion rates and a 2% increase respectively. The campaign was a success, but how did it work?
Using AB Tasty’s AI personalization engine, EmotionsAI, this online shop identified its visitors’ main emotional needs and directed them toward a product listing page best suited for them. EmotionsAI turns buyer emotions into data-driven sales with actionable insights and targeted audiences.
Want to learn more about EmotionsAI? Get a demo to see how AI can impact your roadmap for the better!
3. Automate and personalize your product recommendations
European backpack designer, Cabaïa, used an AI-powered recommendation engine to generate personalized recommendations for their website visitors based on user data collected. The team at Cabaïa previously managed product recommendations manually but wanted to shift their focus to improving the digital customer experience.
AI recommendation tools put the right product in front of the right person, helping boost conversions with a more tailored experience. Since implementing this AI-powered recommendation engine, they’ve had +13% revenue per visitor, increased conversions by 15%, and raised their visitor’s average cart size by 2.4%.
4. Innovate your testing strategy with emotional targeting
According to an online shopper study (2024), traditional personalization is no longer enough. Personalizing based on age, location, and demographics just isn’t as precise anymore.
The team at Groupama, a multinational insurance group, wanted to take A/B testing a step further and better adapt their approach to fit their customers’ unique emotional needs. By using an AI-powered emotional personalization engine, they were able to identify two large groups of website visitors: emotionals and rationals.
They created an A/B test based on these customer profiles. One variation catered to the “emotional” buyers by showing reassuring messaging on the insurance quote to protect their data, and the other catered to “rationals” that displayed the insurance quote without any extra messaging that allowed them to have a distraction-free buyer journey. Within 2 weeks, Groupama saw an instant win with a 10% increase in quote submissions.
5. Simplify the customer journey and build buyer confidence
Like many financial services, purchasing insurance is inherently complex. Consumer behaviors and expectations in insurance are quickly changing.
As a leading insurer in Singapore, DirectAsia has embraced innovative technologies to better serve their customers. By pioneering new technology, Direct Asia was able to segment their visitors based on emotional needs.
The team at DirectAsia identified that the ‘safety’ segment (buyers needing reassurance) was the top unsatisfied emotional need for visitors on both desktop and mobile devices. With these insights, DirectAsia ran an experiment on ‘safety’ visitors, displaying two banners to reassure them and move them further down the form to the quote page.
The banners led to + 10.9% in access to the quote page for one, and +15% in access to the quote page for the other.
The potential risks of AI on your customer experience roadmap
Artificial intelligence has been evolving (very quickly!) over the past few years and it can be tempting to run full speed ahead. However, it’s important to find the right AI that works for you and helps you achieve your goals. Is AI powering something you need, impacting your business, or is it just there to impress?
With that in mind, let’s consider some precautions to take while using AI:
Unfactual or biased information on data reports, website copy, etc.
When researching or asking for data sources, it’s important to keep in mind that artificial intelligence can get it wrong. Just as humans can make mistakes and have biased opinions, AI can do the same. Since AI systems are trained to produce information following patterns, AI can unintentionally amplify bias or discrimination.
Lack of creativity, dependence, and over-reliance
Excessive reliance on AI can reduce decision-making skills, creativity, and proactive thinking. In competitive industries, you need creativity to stand out in the market to capture your audience’s attention. Your roadmap could suffer if you put too much faith in your tool. After all, you are the expert in your own field.
Data and privacy risks
Protecting your data should always be a top concern, especially in the digital experience world. You will want a trusted partner who uses AI with safeguards in place and a good history of data privacy. With the fast-developing capabilities of AI, handling your data correctly and safely becomes a hurdle. As a general best practice, it’s best not to upload any sensitive data into any AI system – even if it seems trustworthy. As these systems often require larger quantities of data to generate results, this can lead to privacy concerns if your data is misused or stored inappropriately.
Hallucinations
According to IBM, AI hallucinations happen when a large language model (LLM) thinks it recognizes patterns that aren’t really there, leading to random or inaccurate results. AI models are incapable of knowing that their response can be hallucinogenic since they lack understanding of the world around us. It’s important to be aware of this possibility because these systems are trained to present their conclusions as factual.
Conclusion: Using AI in the Digital Customer Experience
As with any tool or software, AI is a powerful tool that can enhance your team – not attempt to replace it. Embracing the use of AI in your digital customer experience can lead to incredible results. The key is to be aware of risks and limitations, and understand how to use it effectively to achieve your business goals.
It’s no secret that today’s digital marketplace is highly competitive. Consumers are exposed to an increasingly high number of messages each day. How can you make your message relevant to your consumers and break through the noise?
To capture consumers’ attention, brands need to focus their attention on crafting unique user experiences to deliver 1:1 personalization based on data.
One of the most important focal points to convert visitors into customers and build customer loyalty is 1:1 personalization. More and more customers feel less motivated to complete a transaction when they’re online shopping if their experience is impersonal. Let’s take a look at some data from Forbes:
80% of consumers are more likely to complete an online purchase with brands that offer personalized customer experiences.
72% of consumers explain that they only interact with personalized messaging.
66% of consumers share that coming across content that isn’t personalized would deter them from purchasing.
Customers want personalization. Think about when you walk into a physical store and an employee really listens to your needs, helps you find exactly what you’re looking for, or goes above and beyond your expectations to help you. That is exactly what customers want in the digital marketplace.
A unique, digital one-to-one personalization experience strategy gives companies the potential to customize messages, offers, and other experiences to each website visitor based on data collected about each user.
Digital one-to-one personalization starts with concrete data. Are you leveraging data to better serve and convert your visitors?
To help you answer “yes” to this question, we’ll take a deeper look at:
Delivering a unique (or one-to-one) experience to each online consumer is a technique known as one-to-one personalization in marketing.
By mastering the technique of 1:1 personalization, brands can deliver an exceptional level of customer service by providing personalized messages, product recommendations, offers, and specialized content at the right time based on the user’s needs and expectations.
This type of unique user experience is only made possible thanks to the availability of extensive customer data. If you don’t get to know your customers based on their interactions with your brand and user behavior, you’re missing an opportunity to meet your customers’ expectations.
One goal of personalization is to create a “wow” effect. This means you should be making the customer think, “wow, they really know me.” The more information that a company knows about a certain customer, the more personalized the user experience will be.
Without extensive, personalized data, one-to-one personalization isn’t achievable.
What data to collect to improve your customer experience with personalization?
On a wider scale, it’s important to understand the location of your customer, their demographic information (age, gender, education level), purchasing habits, and website browsing information. However, in the hypercompetitive world of personalization, this surface-level data is not enough.
Brands need to move beyond knowing who the customer is and understand how the customer behaves.
Knowing that your customer is a recent college graduate who lives in New York City and spends a lot of time making Pinterest boards will not be enough information to create a strong buyer persona to achieve a unique and pleasant user experience.
Enhancing your customer’s profile will require you to collect relevant data about how your customer interacts with your brand on all channels, what motivates them to purchase, and what makes them tick on top of knowing who they are.
More specifically, robust personalized data will help you better understand:
Location and demographics
Interests and hobbies
Shopping and purchasing habits
Device and channel frequency
Where and how they prefer to shop and purchase
Satisfaction level
Likes and dislikes
All of this information will allow you to create a sophisticated customer profile. Understanding their motivations, preferences, and expectations helps you characterize users into intricate market segmentations to give them the best possible experience imaginable.
Ideally, the customer will have a positive experience and feel unique based on the information derived from the robust data collection.
