Samsonite APAC personalizes customer journeys with EmotionsAI
+108%Click on Ratings - Competition Segment
+7.17%Overall Transaction Rate
Explore how Samsonite, a leader in the global lifestyle bag industry and one of the world’s largest travel luggage companies, elevated their digital strategy with AB Tasty.
With luggage being a thoughtful, infrequent purchase, the Samsonite APAC team faced the challenge of helping customers find their ideal luggage solution in as few clicks as possible.
By integrating EmotionsAI and leveraging AI-driven emotional insights, Samsonite APAC tailored the shopping experience based on key emotional drivers like ‘Competition’ and ‘Safety,’ making every interaction more relevant and engaging.
Focusing on critical touchpoints like the homepage, product pages, and checkout, Samsonite saw a 108% increase in clicks on product ratings from the competition segment and a 7.17% lift in transaction rates. By understanding and catering to diverse customer needs across regions, they streamlined the path to purchase and reinforced their position as a leader in the travel industry.
Download the full case study to learn how emotional personalization can revolutionize your customer experience.
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Ulta Beauty’s Palette for Innovation Starts with Experimentation
9%revenue increase
Introduction
Ulta Beauty has been a visionary since day one, striving to celebrate the role of beauty in our lives. The largest beauty retailer in the United States, Ulta Beauty is the premier beauty destination for cosmetics, fragrances, skincare products, hair care products, and salon services.
With core values such as Win Together, Improve Always, and Give Wow Experiences, a part of the company’s digital transformation, Ulta Beauty embraced digital experience optimization as a way to deliver on their vision: To be the most loved beauty destination among guests and the most admired retailer by Ulta Beauty associates, communities, partners, and investors. Ulta Beauty turned to AB Tasty to enhance the retailer’s digital presence by reimagining its Digital Store. The Digital Optimization team, or DOT for short, a dynamic group within Ulta Beauty’s Digital Experience team, was tasked with building and evangelizing an experimentation culture and driving strategic optimization through data-driven insights.
Tasked with improving the overall guest experience through optimization, DOT outlined four focus areas to help guide their efforts.
Conversion: Focused on reducing friction to capitalize on guest demand to drive increased revenue for digital business.
Personalization: Focused on driving an enhanced one-to-one experience for our guests while driving engagement and loyalty.
Guided Discovery: Focused on providing our guests with experiences that empower the ability to browse, learn, and experience new brands, categories, products & services.
Omnichannel: Focused on experiences that combine digital and physical guest experiences and built upon strong cross-functional partnerships.
Why Ulta Beauty Chose AB Tasty for Their Experimentation Needs
The Digital Store of the Future initiative necessitated a shift towards a more data-informed approach to inform the redesign and drive innovation. Ulta Beauty sought a solution that would enable them to be more agile, move faster, and gain valuable insights from experimentation to meet their business goals.
Upon implementing AB Tasty’s platform, the Digital Optimization team conducted innovative tests aligned with their product roadmap and business objectives. They leveraged features such as the social proof widget to create urgency and ran numerous experiments to continuously optimize the guest experience.
“We just love that willingness to partner with us to build out features that help us do our jobs more seamlessly. That’s a huge differentiator from what we were getting from our previous solution. We’ve been able to set up experiments with six variations and multi-armed bandit tests incredibly quickly – with minimal developer support – which has drastically improved our team’s agility,” added Sasha Ostrozovich, User Experience Optimization Manager at Ulta Beauty.
Results and Benefits
The collaboration with AB Tasty yielded significant results, including notable e-commerce growth and a substantial increase in the number of tests conducted from 20 tests per year to over 65 tests per year, with plans to continue increasing that metric. Ulta Beauty’s ability to gain insights for the redesign and reduce developer dependency was a key benefit of the company’s partnership with AB Tasty. With an eye on driving revenue metrics, the team tested an overlay that included product recommendations when guests added items to their carts.
Original:
Variation:
With the addition of the overlay, Ulta Beauty was able to showcase products that were most relevant to the guest which resulted in a revenue increase of 9% alongside a 15.1% increase in clicks on “add to bag.” Overall the test listed metrics across the board, with a 2.3% conversion rate uplift, a 4.7% increase in items per order, and an increase of 11.5% for bag views.
