In an era where privacy regulations tighten, browser restrictions escalate, and trust is hard-won, brands need more than great ideas to drive their digital experiments — they need full control over how their technologies behave.
That’s why AB Tasty is proud to introduce Domain Delegation, a groundbreaking feature designed to place independence, performance, and compliance at the heart of your experimentation strategy.
Why Domain Delegation changes the game
The digital landscape is constantly shifting at a fast pace. With evolving browser privacy policies (like ITP and ETP), widespread ad blockers, and stricter data regulations, third-party scripts are increasingly vulnerable — slowing down your site, triggering blockers, or worse, being outright rejected.
For enterprises operating under rigorous security standards, these challenges can make it nearly impossible to deploy tools like AB Tasty efficiently.
That’s where Domain Delegation steps in.
This powerful new feature allows you to serve the AB Tasty tag from a custom subdomain you control (e.g., abt.yourdomain.com), while AB Tasty takes care of the heavy lifting behind the scenes.
What you can do with Domain Delegation
Host the AB Tasty tag on your own subdomain (e.g., abt.brand.com)
Easily delegate DNS management to AB Tasty through an intuitive guided setup
Bypass blockers, improve load speed, and boost reliability
Deliver the tag under your own brand, reinforcing trust and compliance
Minimal technical effort, fully managed from the AB Tasty interface
What’s in It for You
✅ Higher tag reliability ⚡ Better site performance & Core Web Vitals 🔐 Stronger data governance & security posture 🤝 More brand trust with white-labeled tag delivery
Who benefits the most?
Highly regulated industries: Finance, healthcare, government
Privacy-first brands: Total data flow ownership
Tech teams optimizing performance and autonomy
Any organization battling browser or ad blockers
Why Now?
Privacy restrictions aren’t going away. Ad blockers aren’t easing up. With Domain Delegation, AB Tasty empowers you to take back control over your experimentation stack — ensuring you stay compliant, performant, and trusted.
This isn’t just a technical feature. It’s a strategic foundation for the next era of digital experimentation.
How It Works
Define your subdomain (e.g., abt.mybrand.com)
Follow the easy delegation flow in AB Tasty’s interface
Let us handle the rest (provisioning, certificates, delivery)
Your tag. Your domain. All powered by AB Tasty.
Domain Delegation Availability
Interested in Domain Delegation? Contact your AB Tasty Customer Success Manager to get started.
Every insight starts with a story, and every story deserves to be heard. But when your NPS® or CSAT campaigns generate thousands of responses, how do you turn all that feedback into real action, fast?
That’s why we created Feedback Copilot, the AI-powered assistant that transforms your NPS® or CSAT campaigns into actionable intelligence – instantly.
The problem collecting feedback: Too many voices, not enough time
Let’s face it: analyzing feedback is a nightmare. Even when users leave valuable insights in NPS campaigns, the manual work required to analyze hundreds (or thousands) of verbatim responses can paralyze teams. One client told us:
“We received 5,000 verbatim responses. That’s two weeks of manual work.”
And because it’s so time-consuming, teams either:
Underutilize feedback tools like NPS/CSAT
Or don’t act on the insights at all
The solution to overwhelming feedback? Feedback Copilot
Feedback Copilot was born from this pain point – combining the best of AI with our all-in-one experimentation platform. It’s available for free within AB Tasty, and automatically activated for NPS/CSAT campaigns with over 100 responses.
What our Feedback Copilot does:
Segments feedback by sentiment: Instantly separates positive and negative comments based on campaign scores.
Clusters similar comments into key themes: Groups feedback into topics like “price,” “delivery,” or “UX.”
Summarizes each theme: Provides a short description, confidence score, and sample comments for every theme.
Highlights what matters most: Surfaces the top 3 positive and top 3 negative drivers of satisfaction.
Exports labeled feedback: Download results for use in Excel, PowerPoint, and more.
And it does all this while respecting data privacy, using a self-hosted model (Hugging Face) instead of sending sensitive content to third-party LLMs.
What makes our Feedback Copilot unique?
Instant categorization of massive feedback volumes
Quantification of qualitative input – finally, your verbatim responses have numbers to back them
Integrated NPS/CSAT in your test workflows – measure why something works, not just if it does
Enterprise-grade privacy: Comments stay on AB Tasty’s infrastructure
Who benefits from Feedback Copilot?
CROs & Product Managers: Prioritize optimizations based on real user pain points.
UX & Research Teams: Detect trends and go beyond basic survey stats.
Marketing & Customer Success: Understand friction points before and after launches.
What’s next?
Early adopters already report major productivity gains – and they’re asking for more:
Direct A/B test ideas from negative themes
Verbatim-based segmentation for campaign targeting
Improved theme granularity for enterprise-scale campaigns
We’re just getting started. Feedback Copilot is not just a feature – it’s your co-pilot in delivering better, faster, and more human-centered product decisions.
According to a PWC survey, one in three customers would leave a brand after just one bad experience. Hence, your company may invest a lot of time and money optimizing your digital product to stay relevant in today’s often crammed markets.
A critical part of the overall product experience is user onboarding: get it right and win loyal customers, but get it wrong and lose those users forever.
