Spreedly is a B2B payment orchestration platform that supports clients transacting through multiple payment services.
CHALLENGE
After Spreedly engaged AB Tasty as its experimentation platform of choice, we partnered with CXperts to fully onboard Spreedly in an effort to not only begin initial tests but also to build and support a mature experimentation program to scale as they grow.
TEST IDEA
CXperts and Spreedly decided to first test the homepage, hypothesizing that site visitors may not know about Spreedly’s trial. Additionally, improving the CTA could boost engagement and conversions. The teams developed two variations to test: one offering a “trial” and the other offering a “free trial.”
RESULTS
With this test, Spreedly realized a 34% increase in contact form submissions – their main goal – with 90% statistical significance. Although clicks to the CTA didn’t increase, it was clear that exposure to “trial” messaging had a positive impact.
AB Tasty has been critical in helping us make strategic, data-driven decisions that drive more conversions of our web traffic to leads for our sales team.
– Mike Taberksi , Senior Customer Insights Analyst
TAKEAWAYS
Over the course of the onboarding, CXperts was able to use AB Tasty to improve other key engagement metrics for Spreedly, such as pages visited, scroll depth, time on site, and revisit rate, all suggesting an increase in potential long-tail conversions. Additionally, the Spreedly team now has a roadmap of tests and the expertise they need to continue growing the program.
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King Living Increases Revenue 15% by A/B Testing on Site
+15%Clicks
+15% Overall Revenue
King Living is an award-winning Australian furniture retailer that has made a name for itself through selling bespoke items. After noticing a substantial number of drop-offs, King Living utilised AB Tasty to run two experiments to better understand consumers’ purchase behaviour, and, in turn, make data-driven decisions to improve user experience and generate more sales.
Improve product findability for customers
King Living’s website was very content heavy, and customers often had to navigate through content blocks before reaching the product. The team hypothesized that this resulted in drop-offs because it took too long for customers to find what they were looking for.
With this hypothesis in mind, King Living chose to experiment by hiding secondary navigation and displaying products before content. This move resulted in 15% more clicks on product images and 90% increased revenue for all of King Living’s ‘Jasper’ packages.
Consumers are more likely to take action if the information they are seeking is clearly presented to them. In this case, images were more effective than descriptions in communicating what the product was.
Through this experiment, King Living also discovered that their customers do not need a button to go to ‘Products’, which influenced the company’s Product Listing Page and Product Detailing Page redesign.
We noticed that our users don’t actually need a button to go to ‘Products’, so that’s influencing our design decisions in the whole PLP, PDP redesign.
Improve customer conversion by building stronger call-to-action
King Living noticed a substantial number of drop-offs on their check-out page, and pinpointed a few areas for improvement regarding their call-to-action (CTA) – inactive appearance, usage of internal speak and lack of focal point. These factors combined resulted in a CTA difficult for customers to comprehend.
In this experiment, they bolded the important points and translated internal speak into understandable language for consumers. King Living also made their call-to-action appear more visible by shifting away from grey, which is known as the colour of inaction. Through this experiment, King Living’s revenue grew by an astounding 15%.
Having an engaging CTA is important, even at the end of the purchase journey. Consumers are more compelled to follow through with their purchase when the CTA “speaks” to them. This makes a huge difference in minimising drop-offs.
“We had a 15% increase in revenue while that test was running – millions of dollars when you look at it in an annual sense,” Vanja says.
We had a 15% increase in revenue while that test was running — millions of dollars when you look at it in an annual sense.
Experimentation via AB Tasty helped King Living minimise drop-offs, increase conversions and grow business revenue.
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Restarting a Testing Program Starts with the Right Tool
3xIncremental ROI
23Experiences Launched
Mor Furniture for Less was founded over 40 years ago with an industry-leading reputation and has been ranked 33rd among the top 100 furniture retailers in the US in Furniture Today.
CHALLENGE
Mor Furniture cut its A/B testing program a few years ago. With website traffic now increasing, they wanted to return to a data-based approach to website optimization but didn’t know which A/B testing tool to use and didn’t have the resources to run the testing program. PeakActivity was tasked with not only finding a tool with robust features and reporting, but to run the program, as well.
