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Article

Nov 23, 2020
7min read

The Step-by-Step Guide to Progressive Rollout

AB Tasty

AB Tasty

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You’ve heard all about the surface-level benefits of rapid product releases. They let you explore, experiment with, and test features faster. They create a more collaborative development process. And they let you run an efficient high-output team.

All of these benefits are true, but the biggest benefits you’ll enjoy from driving rapid releases lie even deeper than is commonly acknowledged…

Rapid releases do create better products. Rapid releases create a short feedback loop between you and your users. You learn very quickly what’s working and what isn’t, and you can quickly adjust.

But even more important, rapid releases get you and your team out of your own heads. Rapid releases force you to get your product and feature ideas out of the lab and into the real world. This constant contact with reality leads you to create products that simply and directly deliver the actual functions your users need most, while leaving the nice-to-have fluff on the whiteboard. 

Rapid releases do create happier users. Rapid releases let you provide new features, and fix bugs, as quickly as possible. You constantly give your users a better and better product.

But on an even deeper level, rapid releases demonstrate that you care about your users. It shows them that you are listening to their feedback, and that you are taking it seriously. It tells your users that you care about them so much that you have structured the heart of your product management strategy around doing whatever it takes to make them happy and loyal.

Rapid releases do create better businesses. Rapid releases—when properly executed—can create a lot of excitement and enthusiasm throughout your entire organization. They create a culture of progress and forward momentum, where everyone feels that they are contributing to real outcomes and not just spinning their wheels.

But rapid releases also improve your organization’s culture through an even subtler mechanism. Each release can act as a touchpoint that connects the product team with everyone else in the organization. It gives you a common reason to celebrate, to collaborate, and to realign groups that are too often siloed.

Now, we don’t want to oversell rapid releases here. They are not a cure-all, and they are not even appropriate for every single situation. But if you are operating in a context where you can accelerate your product and feature release cycle, you’ll experience a whole lot of upside with little-to-no downside.

To help you drive rapid releases in your organization, we’ll use this piece to explore why rapid releases can be challenging to pull off (even in an agile product development framework), what is the key ingredient you can adopt to overcome all of these challenges, and how to bring that ingredient to life in your organization.

The Biggest Challenges to Driving Rapid Releases

Let’s be clear about one thing— not every organization is well set up to deliver rapid releases. Product managers at big, legacy corporations tend to have a hard time getting anything out in a timely manner. This is almost never their fault. They just have so many layers of review and approval for everything they do that it can take months to push out a small feature that a smaller, nimbler organization could release in weeks or days.

If this is your context, then the best thing you can do is attempt to establish the core principles of lean product development in your organization. This will represent a huge win, and speed things up significantly for you, all by itself.

Now for the rest of you— Let’s assume you are working at one of those smaller, nimbler organizations. And you are already following an agile product development process. And you still are not releasing new products and features as quickly as you’d like. Chances are, you’re being bottlenecked by one or more of these subtle challenges:

  • You are completing sprint after sprint but you never seem to get any closer to having something to release. Your entire development process feels like it’s focused on completing code, and not completing products and features.
  • You are getting products and features close to release, but they get trapped in the testing and QA process. This delays their release significantly—sometimes indefinitely.
  • You are able to complete new features and products, but release gets delayed because it’s such a miserable process. It’s always a big, chaotic scramble. And everyone—from your product team to your business stakeholders—gets stressed and worried about what’s going to happen when you publish the changes and delay the process.

None of these issues are solved by the fundamentals of agile product development. It’s easy to focus agile workflows on development and never give much thought to release. It’s easy to put off testing and QA until the last minute for the sake of velocity, and wind up with a huge backlog to deal with at the end. And agile products and features have developed a reputation (deserved or not) for being buggy, broken, and more aligned with what the product team thinks is right, and not what the customer actually wants.

It’s clear that agile in and of itself will not solve these problems, nor ensure rapid releases. But a small tweak to agile will.

How Progressive Rollouts Unlock Rapid Releases in Agile Product Development

You’ve heard of progressive rollouts before. They are considered an optional subset of agile methodology that restructure the entire release process.

Traditionally, a product manager would release a new product or feature in its full form, to every user, at the exact same time. But a product manager that follows progressive rollouts would release that same new product or feature in smaller forms, to a few user groups at a time, and in staged intervals.

Essentially, progressive rollouts let you break up “big bang” releases into smaller chunks. And along the way, you end up solving a lot of the challenges that prevent rapid releases. For example:

  • Progressive rollouts shift the product team’s focus off developing new code, and onto driving releases.
  • Progressive rollouts force you to focus on code quality, and readiness to deploy, instead of code volume.
  • Progressive rollouts remove most of the risks—and resulting stress—from releases by shrinking them into smaller, easier-to-control stages.