So it makes sense to continuously tweak the user onboarding process – the perfect job for a product team. Such a team often consists of 5 to 8 people, including product managers, designers, and developers. Different companies work with various product team sizes and configurations – whatever is best for their use case. However, we rarely see DevOps engineers in these teams because many view DevOps as just a vehicle for successful feature releases.
Ultimately, however, these DevOps engineers have to get up at night to fix a newly deployed feature that crashes the app every time a user navigates through the onboarding process.
We want to ask you: Can an app whose onboarding process doesn’t work technically be successful, and do release teams significantly impact UX after all? Let’s find out.
In this article, we’ll be exploring how to:
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Make users feel right at home with a great onboarding experience
Most apps require an onboarding process to show new users how to achieve their goals as efficiently and conveniently as possible.
For this, we need to keep in mind that the onboarding experience can affect your relationship with prospects – both positively and negatively.
No matter how good your app actually is, the first impression counts!
Large companies like Slack or Dropbox also frequently overhaul their user onboarding to ensure users have a comfortable, fun, and productive start to their product. But see for yourself. The following images show an excerpt from Slack’s onboarding process from 2014 and 2021. Of course, the design has changed drastically, but you can also see that instead of reading where the team name comes up in the Slack interface, we actually see the user interface and our team name on it. These improvements are certainly not the results of guesswork but of meticulously coordinated optimization workflows.
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The evolution of Slack’s onboarding process (Source)
As even big enterprises invest in optimizing their onboarding processes, we realize that we should do the same and not rest on our laurels. The question remains, how do you make sure you are building the right onboarding experience in the right way?
And this is where cross-functional product teams and Flagship come into play!
Leverage Flagship to unite product teams and ensure great UX
At AB Tasty, when we work towards a great user experience, we focus on two main themes:
Release the right feature: We step into our users’ shoes and conduct experiments and tests to ensure that the feature delivers value and looks and feels good.
Deploy the feature right: It’s not just about functionality and looks. We utilize feature management to ensure that what we’ve created works flawlessly at all times and on different platforms. –
Flagship provides a shared environment for experimentation and feature management
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Flagship gives you the means to get the most out of both: data-driven experimentation and feature management to create and release features for great customer experiences. So we see release teams as an integral part of creating value for our users. This may not be the most popular opinion. Still, now we’d like to tell you more about why we think DevOps should be more closely integrated with product teams.
It’s no secret that teams that work toward a common goal are more likely to reach their true potential than those that don’t. By isolating DevOps from product teams, you probably can’t count on the positive effects of unity and passion necessary to create and release great products. For this reason, we encourage product teams to work more closely with DevOps. Release teams also care about delivering value and great experiences to users. And they bring the skills required to do so to the table.
Flagship provides product managers, developers, and DevOps engineers with a shared environment for experimentation and feature management. You get easy access to all the data and tools needed to have a productive conversation about the product optimization process in a common data-driven language. Simultaneously, instead of isolating specific roles and responsibilities in silos, each member of the product team can focus on doing their job while continuing to work as a collective force.
Now, let’s take a look at how Flagship’s experimentation and feature management capabilities enable product teams to deliver outstanding user experiences.
Deploy the feature right with feature management
First, let’s talk about a few examples of how feature management and releasing a feature right can positively impact your users’ onboarding experience.
Suppose you want to add tooltips to your onboarding process to help users navigate your product’s dashboard confidently. The product team prepares the new feature accordingly and thoroughly tests the functionality on the test servers. After everything seems to be working, they roll out the new feature for all users in one fell swoop. Hopefully, it’s not Friday afternoon, as the changeover could cause unforeseen problems on the production server, like:
Your user is stuck in an infinite loop that they can’t exit
User input isn’t saved, e.g., in a form
The app crashes repeatedly
The user is sent back to the start for no apparent reason
Just imagine what such behavior means for users going through your onboarding process and looking forward to finally using your product when it suddenly stops working. Poof, the magic moment has passed. The user has most likely lost confidence in your app due to bad UX.
Flagship makes code deployments stress-free
With Flagship’s feature management capabilities, your product teams can publish new features with ease – even on Friday afternoons.
Feature management enables release teams to provide the new tooltips feature to a selected target group before continually rolling it out to everyone. This way, you can be sure that the new feature works under realistic conditions, i.e., on production servers with real users.
Through controlled and monitored rollouts, DevOps teams immediately know whether something isn’t working correctly. This enables them to react on time and be glad that only a few users have noticed the error.
For example, suppose the developers wrapped the tooltip feature in a feature flag (which they really should be doing). In that case, they can quickly deactivate it via the flagship dashboard if a problem occurs. Of course, they can also configure automatic code rollbacks based on KPIs to react even faster.
Proper feature management can de-stress your release teams: Gone are the sleepless nights spent dealing with damage control! If you want to learn more about the benefits of feature management for tech teams, we recommend our blog post here.
Release the right feature with experimentation
Perhaps you have great empaths on your product teams and feel like you know your users pretty well. Still, it is wise to experiment and test to create an onboarding process that your users will love.
