Shiseido revitalizes experience optimization strategy with AB Tasty
6Markets Testing
The cosmetics giant has perfected the blend of beauty and data science.
Now Cynthia Bevilacqua, who leads EMEA e-commerce CRO & digital product roadmaps, wants to harness it.
6 Markets Testing
11 tests per month
1 Year WIth AB Tasty
When it comes to the beauty industry, competition is fierce. New brands pop up every day and that means legacy brands need to evolve or risk getting left on the shelf.
With a company philosophy rooted in the artful blend between beauty and science, Shiseido has fully embraced digital transformation in pursuit of being the leader in the data-driven beauty industry.
Today, the company works with AB Tasty to optimize e-commerce experiences for brand Shiseido and NARS in the EMEA region. Just one year into the partnership, Shiseido is now actively running around 11 tests per month across six markets.
But it wasn’t always like this.
At the start of 2022, Shiseido wanted to transform their existing but constricted experimentation strategy into an intuitive and scalable optimization program. The product team was eager to reach a new level of A/B testing capabilities as well as better optimize the time and resources spent on implementation and execution.
Cynthia Bevilacqua, digital product and user experience manager at Shiseido, knew it was time for a change. “This was March 2022, so the CRO mindset was new. We were doing some A/B tests, but it was limited to three or four tests in one year,” she recalls. “Up until this point, optimization was not a core focus. And I really wanted to change that.”
Place alternative payment options closer to “add to cart”
Offering payment installments is one way to motivate users to add more items to their cart. Even if a user doesn’t take advantage of the offer, having the option helps alleviate hesitancy around pricing.
The team at Shiseido wondered whether moving the Klarna payment copy block closer to the “add to cart” CTA could improve the click rate. With an A/B test targeted to the NARS and brand Shiseido UK markets, the team tested placing the price, Klarna copy and CTA closer together.
This small layout change led to a massive improvement with 129% increased clicks on “add to cart” for mobile and 159% for desktop.
ORIGINAL / VARIATION
Mobile
129% increased clicks on “add to cart”
24% increased clicks across all payment options
Desktop
159% increased clicks on “add to cart”
72% increased clicks across all payment options
New partner. New mindset.
A large global footprint requires a lot of cross-team collaboration. From their vantage point within the regional division, Cynthia’s team fields incoming requests from their local markets while also balancing strategic brand ideas from the global HQ in Tokyo.
With oversight on A/B testing and CRO strategies for the Shiseido EMEA region, Cynthia’s next hurdle would be setting a strategy for experimentation across each of the region’s unique markets. More frequent testing enabled by AB Tasty meant simply replicating any test in a new country wouldn’t cut it if they wanted to grow strategically.
“When we made the switch to AB Tasty, we wanted a partner who could help us with specialized testing in each market. We knew a one-size-fits-all did not work for our brand. You cannot say that because a test works well in the UK, that it will equally be successful in France or Germany because the consumer behavior can be quite different across each market.”
To sift through the prioritization of rolling out tests to new regions, Cynthia leveraged AB Tasty’s testing capabilities to implement internal processes. First, evaluating hypotheses through testing and data. Then, successful tests are added to the development roadmap, while the learnings from unsuccessful ones are shared with regional stakeholders and a new round of iterations starts.
“This process helps us ensure that we are not wasting valuable resources and bandwidth. AB Tasty not only enables us to quickly validate the hypothesis with data, but they also help us to say ‘no’ to a request because the data shows it’s not beneficial to the end customers.”
“AB Tasty not only enables us to quickly validate the hypothesis with data, but they also help us to say ‘no’ to a request because the data shows it’s not beneficial to the end customers.”
Cynthia Bevilacqua Digital product and user experience manager at Shiseido
Boost engagement with a higher visibility virtual try-on CTA
Shiseido collected insights that showed customers who interacted with a feature during their decision-making process had a tendency to convert.
Focusing on the French market, the team set up a variation giving the virtual try-on CTA a complete makeover. A small image, camera icon and brighter button color helped increase the CTA’s visibility on the product page.
