But we know two customers will respond differently to your marketing—even if both are shopping for the same product. Each has unique wants, needs, and contexts that shape how they shop online. Because of this, your experience optimization strategy must move beyond the generic and focus on the individual.

At this point, you likely understand the basic principles: personalization is a powerful way to connect with audiences, improve user experience, and drive conversions. But how do you move from understanding the fundamentals to implementing a sophisticated, data-driven personalization strategy that truly makes an impact on conversions?

In this book, we’ll focus on advanced personalization techniques specifically for CRO professionals. We’ll explore key topics like client-side versus server-side personalization, how to leverage data lakes and analytics, and advanced audience segmentation. Plus, we’ll examine how AI tools can take your personalization strategy to the next level.

Customers who say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services

Topics discussed in this e-book include:

• Understanding personalization and the benefits
• Building a personalization strategy
• Evaluating client-side vs server-side solutions
• Personalizing throughout the customer journey
• Audience segmentation by engagement level, content interest, and emotional need
• Segmentation with CDPs and data lakes

Download “The Expert’s Personalization Playbook” and start tailoring your digital experiences to the individual.

The post The Expert’s Personalization Playbook appeared first on abtasty.

It’s important to remember that the digital customer journey does not begin and end with a purchase – it’s a web of all customer interactions and touchpoints with your brand.

AB Tasty has mapped out seven customer phases that we consider crucial in the journey. To craft unique experiences, you’ll need to differentiate these seven phases customers pass through and understand how to animate their digital journey.

Once you have a better understanding of these phases, you will be better equipped to set your business goals and properly optimize your website for growth and impact.

Click to view the full-sized infographic in a new tab

How exactly can you optimize each phase of the digital customer journey? Let’s dive right in and take a look at some examples.

Phase 1: Awareness

When visitors land on your website for the first time, a great first impression is crucial. Your page needs to be both visually appealing and intuitive. A dynamic above the fold design is a great place to start.

In this first phase, it’s important to let your best ideas shine to capture and keep your visitors’ attention. You can accomplish this by creating personalized welcome messages for first-time visitors, displaying your value proposition and organizing high-impact elements for better visibility.

Let’s take a look at Just Over The Top’s experiment to modify the layout of their homepage. They used AB Tasty’s experience optimization platform to test if their users responded better seeing a layout with product categories rather than individual products.

Original:

Variation:

After creating a test variation to run against the original layout, they saw a 17.5% click increase on the three blocks below the hero image. This brought many more users into the second phase of their customer journey.

Phase 2: Discovery

When consumers reach the second phase, they’ve already discovered your brand and they’re getting curious.

To accommodate visitors during this phase, your website should be optimized for an excellent browsing experience. Whether this means making your search bar more visible, creating dynamic filters while searching, or using a virtual assistant to get to know your visitors’ interests with a series of questions, an easy browsing experience with intelligent search is key.

In this example, Claudie Pierlot focused on optimizing the customer browsing experience by testing the search bar visibility. In their variation, the small search icon was made more visible by adding the word “recherche” (or search in English) in the top right-hand corner.

Original:

Variation:

This clear above the fold design made it easier for visitors to identify the search bar to begin their browsing experience. With this simple A/B test, they saw a 47% increase in search bar clicks and a 7% increase in conversion rates coming directly from the search bar.

In another example, Villeroy & Boch, a ceramic manufacturing company, wanted to leverage intelligent search on their website. With the help of AB Tasty, they implemented an AI search algorithm to navigate online shoppers.

With our solution, they designed a new and intuitive navigation complete with filters and a comprehensive autosuggestion feature.

By changing their search functions, Villeroy & Boch saw a 33% increase in search results clicks and a 20% increase in sales through the search function.

Phase 3: Consideration

Now is the time when your visitors are considering your brand and which products they are interested in. Showcasing your product pages in their best light during the consideration phase might be exactly what your visitor needs to continue moving down the funnel.

Let’s look at how Hanna Anderson optimized their product pages during this phase.

The clothing retail company wanted to experiment with the images on their product listing pages. Previously, their toddler line had only images of clothing sizes for an older child. They were convinced there was room for improvement and decided to run a test by changing their images to include toddler sizes.