How do you find user data?
Extensive data can be found and refined by cross-indexing information stored on separate databases.
For example, you can harvest personalized data from a customer’s interactions with your business by analyzing and storing comments on social media sites, ratings on review sites, mobile app usage vs. desktop usage, customer service interactions, download requests, and more.
How to leverage one-to-one personalization with personalized data
As you can see, personalization cannot exist without data. To achieve one-to-one personalization on your digital channels, your brand must have the ability to transform the collected data into action.
After monitoring and gathering rich data on your customer’s interactions, history, and behavior on your site, it’s time to convert this personalized data into a refined customer buyer persona to serve your customers better.
By segmenting your profiles, you will be able to better understand your customer’s preferences and pain points, which will help you craft these personalized messages and display them at the right time.
How to personalize interactions with customers:
Once you have substantial personalized data collected about your visitors, you can determine the best way to interact with them. There is a fine line between being helpful by displaying personalized messages and being invasive.
The difference in these two feelings will depend on the amount of prior engagement that the customer has with you. For example, a customer who is subscribed to every newsletter has a company discount card and frequently completes transactions on your website will expect you to know their preferences fairly well, like a regular coming into a coffee shop. On the other hand, a first-time visitor will not expect you to know much about them, but they will expect to be welcomed.
The best way to understand how to serve your customers is by asking yourself how you would want to be interacted with at their level of engagement with your brand. What would make you feel welcomed and what would make you feel overwhelmed or uneasy?
What messages should you personalize?
The possibilities for personalized messages can stretch as far as your mind (or your software capabilities) will allow.
Think about personalization in a broad sense. Let’s say a company wants to put its logo onto personalized gifts for its employees. The company’s logo can be put onto t-shirts, pens, stickers, coffee mugs, phone cases, backpacks, sunglasses, golf balls, holiday baskets– the possibilities are nearly endless. The same goes for personalized messages for your own customers.
In marketing communication, some of the most common outlets for 1:1 personalization are:
To attract and retain your customer’s attention in a market filled with saturated messages, your brand should focus on personalization as much as possible and in as many channels as you can.
What platform to use for one-to-one personalization in marketing?
The journey to a seamless one-to-one personalization, or one-to-one marketing, experience for your customers starts with sophisticated and intuitive software to help transform your ideas into reality.
AB Tasty is the complete platform for experimentation and personalization equipped with the tools you need to create a richer digital experience for your customers — fast. With embedded AI and automation, this platform can help you achieve omnichannel personalization and revolutionize your brand and product experiences.
What is omnichannel personalization?
In marketing, employing one-to-one personalization across multiple channels, platforms, and touchpoints is commonly referred to as omnichannel personalization.
Customers crave personalization wherever they are – on a mobile device, desktop, social media platform, mobile app, or email. When customers receive a personalized experience, they expect this standard of communication across all channels or platforms that they are interacting with.
Achieving omnichannel personalization requires a seamless flow of customer data from one platform or channel to the next. By gathering information on user preferences, behavior, and interests from all virtual touchpoints, your customer’s profile strengthens.
By receiving this consistent level of personalization across all channels, consumers will be inclined to purchase more and to purchase again from the same brand that made them feel seen and heard.
What are the advantages of omnichannel personalization?
Higher conversion rates
Increased average order value (AOV)
Reduced cart abandonment
Improved brand value and customer loyalty
Higher customer lifetime value
Delivering messages at the right time and place
8 Examples of 1-1 Personalization strategies from retail brands
1. ASOS’s Social Connection
Online retailer ASOS prides itself on offering both new and existing customers a range of personalized discounts and deals, which vary depending on if:
It’s a new customer
It’s a returning customer that’s demonstrated a particular interest (e.g. shoes)
A regular customer (who could then be offered premium next-day delivery, for example)
But how does ASOS get this information? One method they might use is encouraging customers to log in to the site using social media platforms, which would allow ASOS to access further details such as age, gender, and location—which can then be used to tailor even more personalized messages.
Why it works: The ability to use a social platform for account creation makes the process simple for shoppers, while giving ASOS more insight into what deals or promotions would be of the most interest to them.
2. Nordstrom Remembers Your Size
Nordstrom gave its online shopping cart a simple yet effective personal touch: remembering returning customers’ clothing sizes. This may not seem like a massive approach to deliver a personal experience, but it creates a more seamless checkout for the user and brings them one step closer to the purchase. It’s a rather clever move from Nordstrom that hasn’t gone unnoticed.
Why it works: Remembering the customers’ preferred size (based on previous purchases) instantly shows the brand’s attentiveness while making checkout even more simple.
3. Clarins personalization and gamification
Before the booming holiday season,Clarins, a multinational cosmetics company, saw an 89% increase in their conversion rate and a 145% increase in the add-to-basket metric by implementing 1:1 personalization and gamification withAB Tasty.
On Single’s Day, a few weeks before Black Friday, Clarins saw a perfect opportunity to experiment and learn culture by implementing a “Wheel of Fortune” concept in certain countries. The gamification gifts were personalized according to each country’s local culture. Any visitor arriving at their website would play the digital game, spin the wheel, and receive a gift automatically in their inbox. This ease of automatic implementation was a great user experience, especially for mobile visitors.
Amazon is no stranger to personalization marketing. In fact, it could be argued they were the first major e-commerce retailer to really put personalization into action. The company has become known for its product recommendation emails and personalized homepages for logged-in customers. Using their own algorithm, A9, Amazon goes above and beyond to first understand customers’ buying habits and then deliver an experience that’s been deliberately designed for relevance.
Why it works: Customers feel valued and understood by the retailer when seeing emails and recommended “picks” that are tailored to their interests. Consistency also plays a part in Amazon’s approach, as they continue to deliver an even more granular personalized approach for customers.
5. Nike and Their Customized Approach
Nike always goes the extra mile to personalize the shopping experience, as we’ve seen with their SNKRs app that allows premium (loyalty, Nike+ shoppers) access to a large catalog of products that they can then customize. It’s the perfect way to cement customer loyalty by offering them the unique opportunity to tailor items to their exact liking.
Why it works: By giving customers a certain degree of autonomy with design, Nike is giving customers the freedom to express their individuality, even while the company continues to produce the same style of shoe around the world. Despite being a huge brand, Nike has created a great loyalty program that engages customers and stokes their excitement about buying Nike products.
6. Net-A-Porter’s Personalized Touch
Luxury online retailer Net-A-Porter has adopted the ‘recommended for you’ approach but with a unique twist to appeal to its high-end customers who want a more premium service when they shop. The company gives away freebie products to customers based on previous purchases, adding a personal touch to an otherwise standard online shopping experience. This is not unlike Amazon’s recommended emails, except Net-A-Porter customers receive a physical product — and who doesn’t like a gift!
Why it works: These gifts show the appreciation Net-A-Porter has for its customers and help to bring the luxury shopping experience online.
7. Coca-Cola’s Name Campaign
In 2011, Coca-Cola launched its Share a Coke campaign in Australia, printing thousands of names on their diet and original soft drinks. This simple yet effective campaign made sales skyrocket, supporting the notion that consumers engage with brands that address them by their first name (albeit in a rather broad sense!) Personalized bottles became all the rage, with people trying to find their own names along with those of their friends and family members. The campaign was globally recognized and started the ball rolling for other brands such as Marmite, which also saw great success with a naming campaign.
Why it works: Is it the simple notion of vanity that makes these name campaigns so popular? Consumers love to see their own names on popular products, making them almost ‘gimmicky’ with a collectible edge that makes people feel special!