SOLUTION
PeakActivity recommended the AB Tasty platform, based on its advanced features and functionality, including a widgets library for commonly tested elements and functionalities, and out-of-the-box tracking for scroll depth and element visibility. PeakActivity integrated the tool and developed a test plan to show the potential ROI of having a dedicated CRO team.
RESULTS
Soon, we were conducting an average of 4 tests per month and seeing 3X ROI. Now, Mor Furniture is all-in with PeakActivity CRO and AB Tasty. Guided by a “fail fast” mentality, the team learns quickly, iterates where needed, and moves on to testing the next hypothesis. Winning experiences are prioritized for full development, and even “losing” experiences provide valuable analytics and insights.
TAKEAWAYS
Now that the initial proof-of-concept phase has concluded, the iterative test and learn process continues with a hefty roadmap of experiment ideas with high potential ROI.
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High Mowing Organic Seeds Enhances Product Discoverability and Conversions
+22%Increase in Add-to-Cart Rate
+15%Increase in Mobile Conversion Rate
High Mowing Organic Seeds is an independently owned seed company dedicated to supporting sustainable agriculture and providing farmers and gardeners with the highest quality certified organic seeds.
BACKGROUND
AB Tasty’s solution partner, Rightpoint Commerce, has been driving growth for High Mowing Organic Seeds since 2017, with a recent collaborative focus on conversion rate optimization (CRO) to increase sales by using data-driven efforts that improve the customer’s shopping experience. In early 2021, the Rightpoint and High Mowing Organic Seeds team brought on AB Tasty to facilitate the experimentation program. AB Tasty emerged as High Mowing Organic Seeds’ partner of choice for our easy and quick experiment and personalization setup while offering more complex testing and reporting than free tools available in the market. This helps customers like High Mowing Organic Seeds achieve greater ROI and soar to new heights of growth.
CHALLENGE
The majority of High Mowing Organic Seeds’ total traffic originates from mobile devices. Accounting for 50% of total sessions, mobile conversion rate optimization was, understandably, the team’s highest priority. Through data analysis, Rightpoint identified that mobile users were experiencing friction at the top of the shopping funnel, which resulted in a cart-addition rate of 41%.
TEST IDEA
Together, Rightpoint and High Mowing Organic Seeds thoughtfully analyzed data and hypotheses, which then developed into a prioritized backlog of tests intended to directly improve product discovery. From there, they collectively selected driving an increase in traffic to the mobile hamburger menu as the first subject for A/B testing due to its ease of implementation and potential for impact. They would do this by testing a menu highlight to draw more attention to it.
The hamburger menu modification was quickly set up in the AB Tasty platform for testing. The teams created a single mobile-responsive test variant. Leveraging AB Tasty’s robust visual editing capabilities through the WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) editor, the team was able to edit their new menu layout without relying on any code from a design and front-end perspective. The new menu test variation was brought to life within minutes.
Original Mobile Menu (Left) vs. the Variation (Right)
RESULTS
Rightpoint was able to set up custom event tracking within AB Tasty, allowing the High Mowing team to track metrics relevant to their unique business goals. High Mowing tested a primary metric of clicks on the menu and a secondary metric of conversion rate. From there, targeting was set up, the tests went through a thorough QA process, and designs were then tested on various mobile devices – all done in the AB Tasty platform.
The test was launched and ran for four weeks. On the surface, the visual change was minor, but as a result, delivered a high ROI and propelled High Mowing Organic Seeds’ growth to the treetops. The hamburger menu highlight did, in fact, draw visitors’ attention to the right place to better discover products and lead to an increase in clicks and transactions.
TAKEAWAYS
While highlighting the mobile menu was a minor change in terms of effort to execute and visual difference from the original mobile site, it resulted in a significant impact on their business goals. Not to mention, the test clearly helped customers more easily find the products that they required.
For Fiona McMurtrie, Ecommerce Specialist at High Mowing Organic Seeds, the Rightpoint and AB Tasty partnership has been critical to supporting the business’s priorities. “We’ve placed an emphasis on making informed, data-driven decisions to help grow our e-commerce business. The support that we’ve received from Rightpoint, the information we’ve been able to gather, and the experiments we’ve been able to run have enabled us to stay agile and explore creative avenues to reach our goals.”