Not only do the Digital Optimization team’s tests improve business-level performance metrics such as revenue, but they also lend further insight into Ulta Beauty’s guests. These tests prove that the effective use of personalization and recommendations can have significant impacts on the guest experience and help quickly drive results for the business.
Jeff Hamm, Ulta Beauty’s Vice President of Digital Experience and Operations, noted, “2023 marked a phenomenal milestone in our digital transformation. We have a brand new refreshed look and feel, completely overhauled cart, checkout, and guest account features. Not to mention a scalable infrastructure for our future. We’re almost at the finish line, setting the stage for a future filled with growth and innovation. “The transformation has laid a strong foundation, enabling us to scale and enhance our guest experiences. AB Tasty has played a critical role in this transformation, helping our team innovate and validate at a quicker pace with less risk.”
With a heavy focus on innovation, Ulta Beauty has experienced immense digital growth. In a time when guest loyalty is increasingly difficult to secure, Ulta Beauty’s loyalty program grew by 8%, with more than 95% of sales occurring through the loyalty program. Additionally, the work that the team has put into the mobile experience has paid off manifold: over 50% of e-commerce sales occur on Ulta Beauty’s mobile app.
Future Plans
Looking ahead, Ulta Beauty is committed to continuing its experimentation efforts, building a robust personalization strategy, and optimizing the Digital Store to further enhance the guest experience. To achieve this, the team has identified five areas of focus for their testing program.
Streamline the checkout process and optimize landing pages to further improve conversion rates.
Continue to leverage data and analytics to offer personalized product recommendations and content to build on the guest experience.
Prioritize site speed and app performance to ensure a positive guest experience.
Focus on guided discovery through enhanced site search, contextual search, and AI-driven beauty consultations to better facilitate product discovery and decision-making.
Expand options for buy online pickup in-store (BOPIS) and leverage flexible fulfillment means like buy anywhere fulfill anywhere (BaFa).
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Independence Australia Drives Engagement with EmotionsAI
+3%Total revenue uplift
+1.13%Transaction rate uplift
Independence Australia, a not-for-profit social enterprise, is dedicated to supporting individuals with disabilities. With revenue from their commercial endeavors funding vital community programs, their mission hinges on maintaining a successful online presence.
Independence Australia faced a critical challenge: how to keep up with the growing demands of digital consumers while operating within the constraints typical of a social enterprise. The rapidly evolving digital landscape, coupled with increased competition, shifting consumer expectations, and a rise in price sensitivity, added further complexity to their situation. Additionally, brand loyalty had become increasingly volatile, making it more difficult to retain customers in a crowded market.
To address these challenges, Independence Australia integrated EmotionsAI into their digital strategy, marking a turning point in their approach to customer engagement. This AI-powered solution provided deep insights into customer emotions, allowing the team to segment audiences based on emotional needs like ‘Safetyʼ, ‘Need for communityʼ and ‘Competitionʼ.
Want to learn more about how Independence Australia drove insights with emotions while developing their personas for an e-commerce redesign? Download the case study to learn more.
AB Tasty is by far my favorite solution in the Independence Australia stack. The flexibility it offers and the improvements it enables have been transformative for our digital strategy
Head of Digital Experience
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Founded in 1856, Hunter is a progressive British heritage brand renowned for its iconic original boot and holds two Royal Warrants of Appointment to HM The King and HRH The Duke of Edinburgh. The brand has a rich history of innovation and continues to design to protect from the elements and perform on varied landscapes.
The Social Proof Hypothesis
“Social proof is one of the most useful tools of persuasion a brand can employ. Used well it can enrich the customer experience and help customers make an informed decision based on what others are doing” explains Beth Hodge, Head of Optimisation at Conversio. “Working together with Hunter Boots and AB Tasty we wanted to measure whether social proof can improve the experience for Hunter customers and ultimately drive incremental value. Importantly we also had to consider how to serve a message that aligned with the Hunter brand and how it should be applied to different geographic segments considering Hunter Boot’s broad international customer base”
To do this Conversio defined a strategy to test and measure AB Tasty’s social proof capabilities and individually measure the impact on UK and US customers. Conversio’s detailed data-first approach wanted to establish which messaging and metrics most resonate with the customer, which pages and locations social proof has the highest impact and the optimum thresholds that define exposure. “It’s critical that when launching social proofyou optimize all the elements of the experience to maximize your results, it’s about the continuous refinement of the experience” adds Beth.