Compared to the original CTA (which saw an average of 10% click rate), the revamped virtual try-on button saw a whopping 95% increase in clicks. “Add to cart” clicks also increased by 73% for those who used the feature.
ORIGINAL / VARIATION
95% clicks on virtual try-on
73% clicks on “add to cart” for virtual try-on users
16% overall clicks on “add to cart”
61% in transaction rate
Celebrating a culture of experimentation
After a year of working with AB Tasty, the team at Shiseido is thrilled by the tangible results and internal adoption of a CRO mindset. Since moving from four tests per year to over 10 tests per month with AB Tasty, Shiseido has significantly improved the customer experience. The success from 2022’s experimentation rollout resulted in an opportunity for Cynthia to grow the expertise of her team notably on strategic decision-making and roadmap management.
“The partnership we have with AB Tasty’s customer success team is great because we strategize together about our objectives. They feed us different ideas for testing and understand what’s working from other clients. It is fuel to get us thinking about our roadmap and what we should try to implement next.”
The experimentation mindset also fits perfectly into Shiseido’s desire to be a key player within data-driven beauty companies. With stakeholders invested in the testing mindset, Cynthia’s team is empowered to continue putting ideas to the test first before rolling them into a development roadmap.
“The test-and-learn approach is important to have because it’s not about what you think. ‘I think’ is not something we can use. We need data to tell that story,” Cynthia explains. “And now, this is our new reality with AB Tasty.”
WINNING TOGETHER 5 tips for operational excellence
It’s not easy (or practical) to tell someone their opinion is wrong. That’s why Cynthia Bevilacqua, digital product and user experience manager at Shiseido, advocates for using experience optimization platforms like AB Tasty to deliver data-driven decision-making from individual team members all the way up to stakeholders. It’s essential to sustainable growth.
Here are five tips to optimize team operations:
Monthly team meetings for individual tests and results
Quarterly stakeholder meetings for KPI deep dives and macro-insights
Clear KPIs and tracking dashboard
Gradual data-backed rollout to other relevant teams
Business performance or customer pain points at the center of every test
Deepening the partnership with AB Tasty
One learning that Cynthia’s team is incorporating into their 2023 strategy is giving tests more room to breathe in order to collect better data. Launching fewer tests and running them for a longer duration of six weeks with a minimum detectable effect (MDE) calculation allows the team to gather accurate data to inform the actions for the next iteration.
Entering year two of the partnership with AB Tasty, Cynthia is looking to unlock the next level of experience optimization by expanding the solution to Shiseido’s other EMEA brands. For Shiseido’s mature markets, the team plans to introduce personalization campaigns and build more mature testing. And by encouraging digital to local market teams to incorporate experimentation and the testing-first mindset, Cynthia is further driving Shiseido’s data-driven beauty company vision.
“Initially, we were focused on setting up the team for success through processes and an embedded CRO strategy. Now, we’re ready to accelerate with AB Tasty by using the data intelligence from the past year to drive our global experimentation program,” Cynthia says. “We won’t test just anything — we need to always make sure our tests are addressing a user pain point.”
How Clarins Uses AB Tasty for Personalization and Retention
+89%Conversions
+145% Add to Basket
The e-commerce team at Clarins is a true “testing lab,” managing their 5 websites (Germany, Spain, Ireland, Benelux, and Portugal) and helping the other nearby countries to grow their e-commerce business. The goal of this ‘incubator’ is to create an internal community of experimenters to help share testing best practices. This approach paid off with the creation of the ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ a gamification concept launched on Singles Day, November 11, 2020.
While testing using AB Tasty was initiated by the International Content team, Clarins decided in 2020 to not only extend its partnership with AB Tasty to include a commercial component but also to expand to the regional and local level. The tool that the EMEA teams were using previously was limited to creating pop-ins, which wasn’t enough to tackle Clarins’ goals involving retention and personalization.
Personalization via gamification
For Célia Rigaux, E-Commerce Director, EMEA, this was an opportunity to instill a test and learn culture across the EMEA teams. “Our goal is to exchange with our customers, to create a link with them, and to inspire loyalty, by bringing them value through our websites. AB Tasty’s experimentation capabilities enable us to challenge our CRM, Acquisition, and E-store teams using innovative tests that we weren’t able to run before.”