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How Clarins Scaled Their Global E-Commerce Through Agile Experimentation
30Markets worldwide
10Experiences/month
Clarins’ partnership with AB Tasty changed the way their teams work together across 30 markets, turning testing into an agile, collaborative process.
30 Markets Worldwide
10 Experiences/Month
20 Global Projects/Year
The business of Clarins is beauty. And at the heart of their efforts is making women feel comfortable and beautiful at every stage of their lives.
Imagine: Your e-commerce team builds tons of impactful customer experiences, works seamlessly together in an agile environment, and deploys experiments with ease around the world.
This is the reality at Clarins.
The globally-renowned beauty brand was an early adopter of experimentation, using it as a tool to improve user experiences as part of their CRO strategy. Thanks to this investment, Clarins, which operates in over 150 countries and 30 e-commerce markets, has not only turned testing and personalization into a competitive advantage, but also grown local markets through a flourishing culture of experimentation.
For the past decade, the team has championed pairing dynamic digital experiences with offline-quality service. Just ask Stephanie Gaspar and Ryma Ziani, who head up the digital customer experience at Clarins.
“Experimentation has always been part of Clarins’ DNA. Testing new products, formulas, and ideas is part of our culture,” says Stephanie, a 12-year veteran of the organization, who currently manages the digital customer experience team. “The advantage of experimenting is that it helps validate our hypotheses quickly, make faster roadmap decisions, and better leverage user experiences to ‘wow’ our customers.”
Experimentation woven into Clarins’ DNA
Clarins has long been a leader in digital transformation, launching e-shops around the world and ensuring a consistent brand experience online and offline. In recent years, experimentation and data analytics have been the focal point of that transformation, so much that robust practices are now built into day-to-day business operations at Clarins.
What is key for us is leveraging our data to provide personalized, one-to-one service and experiences online. Customers, after all, are at the heart of everything Clarins does.
Stephanie GasparGlobal Digital Director
Knowing exactly which experience is best suited for which customer and in which country is no easy feat — after all, not all personalizations are created equal. This is where the partnership with AB Tasty comes into play, enabling Clarins to quickly identify high-impact growth strategies and avoid low-performing actions through a test-and-learn approach.
The team cites AB Tasty’s experience optimization platform as the game-changer in helping them with easily setting up tests and collecting insights to validate ideas, make data-centric decisions and accelerate time to market.
Ryma, Clarins’ UX project manager who’s been with the brand for more than eight years, is quick to acknowledge the value that AB Tasty’s low-code solution and worldwide customer support coverage has added to the e-commerce and UX teams.
“It gave us the ability to accelerate our rollout at both global and local levels, drive more engagement on our website, and deliver a seamless user experience — without needing to enlist the help of our tech development teams,” she says.
AB Tasty’s platform enables different markets to duplicate experiences and adapt the learnings to a regional context. This knowledge-sharing ethos fosters an exchange of ideas and learning culture, which has also produced a community aspect within the organization.
AB Tasty has changed the way we work together. Today, we have almost 30 markets [onboarded], building a community of users and co-constructing the experimentation roadmap to optimize UX across all our touchpoints.
Ryma ZianiUX Project Manager
Clarins’ center of excellence encourages teams around the world to share and find inspiration from their experiments. That’s how the US team ended up duplicating EMEA’s “Wheel of Fortune” gamification test (left) for their Mother’s Day campaign (right).
A concrete example of both the collaborative, knowledge-sharing aspects and the adaptability of a global approach across local markets is Clarins’ “Wheel of Fortune” experiment, which leveraged gamification during a key promotional selling period.
With the support of the AB Tasty team, Clarins ran a one-day pop-up offer where customers could “spin the wheel” on their website and win a special offer — a free product or a discount coupon. This discount was then automatically applied to the basket. Here, the Clarins team had developed a clever, engaging offer and coupled it with AB Tasty’s solution, enabling them to easily duplicate experiments across markets and drive conversion and revenue.
Originally rolled out across EMEA for Singles Day, this test saw such strong results (585% increase year over year in revenue for Ireland, alone) that the US Clarins team duplicated it for their own high-season period: Mother’s Day. “Literally, we made the decision in a couple of weeks,” says Marine de Valon, senior director of e-commerce and digital transformation for North America.