Original:

Variation:

After implementing age-appropriate clothing images, the results were clear. During this test, the clicks on PLPs increased by almost 8% and the purchase rate on those items skyrocketed by 22%.

Phase 4: Intent

During the intent phase, your visitors are on the verge of becoming customers but need to be convinced to make a purchase.

Social proof, urgency messaging, and bundling algorithms are a few ideas to lightly nudge visitors to add to cart or add more to cart.

Let’s take a look at the impact that urgency messaging can have: IZIPIZI, an eyewear retailer, decided to add a special message flag next to their product description to show viewers how many people have purchased this product. The idea of this message is to show viewers that this product is popular and to encourage them to take action.

With this simple sentence of social proof to validate a product’s desirability, they saw a 36% increase in add-to-basket rate.

In another scenario, you can see that adding a progress bar is a simple way to upsell. With a progress par, you are showing your customer how close they are to earning free shipping, which entices them to add more to their cart.

Vanessa Bruno experimented with this additive with the help of AB Tasty and saw a 3.15% increase in transactions and a €6 AOV uplift.

Phase 5: Purchase

Purchase frustration is real. If customers experience friction during checkout, you risk losing money.

Friction refers to any issues the visitors may encounter such as unclear messaging during the payment (did the payment actually go through?), confusing or expensive shipping options, discounts not working, double authentication check-in delays, difficult sign-in, and more.

Optimizing your checkout sequence for your audience with rollouts and KPI-triggered rollbacks can help you find a seamless fit for your website.

Let’s look at an example for this phase: Galeries Lafayette, the French luxury department store, saw an opportunity to optimize their checkout by displaying default payment methods that do not require double authentication.

During this test, they saw a €113,661 increase in profit, a €5 uplift in average order value, and a 38% increase in the conversion rate by adding the CB (bank card) option for a quicker checkout.

Phase 6: Experience

Optimizing the buyer experience doesn’t end after the purchase. Now is the time to grow your customer base and stop churn in its tracks. So, how do you keep your customers interested? By maintaining the same level of quality in your messages and personalization.

Let’s look at how Envie de Fraise, a French boutique, leveraged their user information to transform a normal post-purchase encounter into a personalized experience.

One of their customers had just purchased a maternity dress and had been browsing multiple maternity dresses prior to their purchase. By knowing this information, they experimented with using the “you will love these products” algorithm to gently nudge their customer to continue shopping.

With a customized recommendation like this, Envie de Fraise saw a €127K increase in their potential profit. As your customer spends more time with your brand, you will learn more about their habits and interests. The more time they spend with you, the more personalized you can make their experience.

Phase 7: Loyalty

In the final step of your customer’s journey, they move into the loyalty phase. To turn customers into champions of your brand, it’s important to remind them that you value their loyalty.

This can be done by sending emails with individual offers, social proof, product suggestions, or incentives for joining a loyalty program to earn rewards or complete product reviews.

Another example of this is sending a personalized email displaying items that are frequently bought together that align with their purchase. This will remind the customer about your brand and give them recommendations for future purchases.

Why Optimizing the Digital Customer Journey is Essential to Boost Conversions

The fierce competition in the e-commerce marketplace is undeniable. In order to attract and retain customers, you have to focus on crafting personalized user experiences to turn passive visitors into active buyers.

Understanding their needs in each phase and optimizing your digital space is your best solution to nudge visitors down the purchasing funnel.

By personalizing the experience of your customers during each phase of the digital customer journey, you can ensure an optimal shopping experience, boost purchases, increase customer satisfaction, and see more repeat customers.

AB Tasty is the best-in-class experience optimization platform that empowers you to create a richer digital experience – fast. From experimentation to personalization, this solution can help you activate and engage your audience to boost your conversions.

Using personalization to enhance your customer journey

With the vast array of products and brands to choose from, customer loyalty has become more important than ever. By focusing on personalizing the digital customer journey, you can reduce the chances of your customer abandoning their purchase or opting for another brand.