About Conversio
Conversio is a leading independent optimization and analytics agency, headquartered in London and partners with AB Tasty. They are down-to-earth e-commerce experts who use data, insight, and continuous experimentation to sustainably grow your business
IMPLEMENTATION
After an initial proof of concept and refining the experience with optimized messaging and positioning social proof demonstrated a +9% conversion rate improvement for the UK site and +6 for the US site.
“What was clear from our analysis of those customers exposed to social proof was that we needed to apply specific tactics and design by market to maximize the value of this feature, for example, it was clear that product view data had a bigger impact on US customers than it did in the UK” explained Beth.
Hunter Boots now had a solid foundation on which to grow and expand their use of social proof.
As part of Conversio’s approach to further refining the customer experience of social proof they worked closely with the AB Tasty team to make use of the social proof API. This gave Hunter Boots greater flexibility about where and when to serve these messages to their customers. This included intelligently rotating two different social proof metrics on the product pages vs. a single message which had shown the initial promising results. This further improved on the conversion uplift already seen by 2% in the UK and 1% in the US.
Next Steps – Building on the success
“We are pleased to see the addition of social proof resonating so well with our customers, we have worked with Conversio to ensure the messaging feels on-brand while still highlighting product popularity. This is especially impactful for the rollout of new footwear product categories like commando boots and sandals as customers are less knowledgeable on these products. Social proof really helps us drive newness, and supports conversion rate across our well-known rubber boots. We are excited to see where we can optimse this experience going forward”
Bryony Longden – Head of eCommerce Operations
Conversio already has plans in place to trial social proof badging on the product list pages as well as using it in the post-add-to-bag experience. Providing extensive experience and end-to-end conversion expertise, applying pre-eminent data analysis, insight and testing methodology to the optimization of e-commerce businesses by means of continuous improvements to their website performance and efficiency.
TAKEAWAYS
The implementation of social proof on Hunter Boots’ website proved to be a successful tactic, resulting in a significant increase in conversion rates for both the UK and US sites. A data-first approach and optimization strategy allowed for the refinement of the social proof experience, tailoring it to specific markets and product categories. It provided Hunter Boots with greater flexibility and opportunities for further optimization.
This success serves as an example of how social proof can be a valuable tool for brands to enrich the customer experience and drive incremental value.
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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.”
Avid Transforms Internal Culture and Website Experience With AB Tasty
+49%supporters
Increasecustomer satisfaction
Avid, a global provider of software and solutions for media creation and management, has been steadily building and infusing a culture of experimentation across the business — and it shows. Here’s how Jeff Copetas, VP of E-Commerce & Digital, has been able to seamlessly collaborate across departments and continuously improve the customer experience.
When Jeff Copetas joined Avid in 2017, there wasn’t exactly a playbook on website optimization. The Burlington, Massachusetts-based multimedia production company — a favorite among Hollywood TV/film producers and most recently, partnered with NBC on its coverage of the 2021 Olympics Games — was struggling to modernize its website to keep up with the latest digital trends and consumer demands.
So the VP of E-Commerce & Digital set out to build a foundation not only for website optimization, but also for a data-driven culture of experimentation within the offices of Avid. The latter, Jeff says, was significant to enabling e-commerce teams to be more autonomous through internal organization and structuring.
As a dynamic, fast-paced technology company, Avid’s lean development team was 100% focused on the product roadmap and the core needs of operating a website. The team’s use of an agile sprint system meant any experiments from the e-commerce team had to wait for prioritization — oftentimes, taking months for deployment.
“The push-and-pull of web, e-commerce teams and IT teams is quite common. They have their roadmap, we have ours. The point of A/B testing is that it doesn’t go through a series of sprints. We need to test quickly and pivot just as fast,” Jeff says.
Enter AB Tasty, whose partnership with Avid has resulted in double-digit increases in transactions, a material uptick in conversions, and an overall better user experience. The capability to test at scale was a prerequisite for Jeff and his team.
