Devred Turns E-commerce Site Into a Strategic Growth Lever Thanks to AB Tasty
35%Weight in revenue
10%Utilization rate
Devred’s Digital Success Strategy:
Recommendations, Merchandising, and Web Experimentationwith AB Tasty
Devred, the iconic men’s ready-to-wear brand, has risen to a major challenge: transforming its e-commerce site into a remove genuine driver of strategic growth.
With 300 physical shops and a well-established in-store identity, Devred has embarked on an ambitious drive to conquer digital experiences, attract younger customers, and boost its online performance.
The company chose AB Tasty to implement a comprehensive solution combining recommendations and merchandising as well as web experimentation in order to, reinvent the online customer experience and maximize its digital impact.
Download our case study to see how Devred achieved significant online sales growth by harnessing improved personalization and strategic merchandising, boosting the digital channel’s contribution to overall sales.
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How GANNI Styles Brand Identity Through Experimentation
Introduction: who is GANNI?
GANNI is a Danish contemporary luxury fashion brand renowned for its ready-to-wear collections, including clothing, shoes, and accessories.
Founded in 2000 and known for its effortless Scandi-cool aesthetic, the brand has evolved into a global name, offering a fresh and vibrant take on modern women’s fashion. With a focus on responsible practices, GANNI is committed to positively impacting the planet, aligning with sustainability initiatives such as using organic and recycled materials. Ganni sells its collections online to customers worldwide, including Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia, making its mark in over 40 countries.
At the heart of GANNI’s business is a community focused on changing a broken fashion system. Led by Ditte and Nicolaj Reffstrup, the brand uses responsible practices as a force of positive change for style, people, and planet.
GANNI has been creating bold, expressive, and responsibly-minded products for radical optimists everywhere. More than just a fashion brand, Thay embrace innovation for responsible progress, integrating creative approaches into every aspect of its business, from products to brand identity.
What does experimentation bring to GANNI?
Identifying itself as a ‘progressive luxury’ brand, experimentation plays a crucial role in how GANNIi’s market position, being customer-centric and defining their brand identity.
While they benchmark and look at other luxury brands, they use experimentation to make better decisions on their brand. It allows them to understand how users behave online, how they engage, how they interact and how they see GANNI. Monika Tamics, Director of Digital Product, explains “We are looking for what customers are struggling with. We identify these, come up with a solution, test it and enhance the online shopping experience by making it easier to find and purchase products, and provide a smoother, more enjoyable shopping journey for greater satisfaction.”
They use AB Tasty to power their experimentation program, successfully running tests that consistently boost conversions and AOV, improve site functionality, and make decisions based on data. By iterating on key features like search, checkout, and more, GANNI continues to improve their site.
Monika goes on to say: “AB Tasty is a platform where there are no limitations, it’s very user friendly, and anyone at any time can go in to look at the data and provide a better user experience for our customers.”
“AB Tasty is a platform where there are no limitations, it’s very user friendly, and anyone at any time can go in to look at the data and provide a better user experience for our customers.”
Monika Tamics, Ganni Director of Digital Product
Driving brand identity through continuous experimentation
GANNI prioritizes the customer in their testing process by identifying pain points in the user journey and implementing solutions to enhance the online experience. To ensure these tests are effective from a business perspective, GANNI’s team evaluates the entire customer funnel, from the initial interaction to the final checkout. This comprehensive approach has revealed key insights.
By focusing on these incremental changes, GANNI’s experimentation strategy not only improves site performance, but also deepens customer engagement, encouraging browsing and product discovery. With AB Tasty empowering them to scale their experimentation program, Ganni is able to continuously test, learn, and optimize their digital experience. Each change brings deeper insights into their identity, helping to define who Ganni is as a brand.
Testing and learning: the search bar
GANNI conducted a large-scale analysis of their website to identify low-hanging opportunities that could make a big impact. One area they quickly observed was the high number of users searching for specific products, a behavior commonly seen across fashion brands. Site search is a powerful tool, often driving higher conversion rates. In fact, studies show users are nearly 40% more likely to convert than those who don’t use it. GANNI’s challenge with their search bar was that it wasn’t prominent enough.