8. Target’s Guest ID
The US retail giant Target decided to up its personalized campaign game by assigning each customer a guest identification number on their first interaction with the brand. Target then used the data to obtain customer details like buying behavior and even job history! Target used personalized data to understand the consumer habits of its customers and to create a view of their individual lifestyles. Target focused particularly on customers who also had a baby registry with them and even used their marketing data to make ‘pregnancy predictability scores’ for customers who were browsing particular items!
Why it works: Arguably, delivering a personalized experience for every customer visiting a physical store is a tough job for any retailer. By assigning a ‘guest ID’, Target was able to understand buying behaviors and patterns from their customers in-store and use the information to make suggestions on products they may be interested in.
Everyone wins with one-to-one personalization
The data you collect equally benefits your brand and your customers. By understanding what your customers are looking for, you save them time by providing them with informed recommendations, personalized messages, and unique experiences to solve their pain points.
Without proper data collection or genuine segmentation, it’s nearly impossible to provide users with a 1:1 personalized experience. Loyal customers want to feel like their brand really knows them and what they’re looking for. Achieve one-to-one personalized experiences by correctly analyzing and leveraging personalized data. If you’re looking to serve your customers, increase sales, and build brand loyalty at the same time, you’ve found your blueprint with personalization.
If you ask most e-commerce marketers how to optimize your website to generate more conversions, they’ll tell you to focus on your homepage or product detail pages. While that answer is technically correct, there is a potential goldmine for clicks that even the most seasoned marketers overlook: product listing pages
While these pages are often used as a catalog for your products and services, they can offer much more than an opportunity to optimize the customer experience. Since visitors browsing your product listing pages are already engaged with your online store, they just need one final push to convert.
In this article, we’ll show you everything you need to know about product listing pages, how to optimize your PLPs, and some examples of great product listing pages.
What are product listing pages?
Product listing pages (sometimes called PLPs or category landing pages) are pages on a website that display products based on a selected category; they may also be based on applied search filters. Product landing pages lead visitors to product detail pages where they can find more information on the items they’re interested in or even add said items to their cart.
One of the main drivers for optimizing your product listing pages is the opportunity they present for optimizing your user experience, as they can be tailored to shoppers with different user intent. On the one hand, we have buyers who visit a website knowing exactly what they are looking for. These potential buyers want to view the items that are most relevant to their search or intent (e.g. a user looking for a mountain bike doesn’t want to view road bikes). On the other hand, other visitors simply love browsing and use your PLPs to sift through the list of products that suit their preferences.
Key elements of a product listing page and how to design your PLPs for better conversions
Creating an effective product listing page starts with the basics. Designing your product listing pages in an optimal way, with all the relevant elements, will increase the odds of shoppers finding the products they are looking for and making a purchase. Here’s what you should make sure to include in your product listing pages:
1. PLP page name: Descriptive title
Remember that Google will only display the first 25, 50, or 64 characters of your title, so make sure your PLP title is optimized accordingly. For example, if you are selling cell phones, you might want to structure your titles according to make, model, memory size, and color so that shoppers can see the most important information upfront.
2. Description: Keyword-rich
The product description and title have a big impact on your PLP’s SEO and product discoverability. Make sure that your descriptions are thorough and contain all the relevant keywords that will help you rank higher. Remember: the more specific, the better.
3. Breadcrumbs: Proper category name
Make sure that each product is placed in the most relevant category to both orient your shoppers and help them discover similar products. Breadcrumbs can display the parent category/subcategories so that users can jump back and forth between product listing pages with ease.
4. Imagery: Thumbnail
People process visual information faster than anything else, and your product images will be the first thing a customer sees. Use high-quality photos and be consistent (for example, use the same color background for every image). If you use various backgrounds, colors, and sizes, your customers will be distracted. Want proof? Read our case study on Hanna Andersson where they have proven that keeping all images simple, clear, and harmonized will work wonders for results.
5. Price
Make sure that your pricing is competitive. Do your research and benchmark your prices against your competitors and make amendments. Highlight any other elements that make your pricing more competitive, like free shipping, or buy-one-get-one-free offers.
6. CTAs
Call to action buttons (also known as CTAs) are items that use imperative wording to nudge your users towards the action you want them to take, like “Add to cart now!” or “Save to Wishlist” if a product is unavailable. It’s important to create an effective CTA by following design best practices and carefully testing different variations of your call to action’s copy, location and colors.
Make sure that your button is visible against the background and all the other elements on the page. This not only draws the visitor’s eye to the call to action but shows them that the button is clickable. It’s important that your button looks like a button, even if you want to adopt a more minimalistic design for your website.
Next, make sure that your call to action conveys urgency. Using phrases like “Sign up now,” “Hurry” or “Don’t delay” encourages your users to not only act, but to act fast. It’s also a good idea to utilize first-person copy so that the visitor feels more connected to the CTA.
7. Filter menu
This menu displays the filtering options available to refine searches by attributes, like pricing, color, style, availability, size, and more. This will help your customers find what they are looking for easily.
8. Sorting menu
The sorting menu presents different options for organizing products using a dropdown menu, including “Price: Low to High,” “Newest,” or “Rating: High to Low.”
Sorting options have a sole purpose: narrowing down the number of products in order to increase conversion. Your sorting options should be based on your audience’s needs and expectations regarding your products. Thinking in the minds of your customers is crucial for optimization at this point in the digital customer journey.
Let’s take WatchShop as an example.
WatchShop knows that watches come in all sorts of shapes and colors, so they created various sorting options to match visitors’ requests. This includes water resistance, strap type, case color, movement type, and so on.
It’s all tailored to match customers’ expectations – and it delivers.
10 best practices for creating and optimizing product listing pages
Now that you know how to design your product listing pages, let’s get into how to optimize them for the best results:
1. Optimize headers or banners
Headers play the “title” role of each category and listing page design.
They’re the main indication of the page’s content and should be treated as the most important thing. If the header does not properly describe the page or the category, visitors will not be able to find what they are looking for.
Headers can reinforce your branding, so use the space on the top of your page to create a great-looking banner that engages and informs without adding clutter. In addition, never forget to include your keywords inside your <h1> tags. Not only will this make them more visible on the page, but they’re also a bit part of your on-page SEO efforts that will help you appear higher in search results.
In the image below, beauty specialist Ulta bets on shiny visuals to increase its headers’ visibility. It’s a good solution to avoid “all text” headers that can seem dull at first glance.
Note: headers can also be used as promotional spaces to display featured products, special offers, and discounts.
2. Experiment with multiple layouts on your product listing display
Your product listing display has a significant impact on the way your customers interact with the products. Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer when it comes to choosing between list and grid views. In fact, it all depends on what type of products you’re selling and what experience you want to provide. The most common choices are list view or grid view:
List view
List views require a little more scrolling but can display more product information than a grid. This makes it easy for shoppers to compare product attributes, like dimensions or features. Some sites let customers toggle between a list or grid view, depending on their preferences.
The list view is better suited for products that require extensive information and specifications in order to help customers compare aspects of similar products.
It’s a great fit for technical products like TVs, computers, electronics, DVDs, hardware, etc. However, this isn’t the only time to use list view for your product pages.
If we take a look at the image below, Wine.com sells luxury wines and champagnes. In this case, it’s important that visitors take their time benchmarking the brands and “grands crus” before making a purchase decision.
Notice how they capitalize on the extra horizontal space to display ratings.