“The deciding factor for us was the partnership that we would build with AB Tasty. We didn’t want to feel like we were being nickel-and-dimed each time we needed help. AB Tasty, at the core, is customer-centric and their customer success team has brought forward so many great ideas,” Jeff explains.
The deciding factor for us was the partnership that we would build with AB Tasty. AB Tasty, at the core, is customer-centric and their customer success team has brought forward so many great ideas.
Implementing a “test and learn” mindset
In some form or another, Jeff has always been a proponent of testing for most of his 20-plus- year career in e-commerce, digital marketing, and social media. His approach is rooted in data-driven decision-making, A/B testing, and most importantly, the customer’s perspective.
“I don’t let my own opinion of what I think looks good cloud the performance of a website. I need data to tell me that. I would rather survey customers,” he shares.
It was this mentality that Jeff was keen on implementing at Avid, not only within his e-commerce team, but across the entire organization. Before implementing any experimentation programs, Jeff wanted a companywide buy-in.
“We had to move from a mindset of ‘I think …’ to ‘let’s test and learn,’ by taking the albatross of opinions out of our decision-making process,” Jeff recalls. “You can make a pretty website, but if it doesn’t perform well and you’re not learning what drives conversion, then all you have is a pretty website that doesn’t perform.”
The problem to root out before implementing experimentation, Jeff advises, is opinions. Whose opinion is “right”? According to Jeff, it’s the one that drives conversion. It’s why he turned to AB Tasty as an internal validation tool. The ease of use and implementation through the visual editor enabled the team to test quickly — without requiring prioritization from the development team — and collect data that Jeff could use to drive his strategy for generating leads and driving revenue.
“My opinion on the color or copy of a CTA doesn’t matter. What matters is the data and what converts. Everyone will come to the table with their opinions or test ideas. With AB Tasty, we can quickly decide which design or copy is the best based on the highest conversion rate,” he says.
You can make a pretty website, but if it doesn’t perform well and you’re not learning what drives conversion, then all you have is a pretty website that doesn’t perform
Turning to the customers, always
Avid runs a lot of tests — from the seemingly minute, such as color changes, to heavier page redesigns — always depending on users’ responses as they navigate through the website. That customer-centric strategy became crucial when it came time to revamp the global site navigation.
Jeff and his team had identified a pain point of their website UX: Visitors typically headed to the navigation bar, which was on the left side of the site and only expanded on hover. However, based on Avid’s deep dive into their search logs, most people ended up using the search bar instead because the navigation bar wasn’t optimally categorized.
The challenge lay in uncovering the different purposes of a navigation bar and search bar for Avid’s clientele. What are the top products they search for? How can that be displayed properly in the navigation bar? What categories or design needed to be drawn up to sufficiently address this particular user experience?
Well, if you know Jeff, you would also know that he went directly to the source: the users. With AB Tasty’s NPS widget, he set up a two-week campaign to collect data points before redesigning the experiment. The no-code widget prompted users via a pop-up to share their feedback about the navigation experience after 1 minutes and 20 seconds — the average time a user spent on the page.
The data collected from this enabled Jeff’s team to prioritize their roadmap based on which improvement would have the highest positive impact. Their first plan of action was to make the navigation bar more visible by moving it to the top of the page and create mega-menus to include more clickable categories to address the main user feedback: The site, simply, was just too hard to navigate.
A week after the test, Jeff relaunched the NPS widget with the same questions to collect feedback on the ease of navigation. The results of his experiment saw an increase of 49% in supporters, who also cited improved overall user experience.
OriginalNew navigation bar
Next-gen experimentation at Avid
Avid’s website addresses two markets. There’s the B2B audience, in which the website serves as a lead generation tool to sell its products and services to companies. Avid also has a B2C segment of individual musicians and media creators that purchase subscriptions, hardware, training materials and other digital downloads directly from a self-service model.
The different segments also mean different growth strategies and website optimization complexities. This, however, doesn’t deter Jeff and his team. Their goal has always been to implement a “test and learn” mindset to drive conversion, whether it’s a form-fill for enterprise leads or a purchase from an individual. And with AB Tasty’s support, particularly in personalization and building customer segments, Jeff is continuously optimizing the website.