With AB Tasty’s dashboard, each market has access to all tests and the resulting engagement data. “AB Tasty allowed all the countries to innovate, create, measure and share experiments, which made a significant impact on our overall global e-commerce,” Marine explained.
Four essentials to building a center of excellence
Building a culture of experimentation goes beyond test execution; it requires heavy knowledge transfer, strategic oversight, and the investment of time and resources alongside the right partner to foster the right mindset. Here are the four things you need:
1. Agility: Equipping the team with scalable processes that allow them to act independently, rapidly test hypotheses, make faster decisions, and pivot quickly should a test prove unsuccessful.
2. Toolbox: Collating guidelines, best practices, examples and outcomes of experiments, and customer data will ensure all teams are equipped to deliver engaging and innovative digital experiences across Clarins’ global e-commerce.
3. Marketmaturity: Leverage mature, high-growth markets to scale your business by presenting a wealth of test ideas from which other markets can find inspiration and subsequently build their own experimentation roadmap.
4. Community: Fostering the culture of collective experience and knowledge and understanding what’s worked and what hasn’t worked across markets have undoubtedly been a key to the success of Clarins’ digital experimentation strategy.
Delivering innovative experiences with AB Tasty
Clarins has achieved a lot over the past two years partnering with AB Tasty, adopting a considered approach to guard against overexposure and inconsistent messaging to their consumers.
By focusing first on developing testing and experimentation protocols, Clarins has built a template of experiences and overarching guidelines that ensure authenticity as a brand. The last step in this roadmap — grow the community of engaged users — fosters increased collaboration and synergy across teams. But the work with AB Tasty does not end there.
“We want to deliver more innovative brand experiences to our customers, by bringing more entertainment on our website and leveraging gamification in consumer engagement,” Stephanie shares. “Our goal is to push the experimentation program with AB Tasty one step further, to become even more user-centric in how we leverage our data for that one-to-one approach.”
ABOUT CLARINS
Jacques Courtin launched his namesake company in 1954 in Paris, with a mission to enhance women’s beauty and well-being. Today, Clarins is present in more than 150 countries and 10,000 employees around the world. The French company continues to pursue a long-term vision focused on strong customer relations, continuous innovation, and a commitment to responsible beauty.
DID YOU KNOW?
The team at Clarins are also strong believers of responsible beauty, sourcing only the best ingredients through their love of nature and plants. That’s the story of the Domaine Clarins, which was founded in 2016 in the French Alps to offer a responsible farm-to-jar approach to beauty. The team uses traditional farming techniques and minimal technology to develop the highest quality plant ingredients for consumers.
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Sage Sees Transaction Lift From A/B Testing Website Copy
+30%Traffic
+7% Transactions
When Sage, a global provider of cloud business management systems, needed to revamp their homepage and conversion funnel, they knew who exactly to turn to: CRO manager Marion Ravel. Here’s how she has used experimentation to test her optimization ideas, leading to higher transaction volume for Sage France’s B2B e-commerce website.
As one of the world’s biggest business management software providers, Sage doesn’t just offer cloud technology services — it also enables entrepreneurs around the world to make smart and fast decisions. From finances, operations, and human resources, Sage prides itself on being a partner to 6 million customers at small and medium businesses in more than 20 countries.
Sage’s digital footprint is made up of local e-commerce websites, supporting multiple products for different personas. For the team at Sage France, this means aligning regional initiatives with the global corporate strategy, while also ensuring a seamless buying experience within a complex website infrastructure. Intuitive user navigation is a must for Sage France’s website, which offers subscription-based software based on business size, profession and sector.
It’s a challenge that Marion Ravel knows too well in her 10-year career of working in marketing and conversion rate optimization (CRO). So much so that Sage France created a position specifically for her to tackle the team’s growing complexities of website optimization.
As Sage France’s CRO manager, Marion places experimentation and customer experience at the forefront of her strategy. She handles both e-commerce and customer product marketing, where she works to build a bridge between selling software and providing customers with product updates and specialized offers.