Let’s look at the tooltip example from before again. Suppose that after your product team successfully integrated the tooltips into user onboarding, your analytics data shows that something must be wrong. Many users still don’t know how to use your app and abandon the process midway through. If you can’t identify and resolve the problem right away, you need to leverage other means to improve the tooltip’s user experience.
First, make sure that everything is fine from a technical point of view. Next, your product team should start working on possible variants to improve the tooltips’ presentation and functionality. You can then experiment and test with Flagship to determine which of these variants and ideas offer the best user experience.
For example, you could utilize A/B tests to see if showing a how-to video before displaying the tooltips helps users get started with your product. Or experiment with different tooltips sequences – perhaps the process is easier to understand if you change the tooltips’ order.
You’re also free to experiment with different colors, copy, UI elements, call to action, and so on. To make your experiments as meaningful as possible, you can define which users see which feature variant and track user acceptance, test results, and KPIs in the Flagship dashboard.
Another advantage of Flagship is that you can utilize 1-to-1 personalization based on audience segments to provide users with unique experiences. For example, after a user registered for a paid subscription, show them a customized welcome message and add more value to their onboarding experience.
… What about client-side tools for experimentation?
Many client-side experience optimization tools, such as our AB Tasty, can also perform most of these experiments – without code deployments. However, the advantage of coding your experiments for a critical process such as user onboarding is that you don’t potentially slow it down with automatically generated UI overlays. Instead, tests and experiments with Flagship are fast, secure, and flicker-free, as they come directly from the server and don’t have to be calculated in the user’s browser. Of course, client-side tools still have their justification and unique uses – Flagship is a great tool to complement your client-side strategy.
Wrapping up
If you want to provide users with the best possible onboarding experience, you need cross-functional teams who know how to release the right feature and how to release a feature right. One of our goals is to advocate the importance of release teams to great UX – whether a product technically works is as important as how it looks and behaves.
Using Flagship’s experimentation and feature management capabilities, product teams can benefit from a shared platform to collaborate on improving the onboarding experience in a productive and data-driven way.
Would you like to try Flagship for your product teams? Book a demo and see how experimentation and feature management can transform your users’ onboarding experience from okay to Yay.
If you’ve played any role in a product development team, you’re probably very familiar with the tricky question of the product roadmap. To build a functioning roadmap, timing, priorities, company goals/vision, customer expectations/feedback, technology, competitive benchmarks, and much more need to be taken into consideration. No easy task!
Luckily, there are a multitude of books that can help you keep on top of all these factors. Here are our favorites, in no particular order.
In this book, Moore proposes the “crossing the chasm” marketing theory. He segments customers into five groups, namely innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.
If you look close enough, you’ll learn to form a blueprint to market your products that win over not only the visionaries and early adopters, but also the mainstream customers. But the key to succeeding according to Moore is to focus on one group at a time, using each group as a base to market to the next one.
If you want in on how your company can recognize and use disruptive technology, then this is the book for you. Citing examples from across various sectors, Christensen defines the innovator’s dilemma and why they fall short of disrupting the market. It’s from his careful analysis that you learn how to become a product manager with a vision and also gain confidence to make tough decisions.
There are lessons for entrepreneurs too who want to overtake the big, established companies leading with sustainable technology and disrupt their hold over their market.
According to Reis, startup founders think they already know what people want and spend a lot of time trying to perfect a business plan for a product which no one actually wants or wants to pay to use. And this overconfidence is exactly the reason they fail.
To reset this failure-driven mindset, Reis teaches the Lean Startup approach which helps entrepreneurs become agile and ‘grow a business with maximum acceleration’. Surely you’ll find his advice practical and build a product that already has a solid customer base.
Mironov’s book is a compilation of some of his most popular articles from the column, Product Bytes, that he wrote between 2002 and 2008. Divided into five sections, there’s plenty of advice on how to get into customers’ heads, price products, and build and maintain product organizations. Reading it, you’ll find everything Minrov says resonates with you, because it’s the same struggle for everyone in product management, except no one quite writes about it the way he does.
Authors: Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Patricia Papadakos, Gregory Bernarda, and Alan Smith
Value Proposition Design is the second book by the same team of authors that published Business Model Generation. Which is also why many readers consider this as a sequel. Overall, in the book the authors explain the oft-misunderstood concept of value proposition, and give people practical tools they can use to discover what customers find valuable, and then design, test, create, and manage products and/or services.
Start at the End offers a framework of designing products that’s grounded in behavioral science. The author’s argument in the book is based on the ‘Intervention Design Process’, by which you create a product with the goal of behavior change in mind. He breaks down complex ideas in the easiest manner possible and packs a punch with his humorous writing style and numerous case studies.
In fact, those who’ve followed the framework have been able to shift the culture in their organization, mainly because they firmly believed in what the author says: ‘creating behavior change is messy, but that’s not the reason not to do it.’
Dunford is a positioning consultant and in her 25-year old career worked with 6 successful startups and launched 16 products. Clearly, she knows why some products click with their customers in a market where every product seems to claim they’re innovation personified.