Grid view
Grid views allow customers to browse and compare products next to each other. This is a good option if your site is picture-heavy and doesn’t require a lot of description outside the product titles.
Grid view is mostly used for products that rely a lot on pictures and can be compared quickly without paying much attention to the specifications. It also allows for more visual experiences.
Amazon uses grid view to display products inside its “gift ideas” category. They also use tags to rank the bestsellers and lure visitors into clicking on the products based on their popularity.
3. Add persuasion triggers
Persuasion triggers create a sense of urgency or scarcity. You most often see this on hotel booking sites or the sales section of a fashion store (“Only 1 item left at this price!” or “Selling out fast!”). These labels trigger visitors’ fear of missing out and push them to take action, so be sure to add them to your images to nudge them into making a purchase.
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4. Personalize the shopping experience
Personalization can dramatically increase conversions, boost engagement, and help shoppers discover relevant products by sorting them according to their individual preferences. Personalization has also been known to reduce bounce rates by 20-30% and increase customer loyalty.
One thing you can do to personalize the experience for your visitors is to display complementary products that they might be interested in. For example, customers shopping for a new bedspread might also be interested in buying pillowcases or sheets, so steer them in that direction.
5. Use recommendations
If someone is already browsing your product listing page, the chances are that they already have the intent of making a purchase. This is the best time to make suggestions and cross-sell or upsell your products:
Some customers suffer from decision fatigue when they are presented with too many options. Gently recommend popular products, others within the same category and with the same tags, or similar (but slightly pricier) alternatives.
Show customers recommended products that might be relevant to the one they are viewing. For example, clients who are interested in a technical product would appreciate a “People who purchased this product also purchased” section that shows the accessories that go along with it.
Present seasonal bestsellers to add specificity and relevance, which could lead to more clicks and conversions. We tend to think that other people’s actions are the correct ones, so if a product is tagged as “trending,” it gains additional legitimacy that could push a customer to make a decision.
Your navigation has to be tailored to help prospective customers find what they are looking for as easily as possible with as little friction as possible. There are a few tips and tricks you can try, including:
Put your best-selling items front and center: We’ve already touched on the fact that customers like knowing what items others are buying. The most popular options are often seen as the safest ones to buy. Throw in some social proof messages like user ratings to really drive the point home.
Site speed is a crucial factor for UX: Make sure that your site loads quickly on both desktop and mobile devices to ensure that customers have an enjoyable experience.
Ensure that your navigation bar is fixed to the top of the page and organizes your products in a logical fashion.
No matter the level of page depth, navigation always plays a crucial role in the user’s experience – and your product listing page should not be different. Because some products have complex specifications and require extensive sorting options, pay attention to your website’s performance when it comes to sorting products and helping customers find their perfect product.
In the image below, RevZilla does a great job of guiding customers through the endless journey of finding the right motorcycle helmet.
They use their left column to help customers sort and rank products according to several criteria (faceted search):
Color
Type
Shape
Category
Size
Gender
Bonus point: RevZilla provides visitors the opportunity to only display products that have a video review. This is a huge value proposition compared to their competitors.
7. What information to display on your PLPs?
There are tons of options regarding which information you can display on your product listing pages and category pages. Simply put, you need to display information that will effectively help and convince consumers to move down the funnel and make a purchase.
In order to help you choose, here’s a list of information that may be displayed on your product listing page:
Star ratings
Discounts
Color options
Stock availability
Best-sellers
Add to cart
New / Used
Short descriptions
As an example in the image below, BestBuy does a great job of providing useful information on its product listing page. Besides the pictures and the price, they also added: star ratings, discounts, and an add to cart button with a smart color hierarchy.ㅤ
8. Optimize SEO for product listing pages
SEO is a big deal for most e-commerce players. In fact, search engine traffic accounts for around 50% of all e-commerce traffic according to a 2023 study led by SmartInsights.
There are two main reasons that justify the dominance of product listing pages regarding SEO:
A. Product listing pages are keyword-rich
Because they contain the names, brands, prices, specifications, and descriptions of products, category pages tend to be keyword-rich. This means that they naturally rank for a lot of keywords in search engines.
B. Product listing pages are the most heavily linked to
Product listing pages are typically where you want your customers to start their journey (or alternatively on the product page itself), which is why SEO pros tend to focus their efforts on these pages. Besides this, all products within a category generally link back to that category, which is a strong internal link-building pattern.
Tips for optimizing SEO on your product listing pages:
Optimizing your title tags
Using unique and original product and meta descriptions
Linking to internal pages
Using image alt attributes and rich snippets
9. Should you use Quick View or add-to-cart buttons?
Quick View is an e-commerce function that allows visitors to generate a miniature version of the desired product page. In other words, it’s a mini product page that generally embeds a direct “add to cart” button.
Not all products require lengthy deliberation and consideration before making a purchase, especially for returning customers or others purchasing fast-moving goods like groceries. Creating add-to-cart buttons makes it easier to speed through the checkout process. You can also implement add-to-wishlist buttons for more complex or expensive items to maximize conversions.ㅤ
10. Use clear and concise CTAs
Call to action buttons can have a massive impact on your conversions. When Dutch watch brand Cluse noticed that their product listing pages had high bounce rates (and that clicks to the product display pages were low), they turned to AB Tasty to find a solution.
Cluse set up a simple test to see whether changing their CTA’s location and color would improve the results. The team’s hypothesis was correct, and the site saw a 2.39% increase in the click-through rate to the product display page and a 1.12% uplift in transactions during the three-week test.
Examples of effective product listing pages
ASOS
ASOS uses short but descriptive copy on their product listing pages.
The clothing retailer’s product listing pages are categorized by trends and style. They use extremely simple copy and appealing photographs to convince shoppers to make a purchase. Users can add items to their wishlist or cart directly from the product listing page and check out using the simple navigation banner.
Everlane
Everlane uses quick add-to-cart buttons to optimize their product listing pages
Everlane uses a number of features from the best practice guidebook, including adding product size options as an overlay in the image, easy navigation using the grid view and sidebar, and quick add-to-cart buttons.
Walmart
Walmart uses compelling headers and content on their product listing page.
Walmart puts bestsellers on top of their product listing pages, Walmart puts bestsellers on top of their product listing pages, along with engaging headers that feature collections by influencers like Sofia Vergara and Kim Kardashian. They also use quick add-to-cart buttons to make it easier to shop. The copy is clear and concise, and users are able to comfortably scroll through galleries of attractive images. Returning users are greeted with a warm, personalized message.
How many products per page and per row to display on your PLP?
If you opt for a grid view template, there’s no doubt that you’ll eventually come to the question, how many products per row?
As for choosing between list view and grid view, there’s no single answer that will fit everyone’s needs. In fact, the number of products displayed per row depends on 3 main factors:
Image size – If you choose to display big, high-resolution images; there’s no doubt that you will have a hard time squeezing more than 4-5 products in a row.
Number of products – The number of products listed per row also depends on your total number of products for a given category. If you only have 12 products to display, it’s a lot more coherent to opt for a 4X3 grid structure rather than 2X6. You need to fill the page visually.
Volume of information – Not all products are considered equal when it comes to their product description. Some products natively require more information than others. The more space they need, the fewer products you will display.
In the image below, Canada Goose, a high-quality outerwear provider, relies on a 2-products-per-row structure. This strategy highlights the visuals and delivers a more premium feeling to the user’s experience.
How to find what works best on your product listing pages?
A/B test your product listing pages.