AB Tasty has really brought so much to the table. We’ve done so much brainstorming together over the years, and the partnership is only getting stronger and stronger.
“AB Tasty has really brought so much to the table. It’s a true partnership that we have on the development side, with the velocity and accuracy of the delivery,” Jeff says. “We’ve done so much brainstorming together over the years, and the partnership is only getting stronger and stronger.”
The tables have also turned since then. Let’s revisit 2017, when Jeff had to rely on the tech team to help him implement his A/B testing. A few years have passed since then, so how well has his “test and learn” philosophy influenced Avid?
“We’ve come a long way. We have shown the value of experimentation to the company by pairing opinions with data. We have enough people coming to my team now to propose tests that we’ve had to introduce an online ticketing system to manage requests,” Jeff says. “I consider that a success. The mindset has absolutely shifted.”
ABOUT JEFF COPETAS
Jeff Copetas has spent over 20 years in the e-commerce and digital marketing space, helping teams create value within their organizations and driving revenue growth consistently. Jeff currently leads the global end-to-end digital experience strategy at Avid, where he serves as VP of E-Commerce & Digital. His responsibilities include ensuring a best-in-class website experience that generates leads and revenue for Avid’s B2C, reseller and enterprise efforts.
ABOUT AVID
Avid delivers the most open and efficient media platform, connecting content creation with collaboration, asset protection, distribution, and consumption. Avid’s preeminent customer community uses Avid’s comprehensive tools and workflow solutions to create, distribute and monetize the most watched, loved and listened to media in the world — from prestigious and award-winning feature films to popular television shows, news programs and televised sporting events, and celebrated music recordings and live concerts. With the most flexible deployment and pricing options, Avid’s industry-leading solutions include Media Composer®, Pro Tools®, Avid NEXIS®, MediaCentral®, iNEWS®, AirSpeed®, Sibelius®, Avid VENUE™, FastServe®, and Maestro™. For more information about Avid solutions and services, visit www.avid.com.
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How a Dedicated Optimization Program Helped Fragrance Direct Delight Its Customers
+21%Revenue Uplift
+20%Increase in Transactions
Fragrance Direct is a UK-based pure-play beauty retailer who has been operating since 1993. It sells over 14,000 products across 600 big-name brands, designer labels, and high street favorites. In addition to fragrances, Fragrance Direct sells makeup, skincare, and haircare products from both everyday and luxury brands. Fragrance Direct has been partnering with AB Tasty for over 2 years, and for just under 2 years with Endless Gain.
The Objective
To improve Fragrance Direct’s customers’ experience and generate the business more sales and profit. AB Tasty and Endless Gain approached this in three key ways with outstanding results.
The Approach
Social proof messaging helps instill trust in Fragrance Direct among customers
Research showed that the wider market awareness of Fragrance Direct was quite low. A variety of social proof messages were successfully introduced to new customers. These social proof experiences delivered an increase of over 8% in the user conversion rate.
Personalization helps strengthen an already-strong trading period
Fragrance Direct does very well during three gifting seasons: Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Christmas, through the Fragrance Finder page.
However, research showed that traffic volumes were low on this page (even during peak periods) despite high conversion rates, and users surveyed said they didn’t actually know what they were looking for from a gifting point of view when they arrived on this page. Using AB Tasty’s Audiences feature, Endless Gain identified users arriving on-site either looking for gifts or unsure about what to buy. These specific user segments were prompted with the question “Searching for gift?”.
Users who clicked on the prompt were taken to the Fragrance Finder page where they were then able to, through a series of personalized questions, engage with and find their desired gift.
The prompt was not shown to users who were not looking for gifts, in order to avoid distracting them and disrupting their journey with the brand. With tactical usage, this personalized strategy delivered a 10% increase in the user conversion rate for Fragrance Direct during their peak periods.
Helping customers checkout faster, and easily, increases sales
Multiple pieces of research highlighted the checkout funnel as one of the key priorities. Various steps within the funnel (and the fields within them) caused considerable friction for customers. Each of these elements, either singularly or combined, were likely to be harming conversions. Endless Gain redesigned multiple elements with the checkout. Through experimentation, the improvements increased the user conversion rate by 2%.