Progressive rollouts are the key ingredient that takes the solid foundation of lean product management, and ensures it’s properly lined up to deliver rapid releases. Here’s how you can bring it to life in your organization.

7 Steps to Ensuring Rapid Releases with Progressive Rollouts

  1. Structure Your Release Phases: Don’t let them be hurried, disorganized dashes at the end of a development cycle. Give them the same time, attention, and care as you give every other element of your product management framework. Create formalized processes, and adopt the tools you need to make those processes automatic habits.
  2. Decide Which Products and Features to Release. Review your current queue. Identify the highest impact products and features that you can drive to completion soonest. Employ feature flags to hide features in products that aren’t ready yet, and focus your users on one small subset of new functionality at a time.
  3. Establish Your Personas and User Groups. Identify your highest-value users, and the opportunities they represent. Leverage these groups to test the new products and features they will love most. Personalize and customize their experience to let them know they’re getting early access because of just how valuable they are to you.
  4. Plan Your Progressive Rollouts: Define the features and products you are going to release. Define who they are going to be released to. Define when they are going to be released, and what the stages look like. And then organize your sprints to deliver to these requirements.
  5. Define the Impact of Each Rollout. Establish the exact, measurable, accountable business metrics you plan to improve with each of your rollouts. Define the hard and soft impact each release will have on every function in your business— and tell each function about the release before it happens.
  6. Communicate Your Release. Loop your business stakeholders in on each element of your release plans that might give them pause or concern. Show them how progressive rollouts mitigate their risk around product and feature quality and alignment. And update them on the progress of each release at each stage of your rollout. 
  7. Automate as Much of Your Rollout as Possible. Remove yourself and your team as the bottleneck. Automate your QA and testing. Set your deployment intervals and parameters, and then let your software execute it for you. Monitor your release’s performance at each stage. A/B test as much as possible. And intervene ASAP when an issue is identified. But otherwise, let the right tools make rapid releases through progressive rollouts a smooth element of your agile product development process.

With a little bit of intentional planning, with a shift in the focus of your agile product development, and with the right tools, you can easily bring progressive rollouts to your organization, and rapidly increase the rate of your releases. 

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Article

Nov 16, 2020
8min read

Call to Action: A Simple Guide to More Conversions

AB Tasty

AB Tasty

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A Call to Action, also known as a CTA, refers, in marketing, to any item that will, using imperative wording, encourage an immediate action or response from the user.

Calls to Action are essential in marketing campaigns. They’re a way to lead customers to a specific action. They generally come as a button, but they also exist in many other forms. In this guide, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about CTAs, how they work and how to use them on your website.

What is a Call to Action?

Behind this mysterious name hides a very simple marketing concept you’ve all seen before. Calls to Action (CTAs) refer to any device conceived to persuade users to do a specific action. 

E-commerce companies usually use them in the form of buttons to encourage buyers to add an item to their shopping cart or to complete a transaction. It is a key element to integrate playful interaction with your users and an effective means to increase conversions. 

The goal of a CTA is to use a word or a sentence (most of the time containing action verbs) to push your users toward a specific action like “click here”, “subscribe”, “check out” and many others. These action words can also be used with a “now” creating a sense of urgency. Calls to Action were proven to be very effective and to optimize conversion rates.

CTAs can be used to push users down the purchase funnel, but they can also be used for any kind of action like registering, subscribing to a newsletter or adding to cart. 

What makes an effective CTA? When creating a CTA for your website, every detail counts. Here are some aspects you need to pay attention to for your CTA button: 

  • Visual aspect
  • Wording
  • Action word
  • Placement
  • Form
  • Color
  • Size

Do not underestimate the impact your CTA button can have on your conversion rate. A well-written Call to Action needs to be adapted to your audience, their age, their gender or their nationality. Remember that a CTA isn’t just a command or an invitation for your users, it is part of the full purchasing process. That’s why it needs to be discreetly integrated but obvious enough to be noticed by users.

Why do you need a clear Call to Action in your CRO strategy?

Always remember the importance of CTAs in your purchase funnel. Your customer’s path to completing a transaction is paved with CTA buttons. They are a key element in your CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) strategy, they need to be quite obvious since they are meant to lead users to the action you want them to complete.

A good and clear Call to Action comes with a nice visual, adapted to your target audience, with a clear and straightforward message. That way, and only that way, you will get the best out of your CTA and note effective results in your conversion rate AND your CTR (Click Through Rates).