They found that visitors who used their original search function experienced a significant drop in conversion rates. To address this, they focused on making the search bar more visible and user-friendly. They implemented several tests, including adding a border around the search bar, increasing the visibility of the magnifying glass icon, and testing different variations such as a longer search bar with a text hint.
From these simple yet impactful tests, GANNI achieved a 7.5% increase in conversion rates and a massive 21.9% uplift in users engaging with the mobile search function.
Another example of incremental learning, GANNI’s test-and-learn mindset allowed them to experiment with changes that significantly improve their user’s customer journey. By optimizing the search experience, GANNIi made it easier for customers to find products they love, driving higher engagement.
Ganni’s checkout challenge
The checkout process presented another key opportunity for GANNI’s experimentation team. Initially, users were required to enter their email address before accessing the checkout page – a step that caused a drop-off in the funnel. GANNI hypothesized that this barrier led customers to assume guest checkout wasn’t an option, prompting cart abandonment.
Not all tests are winning tests and GANNI’s experimentation on the checkout page is a good example of this. During the first round of tests, designed to clarify the availability of guest checkout, gave inconclusive results. Undeterred by the initial results, GANNI’s experimentation program continued testing.
They refined their approach, focusing on simplifying the checkout flow by combining the email entry and information input into one step. The team’s determination paid off, generating an impressive uplift in conversions.
Although it was frustrating when the first round of tests didn’t deliver the expected results, GANNI’s Senior Digital Project Manager, Anders Skaarup, notes how they “provided some kind of insights toward the overall purchase funnel or discovery funnel for the user.” By testing barriers in the user journey, GANNI not only improved conversion rates but also deepened their understanding of how small changes can have a significant impact on customer behavior and these learnings led to them adding more and more improvements on the checkout page.
Small changes, big impact
The checkout process or search function can make or break a customer’s decision to complete their purchase. GANNI’s experience is a testament to the power of iterative testing. By identifying key drop-off points and continuously refining their approach, the team is able to remove friction points and unlock valuable insights into user behavior. Not only does this improve CRO and minimize potential revenue loss, but AB Tasty also improves the brand’s overall digital experience. GANNI isn’t reliant on gut feelings or abstract concepts when it comes to experimentation – the team tests, learns and makes data-driven decisions that shape their brand identity.
A better site for a better customer experience
GANNI wants to speak to their customer group – and the more they can understand them, the better the user’s digital experience. By fostering collaboration across departments, they ensure that all teams are aligned with customer-centric goals.
As Anders Skaarup, Senior Digital Product Manager states, “This is the way that decisions can be made together – based on data that allows us to become an elevated brand. It also means that we can share insights and help prevent loss – it isn’t simply about gaining more – but being able to capitalize on what is there. At GANNI, we want to speak to our customer group – and the more we can understand them, the better the digital experience.”
“At GANNI, we want to speak to our customer group – and the more we can understand them, the better the digital experience.”
Anders Skaarup, Ganni Senior Digital Product Manager
Brand identity
By continuously testing and learning, they gain real-time insights into customer preferences, allowing them to quickly adapt and deliver a digital experience that resonates deeply with their audience.
With AB Tasty, GANNI may gain insights into what drives revenue and user conversion, enabling faster implementation of new designs, but the real benefit is how it informs who they are as a brand and how this relates to their customers.
This unified approach to experimentation, continuous learning, small iterations and identifying areas to improve helps to build a customer experience that GANNI’s audience love and strengthens their market position.
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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CleanChoice Energy is a leading 100% renewable energy supplier in the U.S., building solar farms and providing consumers with alternative ways to access clean energy.
CHALLENGE
While the CleanChoice team’s paid media campaigns drove heavily engaged traffic to the website, they found those visitors weren’t quite ready to commit to pursuing clean energy.
In an effort to boost the performance of top-of-funnel and awareness campaigns, they decided to test if a timed pop-in on certain pages would drive better lead capture.
TEST IDEAS
The CleanChoice Energy team hypothesized that displaying an email pop-in within 15 seconds of users landing on one of three different test pages would generate more email sign-ups for their newsletter campaigns than its original placement as a button at the bottom of each page.