There is no secret when it comes to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) – testing is what makes it work. The recipe for success doesn’t change for your product listing pages, you just have to A/B test them.
Now the question is, how can you do that? We have great news for you: we’re A/B testing specialists.
Making a good product listing page isn’t easy. You will have to identify elements that work and elements that don’t to gradually increase your conversions and offer an overall better user experience to your customers.
Want to start optimizing your product listing pages? AB Tasty is the best-in-class experience optimization platform that empowers you to create a richer digital experience – fast. From experimentation to personalization to smart search and recommendations, our solution can help you activate and engage your audience to boost your conversions.
Conclusion: The ultimate product listing page
Product listing pages can be conversion machines. When they’re properly optimized, they’re key for delivering an exceptional customer experience, helping you rise to the top of search engine results, and increasing basket size.
Whether you’re a seasoned seller or are venturing into the world of e-commerce for the first time, it may seem overwhelming to hit all the right notes – and find the best ideas to take your product listing pages to the next level!
Creating product listing pages will look a bit different depending on your market sector. However, for maximum performance, keep these best practices in mind for your e-commerce brand.
With experimentation, the goal is simple: find out what resonates best with your digital audience to create a relationship and drive business growth. But, how do you reach the point of success?
Experimentation opens the door to fresh insights that are only found through testing, compelling you to continuously refine different facets of your website for an improved digital experience across the board. Once you take your first steps down your experimentation roadmap, your path toward optimization evolves to the point where you can become a more prominent digital player.
However, experimentation success will introduce growing pains – especially if you’re a company starting its CRO journey. Allocating your CRO resources early and efficientlyis important to set your business up for continued success, prosperity, and evolution.
A firm foundation and building good habits from the start is the best way to ensure that your growth won’t stop.
How to build out your CRO team following the centralized model
A successful CRO team needs to be well-equipped with the necessary resources to carry out their missions which include time, tools, people and technology.
The first step in creating your team is to focus on leadership. The leader of your team needs to set an example by prioritizing experimentation and making it a part of your organization’s values. Your leader needs to value and encourage experimentation by creating a safe environment for testing where failures are seen as learning opportunities. CRO organizations need to create a culture of collaboration and communication where everyone works together to achieve a common goal.
It’s important to keep in mind that experimentation requires a lot of collaboration. By having a vast team equipped with different skills, you’ll need to facilitate communication between different teams, such as designers, developers, marketers, and data analysts.
This means that everyone needs to be aware of the goals and deliverables of each experiment, the roles of each stakeholder, the project timeline, and certainly if there are changes to the roadmap. This requires constant and open communication to keep everyone prepared. Each team member needs to be able to trust their teammates to perform certain tasks and have confidence in their own individual role.
With open communication and frequent regroups to check progress and share ideas, you can ensure that everyone is aligned and working towards the same objectives. Sharing results builds trust between team members and gives everyone an opportunity to celebrate wins, support each other through the learning opportunities and create a positive environment where feedback is welcome.
What is the ideal CRO team structure?
When picking the ideal structure for your CRO team, you have to keep in mind that this will vary depending on your organization’s size, goals, and resources at hand.
A small CRO team following the centralized model will need to have individuals responsible for covering all core responsibilities – from ideation to implementation to examination. Ideally, this would include:
CRO Manager
UX/UI Designer
Data Analyst
Web Developer
Content Specialist
To continue CRO team expansion, a medium-sized or large team should adopt the positions above and some or all positions listed below:
Product Manager
Product Designer
Data Scientist
Content Designer
Content Writer
Conversion Rate Optimizer/Tester
Technical Web Analyst
Website Animation Specialist
The skills needed to perform CRO are vast. A person equipped to be a great addition to your CRO team will most likely have a background in one of the following areas:
Chief Data Officer
Full Stack Developer
Functional Designer
Digital Marketing Specialists
Data Scientist (Specializing in CRO)
Web Analyst
Keep in mind that a CRO team is typically a cross-functional team and team members may be involved in other projects simultaneously. As each organization is completely unique, there are no hard and fast rules for the “perfect” team. Your ideal structure may shift as you go, reminding you of the importance of flexibility.
Rapid CRO growth
To put the rapid growth of CRO teams into context, let’s take a quick look at one global leader in the premium cosmetics industry: Shiseido.
Even though Shiseido already had a CRO team in place, they wanted to grow and turn their constricted experimentation strategy into an intuitive and scalable optimization program. They went from running four tests per year to over 10 tests per month using AB Tasty and expanded their team accordingly to cover more ground and expand their experimentation goals. Growth can happen quickly when setting new priorities and adopting a new mindset. See how Shiseido revitalized its experience optimization strategy with AB Tasty.
Steps for successful CRO implementation
Mindset shift
Building a culture of experimentation is crucial for a successful CRO organization. There needs to be a mindset shift towards data-driven decision-making, embracing bold decisions and viewing failure as an opportunity to learn and improve.
One of the most significant obstacles in establishing this culture is the fear and apprehension linked to failure. CRO teams need to recognize that failure is a natural part of the experimentation process and that every failed experiment provides valuable insights and learnings. By embracing what doesn’t work, CRO teams can create a culture that encourages experimentation and embraces risks.
All data derived from tests is valuable for building out future steps. The sooner an organization can adapt to this mentality, the more stable its CRO foundation will be.
LOOKING FOR MORE about the culture of experimentation?
Listen to the 1000 Experiments Club Podcast. The only podcast that interviews industry experts who have run over 1,000 experiments.
Set goals for your CRO team
CRO teams need to define exactly what they want to achieve through experimentation and how they will measure success. With this being said, data should be at the heart of all experimentation. Decisions should be made based on data collected and not only a gut feeling. By setting goals and assigning metrics to track progress, CRO teams can stay focused on their vision to achieve their objectives and track their progress.
Define the challenges of CRO implementation
There will be challenges to any success story. It’s important to address the potential challenges that may arise early on to keep your team prepared for any tough moments.
Barriers to continual success could include time restrictions, lack of adequate resources, employees with sub-par attitudes, pressure from HIPPOS, technology or anything that could potentially interfere with your roadmap.
After setting your goals and defining the next steps on your roadmap, it’s easier to outline the barriers that may prevent you from achieving those objectives, such as technical limitations or budget constraints.
Outline the team’s roles and responsibilities
Next, define the team’s roles and responsibilities. All team members should be aware of their personal objectives and how their work contributes to the overall success of the project (and their impact on the organization).
This includes identifying who will be responsible for testing, analyzing data, creating content, and making technical improvements to the website or app. Especially if team members have cross-functional roles where their time is divided, their responsibilities during each project should be clearly defined.
Standardize the A/B test process with your CRO Team
To standardize the A/B test process in your organization, there needs to be coordination of all digital teams around A/B tests and your overall CRO strategy. Your testing roadmap should outline the experiments your team will conduct, the hypotheses they will test, and the metrics they will use to measure success. By developing a testing plan, CRO teams can ensure that their experiments are aligned with their goals and that they are testing the right elements of the website or landing page.
With your new CRO team, it’s important to always start with identifying the most valuable tests at the right time. By brainstorming with your team to identify multiple elements, you will have various high-value optimization paths available to you when your team has the bandwidth.
When implementing a test, you must have a team ready to create the design and content for the test and another team available to put it all into production.
As a post-launch follow-up plan, you will need to develop an optimization plan to cater to the results.
Implement the winning variation – If your variation shows better results when compared to the original, plan for adequate time in your roadmap to incorporate any permanent changes.