With the strategic holiday season approaching, the time was right to launch a far-reaching test across all of the sites managed by the EMEA e-commerce team. Singles Day (celebrated on November 11 in many countries) was the perfect option, seeing as it was also only a few days before Black Friday. All that was left was to decide what kind of game to display.
Everyone’s a winner
At the end of September 2020, Clarins got in touch with their Customer Success Manager at AB Tasty to see if their idea was feasible. After a few exchanges, they decided on the right set-up that struck a perfect balance between technical feasibility and a smooth user experience.
The idea was simple: Every person who visits any of Clarins’ EMEA websites, whether on desktop or mobile, sees the game appear. If they click on it, the wheel spins and stops at one of 6 gifts. The gifts are promo codes, automatically applied to the winning visitor’s basket, which makes for a great user experience (especially on mobile).
“We were able to launch our tests in two weeks,” explains Anaëlle Thomas, E-store Project Manager EMEA, who was responsible for the development of the project. One of the major advantages of AB Tasty was the ability to duplicate each experiment for each of Clarins’ sites. If the first test took 20 hours to implement, this number shrank by 5 for each of the other 4 sites. This experience is now live for all of the other countries Clarins’ is present in, and adaptable for other offers.
4x the orders
The first gamification test was a success for Clarins’ EMEA e-commerce team. The game, buoyed up by the increased web traffic brought on by the pandemic, performed very well. Live for 24 hours (from the 10th to the 11th in the evening), the total number of orders completed on the 4 main sites (Germany, Spain, Ireland and Benelux) quadrupled when compared to the results of November 11, 2019. Ireland stood out, with an order increase of +495% and a +585% increase in revenue.
The conversion rate did well, increasing by +89.34% compared to 2019. Finally, the add-to-basket rate increased by +145% compared to the 2020 average. It should be noted that, though the game performed well in all countries, it was Ireland that attracted the most visitors, with 61.37% of visitors trying their luck.
“We systematically test on all our sites to see how each country reacts according to the local culture. So we shared the success of this experiment with the other countries,” elaborated Anaëlle Thomas. “South Africa was particularly interested and launched their own version in December. The United Arab Emirates also ran the test during the 4 days of Black Friday.”
Pursuing personalization in 2021
Previously known mostly as an A/B testing tool, AB Tasty has attained the level of ‘business partner.’ The EMEA teams even share their experimentation tips via Teams. Next step: Further develop their personalization strategy, especially by learning from other AB Tasty clients’ experiences. See you in 2021!
“The ability to duplicate tests in AB Tasty allows us to exchange more often with the other EMEA countries and to share experiments. We rely on AB Tasty to guide us in driving our personalization strategy forward.”
AB Tasty Enables MoneySmart to Innovate at the Pace of Their Ideas
+12%CTA clicks
+40%Use of filters
MoneySmart Group is South East Asia’s leading personal finance portal, helping consumers compare loans, insurance, and credit cards. From everyday decisions like choosing the best credit card to big decisions like buying a home, MoneySmart shows their customers what’s out there, recommends what’s best for them and helps with the application process.
AB Tasty accelerates experimentation
Today, MoneySmart’s product team can get an experiment up and running – and see results – in under 24 hours. Someone has an idea to test a form length, button color or banner? No sweat! But it wasn’t always like this, as Vincent Paca, Engineering Manager at MoneySmart, explains:
“Before AB Tasty, we were running our own, experimental platform. A lot of the developers’ time was spent creating and coding in different variations of tests. What this meant was that you could spend a sprint just to launch a very simple test. It was a very costly endeavor.”
Sanjiv Shah, Product Manager at MoneySmart, elaborates: “It took a long time to set up a test, it was very manual and painful. While we wanted to experiment with speed, it just took such a long time.”
This sluggish process is less than ideal.
First, testing inertia can mean missed opportunities to convert traffic to leads, or leads into customers. This can eat away at a business’s bottom line. Perhaps more crucially however, it can also entail falling behind competitors who are more rapidly refining the experience on their websites. Consumers increasingly expect financial sector brands to offer digital experiences that are as smooth and delightful as those of e-commerce or social media sites. If MoneySmart wanted to keep up, it was time to make a change.