An individualized customer journey is beneficial for the following reasons:

• Option overload: As online brands fight for the attention of consumers, it’s important to set your brand apart from the rest, with a customer journey that is tailored to their needs.
• Analysis paralysis: With a plethora of information now readily available to customers who are researching and comparing potential purchases, your digital customer journey can help to deliver the information they need with ease and offer them the best shopping experience, thereby tipping the scale in your favor.
• Lack of loyalty: The ease with which a customer can change service providers has increased the pressure and importance of meeting their needs during the entirety of the digital customer journey. Every interaction matters.

Offering a personalized experience elevates the customer journey and helps to ensure customer satisfaction. By leveraging the power of personalization, you can adapt the individual phases of the customer journey to each customer’s needs for an optimal e-commerce experience.

Personalization is the key to customer satisfaction

There is no way to deny the intense competition in the e-commerce space. Attracting and retaining customers is more difficult now than it has ever been. To advance ahead of the competition, you must understand customer needs and personalize each user journey with the help of a customer journey model.

By personalizing each experience your customers have with your brand, you can be sure to give your customers an optimal shopping experience, guarantee customer satisfaction, and encourage customer loyalty.

The post Understanding the Digital Customer Journey appeared first on abtasty.

How can you gain insights about your customers to improve your website’s usability and understand buying trends?

The answer is simple: build a customer journey map.

In this blog, we’ll dive into a few things: what is a customer journey, a customer journey map, how to map the customer journey visually, templates of different customer journeys, a step by step guide for how to create them, and examples of customer journeys in action. Let’s get started

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey is a combination of all the interactions customers have with your brand before reaching a specific goal.

Creating a compelling journey helps you stand out and shows customers that you care about their experience. An enjoyable customer journey promotes positive engagement, making for more satisfied customers that are more likely to return for repeat purchases.

By better understanding your customers, you’ll be able to provide them with the best possible user experience every time they visit your online store. The best way to do this is by creating visual customer journey maps that present all this information about customers at a glance.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s interaction with your business or website. It’s used to define which parts of this process might not be working as smoothly as they should be, thus improving the customer’s experience.

The customer journey map is a (mostly) visual tool that helps businesses understand what a customer goes through when buying a product or service from them. It maps out in clear, concise, visual terms, the journey each customer is likely to experience through buyer personas and user data.

The best customer journey map is a story, brought to life visually, of the customer’s experience. In essence, the best customer journey map is a story, brought to life visually, of the customer’s experience. It should be noted, however, that more complex information on the map may require text.

The map itself highlights “touchpoints, which are specific elements of the customer’s interaction with a business. Each of these touchpoints – for example, seeking a product, researching its content, buying the product, waiting for delivery, and returning it if unsatisfied – can be judged as negative, neutral, or positive from the customer’s perspective.

Customer journey maps require various research techniques that include hard data, customer feedback, and creative thinking. As such, no two maps are the same and each one will depend on many different factors that can’t be simplified or stereotyped as a matter of course.

The heart of customer journey maps: Buyer personas

Buyer personas are at the heart of a customer journey map tool and are broad representations, presented as fictional characters, based on real-life data and customer feedback. Typically, each project will create between three and seven buyer personas, each of which will require its own customer journey map.

The point of the customer journey map is to understand, as clearly as possible, what a customer will encounter when using your service. It will also help you improve the elements that are not functioning properly, are not easy to navigate, and show you how to make the entire experience more satisfying.

Each persona, and therefore the journey map itself, is not meant to be a perfect illustration of actual interactions. Rather, it’s a broad representation of the experience from the persona’s perspective.

Who Can Benefit From A Customer Journey Map?

There are many reasons why a customer journey map can be useful to a business. Customer satisfaction is more important than ever to a business, and it’s tied to loyalty to an extent that has not previously existed. Customers are more demanding, aware of their options, and willing to shop around.

By mapping each of the previously mentioned touchpoints, a well-designed customer journey map template can highlight any problems that clients might experience in the process of interacting with a business and help foster a relationship with an organization, product, service, or brand. This can occur across multiple channels and over a long period of time.

Once a customer journey map template has been designed, the entire enterprise can keep the customer at the forefront of the decision-making process. With a focus on the customer and their experience, or user experience (UX), any kinks, holes, or brick walls within the timeline’s touchpoints can be ironed out.