RESULTS
On average, the tests resulted in a 204% increase in email submissions with the pop-in than without. This helped increase the performance of the top-of-funnel awareness campaigns significantly.
TAKEAWAYS
Not every website visitor is ready to immediately make a purchase. This test proved to the CleanChoice Energy team that they could benefit from a lead-capture strategy for visitors across all stages of the funnel. The team made this pop-in a permanent feature of the site and began testing pop-ins with different messaging on other site pages to target visitors across additional funnel stages.
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On The Beach has perfected its personalized messaging by using AB Tasty’s experience optimization platform to speak to its different customer segments, leveraging data-driven decision-making to get more beaches to more people.
On The Beach is a UK travel company specializing in beach holidays. Known for their vibrant and dynamic brand image, they provide hassle-free and affordable beach holiday experiences.
They strive to appeal to a wide range of travelers, offering a wide selection of destinations, accommodations, and activities.
Often highlighting the excitement and joy of beach vacations, their website showcases the company’s commitment to creating unforgettable holiday experiences. By promoting transparency, flexibility, and excellent customer service, On The Beach has established itself as a trusted and sought-after brand in the UK travel industry.
Fine Tuning the Customer Journey
As On The Beach caters to a wide range of customers, it’s important to ensure that their website provides a personalized experience according to each customer’s needs.
Customers start the journey of looking for their perfect holiday, they may often visit a website multiple times before making a final decision and reaching the final stage of purchase.
This means they have new or returning customers coming to their website. The company should be able to show it understands its customers by providing personalized and targeted messaging along the different stages of the customer/purchasing journey.
This is where testing and experimentation become vital as On The Beach finds the right messaging with the highest positive impact on its different user segments. The Conversion Rate Optimization Manager, Alex McClean, explained,
“We’re trying to look at how we can take our different customer types and give them a better, improved journey”.
An example is when they used different badges to recommend holidays to individual segments coming into their site. With the help of AB Tasty, they discovered that new users preferred a recommendation marked “Bestsellers” and that returning users reacted better to “Our pick”, as they already had trust in the brand.
Testing these various types of messages allowed them to determine the right messaging for each user group, ultimately leading to increased bookings.
The Roll-Out of AB Tasty Across the Company
On The Beach understood the advantage of being able to test and learn after seeing the impact that A/B testing has on their business. In this way, after trying simple tests, based on content and product placement, they started to increase the number of tests they did a month while bringing in other team members.
By sharing test results, learnings, and best practices, On The Beach ensured that all departments, including marketing, product development, and customer support, had access to the latest information. This cross-team collaboration enabled the company to make data-driven decisions, implement successful optimizations, and continuously enhance the overall user experience, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and business growth. A real experimentation culture was fostered.
When we first started using AB Tasty we were looking at rolling out maybe five to ten tests a month. But now, as the business has advanced its testing capabilities and more people are getting involved, we’re rolling out 20-30 tests, with buy-in from the whole business
Key Support from AB Tasty
One of the great advantages for On The Beach, as their testing program expands, is being able to learn at speed, as well as the support they receive from AB Tasty’s teams.
With a responsive and knowledgeable support staff, AB Tasty assists On The Beach in setting up tests, interpreting results, and implementing optimizations. They offer timely and personalized assistance, guiding the company through the testing process and offering expert advice on best practices.
Alex explains,
“For us, the real reason that we chose AB Tasty, and what differentiated AB Tasty from the competitors was the level of service that we were offered. We have complete access to developers, really attentive CSMs, It’s really beneficial to keep things moving where we don’t need to go to our development team”
The support from AB Tasty means that On The Beach can leverage and grow at speed. The learnings that are achieved through testing mean they can improve their site experience and conversions, re-iterate, and grow to provide a customer experience that speaks to their audience.
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Embark Veterinary Optimizes Product Pages to Drive Growth
+7%Conversion rate
How Embark Veterinary Optimizes Product Pages to Drive Growth
Learn more about how the e-commerce team at Embark Veterinary leverages experimentation and a data-driven approach to drive improvements across every key performance indicator.