That change came in the form of AB Tasty.
No such thing as a losing test
“What AB Tasty gave us was a tool that let us easily make changes to our website, deploy these changes and get the results out of the door within a day,” explains Vincent. “The QA function is fantastic,” adds Sanjiv. “You can actually see what a test will really look like for your customers by doing a test in production on just your computer’s IP address.” The best part? No flickering effect and virtually no change to the load speed time.
AB Tasty’s arrival was a watershed moment for the product and tech teams at MoneySmart.
Gone was the manual, tedious process of aligning devops and data teams to regulate traffic flows and build dashboards from scratch. Gone, too, was the stress of not knowing if a new idea would be a hit or a flop. “With AB Tasty, even if a test idea doesn’t ‘win’, we still save a lot on production cost and avoid frustration from developers, product managers and designers,” concludes Efrim Bartosik, Head of Product Design.
Teams come together around experimentation
One of the most appreciated aspects of AB Tasty, according to Bui Hanh, Product Manager at MoneySmart, is the perfect balance between features for technical and non-technical profiles. Not only is MoneySmart’s product team champing at the bit to run a multitude of tests, but so are the commercial, marketing and content teams. Through a testing tool that’s accessible to everyone, a true culture of experimentation is starting to take root, aligning departments around common goals and igniting growth.
A perfect example is the test shown below. Design, product and developer teams worked together to test a new layout for the ‘apply for a personal loan’ feature. The goal was to increase clicks to the ‘Apply Now’ CTA, and the new version did just that. CTR increased by nearly 12%, as did the use of the filters function (by 40%).
Takeaway
When barriers to experimentation – whether they be in terms of time, money or company culture – are removed, growth flourishes. Aligning teams around creativity and agility is a key ingredient to increasing both business outcomes as well as customer satisfaction. AB Tasty is the perfect partner to help product and marketing teams achieve both.
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OUI.sncf Relies on AB Tasty for Risk-Free Innovation
61%Increase in conversion rate
Fasterinnovation
For Hélène Doré, brand loyalty is her bread and butter.
As a Conversion Rate Optimization Manager at OUI.sncf, her day-to-day consists of thinking up ways to make customer experiences smoother and conversions higher. It’s a job she loves, but it’s not without its challenges. Today’s consumers are fickle and their expectations are exacting; one poor experience on an app or website can create a long-lasting negative feeling, potentially spiralling into poor brand perception, a drop off to a competitor, or bad word of mouth.
“More likely than not, when a customer faces a problem during his/her visit, it creates a bad memory, which may mean the customer doesn’t return. Creating an exceptional, personalized, and fluid customer experience gives a sentiment of recognition to the customer, which will incite him/her to complete a transaction and potentially come back. If we work on creating the most seamless and personalized customer journey, over time, this recognition will transform into loyalty and create stickiness, inciting the customer to come back and therefore form a virtuous relationship with us.”
– Hélène Doré, Conversion Rate Optimization Manager at OUI.sncf
The conversion rate optimization team, along with the product feature teams, at OUI.sncf has plenty of ideas for how to avoid these scenarios and create truly exceptional customer experiences. The question is: which ideas should they implement? Which should they scale? And how can they be sure an idea won’t backfire?
A/B Testing: The way of data, not debates
What Hélène and her manager Sunny Song, Lead CRO, needed was the ability to run data-driven experiments in order to know which of their ideas will perform best (to optimize the customer experience), and to mitigate risk in case the idea goes south. AB Tasty was able to provide this capability!
“When we have a goal to achieve and we have several possible propositions to achieve the same goal, AB Tasty helps us by allowing us to test these propositions. We can then make the best decision by determining which proposition has the greatest impact,” explains Sunny.
One great example is OUI.sncf’s ‘Exploration Assistant’.
Think of the ‘Exploration Assistant’ as an AI-powered travel agent. Based on an in-house algorithm, the Assistant is displayed to visitors with a high enough ‘interest score’, and suggests a trip itinerary for the visitor. The idea sounds great on paper, but would the Exploration Assistant actually make a business impact on bookings?