Bringing Together All Aspects Of The Business

Customer journey maps can help a business by bringing together departments with a focus on customer experience. To begin with, all departments can be engaged to discuss issues that customers may face when dealing with them. This is no small thing as many departments may not be used to dealing with customers, yet the decisions they take may have a profound effect on UX. By creating an understanding of how each touchpoint affects UX across the entire business, decisions can be made from an empathetic perspective.

Traditional marketing stops at the point of purchase, but customer experience does not necessarily end there. For example, perhaps the purchase was not to their satisfaction and they want to return the goods. Departments that might not typically be involved in touchpoints before purchase now have a central role to play. How easy is it for the customer to find the return information on a website? If they need information on delivery or collection times, how likely are they to get a response that will satisfy them? This all requires forethought and a policy that keeps customer experience central to design and organization.

How to map the customer journey visually

A customer journey map is a visual representation that helps you gain better insight into your customers’ experiences (from start to finish) from their point of view.

There are two vital elements to creating a customer journey map:

• Defining your customers’ goals
• Understanding how to map their nonlinear journey

By mapping out a customer’s digital journey, you are outlining every possible opportunity that you have to produce customer delight. You can then use these touchpoints to craft engagement strategies.

According to Aberdeen Group (via Internet Retailer), 89% of companies with multi-channel engagement strategies were able to retain their customers, compared to 33% of those who didn’t.

To visually map every point of interaction and follow your customer on their journey, you can use Excel sheets, infographics, illustrations, or diagrams to help you better understand.

Customer journey maps also help brands with:

• Retargeting goals with an inbound viewpoint
• Targeting a new customer group
• Forming a customer-centric mindset

All of these lead to better customer experiences, which lead to more conversions and an increase in revenue.

Want more information on the digital customer journey? Check out our digital customer journey resource kit for a detailed e-book, an editable workbook, a use case booklet, and an infographic.

Examples of Customer Journey Map Templates and Which to Choose

There are four different types of customer journey maps to choose from. Each map type highlights different customer behaviors as they interact with your business at different points in time. Choosing the right template is essential based on your goals.

1. Current state template

The current state template is the most commonly used journey map that focuses on what customers currently do, their way of thinking, and how they feel during interactions.

It’s great for highlighting existing pain points and works best for implementing incremental changes to customer experiences.

2. Future state template

The future state template focuses on what customers will do, think, and feel during future encounters. It’s useful for conveying a picture of how customers will respond to new products, services, and experiences.

3. Day in the Life Template

This template is similar to the current state template because it visualizes present-day customer behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. However, this template assesses how customers behave both with your organization and with peers in your area.

This type of journey map works best for spurring new initiatives by examining unfulfilled needs in the market.

4. Service Blueprint Template

When creating a service blueprint template, you typically begin with an abridged version of a current or future state journey map. Then you add a network of people, methods, procedures, and technologies responsible for giving a simplified customer experience, either in the present or in the future.

Current state blueprint maps are beneficial for recognizing the source of current pain points, whereas future state blueprint maps help create an environment that will be necessary for providing a planned experience.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map (7 Steps)

Creating customer journey maps may feel repetitive, but the design and application you choose will vary from map to map. Remember: customer journeys are as unique as your individual customers.

Step 1: Create Buyer Personas

Before creating a journey map, it’s important to identify a clear objective so you know who you’re making the map for and why. Building personas is the most time-consuming part of the process. It requires detailed research, including qualitative and quantitative data, and is the foundation of the entire process. A persona is a highly relatable and rounded fictional character, generalized, but not stereotyped.

Buyer personas help define customer goals, providing a deeper understanding of their needs and topics of interest. More detail makes for more realistic personas, which means you’ll need to do a fair amount of market research to acquire this data.

Start by creating a rough outline of your buyer’s persona with demographics like age, gender, occupation, education, income, and geography. When you have that in place, you’ll need to get psychographic data on your customers. This kind of information may be harder to collect compared to demographic data, but it is worthwhile to understand customer preferences, needs and wants.

In short, demographics tell you who your customers are and psychographics provide insights into the why behind their behavior. Collecting concrete data on your customers helps you serve them better and deliver a more personalized user experience.

Collecting concrete data on your customers helps you serve them better and deliver a more personalized user experience.