7% increase in conversion rate
10% increase in revenue per session
Embark Veterinary, Inc. was founded on a passion for scientific research and a lifelong love of dogs. Their DNA test kits and online platform enable dog owners to better understand their dog’s breed, health, and much more while helping to advance research into the best ways to care for man’s best friend.
The Experimentation Program at Embark Veterinary
The team at Embark uses a few KPIs when determining the success of experiments. Of course, they always attempt to improve the conversion rate, but they also place a heavy emphasis on average order value.
Lastly, the team analyzes revenue per session as a primary KPI because it takes into account both conversion rate and average order value.
How can you best identify what information to present to customers at the right time and right place?
Because Embarks sells two products, a baseline product and a premium product, the team strives to sell more kits, but they also want to sell more premium kits.
The premium kits include information about dogs’ genetic health (not included in the baseline kits), and this particular experiment was designed to help customers understand the benefits of knowing additional health details for their pets.
The Embark team wanted to understand if different types of product copy would result in higher sales for their premium dog DNA test kits. In order to determine this, the team developed two tests: an initial test to understand the style of product copy that resonated with customers, ranging from clinical to emotional, and a second test to understand the impact of including examples in the product copy.
Test #1 included three variations of product copy ranging from more emotional to more clinical.
In this test, the team prepared three variations of copy. Variation 1 featured more “emotional” copy, variation 2 featured more “clinical” copy, and variation 3 struck a balance between “emotional” and “clinical.”
Results
The first test resulted in a very clear winner, not only indicating that the product copy makes a difference for customers but also that clinical copy resonates the most with their customers.
The clinical copy in variation 2 resulted in a 4% increase in conversion rate, a 3.5% decrease in average order value, and a 1% increase in revenue per session with the increase in conversion rate compensating for the decrease in average order value.
Test #2 included 3 variations of product copy with health examples ranging from less severe to more severe.
In this test, again, the team prepared three variations featuring examples ranging from “less severe” to “more severe.” Variation 1 included a “more severe” example, variation 2 included a somewhat balance example, and variation 3 included a less severe example.
Results
The addition of examples in the product copy made a huge difference. Showing customers a real scenario where they may need to have their dog’s additional health info has a direct impact on revenue. The “less severe” drove the most impact with a 7% increase in conversion rate, a $9 increase in average order value, and 10% increase in revenue per session.
Key Learnings
Understanding your customers and their needs is core to driving growth and delivering a better buying experience.
The Embark team always keeps a “what’s next” mentality. After seeing the potential impact of product copy through the first test, the team asked “what’s next” to figure out how to use a second test to draw more value out of that component of the product detail page.
ABOUT EMBARK
Embark Veterinary, Inc. was launched in 2015 with a passion for scientific research and a lifelong love for dogs. Starting with its best-in-class canine DNA test, Embark is building a powerful platform for scientific discovery that will accelerate advancements in personalized dog care. Embark offers the most scientifically advanced, most trusted, and highest-rated dog DNA tests on the market that helps dog owners, breeders, and veterinarians learn about their dog’s breed, health, and ancestry. Customers gain hundreds of actionable insights that inform more proactive care, and every test fuels new research to help all dogs lead longer, healthier lives. Embark is an official research partner of Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, was named to the Inc. 5000 list for the past two years, and was included on Forbes‘ next billion-dollar startups list.
For more information, visit Embark’s website at EmbarkVet.com.
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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.”
Clarins UK Invests in Continuous Testing and Learning
30Markets worldwide
10Experiences/month
Innovating with Confidence: Clarins UK Strategy for Feature and Product Launches
Clarins uses testing and experimentation for all feature or product launches on their site. Learn how it informs their work and how they measure impact with AB Tasty.
Clarins is the number one global company for premium skincare and beauty products with a commitment to responsible beauty and an entrepreneurial spirit that informs everything they do. Their vision is to promote well-being and cosmetics for all women.
With over 150 markets around the world, the UK market is one of the strongest performers so we popped over to the Clarins UK office to speak with Roisin O’Brien, e-commerce trading manager, and Alejandra Salazar, e-commerce content manager, on their experimentation strategy.
Both Roisin and Alejandra use testing and experimentation as part of their everyday work. Their priority is to create the best experience that they can for their users. Data gathered from testing is analyzed to help them better optimize and personalize the customer experience.