Using AB Tasty to run a statistically rigorous A/B test, the team determined that conversion rates did significantly increase for those visitors that engaged with the Assistant.
“This test showed extremely positive results: +61% for web responsive and +33% for desktop impact on the conversion rate,” explains Sunny. This particular experiment was important for more than its impact on these KPIs: “This test was a milestone project for Oui.sncf because it was a very technically complex A/B test and was the first test that incorporated AI algorithms. But the work doesn’t stop here. It’s really essential for the teams to continuously iterate on this version of the algorithm, to test and tweak it for better and better results, so that we’re always proposing the most efficient itinerary to our customers. This is how algorithms evolve, and it goes hand in hand with a continuous optimization strategy.”
In other words: targeted, data-driven testing helps validate strategic decisions at key moments, confirming high-level strategy choices and setting future roadmaps.
“Thanks to the Exploration Assistant A/B test and its very impactful results, we will now industrialize this test. This test was very strategic because it was the first which included AI, which plays a key role in OUI.sncf’s strategy.”
– Sunny Song, Lead CRO at OUI.sncf
Another advantage to attaching numbered results to testing ideas? Avoiding circular, time-sapping discussions about whose idea to run with. “By implementing A/B tests and providing concrete results and data to prove the effectiveness of certain ideas, we were able to eliminate the “endless” debates we could have where each person has his own opinion on topics,” concludes Sunny.
For example, low click-through rate data indicated to the team that unfolding travel details on the ticket information page on their app could increase clicks to a key CTA.
This idea could have led to hours of endless debate around the respective value of each of these blocks.
Instead, the team usedFlagship (AB Tasty’s server-side platform) to run an A/B test on the app. This allowed them to quickly validate the winning variation – which happened to be the version B, where the details of the first trip were automatically unfolded. This led to a 2.49% increase in the click-through rate to the CTA “Choose this trip”, as well as 0.28% more arrivals to the basket page.
Flagship: The platform behind the magic
“Our strategy is to offer the most fluid and seamless user experience possible to our clients, the vast majority of whom browse and book on our OUI.sncf mobile app, which has become extremely popular.”
– Ingrid Peiniau Head of Customer Experience at OUI.sncf
Customer experience has become increasingly mobile-first. Alongside buying their groceries, clothing and movie tickets on their smartphones, consumers expect to be able to search, book, or reschedule travel via a user-friendly app. This is especially true for OUI.sncf, where a majority of visits are generated via their mobile app.
This meant that it made sense for OUI.sncf to turn to AB Tasty’s server-side solution, Flagship, for their optimization efforts. It’s the platform they used for tests run on their mobile app, versus their website.
Not only does Flagship enable the kind of experiments OUI.sncf was running on their mobile app, it also allows product teams to release new features with virtually no risk. Why? Teams are able to not only rollout a new feature progressively – that is, not exposing all of their user base at once – but they can also easily rollback that feature if they notice a dip in KPIs.
“We’re particularly interested in Flagship’s progressive rollout capabilities. We want to be done with publication planning dependencies. Progressive rollout lets us stop or fully rollout a test as soon as it reaches statistical significance without having to wait for a new publication of the app. If the chosen KPIs worsen, we can avoid prolonging a sub-optimal experience. On the other hand, if the test is positive, all of our clients can start feeling the benefits immediately.”
From increasing conversion rates on their mobile app to validating high-level strategy and reducing the risk inherent in feature rollouts, Flagship has become a strategic partner for OUI.sncf.
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How Pets at Home Increased Their Average Order Value by 1.2%
23%Increase in clicks on recommended products
1.2%Uplift in average order value
Pets at Home is the UK’s largest pet care business and provides pet owners with everything they need to be able to look after their pet – from food, toys and bedding, and grooming services, to first opinion veterinary care and world-class specialist veterinary hospitals.
The Challenge
Pets at Home found that its users were repeatedly missing product recommendations at the bottom of the product display page. After adding an item to their basket, many users missed the opportunity to view related products which led to low engagement with suggested product recommendations.