An efficient CTA is nothing but a perfect compromise between your e-commerce site’s goal, which is to increase sales or to sell a specific product, and users’ needs, i.e. a smooth navigation experience while purchasing a product. That’s why your CTA needs to be neat and easy to find, and user experience always needs to be taken into account.

Best Call to Action examples of 2020

CTAs come in many forms. To help you with your CTA A/B testing, we listed the 5 best forms of CTAs in 2020: 

1.       Direct Calls to Action  

Let’s say your goal is to push your customers down the purchase funnel. Then, you might opt for a direct CTA, such as:

  • Shop now
  • Buy now
  • Add to shopping cart

This is an Amazon product page showing CTAAn Amazon product page containing an add to shopping cart and buying button CTA (Image Source).

2. “Get for Free” Calls to Action  

With these CTAs, you can highlight an opportunity for the users. Generally, these come with a “subscribe” box. You can collect your users’ email addresses in exchange for a sample of a document or a free trial. These CTAs usually appear as:

  • Download for free
  • Free 30 day trial
  • Start free trial

This is a screen shot of Tidal's free trial

Tidal homepage enticing users to register with a free trial (Image Source).

3. Basic Calls to Action examples

CTAs can be a mere invitation. For instance, on a social media’s ad or as a shortcut to a long text. This kind of CTA is often used in blog posts or Facebooks Ads. Awakening the user’s curiosity, it is supposed to make users want to go further and learn more about a topic with messages like:

  • Check it out
  • Start here
  • Find out more
  • Learn more

This is a screen shot of Philips CTA for their newsletterPhilips USA homepage with multiple CTAs (Image Source).

4.       Registering Calls to Action

This kind of CTA is often found on social media or e-commerce sites. The goal is simple: encourage your visitors to create an account and register with messages such as: 

  • Create your account 
  • Sign up
  • Join us

This is a screen shot of Bose's sign up CTABose homepage with sign up CTA (Image Source).

5.       Email Calls to Action

 All of the above have one thing in common: they allow you to connect with your users by collecting their emails, which will be useful for your email marketing campaigns. According to what you are proposing, users can fill in their email to get something like a discount, a coupon or a free PDF. For these, you can use wordings such as: 

  • Subscribe
  • Get coupon
  • Download free PDF
  • Sign up

This is a screen shot of Anastasia's CTA to join the emailing list

For more, read our article about “14 Examples of CTAs You Can’t Resist”.

A/B Test your CTA for better results

A/B testing

A/B testing is the most accurate technique for CRO. This digital marketing strategy consists of making changes on your website and observing the impact of this change on a segment of users. 

This is the best method to improve your conversion rate, because you can try out any feature and choose the one whose results are best. It is more reliable since users are the ones determining which feature works best. With this method, you can test your idea with your target users or potential customers.

A/B testing your CTA buttons is the best way to improve your website’s UX and your conversion rate at the same time. At AB Tasty, we offer a super quick and easy way to run these kinds of tests – our drag and drop visual editor.

How to run an A/B test for your CTA? 

Here are the different steps you need to follow to A/B test your Call to Action button:

  • Define your test’s goal and the KPIs you want to improve

Changing your button’s feature must serve a goal. It wouldn’t make sense to change your CTA’s color, to run your test and wait for random results. Your goal can be to increase the number of users that subscribe to your newsletter, for instance.

  • Define the original and alternative version (A and B version)

Choose the CTA you want to run your A/B test on, let’s say the red “subscribe to newsletter” button. This red button will be your A version. 

What do you want to change about it? Maybe users will be more likely to click on this button if it were blue? Then, change your button’s color. (If you’re using AB Tasty, this takes two seconds with our drag and drop editor). The blue version of the CTA button will be your B version.

  • Run your A/B test 

Worried about exposing 50% of your website visitors to this new change?  If you have enough traffic, you can run your test on a smaller percentage of your entire website audience to mitigate the risk of any potential lost conversions.

  • Collect data and check your analytics

Usually, A/B tests take several weeks before you get reliable results. During that period, observe your A/B testing tool reporting. Did your conversion rate increase? Did it decrease? 

  • Hard code changes (or not)

Figures don’t lie. Based on the test’s results, change what needs to be changed and keep what needs to be kept. Step by step you will find the best combination of features for the perfect CTA. 

Conclusion

CTAs are essential in your conversion rate optimization strategy, but they can’t appear randomly or look like any old button. They need to be wisely thought out, otherwise they might not have the expected effect. 

Thanks to A/B testing, you will be able to find the right features in order to get the best performance out of them. Remember that visual aspects (like form, color, or size), wording, the chosen action word, and placement matter in your CTA’s performance.

So, what’s the takeaway? An effective Call to Action can boost your website KPIs, and you can A/B test any of your website’s pages – the sky’s the limit.

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