The Importance of Continually Testing and Experimenting for Clarins UK
For Clarins, experimentation is woven into the fabric of the company. With the help of AB Tasty, their global team has enabled the company to become a leader in digital transformation, launching e-shops around the world and ensuring a consistent brand experience online and offline.
Clarins only pushes out significant features or products online once they have done testing first. As Alejandra describes it, “For us, backing up all experimentation with data is very important. The importance is that customers find products and what they need on the website, rather than complicating their journey.”
For us, backing up all experimentation with data is very important. The importance is that customers find products and what they need on the website, rather than complicating their journey.
Alejandra SalazarE-commerce Content Manager
In order to drive that experience, both in-store and online, experimentation and optimization are key to how they continuously improve. Experimentation enables them to try out new ideas, improve the customer journey as well as reach their commercial targets.
We wouldn’t be able to drive the numbers that we do without being able to test the experiences that we offer. We always run tests on new promotions and offers to make sure that we’re delivering a great customer experience as well as ensuring the commercial priorities of the website
Roisin O’BrienE-Commerce Trading Manager
Two variants that allowed the Clarins UK to effectively promote their gift sets with AB Tasty
Testing Gift Set Promotion
Because of this culture of experimentation, the UK team has deployed many different tests on their site – and shared those results with the global team.
One of their most successful tests was one where they encouraged users to opt for a gift set when shopping for certain items. Using AB Tasty to badge different products that were available as a gift set on the product listing and description pages, this simple test not only increased awareness, but also improved the transaction rate.
Roisin confirms: “Testing, experimenting, optimizing are all really important to continually improve on what we are already doing” We wouldn’t be able to drive the numbers that we do without being able to test the experiences that we offer. We always run tests on new promotions and offers to make sure that we’re delivering a great customer experience as well as ensuring the commercial priorities of the website.”
Adding the wishlist functionality to the product listing pages and the product description pages allowed users to save their favourite products and remember to purchase them later on.
Creating a wish list for customers
Many e-commerce managers are aware of how important the PDP pages are to tell the story of your brand. Today, they can often be the point of entry for your users on your site, which means they need to quickly communicate a sufficient amount of information about your brand. With that in mind, using AB Tasty, Clarins was able to provide an option for visitors to create a wishlist on these pages.
This test meant users could save a product they liked, or keep an eye on their favorite products to buy them later. The test proved to be a success as it resulted in a boost to their basket page views and a 1.84% increase in transactions.
As Alejandra explains, “By adding the wishlist option, you’re simplifying the customer’s journey and you are also making their decision a little bit simpler once they decide to convert.”
AB Tasty helps Clarins to test and experiment at speed. In a short space of time, they can assess whether new features or changes are working on the site in order to give a seamless customer journey. As Roisin points out, “We’re really passionate about continually optimizing what we’re already doing well, whilst also testing new theories to drive a great customer experience.”
MeUndies Lifts Revenue with Product Page Promo Banner
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MeUndies, a leading retailer of underwear and loungewear, has made waves by offering comfortable and sustainable products with fun and stylish designs at an affordable price. Using AB Tasty, they were able to improve transaction rate by quickly adding promo banners to product description pages.
CHALLENGE
With ad campaigns driving traffic directly to product pages, MeUndies needed to capitalize on a segment of users that may have bypassed messaging informing that traffic of current sales and promotions.
TEST IDEA
Using AB Tasty, MeUndies tested the addition of a promotional widget to the product description pages during a peak sales time (Valentine’s Day) to increase clarity and remind visitors of the available promo code on select products.
Original PDP (Left) vs. the Variation with Banner (Right)
RESULTS
MeUndies brought more visibility to their promotions — no matter the user’s entry point into their website. The result was an increase in transactions by 9.8% with 10% more clicks on the “add to bag” option.
TAKEAWAYS
Creating eye-catching and relevant promotional banners on product pages improved the ROI on MeUndies’ ad campaign. Bringing more visibility to available promotional codes on product description pages through AB Tasty ultimately led to more purchases and greater revenue.
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Alejandra Salazar
E-commerce Content Manager
Roisin O’Brien E-Commerce Trading Manager