Test Hypothesis
To drive more engagement to the overlooked product recommendations section Pets at Home briefed Good Growth, using AB Tasty, to set up a simple A/B test inserting an anchor link in the variation. The anchor link variation would automatically scroll the page down to the recommended products after a user had added a product to their basket. The “add to basket” action would trigger the anchor link to drop the user down to the product recommendations, which in turn would increase engagement and the number of items per order.
Results
The anchor link variation outperformed the original variation, proving statistical significance after 3 weeks. Running the variation to both desktop and mobile users increased the engagement with the product recommendations and saw an uplift of + 1.2 % in average order value.
Anchor Link Variation
Takeaway Tips
Ensuring good visibility of product recommendations on the product display page can drive a higher average order value and increase user engagement
Leverage anchor links to highlight sections of your website that you want to call attention to
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How Three Ships Drove Traffic to Partner Pages Using a Single Widget
7%Increase in CTA clicks to partner pages
2 weeksTest duration
Three Ships is a marketing agency dedicated to driving growth for its partners. Their multifaceted approach spans affiliate marketing, performance-driven content, conversion rate optimization, and media investment management.
Three Ships teamed up with AB Tasty to accelerate growth for its partners through experimentation. By thinking critically about the connection between user intent, device, and UX design, they were able to increase visits to partner pages by 7%. Here’s how they did it.
The Situation
Mattress Advisor is a comprehensive resource for shoppers looking to purchase a new bed— complete with user reviews, product guides, and general resources on all things sleep-related. The Three Ships team wanted to focus on Mattress Advisor’s branded pages, which featured only one mattress brand (as opposed to comparing multiple, like on non-branded pages).
The goal was to get users to click on the CTA (“Buy Now”), which would send shoppers to the brand’s own page to complete the conversion.
Three Ships knew that visitors to Mattress Advisor’s branded pages had a strong intent (incoming traffic was via paid search links, meaning shoppers had used brand-specific keywords in their search). These shoppers were nearing the end of their research, had a specific mattress in mind, and were closing in on a purchase decision.
In analyzing this website traffic further, Three Ships saw that roughly two-thirds of visitors were using mobile devices. So, optimizing the CTA had to consider both the stage in the customer journey and mobile usability (e.g. smaller screen sizes, the role of touch in the user experience).
The Experiment
Three Ships used an AB Tasty banner widget to place a sticky CTA at the bottom of the screen and duplicated this test across all branded pages.
The idea was that a sticky CTA would be easily accessible to visitors on mobile devices without blocking important information like reviews and ratings that often influence decision-making.
Results
It only took two weeks for this experiment to reach statistical significance due to the high traffic of these pages.
In the end, the sticky CTA across branded mobile pages was a success, with the conversion rate averaging at about 7%. It’s since been hard-coded onto the site.
Takeaway Tip
Mattresses are big purchases with long periods between return customers. It’s important to find a balance between encouraging a conversion while not coming across as too pushy. In this scenario, Three Ships knew that visitors were close to making a purchase. So, it was important that taking the next step to convert was easily accessible while not overtaking the entire web page.Implementing this experiment was simple, fast, and scalable thanks to AB Tasty’s widget library. No developer support was needed to create the sticky CTA, and it took only two weeks to prove its effectiveness.
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Cluse Sees an Uplift in Transactions With Product Landing Page Optimization
+1.12%Uplift in transactions
+2.39%Increase click-through rate to the PDP
Known for their modern, simple, and elegant watches & jewelry, Dutch watch brand Cluse has established itself as one of the fastest-growing accessories brands.
The Challenge
Cluse noticed that the bounce rate for their product landing pages was high and found that not many users clicked through to the product display pages. There was no clear call-to-action for the user to progress to the product display page.
Original
Test Hypothesis
To encourage more users to click through to the individual product pages Cluse set up an A/B/n test including different CTA color variations. The “View Details” CTA button was inserted below the product image, linking to the respective product display pages (PDP). With a clear CTA the objective of the test was to increase users reaching the PDP from the product landing page, which in turn would increase the add-to-cart clicks and transactions.