ABOUT MARION RAVEL
Marion Ravel, CRO manager at Sage France, has over 10 years of CRO, A/B testing, UX, and e-commerce marketing experience. At Sage France, she is responsible for mapping the online customer journey, identifying user personas and ensuring that each pathway is highly optimized through A/B testing and continuous iteration.
The challenges of building a seamless CX
While Sage France had a successful acquisition strategy in place, the website was not fully optimized nor suited for today’s customer demands.
“To update a website, you need to tackle it bit by bit through testing. It would be a huge investment, and potentially erroneous, to redo an entire website and not be sure of which change ignited the positive impact,” Marion explains.
Sage’s e-commerce website is also linked to the customer support page, meaning that any change had to be seamless. For example, conversion can happen on the e-commerce site, but then invoicing would take place on the customer page, so a heavy amount of coordination was needed to ensure a cohesive customer experience.
Recognizing the scale of the challenge ahead of her, Marion knew she needed to find the right technical partner to test, validate, and seamlessly implement her optimization strategies. Luckily, Marion was already a champion of AB Tasty’s client-side solution since 2016.
“The support I’ve received from AB Tasty has never wavered throughout the years, even when I’ve changed companies,” Marion says. “At Sage, we tested many other website optimization solutions for the sake of comparison, but there was no one that came close. AB Tasty is the best tool to implement all your testing with intuitive plug-ins and a dashboard that provides clear insights. On top of that, the Customer Success team has always been helpful and friendly so I didn’t see why I would switch partners.”
At Sage, we tested many other website optimization solutions for the sake of comparison, but there was no one that came close. AB Tasty is the best tool to implement all your testing with intuitive plug-ins and a dashboard that provides clear insights.
The ROI of testing with AB Tasty
In its most basic form, the conversion funnel represents the potential buyer’s journey, from the moment they land on the homepage to when they make a transaction or, in the case of a B2B SaaS business, generate a lead or subscription sign-up. The team at Sage noticed there was a drop in their conversion funnel between the homepage and the product page. Nearly 18% of visitors from the homepage bounced without viewing the product page.
From Marion’s perspective, the product page simply was too crowded with text and CTAs that were competing for attention. Before investing in radical changes like creating new icons that needed corporate sign-off, Marion wanted to test her theory that the UX had to be simplified. She stripped each product category of its clutter, leaving only the title. Quickly, Marion learned that it was not the right direction.
“From the testing, we realized that people were still hesitating about clicking on product categories. The data was showing the category titles were not enough. So we iterated by adding more copy to guide visitors into clicking further into the products,” Marion explains.
Testing isn’t always about finding the winning formula; it’s about learning — quickly. After a month of modifying the product pages, Marion saw an increase of 30% in traffic from the homepage to product pages, representing an increase of 7% in transactions and a decrease of 7% in bounce rate.
“Before AB Tasty, we couldn’t measure how effective our changes were and how customers were reacting. We were just working with opinions and assumptions, and really struggling to put both of them aside. Now with AB Tasty, I’m always surprised with the results of an experiment,” she says.
Before AB Tasty, we couldn’t measure how effective our changes were and how customers were reacting. We were just working with opinions and assumptions, and really struggling to put both of them aside. Now with AB Tasty, I’m always surprised with the results of an experiment.
The evangelizing of experimentation
In the two years that Marion has been working with Sage, nothing has changed internally more than the user-feedback mentality. AB Tasty has helped the team collect unbiased data through experimentation and derive insights for future continuous iterations.
“The way our culture has changed internally is also resonating well with our users, since they see how their feedback is being implemented. It’s the combination of AB Tasty and customer feedback that enabled us to build an optimized website that delivers on the customer experience,” Marion says.
She is also on a mission to take data-driven experimentation to center stage at Sage, via monthly newsletters to stakeholders within Sage where she shares CRO achievements and learnings.
“I realized quite early in my career that it’s important to share your successes and how you got there. It’s more interesting why certain variables or differentiations didn’t work, and what we changed to achieve the positive results,” Marion says. “It’s a continuous effort of testing, learning and optimizing.”
ABOUT SAGE
Sage is cloud business management system provider, offering integrated accounting, payroll, and payment systems — enabling entrepreneurs worldwide to make fast, informed business decisions and improvements. The global enterprise software company was founded in 1981 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and has since expanded to over 20 countries, 13,000 employees and millions of clients.