So do yourself a favor and pick this book, especially if you’re someone who thinks their product is ‘obviously awesome’, but can’t figure out why it isn’t a rage in the super crowded marketplace. Even if you think you’ve figured it all out, you’ll learn how you can use positioning to know what people know and ‘help them understand what they don’t’.
Authors: C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, and Michael Connors
“A good roadmap is not so much a project plan as a strategic communication tool, a statement of intent and direction.”
If your definition of a roadmap is any different, you must read this book right away and reboot for success. It comprehensively covers the whys, hows and the whats of product roadmapping alongside giving examples and practical advice to help you come up with your own functional roadmap.
Authors: Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw
Want to pick the brain of the who’s who in the product management world? Get this book. The authors with decades of their combined experience of creating products come together to compile interviews with nearly 100 leading product managers from around the world. Overall, you’ll find actionable tips on becoming not just better product managers, but better product leaders.
Are your favorites in the list? If not, we’d love you to know which books you’d recommend!
“Freemium is like a Samurai sword: unless you’re a master at using it, you can cut your arm off.” – Rob Walling
Scary as this may sound, you’re in the right place to learn what it takes to work the freemium business model in your favor.
Definition of a Freemium Business Model
A freemium business model is an extremely popular customer acquisition strategy among SaaS business owners. Think Dropbox, Spotify, Venngage, Trello, MailChimp, Buffer, Grammarly, etc. Without spending a penny subscribers can experience the product and test out basic features.
Basically, a freemium offering helps companies not only amplify their reach and popularity (Network Effect), but also create conversion opportunities. How? By activating cognitive biases.
Let’s say you’re a steadily growing small business subscribed to a freemium plan of ‘product X.’ Owing to free plan limitations you agree to upgrade. But there’s more to this than meets the eye. You pay willingly, because thanks to the Endowment Effect, you want to avoid loss of any kind and continue owning the product you’ve become familiar with.
That said, not every business successfully converts prospects into paying customers. There are some inherent challenges, but more on that later. For now, let’s cover the basics.
Differences Between Freemium and Free Trial
Unlike the freemium business model, the free trial plans give prospects complete or partial access to the product—free of charge, but for a limited amount of time.
The idea is to get people to experience the product completely and eliminate doubts within a reasonable time frame. A classic example is Netflix.
When to Opt for the Freemium Business Model
Freemium might seem like a good fit for your product, but only if:
#1 You have a problem-solving product with a huge market
Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote once said: “The easiest way to get 1 million people paying is to get 1 billion people using.”
Certainly makes sense. For viral adoption of your product, it should have a huge market and address freemium users’ pain points. This combination will generate positive word-of-mouth marketing, resulting in engaged customers and improved conversions.
#2 If your product is easy-to-use
The easier it is for users to get around, the less intervention on your part. Besides that, users should understand what they’re getting for free as well as the advantages of upgrading. This essentially means you can spend more time and resources on other important aspects of your business.
#3 If your product isn’t way too expensive
Consumers are price sensitive. To motivate them to upgrade from freemium to a paid plan, your product has to be within an affordable range, justifying the fee and the value you’re delivering. At the same time, it shouldn’t cost you a lot to support a large, non-paying user base.
What Should Your Target Conversion Rate Be?
Generally speaking, freemium conversion rates are low and hover between 2-5%. But that’s not to say that anything lower than that is bad. In fact, you’re better off as long as you’re consistently improving month on month.
Problem is if your conversion rates are either too low or too high. Here’s why:
A low conversion rate means you’re offering way too many features for free and giving prospects no reason to convert. Conversely, high conversion means your freemium offer isn’t exciting which then threatens future customer acquisitions. So ideally, go after a number that’s neither too low nor too high.
How to Increase Your Freemium Conversion Rate
Convinced that the freemium model is good for your business? Great. Though for it to work, understand that it doesn’t deliver on its own. Put simply, freemium subscribers don’t magically convert into paid users. Yeah, sorry, but someone had to burst your bubble.
So draft a solid plan to compel prospects to open their wallets and also passionately endorse you. 😉
Let’s see how you can position yourself better and maximize freemium conversions.
#1 Review your freemium limitations
To let users test out your product completely and get a taste of exclusive features of the premium plan, get rid of the limited features restriction. Instead, limit the users or usage.
On Slack, for example, there’s a limit placed on the number of users, messages, and app installations. Then there’s Dropbox where users are given only a certain amount of storage before they’re asked to pay to upgrade.
Slack’s a perfect example of how to make paid plans enticing.
#2 Send subtle reminders
Stop bombarding freemium users with pushy sales emails and in-app pop-ups to upgrade. This ‘money talk’ can wait, especially if they’re still new to using your product.
On the contrary, go the subtle, non-aggressive route. Integrate your upgrade message intelligently into the product. Sure, it could take longer for users to really consider upgrading, but your subtle hints won’t go unnoticed.
Spotify does this well, allowing freemium users to skip only 6 songs every hour. The seventh time users are nudged to slow down or get premium.
Spotify’s message prompt is simple yet packs a punch.
#3 Conduct thorough customer research
Products are created with users in mind. The only way yours will be noticed is if you understand who your customer is and what they want. So as step one, conduct solid customer research. Think customer interviews, email surveys, analytics, social listening, discussion forums, heatmap tools, etc.