Develop a new variation – Let’s say your variation wasn’t more influential than the original version. You’ve learned more about your audience that you can use in the future. If you’ve found what doesn’t work, leave room in your plans to go back to the drawing board to find a variation that resonates better with your audience.
Accept the original version – If you and your team are happy with the performance of the original version of your webpage, it’s time to move on to the next priority on your optimization list.
Re-challenge the winning variation – Consumer preferences are constantly changing. What worked 6 months ago might not resonate with your audience in the same way down the road. Plan time in your roadmap for more challenges to see continued success.
To promote communication, your experimentation roadmap and the results of each experiment should be accessible to everyone and promote transparency. This keeps your team aligned to standardize your process.
In CRO, you need to be adaptable. You won’t know the outcome of a test until it’s over (you don’t want to develop a bias by trying to guess the results either!). Based on the results, you and your team need to be ready to react quickly to follow the next steps of whichever path you choose.
A centralized CRO team built for sustainable growth
Developing a CRO team that’s built to grow and build a sustainable culture of experimentation is not the easiest task. There is always room for trial and error when figuring out what works best for your organization.
With a mindset shift, a well-equipped team, and a clear understanding of goals, barriers, and team roles, your organization will be prepped to carry out your winning strategy. With these elements in place, your organization can continuously test and optimize all digital e-commerce channels, leading to increased conversions, higher customer satisfaction, and ultimately, better business results.
Artificial intelligence has been a recurring theme for decades. However, it’s no longer science fiction – it’s a reality.
Since OpenAI launched its own form of generative AI, ChatGPT, in November 2022, the world has yet to stop talking about its striking capabilities. It’s particularly fascinating to see just how easy it is to get results after interacting with this bot which is comprised of deep-learning algorithms for natural language processing.
Even Google quickly followed by launching a new and experimental project, Gemini, to revolutionize its own Search. By harnessing the power of generative AI and the capacity of large language models, Google is seeking to take its search process to the next level.
Given the rapid growth of this technological advancement over the past few months, it’s time that we talk about generative AI in the context of A/B testing and experimentation.
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that doesn’t have programming limitations, which allows it to generate new content (think ChatGPT). Instead of following a specific, pre-existing dataset, generative AI learns from indexing extensive data, focusing on patterns and using deep learning techniques and neural networks to create human-like content based on its learnings.
The way algorithms capture ideas is similar to how humans gather inspiration from previous experiences to create something unique. Based on the large amounts of data used to craft generative AI’s learning abilities, it’s capable of outputting high-quality responses that are similar to what a human would create.
However, some concerns need to be addressed:
Biased information: Artificial intelligence is only as good as the datasets used to train it. Therefore if the data used to train it has biases, it may create “ideas” that are equally biased or flawed.
Spreading misinformation: There are many concerns about the ethics of generative AI and sharing information directly from it. It’s best practice to fact-check any content written by AI to avoid putting out false or misleading information.
Content ownership: Since content generated with AI is not generated by a human, can you ethically can claim it as your own idea? In a similar sense, the same idea could potentially be generated elsewhere by using a similar prompt. Copywriting and ownership are then called into question here.
Data and privacy: Data privacy is always a top-of-mind concern. With the new capabilities of artificial intelligence, data handling becomes even more challenging. It’s always best practice to avoid using sensitive information with any form of generative AI.
By keeping these limitations in mind, generative AI has the potential to streamline processes and revolutionize the way we work – just as technology has always done in the past.
10 generative AI uses for A/B testing
In the A/B testing world, we are very interested in how one can harness these technological breakthroughs for experimentation. We are brainstorming a few approaches to re-imagine the process of revolutionizing digital customer experiences to ultimately save time and resources.
Just like everyone else, we started to wonder how generative AI could impact the world of experimentation and our customers. Here are some ideas, some of them concrete and some more abstract, as to how artificial intelligence could help our industry:
DISCLAIMER: Before uploading information into any AI platform, ensure that you understand their privacy and security practices. While AI models strive to maintain a privacy standard, there’s always the risk of data breaches. Always protect your confidential information.
1. Homepage optimization
Your homepage is likely the first thing your visitors will see so optimization is key to staying ahead of your competitors. If you want a quick comparison of content on your homepage versus your competitors, you can feed this information into generative AI to give it a basis for understanding. Once your AI is loaded with information about your competitors, you can ask for a list of best practices to employ to make new tests for your own website.
2. Analyze experimentation results
Reporting and analyzing are crucial to progressing on your experimentation roadmap, but it’s also time-consuming. By collecting a summary of testing logs, generative AI can help highlight important findings, summarize your results, and potentially even suggest future steps. Ideally, you can feed your A/B test hypothesis as well as the results to show your thought process and organization. After it recognizes this specific thought process and desired results, it could aid in generating new test hypotheses or suggestions.
3. Recommend optimization barriers
Generative AI can help you prioritize your efforts and identify the most impactful barriers to your conversion rate. Uploading your nonsensitive website performance data gathered from your analytics platforms can give AI the insight it needs into your performance. Whether it suggests that you update your title tags or compress images on your homepage, AI can quickly spot where you have the biggest drop-offs to suggest areas for optimization.
4. Client reviews
User feedback is your own treasure trove of information for optimization. One of the great benefits of AI that we already see is that it can understand large amounts of data quickly and summarize it. By uploading client reviews, surveys and other consumer feedback into the database, generative AI can assist you in creating detailed summaries of your users’ pain points, preferences and levels of satisfaction. The more detailed your reviews – the better the analysis will be.
5. Chatbots
Chatbots are a popular way to communicate with website visitors. As generative AI is a large language model, it can quickly generate conversational scripts, prompts and responses to reduce your brainstorming time. You can also use AI to filter and analyze conversations that your chatbot is already having to determine if there are gaps in the conversation or ways to enhance its interaction with customers.
6. Translation
Language barriers can limit a brand that has a presence in multiple regions. Whether you need translations for your chatbot conversations, CTAs or longer form copy, generative AI can provide you with translations in real time to save you time and make your content accessible to all zones touched by your brand.
7. Google Adwords
Speed up brainstorming sessions by using generative AI to experiment with different copy variations. Based on the prompts you provide, AI can provide you with a series of ideas for targeting keywords and creating copy with a particular tone of voice to use with Google Adwords. Caution: be sure to double-check all keywords proposed to verify their intent.
8. Personalization
Personalized content can be scaled at speed by leveraging artificial intelligence to produce variations of the same messages. By customizing your copy, recommendations, product suggestions and other messages based on past user interactions and consumer demographics, you can significantly boost your digital consumer engagement.
9. Product Descriptions
Finding the best wording to describe why your product is worth purchasing may be a challenge. With generative AI, you can get more ambitious with your product descriptions by testing out different variations of copy to see which version is the most promising for your visitors.
10. Predict User Behavior
Based on historical data from your user behavior, generative AI can predict behavior that can help you to anticipate your next A/B test. Tailoring your tests according to patterns and trends in user interaction can help you conduct better experiments. It’s important to note that predictions will be limited to patterns interpreted by past customer data collected and uploaded. Using generative AI is better when it’s used as a tool to guide you in your decision-making process rather than to be the deciding force alone.
The extensive use of artificial intelligence is a new and fast-evolving subject in the tech world. If you want to leverage it in the future, you need to start familiarizing yourself with its capabilities.