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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 Hanna Andersson Experiments Its Way to Higher Lifetime Value
+8% PLP Clicks
+22% Purchase Rate
About Hanna Andersson
Adored by parents around the world, Hanna Andersson offers a wide range of children’s clothing and matching pajamas for the entire family. Founded in Portland, OR by Gun Denhart in 1983 as a purely catalogue company, the brand has since successfully made the transition to online sales.
Increasing Customer Lifetime Value
“One of our challenges is marketing our toddler collection,” explains Morganne Hatfield, Marketing Analyst at Hanna Andersson. “We recently combined the kids line and the toddler line into one collection. But toddler is a key demographic – if we can get moms to discover and fall in love with Hanna Andersson clothing for their young children, chances are they’ll stay loyal customers as their kids grow, increasing their overall customer lifetime value (CLV).”
Creating an e-commerce growth engine
Expanding a product line is a far-reaching goal that affects all aspects of a business. Morganne’s challenge was to figure out how to use Hanna Andersson’s website to increase awareness and sales. But where to start! The team could rewrite product descriptions, increase or decrease product image sizes, add customer reviews or implement a cross-sell bar…
The possibilities were endless: what was the best tactic to increase growth?
Experiment to increase uplift
Enter experimentation. Hanna Andersson’s SVP of Digital was a firm believer in the merits of testing and using data-driven rationales for optimization. Through a prioritized experimentation roadmap, the team could systematically test their optimization ideas, learn from the results, and implement winning variations. No more guesswork or time lost in internal debates.
Is a picture worth a thousand conversions?
One idea Morganne was eager to test involved the default image shown on the product listing pages (PLPs) and product description pages (PDPs) of the toddler section.
When someone went browsing through the toddler collection, the first image on the page showed the clothing item sized for an older child – not a 1 to 3 year old. Though the product itself was identical, it certainly didn’t look the same when sized for a lanky seven year old versus a toddler still round with baby fat. Her idea was to test whether it was worth the effort to photograph the smaller sizes and use them for the toddler product page images. Would they convert better?
Morganne decided to test swapping out the default image with one where the item was sized for a toddler, but only if the user was navigating from the toddler section of the site. “I wanted to test if buyers would react more positively to the age-appropriate clothing, whether this would increase basket rate and overall conversion rate.”
Control
Test
Significant revenue impact
After a quick set up, the test was live and results rolled in: the experiment was an absolute success. “I was honestly surprised by just how well it worked – clicks on PLPs increased by about 8%, and purchase rate on those items by 22%, which is huge. At the time of this test we only had a handful of toddler-sized items online. But we’ll soon be offering 100% of our line in these sizes, so if you multiply these results by hundreds of products, the revenue impact is significant.”
“Our merchandising team was thrilled”
Not only did the test have a positive impact on immediate business metrics, it was also another step in solidifying the marketing for the toddler clothing line.
“When I shared these results in our quarterly review, our merchandising team was thrilled,” explained Morganne. “Having this kind of data-driven evidence helps us confidently make strategic investments – this knowledge is really helpful,” concludes Morganne.
AB Tasty enables agility
AB Tasty’s ease of use was instrumental in the success of this experiment. Without the marketing-friendly interface and widget library, it wouldn’t have been possible to get this test up and running in under a week.
“It’s great to be able to use AB Tasty to launch these kinds of campaigns independently, without having to bother our dev team,” says Morganne. “We’re really pleased with the results we’ve had, and how agile the AB Tasty Customer Success team has been. The widget library especially – the countdown banners, NPS surveys – have been key in enabling us to be autonomous and launch campaigns fast. ”
Looking forward
This test on the toddler line was undoubtedly a success. But that doesn’t mean the testing ends. Continuous optimization is key to fully reaping the benefits of experimentation and personalization, and Morganne intends to continue perfecting the customer journey. “We dug into the data and realized that, although 70% of our traffic comes from mobile devices, there’s still a lot of room for improvement when it comes to converting that traffic,” explains Morganne. “We’re excited to see what more we can achieve with AB Tasty!”