Finally, let your findings guide you to create and/or improve your product that immediately addresses users’ problems. Not only will they engage better, but they’ll also provide a plethora of insights on how to keep innovating, show value, and stay relevant.
For instance, if you notice a consistent spike in demand for certain features, test those to statistically determine which results in maximum conversions.
#4 Personalize freemium users’ journey
When freemium users are left to their own devices they don’t learn a lot about the product features. To fix this, tailor your potential customer’s journey because each one of them walks a distinct conversion path and has different reasons for why they sign up.
Using a marketing automation platform, contact them early and often so they learn how the product can add value to their professional lives. And when they complete a task, send them encouraging emails and cross-promote other useful features to help them get more work done.
Also, personalize the journey of inactive users and stop them from churning. Trace their previous activity and motivate them to get back in action.
Before you know it, you’ll have helped them build muscle memory, a new habit of using your product. Let’s say your prospect used your product to create a quiz. Congratulate them and get them to explore other offerings, such as creating a poll.
#5 Create product/feature-focused content
Make self-learning easy. Produce a vault of content, including blog posts, videos, tutorials, and FAQs. Your efforts to educate your prospects will be appreciated and result in quick adoption of your product.
Besides, as mentioned earlier, the more they get used to using your product, the stronger the Endowment Effect and the possibility of them becoming paid users will be.
Buffer sends product updates over email to engage users and set them on the path to feature discovery.
#6 Create a sense of urgency
Urgency triggers fear-of-missing-out or FOMO which makes it a powerful conversion tactic.
One of the ways to create urgency is by giving your highly engaged users an attractive, time-limited upgrade discount. Make sure you highlight what they’re going to miss if they don’t go premium. It’s bound to work since they know their way around the product and might want to keep using it.
#7 Make way for friction-free payment
This one’s a no-brainer. Get rid of every possible barrier on the payment page and make it easier for your customers to start using the product right away. It’ll create an excellent customer experience (hopefully resulting in more referrals), reduce payment abandonment rates, and increase your revenue.
What you can do:
Auto-fill data you already have in your database.
Do not kill their buzz with hidden fees.
Give multiple/preferred payment options.
Recap what’s included in the paid subscription.
Mention when the renewal is due.
Dropbox’s no-nonsense payment page.
However, despite this, if you notice users step away multiple times from signing-up, reach out to them and discuss why they’re hesitant in coming onboard. You’ll surprise yourself with the kind of customer intelligence you might uncover.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this guide has helped you get a handle on the freemium business model.
Now to sum it up and before you wrap your SaaS product as a freemium offering, make sure it has a huge demand, is easy-to-use, and doesn’t burn a hole in either your or your customers’ pockets. Aside from that, implement the best practices discussed in this post to run a sustainable business.
A business is more than a product. Think of any brand name company or ecommerce website- many offer an array of products and multiple product lines. Apple doesn’t just have the iPhone, they sell all the accessories, plugs, and adapters as well as vertical integrations such as computers and tablets. They even offer television services, and they’re creating their own version of Netflix.
The reason for Apple’s vast array of products is because product diversification is one of the strongest ways for companies to grow and strengthen. Businesses simply cannot last on a single product.
So how exactly do product line expansion and diversification help grow your ecommerce business and increase conversions? We’ve listed 6 key ways below. For more tips, read our complete guide to conversion optimization.
1. Minimizes risk
Almost every product has a shelf life, and that goes for ecommerce businesses too. There are four “stages” of the life cycle of a product: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.
The launch is exciting and is often followed by a surge of sales, but at some point, the product will wear itself out. This decline could happen for a variety of different reasons – maybe it saturated the market, maybe there’s no longer a need for the product, or perhaps it’s been replaced by upgraded or improved products. When sales start to drop, the chances of your business surviving becomes slim to none.
Even those ecommerce products that don’t have a shelf life, like commodities such as toilet paper or toothpaste, have a “max cap”. People will always need the basics, but that also means there will always be competitors for those products. The next trendy organic toothpaste is just around the corner, and researchers will be figuring out how to make extra-comfort recyclable toilet paper. These trends and innovations will always pose a risk to pushing your basic products out of business
No product is immune to death.
2. Increases market share
With more products, you have the ability to reach a greater audience and purchasing market. This gives you a deeper and greater hold on your current market, while also opening up to a fresh audience as well.
For example, you sell a line of sunglasses on your ecommerce site. You have loyal customers who love your sunglasses, but they only buy one pair per year. Now, let’s say you introduce sunscreen and hats as well. Your customers who have been buying sunglasses from you for years already believe in your brand, so they start to buy your sunscreen and hats as well. Now, not only are you selling more to your current customer base, but you’re also reaching a new market who is looking to switch brands of sunscreen or someone that needs a more protective hat for the beach.
This expansion in product lines on your ecommerce site ultimately allows you to make more sales in the long-term, increasing your conversions and revenue. Before increasing your market share, you must understand your customer and the market itself. Without knowing the demographics of your business’ customer, you won’t be able to assess where you stand in the market and what products your target demographic needs.