Keep in mind that it’s important to verify the facts and information AI generates just as you carefully verify data before you upload. Using generative AI in conjunction with your internal experts and team resources can assist in improving ideation and efficiency. However, the quality of the output from generative AI is only as good as what you put in.
Is generative AI a source of competitive advantage in A/B testing?
The great news is that this technology is accessible to everyone – from big industry leaders like Google to start-ups with a limited budget. However, the not-so-great news is that this is available to everyone. In other words, generative AI is not necessarily a source of competitive advantage.
Technology existing by itself does not create more value for a business. Rather, it’s the people driving the technology who are creating value by leveraging it in combination with their own industry-specific knowledge, past experiences, data collection and interpretation capabilities and understanding of customer needs and pain points.
While we aren’t here to say that generative AI is a replacement for human-generated ideas, this technology can definitely be used to complement and amplify your already-existing skills.
Leveraging generative AI in A/B testing
From education to copywriting or coding – all industries are starting to see the impact that these new software developments will have. Leveraging “large language models” is becoming increasingly popular as these algorithms can generate ideas, summarize long forms of text, provide insights and even translate in real-time.
Proper experimentation and A/B testing are at the core of engaging your audience, however, these practices can take a lot of time and resources to accomplish successfully. If generative AI can offer you ways to save time and streamline your processes, it might be time to use it as your not-so-secret weapon. In today’s competitive digital environment, continually enhancing your online presence should be at the top of your mind.
Want to start optimizing your website?AB Tasty is the best-in-class experience optimization platform that empowers you to create a richer digital experience – fast. From experimentation to personalization, this solution can help you activate and engage your audience to boost your conversions.
One of the biggest challenges for mid-market businesses is keeping your website visitors engaged. At this point, you’ve grown your brand enough to have a significant amount of traffic, but are in search of the right strategy to nudge your passive visitors into paying customers.
When you have a significant number of passive visitors, enticing them to take action is crucial to growing your commercial activity, achieving your business objectives and creating loyalty.
After working diligently to get traffic on your website, how do you engage these visitors?
In this article, we will answer that burning question with some practical strategies to ultimately improve your conversions.
What are passive users?
Passive users are visitors on your website that do not take any action.
These individuals may browse through some content on your site, but they leave before impacting your conversion rates in a positive way.
They are simply just browsing your web pages instead of filling out forms, subscribing to newsletters, engaging with CTAs, or making a purchase.
How to identify passive users
To engage passive users, you have to identify them.
Website analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, can help you identify these particular users by recognizing patterns when you’re analyzing your users’ behavior.
With analytics tools, you can see:
Which pages are more likely to attract passive visitors
The number of passive visitors on your website
Which pages attract active users
The actions taken on each page
The amount of time visitors spend on each page
Where your visitors come from
And more
Note: Many analytics tools provide more metrics than you can manage. In other words, it’s easy to get lost in the sea of data and metrics. It’s important to identify key performance indicators to measure your user behavior consistently.
This information can help you understand user behavior and recognize what motivates visitors to take action if you analyze it correctly. Once you can identify these motivators, you can begin to create a strategy to employ similar tactics on other pages for consistency in your engagement.
Identifying and understanding your digital consumers’ behavior is the first step to reaching your conversion goals.
Why you need to engage your audience
Converting passive visitors into paying customers is crucial for success. A higher conversion rate means more revenue and growth opportunities.
To recap: in order to engage your audience, you will need to understand them based on the data you collect from their behavior. This collection of information will help you develop best practices and develop guidelines for your future endeavors. Not to mention, you will also see what doesn’t work.
Mastering this first step to engaging your audience will, at the same time, help you to create a more seamless and attractive digital customer experience.
As your company increases conversions, your brand reputation will grow in parallel. A great reputation attracts new customers and creates further brand loyalty.
Now the question is, how do you engage your users in the mid-market?
How to engage visitors with widgets
Unfortunately, maximizing your digital consumer engagement won’t happen overnight. Based on your consumer research on your website, you will need to create a plan to optimize your digital customer journey.
Offering incentives such as discounts, free trials or exclusive offers is one great way to engage passive website visitors. By doing this you are providing a reason for users to take action.
How can you achieve such engagement at a mid-market level?Leveraging widgets.
With little to no-code needed, widgets are the best tools you can use for your website optimization strategy. Deploying flexible, visually appealing, and impactful components, such as widgets, is a foolproof way to increase digital consumer engagement.
Here are a few ideas and advice on how you can implement widgets to boost your engagement:
Alert and notify with a pop-in
An exit-intent pop-in is one popular widget to set up on your page that can have a real impact on retaining your visitors before they leave. By displaying important information that your visitor might have missed, you are giving them another opportunity to benefit from your message.
Le Slip Français, a French clothing manufacturer, displayed a seasonal exit pop-in with free delivery during Valentine’s Day, leading to a 22% increase in clicks.
Leverage geotargeting banners
Having multiple regions requires you to differentiate your communication. With geo-targeted banners, you can maximize your chances of a conversion by sending the right message to the right digital consumer in the right location.
This type of widget can be used in a variety of ways such as creating a customizable banner to offer discounts or services at the closest physical store to the user, which could entice them to go to your location.
Be aware of overuse
It’s important to think of the right time and place for your information. Put yourself in the shoes of your digital audience and ask yourself what information would be enticing and what would be overwhelming.
Creating space with your messages is essential to avoid burdening visitors with too many pop-ins and banners. Even if you’re offering discounts for various reasons, be sure not to go overboard.
Test what works and what doesn’t
Every audience is unique. What works for one company may not work for the next.
This is why A/B testing your new ideas is important to find out what your audience likes. Without testing, a bias based on your personal likes and dislikes can get in the way of data-driven decision-making. Experimentation is the only way to find what works for your customers without making prior assumptions.
Want to start enticing your customers with widgets and leveraging A/B testing on your website?AB Tasty is the best-in-class experience optimization platform that empowers you to create a richer digital experience – fast. From experimentation to adding widgets, this solution can help you activate and engage your audience to boost your conversions.
Benefits of engaging digital consumers with widgets
Providing your visitors with additional opportunities to engage with your website can bring a number of benefits to your business, which include:
Drive conversions
Your visitors have already communicated their interest in your products by visiting your webpage. Now they need to be convinced that your products or service will be worth it to nudge them down the funnel.
Find out what influences your digital consumers’ decision-making with different tactics:
A countdown timer creates excitement for digital consumers. Alerting visitors that there is a timely discount helps create a sense of urgency that will help them make a decision, fast.
Adding social proof to your product pages is a popular scarcity and urgency tactic used by many marketers to help draw attention to certain products. By letting visitors know that their peers are also interested in the same product, they will feel a sense of comfort knowing they aren’t alone.
As an example, NYX cosmetics leveraged AB Tasty’s social proof banner widget on their product pages to create desire. Without any coding knowledge, NYX created this test and saw a 2x increase in their transaction rate compared to the original version.
Increase basket size
Another benefit of engaging users on your website is increasing the average basket size.
By adding widgets that propose complimentary products to your consumer’s purchases, you are actively encouraging them to add more to their basket while highlighting benefits that they may receive.
Let non-subscribers know they are eligible for a discount if they upgrade or give visibility to a free shipping discount by adding a progress bar.
Decathlon, a French sporting goods retailer, implemented a progress bar using AB Tasty’s easy-to-use widgets. By offering this special “gift” of free shipping to customers who filled the progress bar, they saw a 10% increase in the transaction rate.
Build loyalty
Building loyalty is an ever-growing challenge with the growing market saturation. Post-purchase, you should focus your attention on building customer loyalty and creating new brand ambassadors.