Step 2: Select Your Target Customer

After making several customer personas, it’s time to do a “deep dive” into each to build a more accurate reflection of their experience.

Start by analyzing their first interaction with your brand and mapping out their movements from there.

What questions are they trying to answer? What is their biggest priority?

Step 3: List Customer Touchpoints

Any interaction or engagement between your brand and the customer is a touchpoint.

List all the touchpoints in the customer journey, considering everything from the website to social channels, paid advertisements, email marketing, third-party reviews, or mentions.

Which touchpoints have higher engagement? Which touchpoints need to be optimized?

All customer journey mapping examples are unique. Therefore, touchpoints on one map are unlikely to work for another. In fact, every business needs to update its buyer personas and customer journey maps as their business changes. Even quite subtle changes can have profound effects on the customer journey map template.

Step 4: Identify Customer Actions

Once you have identified all your customer touchpoints, identify common actions your customers make at each step. By dividing the journey into individual actions, it becomes easier for you to improve each micro-engagement and move them forward along the funnel.

Think of how many steps a customer needs to reach the end of their journey. Look for opportunities to reduce or streamline that number so customers can reach their goals sooner. One way to do this is by identifying obstacles or pain points in the process and creating solutions that remove them.

This is a great time to use the personas you created. Understanding the customer will help you troubleshoot problem areas.

Anticipating what your customer will do is another important part of mapping the customer journey. Accurate predictions lead to you providing better experiences, which ultimately leads to more conversions.

Step 5: Understand your available resources

Creating customer journey maps presents a picture of your entire business and highlights every resource being used to build the customer experience.

Use your plan to assess which touchpoints need more support, such as customer service. Determine whether these resources are enough to give the best customer experience possible. Additionally, you can correctly anticipate how existing or new resources will affect your sales and increase ROI.

Step 6: Analyzing the Customer Journey

An essential part of creating a customer journey map is analyzing the results.

Now you have your data, customer journey mapping template, touchpoints, and goals, it’s time to put it all together and define where the UX is meeting expectations and where things can be improved. It is important to note that mapping where things are going well is almost as important as defining what isn’t. Some elements of the journey can be spread to other areas.

As you assess the data, look for touchpoints that might drive customers to leave before making a purchase or areas where they may need more support. Analyzing your finished customer journey map should help you address places that aren’t meeting customers’ needs and find solutions for them.

Take the journey yourself and see if there’s something you missed or if there is still room for improvement. Doing so will provide a detailed view of the journey your customer will take.

Follow your map with each persona and examine their journeys through social media, email, and online browsing so you can get a better idea of how you can create a smoother, more value-filled experience.

One of the best ways of pinpointing where things are not going to plan is through customer feedback. This is typically done through surveys and customer support transcripts.

Step 7: Take Business Action

Having a visualization of what the journey looks like ensures that you continuously meet customer needs at every point while giving your business a clear direction for the changes they will respond to best.

Any variations you make from then on will promote a smoother journey since they will address customer pain points.

A great way to test your variations to find out what better serves your customers throughout their user journey is by leveraging A/B testing.

AB Tasty is a best-in-class A/B testing solution that helps you convert more customers by leveraging experimentation to create a richer digital experience – fast. This experience optimization platform embedded with AI and automation can help you achieve the perfect digital experience with ease.

Analyzing the data from your customer journey map will give you a better perspective on changes you should make to your site to reach your objective.

Once you implement your map, review and revise it regularly. This way, you will continue to streamline the journey. Use analytics and feedback from users to monitor obstacles.

Customer Journey Map Examples

Customer journey map templates are varied, some appear like works of art, while others are the work of a child, but as long as they are clear and concise, they can be effective.

This customer journey map for the charity ‘The Samaritans’ is a highly empathetic map, focused on the purpose of the charity itself. Note how the text is highly visual and therefore makes it easy to relate to the image of the map itself.

This is an example of a map that gives the impression of a journey, rather than a linear UX. This can help push home the point that customer experience is rarely easy to define as a journey from A to B.

The Truth about Customer Journeys

Customer journeys are ever-changing. Journey maps help businesses stay close to their customers and continuously address their needs and pain points. They provide a visual of different customers which helps to understand the nuances of their audience and stay customer-focused.