3. Improves credibility
The larger and more loyal your audience is, the greater your credibility will be. At that point, you are known for your brand, instead of the products that you sell. Furthermore, the more products you have and the more customers you sell to, the greater your company’s credibility.
The snowball effect takes over at this point. When you gain brand awareness, you get more reviews, and your rank will increase. If your customers are satisfied, your credibility will increase. More visitors and sales will also boost your SEO on Google and Amazon, which can further enhance your visibility.
The more visible your company is, the more people will remember it and think of it as an upstanding brand. The more people that think of you as an upstanding, credible brand, the more likely that those people will enter your sales funnel, leading to a higher conversion rate.
4. Boosts customer loyalty
Customers have greater opportunities to engage with your brand if you offer more products. This increased level of engagement leads to repeat purchases, improved social proof, and enhanced customer loyalty.
Product diversification helps you retain your current customers by offering them new, exciting parts of your brand. This not only increases your revenue, but it also decreases costs. Keep in mind that customer retention is significantly cheaper than customer acquisition.
It also allows you to offer more products that your customers are demanding. You can find out what they want and then offer them those products. For example, your sunglass customers are constantly telling you that they wish they had bathing suits that matched your sunglasses. If you start selling matching bathing suits at this request, you are showing that you are concerned with the wants and needs of your customers while tapping into a pre-existing demand for a demographic you are already established in.
Remember that customer needs are always changing—which means your product line should always be changing as well. What you don’t want to change is your brand, which is what customers are loyal to.
5. Meets customer needs
In some cases, product diversification is as simple as offering product variations. For example, you could offer the same t-shirt in multiple colors. Or you could have a variety of essential oil scents. This gives your customers more options, so you’re more likely to offer the product they’re looking for.
For example, you sell a t-shirt in red and blue. But your customer is looking for a green t-shirt. They’ll go to a competitor to find your t-shirt in green. But if you offer a wider assortment of product variations, your customers are more likely to find what they’re looking for. This means increased conversions and happier customers.
6. Helps SEO ranking
Purchasing patterns are born in routine. Customers are used to Google and Amazon directing them to exactly what they’re looking for. Think about how often you go past page one on their search results pages – not very often, right?
The first page is credible because that’s where customers find what they need, you want to get as high on that first page as possible so that your potential customers can find you more easily. The more products you have, the more search results you will show up in and the more potential customers you can reach. The more potential customers you reach, the greater the chance you can get on that first page.
More products also means more product reviews. More reviews (especially good reviews) make you look more credible to search engine algorithms. Furthermore, product reviews come from trusted sources – unbiased customers. Potential customers trust a review more than they trust an ad or product listing because the reviewer doesn’t profit from writing the review. Learn how to get more positive product reviews here.
Check out G2Crowd and TrustRadius if you are a Software as a Service company for an in-depth look at software-specific reviews that help get to the source of what your customers need.
How to diversify
Here are some of our top tips and tricks to make your product diversification efforts a success:
Do your market research first. Make sure you are making products that your customers actually want or need.
Work with your partnersto see if there are any products that are natural shoot-offs. Your partners might have ideas about what their customers are asking for, opening doors for you to step in to deliver.
Conduct thorough competitive analyses. Focus on markets with low competition and, high potential.
Create a unique value proposition for every product extension. No product is standalone. You still need to run a thorough analysis of the product to make sure it has a unique selling point that will place it competitively in the market.
Compare your products. Make sure that each addition to your product portfolio makes sense with your brand.
Consider the sales and distribution channels that you’ll use for the new products. They may be unique from your other products depending on the target market segments.
Be careful of resource allocation. Make sure that you don’t neglect your current products as you launch new products.
Conclusion
Product diversification is one of the strongest ways to increase conversions and sales on your ecommerce webiste, as it creates new avenues to engage with your current audience while encouraging greater brand visibility and awareness. Increasing conversion largely relies on getting your brand in front of more of the right eyes, not just more eyes.
Product expansion isn’t just for large corporations. You don’t have to own a large corporation to benefit from expansion. If you want to turn your online store into a long-term ecommerce business, it’s time to move from selling products to selling a brand. What kind of products and lifestyle does your brand offer?
AB Tasty makes server-side testing available to our clients thought the Feature platform . This opens up a whole new world of testing possibilities – but it also makes us realize that not everyone is 100% familiar with what server-side testing is, when it’s useful, and how it can be fully exploited.
So, here’s a quick recap for those of you who might still be wondering – just what is server-side testing?
Server-side and client-side testing
Before we dive into server-side, let’s get some terminology straight.
If you’re using a website optimization SaaS solution (AB Tasty or similar), you’re already familiar with server-side testing’s counterpart – client-side testing.
Client-side testing simply means website optimization changes are only happening in the visitor’s browser. You don’t necessarily have to have any coding knowledge – in fact, it’s one of our promises at AB Tasty – though sometimes familiarity with HTML, JS, or CSS can be useful.
This is one of the main things to remember about client-side – the web interface is the control room of your tests, and all of the scripts are running on your visitors’ browsers.