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How Clarins Uses AB Tasty for Personalization and Retention
+89%Conversions
+145% Add to Basket
The e-commerce team at Clarins is a true “testing lab,” managing their 5 websites (Germany, Spain, Ireland, Benelux, and Portugal) and helping the other nearby countries to grow their e-commerce business. The goal of this ‘incubator’ is to create an internal community of experimenters to help share testing best practices. This approach paid off with the creation of the ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ a gamification concept launched on Singles Day, November 11, 2020.
While testing using AB Tasty was initiated by the International Content team, Clarins decided in 2020 to not only extend its partnership with AB Tasty to include a commercial component but also to expand to the regional and local level. The tool that the EMEA teams were using previously was limited to creating pop-ins, which wasn’t enough to tackle Clarins’ goals involving retention and personalization.
Personalization via gamification
For Célia Rigaux, E-Commerce Director, EMEA, this was an opportunity to instill a test and learn culture across the EMEA teams. “Our goal is to exchange with our customers, to create a link with them, and to inspire loyalty, by bringing them value through our websites. AB Tasty’s experimentation capabilities enable us to challenge our CRM, Acquisition, and E-store teams using innovative tests that we weren’t able to run before.”
With the strategic holiday season approaching, the time was right to launch a far-reaching test across all of the sites managed by the EMEA e-commerce team. Singles Day (celebrated on November 11 in many countries) was the perfect option, seeing as it was also only a few days before Black Friday. All that was left was to decide what kind of game to display.
Everyone’s a winner
At the end of September 2020, Clarins got in touch with their Customer Success Manager at AB Tasty to see if their idea was feasible. After a few exchanges, they decided on the right set-up that struck a perfect balance between technical feasibility and a smooth user experience.
The idea was simple: Every person who visits any of Clarins’ EMEA websites, whether on desktop or mobile, sees the game appear. If they click on it, the wheel spins and stops at one of 6 gifts. The gifts are promo codes, automatically applied to the winning visitor’s basket, which makes for a great user experience (especially on mobile).
“We were able to launch our tests in two weeks,” explains Anaëlle Thomas, E-store Project Manager EMEA, who was responsible for the development of the project. One of the major advantages of AB Tasty was the ability to duplicate each experiment for each of Clarins’ sites. If the first test took 20 hours to implement, this number shrank by 5 for each of the other 4 sites. This experience is now live for all of the other countries Clarins’ is present in, and adaptable for other offers.
4x the orders
The first gamification test was a success for Clarins’ EMEA e-commerce team. The game, buoyed up by the increased web traffic brought on by the pandemic, performed very well. Live for 24 hours (from the 10th to the 11th in the evening), the total number of orders completed on the 4 main sites (Germany, Spain, Ireland and Benelux) quadrupled when compared to the results of November 11, 2019. Ireland stood out, with an order increase of +495% and a +585% increase in revenue.
The conversion rate did well, increasing by +89.34% compared to 2019. Finally, the add-to-basket rate increased by +145% compared to the 2020 average. It should be noted that, though the game performed well in all countries, it was Ireland that attracted the most visitors, with 61.37% of visitors trying their luck.
“We systematically test on all our sites to see how each country reacts according to the local culture. So we shared the success of this experiment with the other countries,” elaborated Anaëlle Thomas. “South Africa was particularly interested and launched their own version in December. The United Arab Emirates also ran the test during the 4 days of Black Friday.”
Pursuing personalization in 2021
Previously known mostly as an A/B testing tool, AB Tasty has attained the level of ‘business partner.’ The EMEA teams even share their experimentation tips via Teams. Next step: Further develop their personalization strategy, especially by learning from other AB Tasty clients’ experiences. See you in 2021!
“The ability to duplicate tests in AB Tasty allows us to exchange more often with the other EMEA countries and to share experiments. We rely on AB Tasty to guide us in driving our personalization strategy forward.”
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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ABOUT MARION RAVEL
ABOUT JEFF COPETAS
“We were able to launch our tests in two weeks,” explains Anaëlle Thomas, E-store Project Manager EMEA, who was responsible for the development of the project. One of the major advantages of AB Tasty was the ability to duplicate each experiment for each of Clarins’ sites. If the first test took 20 hours to implement, this number shrank by 5 for each of the other 4 sites. This experience is now live for all of the other countries Clarins’ is present in, and adaptable for other offers.