“Using AB Tasty, an efficient and flexible experimentation and personalization platform, enabled us to build on our optimization approach. To continue to build on that, we decided to hire Endless Gain. Working with Endless Gain means we get dedicated resources who are focused 100% of their time on improving our
customers experience without the distraction of day-to-day business challenges.”
– Julian Thompson, E-Commerce Director, Fragrance Direct
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Whether you’re a converted couch potato or an experienced athlete, Decathlon has something for everyone. Present in 52 countries, Decathlon designs and sells sporting goods, both online and in 1,600 brick-and-mortar locations.
Challenge
Decathlon’s mission is to make sports accessible to all. One of the ways they accomplish this is through offering a wide array of choice – 10,000 products covering 80 sports are sold on Decathlon’s website. With a range of price points and styles, there is an almost dizzying array of items to choose from. For some shoppers – especially those trying out an activity for the first time – this amount of choice might seem overwhelming.
How could Decathlon help shoppers get situated?
Social Proof Hypothesis
“We know that social proof – the idea that, when unsure, people look to others for direction – is a powerful and effective concept,” explains David Harari, Customer Success Manager at AB Tasty. “In the context of e-commerce, this means people are influenced by what their peers are interested in when deciding what to buy. We wanted to test out if a simple line of social proof messaging would nudge website visitors further down the purchase funnel.”
To do this, Decathlon’s UK digital team ran an experiment based on AB Tasty’s Social Proof widget. The AI-powered widget dynamically surfaces the number of times a product is viewed by other shoppers on a site in a given timeframe. This gives other browsers an idea of which items are getting more traction.
Product page with social proof messaging
“We thought it could be that extra little nudge to hit ‘add to basket’ – and might help certain customers continue through the purchase funnel,” elaborates Florent Beck, UX Leader at Decathlon UK. The team set up an A/B test on 400 product pages to see whether this kind of social proof messaging would have an impact on visitors’ purchase decisions. The text was inserted automatically just below the customer reviews ratings (another element of social proof), and above the product description. “What was really handy about the AB Tasty widget was that we can set a minimum amount of views before the message showed. In this case, we chose 20 – so if fewer than that number of people viewed the product, the message wouldn’t show, and once it hit 20, it would automatically appear,” explained Florent.
Results
Adding this simple line of social proof messaging not only increased clicks on the ‘Add to cart’ button, it also bumped up transactions and revenue. For all audiences, clicks increased by 1.5%, transactions by 2.4% and revenue by 1.3%.
Interestingly, when the team segmented the results by certain audience profiles, they realized that the social proof messaging worked better on returning visitors. They clicked 2.8% more, with an increase of 3.3% on transactions and 2.8% for revenue lift. “This might indicate that shoppers that know and trust the Decathlon brand are even more likely to put stock in others in the Decathlon community, versus first time visitors who are more wary,” explained David.
Even more interesting was when they dove into the data to look for what kinds of products this messaging worked best with. They also discovered that the social proof approach worked better for lower priced items – less than 10 pounds – versus more expensive, ‘investment items’, like a nice bike or set of skis. This kind of information can help Decathlon increase the efficacy of their campaigns in the future, and scale up this tactic for other markets.
“We value our community at Decathlon. What’s great about this kind of social proof messaging is that it’s a way to automatically let people take the opinions of other Decathlon shoppers into account – if a certain product is popular or trending, others can know that in real time as they’re browsing. From a business perspective, it increases our transaction rate and revenue, and from a customer experience perspective, it helps orient shoppers.” – Florent Beck, UX Leader, Decathlon UK
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NYX Professional Makeup Increases Transactions and Decreases Bounce Rate Using Social Proof Messaging
43%Increase in click-through rate
2xIncrease in transaction rate
The Proof Behind ‘Social Proof’
Though the brand NYX Professional Makeup is rooted in ancient mythology – the name comes from the eponymous Greek goddess of the night – its marketing strategy is anything but old-fashioned. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Los Angeles, NYX Professional Makeup (owned by the L’Oréal Group) is today present in 70 countries around the world.
Their rapid expansion, especially in North America, is due in large part to their savvy digital practices and their strong e-commerce presence. Indeed, the brand, which has been able to retain its affordable price-point and is adored by bloggers, influencers and everyday consumers, is pioneering the use of virtual reality and live-streaming to bring the same in-store service right to the consumer’s home.