Customer journey maps can vary widely, but all maps share the same steps. With regular updates and the proactive removal of roadblocks, your brand can stand out, provide meaningful engagement, improve customer experiences, and see positive business growth.

The post How To Build A Customer Journey Map appeared first on abtasty.

Luxury e-commerce brands face unique challenges but also unparalleled opportunity.

As technology advances and consumer expectations are high, the key to thriving in the luxury industry lies in mastering the art of experimentation, personalization and continuous experience optimization.

Unveil an arsenal of test ideas that luxury brands can employ to curate custom experiences, featuring examples from real AB Tasty clients in the luxury industry to serve as inspiration for you to start creating your own dazzling digital experiences.

Craft experiences that wow!

Get your copy of “7 Luxury Test Ideas To Make Your Digital Experiences Shimmer” now.

LUXURIOUS TEST IDEA

Help visitors find the products they need with subcategories like ba&sh

The team at ba&sh found that their product listing pages were often the first place visitors landed on the website. From there, visitors often browse but click away if they don’t find what they are looking for quickly. An A/B test proved that  displaying clear category filters helped ease the shopping experience, leading to a 2% increase in traffic to the product detail pages and a 3% increase in revenue.

Build luxe experiences that surpass your customers’ expectations

Get access to the latest trends in experimentation with “7 Luxury Test Ideas To Make Your Digital Experiences Shimmer.”

The post 7 Luxury Test Ideas To Make Your Digital Experiences Shimmer appeared first on abtasty.

Watch AB Tasty and Mitch Hussey, Product Manager at Bonobos on how to use cross-functional experimentation to improve your digital experience.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• How to prioritize and roadmap experiments that will have the biggest impact on your customer experience.
• How to define roles and responsibilities for a cross-functional team so that everyone is aligned on goals and expectations.
• How to measure the impact of experiments on the customer experience, revenue, and product functionality.

You’ll also get a behind-the-scenes look at three real-world experiments that Bonobos has run, and learn how to apply these insights to your own business.

This webinar is for you if you’re interested in:

• Improving your digital experience
• Learning how to use experimentation to drive results
• Getting insights from a leading retailer

The post How Bonobos Works Cross-Functionally to Create Winning Customer Experiences appeared first on abtasty.

Evan Wells, Sr Solution Consultant at Contentsquare, is an expert at creating successful digital experiences. His secret? Combine digital insights with AB testing to increase web activity and drive growth.

The customer journey experience has never been more important to companies than in the challenging landscape of 2023. Get insights from Contentsquare for the key to CX success. The upward rise in traffic, conversion rate, and how to retain customers on your site.

We’ll share key insights from the report that may already be affecting your CX and how you can enrich your testing initiatives to create conversions.

The post Curbing the Consumption Crisis appeared first on abtasty.

Continuous optimization of website elements such as landing pages, site speed, and user experience, can increase businesses’ conversion rates and reduce bounce rates, leading to a higher ROI for their paid media efforts. Wpromote will explore the various ways to improve site experience for paid media and the importance of implementing these strategies for achieving optimal results.

The post Smart Site Optimization Boosts Paid Media Performance appeared first on abtasty.

But there’s a major problem: you don’t know when you should place an order and who you should order from. You’re browsing a couple of websites and you see a gorgeous flower bouquet. You scroll down a bit and promptly read:

“Mother’s Day: Order now for on-time delivery.”

That’s it – you need to order now for the bouquet to be delivered before Mother’s Day.

That pressure you just felt? It’s called urgency.

Urgency and scarcity are widely used across marketing campaigns to increase engagement and boost conversions, because it works.

Take Black Friday for example: according to Adobe Digital Insights, that day alone racked up almost $9B dollars in sales in 2021.

Basically, urgent situations push us to act fast and scarcity triggers purchase anxiety, forcing us to act promptly. Put into the right hands, these tools can help e-commerce and online businesses boost their conversions and increase sales.

Before we look into the best practices, let’s take a quick look at the psychology behind scarcity and urgency.

Understand the psychology behind urgency

Urgency is a psychological trigger that is deeply rooted inside our brain: it relates to the human loss aversion or the so-called “fear of missing out” (FOMO).