Results
Targeting all users across desktop and mobile, the A/B/n test ran for 3 weeks across Cluse’ French domain. The winning variation (pictured below) significantly increased the click-through rate from the product landing page to the product display page as well as driving an increase in transactions.
+2.39% increase in click-through rate to the product display page
+1.12% uplift in transactions
Winning Variation
Takeaway Tips
Make it easy & clear for your users to reach the product display page. Optimizing the gateway to your product pages can help you convert users into customers.
Small changes to your CTA’s can help you achieve quick wins.
Analyze the data you have from an AA test or insights from other means, to better understand the user behavior on your site, and help you come up with test ideas that could help improve the users’ experience on the site.
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ŠKODA Jump-Starts Test-Drive Bookings with Countdown Banner
2xNumber of booked test-drives
8Day campaign
One of the gems of the Czech industry, ŠKODA has evolved into a modern, respected car manufacturer present in more than 100 markets worldwide. Known today for their unique and reliable designs, the ŠKODA brand started out over a hundred years ago crafting bicycles, followed by motorcycles and, ultimately, cars.
Challenge
In the automotive industry, booking a test-drive is a crucial step in the purchase funnel. Marketers spend considerable time, resources and budget converting website traffic into test-drive appointments; naturally, people who are willing to leave their personal information to physically try out a vehicle are exhibiting high buyer intent.
On a more pragmatic level, retailers also prefer potential customers to book ahead of time, instead of stopping by on the fly, so they can better manage their schedules. All around, increasing the number of online test-drive bookings generates hot leads and better pipeline visibility.
In addition to this ever-present goal, the digital marketing team at ŠKODA’s French branch had a particular challenge to address. They wanted to capitalize on a rare, time-limited promotional offer – a zero-interest loan program – to jump-start their online test-drive bookings. They just weren’t sure of the best website optimization tactic to employ.
Urgency Principle and Engagement Idea
They brought the opportunity to the attention of AB Tasty and Rosapark, their digital marketing agency. “We talked through a few options for how to make the most of this valuable offer,” explained Laura Rérolle, Partnership Success Manager at AB Tasty. “We decided on a simple countdown banner that would show how much time was left before the zero-interest loan option ended. The idea was to give the offer the air of an event, to make it prominent on the homepage and other key areas of the site. This would attract attention and draw interested viewers down the purchase funnel. Since this type of engagement technique is not frequently used in this industry, we wanted to try it out in this limited scope to test the idea.”
The team at ŠKODA then worked with Rosapark on the creative design and deployment aspects. They ran the campaign using AB Tasty for mobile and desktop viewers for the full duration of the offer (eight days), on their homepage and the product pages (those that detailed the cars for sale).
The countdown clock banner included two calls-to-action: one to ‘learn more’ about the offer, (which redirected to an explanatory landing page), and the other, ‘book a test-drive,’ to a booking page.
Zoom in on mobile version of countdown bannerCountdown clock on desktop
Results
There was no doubt about it – the countdown banner clearly drew positive attention, encouraging online visitors to book the coveted test-drives. “We ran this campaign with AB Tasty as part of a big media blast around this offer. We were thrilled to see that, the week of the campaign, we more than doubled the number of booked test-drives compared to the previous week. In fact, a full 13% of that week’s leads came directly from this countdown clock. This is a significant uplift in qualified leads, at very little extra effort or resources. We’re very happy with these results,” explained Sebastien Toussaint, Customer Experience & Data Performance Manager at ŠKODA, France.
“The countdown banner was very effective during this key offer. While taking care not to overuse this engagement tactic, ŠKODA could certainly employ it again during their open house events two or three times per year,” elaborated Laura.
Takeaway Tip
Engagement techniques like countdown banners, when used judiciously, can effectively nudge website visitors into converting.
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“We were able to launch our tests in two weeks,” explains Anaëlle Thomas, E-store Project Manager EMEA, who was responsible for the development of the project. One of the major advantages of AB Tasty was the ability to duplicate each experiment for each of Clarins’ sites. If the first test took 20 hours to implement, this number shrank by 5 for each of the other 4 sites. This experience is now live for all of the other countries Clarins’ is present in, and adaptable for other offers.