NYX Professional Makeup at the Forefront of Digital Strategy
“Digital is at the core of our marketing strategy. Driven by the strength of social media, the fear of products being out of stock can be strong around star launches,” comments Guilhem Cussonnet, Data Scientist at L’Oréal Consumer Products France, who is also in charge of Digital Projects. “Brands like ours are benefiting from a makeup boom in the era of social beauty, and it’s essential for our brand to stay on the cutting edge.”
When the team at NYX Professional Makeup heard that AB Tasty was developing a social proof messaging solution, they were eager to be one of the first clients to try it out. Léa Benquet, Customer Success Strategist at AB Tasty, elaborated: “Our social proof messaging was a perfect fit for NYX Professional Makeup, who are extremely strong in their digital promotional strategy. We had already implemented similar tactics with their sister brand, Urban Decay – who target a near-identical consumer segment – to great effect.”
“What was really appealing about AB Tasty’s solution was that it was in a ready-to-use format – there was little to no code to implement. We were able to set up the messaging template on our own in only a few weeks, shortening significantly our usual IT lead times,” added Guilhem.
AB Tasty’s social proof solution comes in an industry-specific, ready-to-use format. It only takes two clicks to choose and customize the social proof messaging you want to display.
Social Proof: Why it Works
Social Proof messaging is based on one of the many cognitive biases inherent in human thinking – basically, we look to other people to help us decide what to do. It’s a fluke in the way people’s brains are wired, and one that many marketers already tap into. In contexts that are particularly influenced by trends and social norms, such as the beauty and fashion industry, social proof is especially salient. “Influencers, recommendations, reviews, celebrity endorsements…all of these tactics work because consumers care about what people they admire, or people like them, are liking, buying, and wearing,” commented Léa.
NYX Professional Makeup Puts Social Proof to the (A/B) Test
The team at NYX Professional Makeup decided to run a simple A/B test on the product pages of their French e-commerce site to try out just how effective a simple line of social proof messaging could be. Version A of the test remained the same – a typical product page already in use. They then tested two alternate versions (for desktop visitors), with slightly different social proof messaging just below the ‘buy’ call-to-action. The first variation indicated how many of the items had been purchased that day; the second variation referred to the number of items viewed.
Concretely, they wanted to test how effective these simple lines of text would be at encouraging browsers to click on ‘buy’, as well as actually confirming their purchase.How powerful would the simple act of displaying what consumers’ peers were buying be at influencing their own behavior?
Original Version – No Social Proof Messaging
First Variation of Social Proof Messaging
Second Variation of Social Proof Messaging
Double the Transaction Rate
After letting the test run for a full business cycle, the results were in: both styles of social proof messaging had a positive effect on click-through rate, transactions and bounce rate.
Overall, the wording based around ‘purchases’ instead of ‘views’ was more impactful. When compared to the original page, it bumped up the click-through rate on ‘buy’ by 43%, and it also doubled the transaction rate. The variation based on views also performed well – it increased the click-through rate by 32%, and the transaction rate by 33%.
An added bonus was the significant reduction in bounce rates to the pages with either social proof messaging; both variations brought that down by around 38%.
Clearly, this social proof messaging caught buyers’ attention and stimulated them to continue down the purchase funnel.
Next Steps for Social Proof
“The results of this first test were far beyond our expectations,” concluded Guilhem. “This is just the beginning: we are eager to scale the use of social proof on many more use cases in order to maximize the business impact.” In addition to implementing this kind of messaging on a wider range of pages, NYX Professional Makeup can also use AB Tasty to run further experiments to test different types of social proof messaging. Adding more emphasis on creating urgency – for example, inciting consumers to ‘act fast’ to purchase very popular products – may also be effective in certain cases. AB Tasty’s social proof templates are completely customizable, so NYX Professional Makeup will also be able to test different variations that play with the look and feel of the messaging.
“Social proof messaging is a kind of website personalization,” explained Arthur Charbit, Product Manager at AB Tasty. “And just like with website personalization, best practice is to experiment to discover which messages resonate best with which audience segments.”
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