However, the relative ease of use of client-side testing – little to no coding needed – also comes with drawbacks. Namely, the scope of your tests remains largely related to design: changing color, wording, layout, hiding or adding elements, etc.
With client-side testing, the scope of your tests remains largely related to design: changing color, wording, layout, hiding or adding elements, etc.
For some companies, this is just fine – and there are countless test ideas you can run client-side – but after a certain point, many want to do more. This is where server-side comes in.
Client-Side
Server-Side
Marketing + Tech
Tech + Marketing
Agility & Reactivity
Advanced Scenarios & Constraints
WYSIWYG + HTML/CSS/JS
In Code / App Implementation
Content, UI and UX
Features & Business Logics
Web Technologies
Platform & Language Agnostic
More sophisticated tests with server-side
In a certain sense, server-side testing cuts out the middleman – the AB Tasty tag used with client-side tests. Instead, using code, developers can go straight to the source and work on the servers that deliver the website to the end user’s browser. Marketers can still set the parameters of a test up in the AB Tasty interface, but all of the implementation takes place at the level of the web server.
Client-side campaigns are defined in the AB Tasty interface. In the above screenshot, you define your variations, your goals and set the traffic allocation, whether dynamic or not.
Because the kind of implementation involved in server-side is more direct, it allows for much more sophisticated tests and website optimization campaigns.
However, the inescapable fact about server-side testing is that whoever is setting up the tests needs to be fluent in back-end coding languages, like PHP, Node.js or Python. If the marketing, digital or e-commerce team is the one running your CRO program, you may already have the appropriate web developer on staff. Others may look to hire a freelancer. However you go about it, if you want to start out with server-side testing, you’ll need both:
Access to the source code of your website
A skilled developer to set up and manage the server-side campaigns
Advantages and limits
Neither way of testing is inherently ‘better’ than the other – both have their place in a website optimization strategy. Instead, it’s more about choosing which is right for your company based on your resources and goals. Very often, you’ll want to use both techniques at once.
Advantages of client-side testing:
Simple and quick to get started – easy ramp-up
No knowledge of coding necessary (marketers don’t need to get the IT team involved)
All testing data stored in easy-to-read SaaS interface
Limits of client-side testing:
Testing scope is ‘cosmetic’ in nature (shape, color, configuration)
Difficult or impossible to involve multiple channels (desktop, mobile web apps, IoT…)
Advantages of server-side testing:
Complex and sophisticated tests possible, including omnichannel
Limits of server-side testing:
Web developer / significant coding skills necessary
Marketers are less autonomous
With AB Tasty, your server-side tests will also benefit from what we offer, client-side: sophisticated reporting, reliable Bayesian statistics, and a dynamic traffic allocation algorithm that means you can optimize every website visit to the max.
Some examples of server-side tests
So, is server-side worth the investment? It depends on your resources, goals and level of maturity, but some of the following examples illustrate just how powerful server-side tests can be:
Companies that offer a free version of their product know that, at some point, they need to start charging for their services. The question is, at exactly what point?
This is the issue that AlloVoisins, the French online marketplace for exchanging services among neighbors, was asking themselves. With the help of AB Tasty’s server-side solution, they were able to run a one-month test to determine the optimal number of free ads one could post or accept before being required to switch to the paid version. Finding this sweet spot would allow them to continue offering a free service to entice new customers, without losing out on revenues.
Find the ideal limit for free shipping
Deciding at which basket value an e-commerce site should offer free shipping is a big issue for many companies. A server-side testing approach can help you determine the sweet spot that incentivizes purchases without taking too much off of your bottom line.
Test your search algorithms
Any testing having to do with your search engine or searchandizing solution will need to go through a server-side approach: testing that involves the number of products viewed, the rate at which products are added to the cart, transaction rate, average order value…all need a server-side methodology.
Find the ideal paywall form
If you’re an online media outlet, paywalls are probably part of your website.
Though it is possible to put in place a paywall client-side, people can easily get around them by deleting their cookies or browsing history. For a 100% trustworthy solution, the trigger rules should be managed server-side. This way, you can securely test the impact of different kinds of paywall configurations on your subscription rate.
I want to learn more about server-side testing with AB Tasty!
We’re enriching our conversion rate optimization platform with a server-side A/B testing solution. What is server-side A/B testing, you ask? It’s the subject of an announcement of ours that will make anybody who’s passionate about experimentation pretty excited…because it means they can now test any hypothesis on any device.
No matter if you want to test visual modifications suggested by your marketing team or advanced modifications tied to your back office that are essential in the decision-making process of your product team, we’ve got the right tool for you.
What’s the difference between A/B testing client-side, and A/B testing server-side?
Client-side A/B testing tools help you create variations of your pages by changing the content sent by your server to internet users in the web browser. So, all the magic happens at the level of the web browser (called ‘client’ in the IT world), thanks to JavaScript. Your server is never called, and never intervenes in this process: it still sends the same content to the internet user.
Server-side A/B testing tools, on the other hand, offload all of this work from the web browser. In this case, it’s your server that takes on the task of randomly sending the internet user a modified version.
4 reasons to A/B test, server-side
Running an A/B test server-side has many advantages.