One strategy to increase loyalty is by implementing widgets to collect information about their experience in the form of a pop-up survey. An exit pop-in is a great way to capture your customers’ attention while the transaction process is still fresh in their minds.
Unicef, an agency of the United Nations responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide, used an iframe widget to collect information about their digital consumer’s experience quickly and saw over 300 answers in a short period of time.
Engaging your digital audience
When you have fewer interactive elements, there’s nothing in place to entice visitors to stay on your website. This means ultimately ending up with more passive customers.
Meanwhile, placing easy-to-use widgets is a great way to grab your customers’ attention and give them the nudge they need to engage more with your website. Getting your digital consumers to make the switch from passive to active will eventually make a positive impact on the KPIs that matter to you most.
If you’re looking to drive conversions, increase your basket size or drive loyalty – widgets may be the perfect addition to your optimization roadmap.
Incomplete, irrelevant or poorly formulated A/B test hypotheses are at the root of many neutral or negative tests.
Often we imagine that doing A/B tests to improve your e-commerce site’s performance means quickly changing the color of the “add to cart” button will lead to a drastic increase in your conversion rate, for example. However, A/B testing is not always so simple.
Unfortunately, implementing random changes to your pages won’t always significantly improve your results – there should be a reason behind your web experiments.
This brings us to the following question: how do you know which elements to experiment with and how can you create an effective AB test hypothesis?
Determine the problem and the hypothesis
Far too few people question the true origins of the success (or failure) of the changes they put in place to improve their conversion rate.
However, it’s important to know how to determine both the problem and the hypothesis that will allow you to obtain the best results.
Instead of searching for a quick “DIY” solution, it’s often more valuable in the long term to take a step back and do two things:
Identify the real problem – What is the source of your poor performance? Is it a high bounce rate on your order confirmation page, too many single-page sessions, a low-performing checkout CTA or something more complex?
Establish a hypothesis – This could show the root of the problem. For example, a great hypothesis for A/B testing could be: “Our customers do not immediately understand the characteristics of our products when they read the pages on our e-commerce site. Making the information more visible will increase the clicks on the “add-to-cart” button.”
The second step may seem very difficult because it requires a capacity for introspection and a critical look at the existing site. Nevertheless, it’s crucial for anyone who wants to see their KPIs improve drastically.
If you’re feeling a bit uncomfortable with this type of uncertainty around creating an effective hypothesis, know that you’ve come to the right place.
What is an A/B test hypothesis?
Technically speaking, the word hypothesis has a very simple definition:
“A proposal that seeks to provide a plausible explanation of a set of facts and which must be controlled against experience or verified in its consequences.”
The first interesting point to notice in this definition is “the set of facts to be explained.” In A/B testing, a hypothesis must always start with a clearly identified problem.
A/B tests should not be done randomly, or you risk wasting time.
Let’s talk about how to identify the problem:
Web analytics data – While this data does not explain digital consumers’ behavior exactly, it can highlight conversion problems (identifying abandoned carts, for example) and help prioritize the pages in need of testing.
Heuristic evaluation and ergonomic audit – These analyses allow you to assess the site’s user experience at a lower cost using an analysis grid.
User tests – This qualitative data is limited by the sample size but can be very rich in information that would not have been detected with quantitative methods. They often reveal problems understanding the site’s ergonomics. Even if the experience can be painful given the potential for negative remarks, it will allow you to gather qualified data with precise insights.
Eye tracking or heatmaps – These methods provide visibility into how people interact with items within a page – not between pages.
Customer feedback – As well as analyzing feedback, you can implement tools such as customer surveys or live chats to collect more information.
The tactics above will help you highlight the real problems that impact your site’s performance and save you time and money in the long run.
A/B test hypothesis formula
Initially, making an A/B test hypothesis may seem too simple. At the start, you mainly focus on one change and the effect it produces. You should always respect the following format: If I change this, it will cause that effect. For example:
Changing (the element being tested) from ___________ to ___________ will increase/decrease (the defined measurement).
At this stage, this formula is only a theoretical assumption that will need to be proven or disproven, but it will guide you in solving the problem.
An important point, however, is that the impact of the change you want to bring must always be measurable in quantifiable terms (conversion rate, bounce rate, abandonment rate, etc.).
Here are two examples of hypotheses phrased according to the formula explained above and that can apply to e-commerce:
Changing our CTA from “BUY YOUR TICKETS NOW” to “TICKETS ARE SELLING FAST – ONLY 50 LEFT!” will improve our sales on our e-commerce site.
Shortening the sign-up form by deleting optional fields such as phone and mailing address will increase the number of contacts collected.
In addition, when you think about the solution you want to implement, include the psychology of the prospect by asking yourself the following:
What psychological impact could the problem cause in the digital consumer’s mind?
For example, if your problem is a lack of clarity in the registration process which impacts the purchases, then the psychological impact could be that your prospect is confused when reading information.
With this in mind, you can begin to think concretely about the solution to correct this feeling on the client side. In this case, we can imagine that one fix could be including a progress bar that shows the different stages of registration.
Be aware: the psychological aspect should not be included when formulating your test hypothesis.
Once you have gotten the results, you should then be able to say whether it is true or false. Therefore, we can only rely on concrete and tangible assumptions.
Best practice for e-commerce optimization based on A/B hypotheses
There are many testable elements on your website. Looking into these elements and their metrics can help you create an effective test hypothesis.
We are going to give you some concrete examples of common areas to test to inspire you on your optimization journey:
HOMEPAGE
The header/main banner explaining the products/services that your site offers can increase customers’ curiosity and extend their time on the site.
A visible call-to-action appearing upon arrival will increase the chance visitors will click.
A very visible “about” section will build prospects’ trust in the brand when they arrive on the site.
PRODUCT SECTIONS
Filters save customers a lot of time by quickly showing them what they are looking for.
Highlighting a selection of the most popular products at the top of the sections is an excellent starting point for generating sales.
A “find out more” button or link under each product will encourage users to investigate.
PRODUCT PAGES
Product recommendations create a more personal experience for the user and help increase their average shopping cart
A visible “add to cart” button will catch the prospect’s attention and increase the click rate.
An “add to cart and pay” button saves the customer time, as many customers have an average of one transaction at a time.
Adding social sharing buttons is an effective way of turning the product listing into viral content.
Want to start A/B testing elements on your website?AB Tasty is the best-in-class experience optimization platform to help you convert more customers by leveraging intelligent search and recommendations to create a richer digital experience – fast. From experimentation to personalization, this solution can help you achieve the perfect digital experience with ease.
CART PAGE
The presence of logos such as “Visa certified” enhances customer confidence in the site.
A very visible button/link to “proceed to payment” greatly encourages users to click.
PAYMENT
A single page for payment reduces the exit rate.
Paying for an order without registration is very much appreciated by new prospects, who are not necessarily inclined to share their personal information when first visiting the site.
Having visibility over the entire payment process reassures consumers and will nudge them to finalize their purchase.
These best practices allow you to build your A/B test hypotheses by comparing your current site with the suggestions above and see what directly impacts conversion performance.
The goal of creating an A/B test hypothesis
The end goal of creating an A/B test hypothesis is to identify quickly what will help guarantee you the best results. Whether you have a “winning” hypothesis or not, it will still serve as a learning experience.
While defining your hypotheses can seem complex and methodical, it’s one of the most important ways for you to understand your pages’ performance and analyze the potential benefits of change.