1. Dedicated to the needs of your product team
Client-side A/B testing is often limited to surface-level modifications. These refer to visual aspects, like the page’s organization, adding or deleting of blocks of content or modifying text. If you’re interested in deeper-level modifications related to your back office – for example, reorganizing your purchase funnel, or the results of your search or product sorting algorithm – it’s a bit more complicated.
With server-side testing, you have a lot more options to work with, since you can modify all aspects of your site, whether front-end or back-end. With server-side testing, you have a lot more options to work with, since you can modify all aspects of your site, whether front-end or back-end.
All of this is possible because you remain in control of the content sent by your server to your website visitors. Your product team will be overjoyed since they’ll gain an enormous amount of flexibility. They can now test all kinds of features and benefit from a truly data-driven approach, to make better decisions. The price of this increased flexibility is the fact that server-side testing requires your IT team to get involved in order to implement modifications. We’ll get back to this later.
Your product team will be overjoyed to test all kinds of features
2. Better performance
Poor performance – loading time or the flickering effect – is often the first criticism made about client-side A/B testing solutions.
In the most extreme cases, some sites only add the JavaScript tag to the footer of the page to avoid any potential impact on their technical performance. This policy automatically means excluding using any client-side A/B testing tools, since a ‘footer’ tag is often synonymous with flickering effect.
When using a server-side A/B testing tool, you don’t have any JavaScript tag to insert on your pages, and you’re in control of any potential performance bottlenecks. You also remain responsible for your company’s security policy and the adherence to internal technical procedure.
3. Adapted to your business’s rules
In some cases, your A/B test might be limited to design-related modifications, but you have to deal with profession-specific constraints that make it difficult to interpret a classic A/B test.
For example, an e-commerce merchant might understandably wish to take into account canceled orders in their results, or else exclude highly unusual orders which skew their stats (the notion of outliers).
With a client-side A/B test, a conversion is counted as soon as it occurs on the web browser side when the purchase confirmation page loads or a transaction event type is triggered. With a server-side A/B test, you remain in complete control of what is taken into account, and you can, for example, exclude in real time certain conversions or register others after the fact, by batch. You can also optimize for more long-term goals like customer lifetime value (LTV).
4. New omnichannel opportunities
Server-side A/B testing is inseparably linked to omni-channel and multi-devices strategies.
With a client-side solution – which relies on JavaScript and cookies – your playing field is limited to devices that have a web browser, whether it’s on desktop, tablet or mobile. It’s therefore impossible to A/B test on native mobile apps (iOS or Android) or on connected objects, those that already exist and those still yet to come.
On the other hand, with a server-side solution, as soon as you can match up the identity of a consumer, whatever the device used, you can deploy A/B tests or omnichannel personalization campaigns as part of a unified client journey. Your playing field just got a lot bigger 🙂 and the opportunities are numerous. Think connected objects, TV apps, chatbots, beacons, digital stores…
Use cases for server-side A/B testing
Now, you’re probably wondering what you can concretely test with a server-side solution that you couldn’t test with a client-side tool?
Included are tests for sign up forms, tests for order funnels, tests for research algorithms, feature tests…
How can you put in place a server-side A/B test?
To put a server-side A/B test in place, you’ll need to use our API. We’ve described below in general terms how it works. For more information, you can contact our support team, who can give you the complete technical documentation.
When an internet user lands on your site, the first step is to call our API to get a unique visitor ID from AB Tasty, which you then store (ex: cookie, session storage). If a visitor already has an ID from another visit, you’ll use this one instead.
On pages where a test needs to be triggered, you’ll then call our API passing in parameters the visitor ID mentioned above and the ID of the test in question. This test ID is accessible from our interface when you create the test.
As a response to your API request, AB Tasty sends the variation ID to be displayed. Your server then needs to build its response based on this variation ID. Lastly, you need to inform our data servers as soon as a conversion takes place, by calling the API with the visitor ID, and data relevant to the conversion, like its type (action tracking, transaction, custom event…) and/or its value.
Don’t hesitate to use our expertise to analyze and optimize your test results thanks to our dynamic traffic allocation algorithms, which tackle the so-called ‘multi-armed bandit’ issue.
As you’ve seen, putting in place a server-side A/B test absolutely requires involvement from your tech team and a change in your work routine.
While client-side A/B testing is often managed and centralized by your marketing team, server-side A/B testing is decentralized at the product team or project level. While client-side A/B testing is often managed and centralized by your marketing team, server-side A/B testing is decentralized at the product team or project level.
Should you stop using client-side A/B tests?
The answer is no. Client and server-side A/B testing aren’t contradictory, they’re complementary. The highest performing businesses use both in tandem according to their needs and the teams involved.
Client-side A/B testing is easy to start using, and ideal for marketing teams that want to stay autonomous and not involve their head of IT. The keyword here is AGILITY. You can quickly test a lot of ideas.
Server-side A/B testing is more oriented towards product teams, whose needs involve more business rules and which are tightly linked to product features. The keyword here is FLEXIBILITY.
By offering you the best of both worlds, AB Tasty become an indispensable partner for all of your testing and data-driven, decision-making needs.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch to discuss your testing projects – even the craziest ones!