Scientifically speaking, urgency is a time-based concept that prompts us to act quickly.

Similar to the scarcity principle, FOMO is a kind of social anxiety defined by wanting to stay connected with everyone around you and continually keep up with what they are doing.

When faced with a limited-time offer (e.g. a discount), we automatically start to evaluate if we’re comfortable letting this opportunity get away. In other words, the fear of missing out grows.

Understand the psychology behind scarcity

Similar to urgency, scarcity is a psychological trigger that uses quantity to compel us to act quickly. Scarcity triggers a thought that pushes us to place a higher value on objects that are scarce or rare.

Scarcity also triggers our FOMO instinct: if something was running out of stock, we’d also consider the pros and cons of buying it before it’s too late.

Now that we covered the psychological basis behind urgency and scarcity, here are the best practices to apply them in real-life marketing cases.

Scarcity and urgency best practices for marketers

Scarcity and urgency are undoubtedly powerful techniques to increase conversions.

However, they should be used with caution because pushy methods can rapidly become risky for your brand loyalty.

Avoid fake urgency and scarcity

Creating urgency is good, but abusing it is bad.

Some stores go all out and put everything on sale all year long, creating the feeling that everything is a bargain.

In the image below, you can see that the page gives the impression that every item is on sale. When everything is on sale, your customers realize that nothing really is and you’ll lose credibility.

Scarcity tactics don’t perform well when perceived as manipulative.

As a rule of thumb, only display genuine offers and don’t abuse them. Occasional sales are enough and generally more powerful.

Use the right vocabulary

As we’re exposed to sales and promotional offers all the time, sometimes it’s hard to distinguish fake sales from real bargains.

To avoid sounding too pushy, try not to use too many flashing banners—your visitors should be able to sense a real bargain at first glance.

Create powerful CTAs

Similar to the carefully chosen vocabulary, your call-to-action should state a real benefit and emphasize the urgency/scarcity.

For example, it’s a common practice to indicate the remaining stock in order to trigger the scarcity instinct.

You can see in the image below that Walmart is using this tactic by displaying “only 3 left!” below the price.

Personalize your messages

Crafting personalized messages is a major trend we see in digital marketing.

Whether in B2C or B2B, 1:1 personalization yields major benefits and overall better conversions.

Because it’s so efficient, adding hints of scarcity and urgency to your personalized messages could dramatically increase your sales.

Here are a few tips that you could use to implement scarcity-based personalized messages:

• Additional personalized product suggestions
• Dynamic text insertion
• Email campaigns using marketing automation
• Contextual Targeting

Want to get started on personalizing your content? AB Tasty is the complete platform for personalization and experimentation equipped with the tools you need to create a richer digital experience for your customers — fast. With embedded AI and automation, this platform can help you achieve omnichannel personalization and revolutionize your brand and product experiences.

5 Real-life examples of scarcity and urgency tactics used to increase conversions

Now that we’ve covered the best practices in scarcity marketing and urgency marketing tactics, let’s see some real-life examples.

Booking.com

Booking.com does an outstanding job of triggering a sense of urgency among its visitors. In the image below, you can see that they indicate how many times a given hotel was booked in a 12 or 24-hour period.

On top of that, they use messaging to enhance this sense of urgency such as: “Don’t Miss This” or “In High Demand!”

Using scarcity methods, Booking.com can boost internal competition in order to provide a superior service to its customers.

OnePlus

OnePlus is a smartphone company that became popular in a matter of months by playing solely on the scarcity tactic. They created a smartphone that you could only buy if you were invited.

It was impossible to buy this smartphone from any store and you could only order it directly from their website.

By creating a sense of exclusivity, OnePlus triggered a massive fear-of-missing-out effect that spread within the tech-savvy community.

Their daring marketing campaign was mostly based on the scarcity principle and led to a massive 1M unit sales and 25 million visits to their website.

Sushi Shop

In the food delivery industry, avoiding late deliveries is a tremendous challenge, considering that the average worker only dedicates half an hour for lunch breaks.

Marketers at SushiShop (a French leader in sushi delivery) wanted to test an urgency marketing tactic to see if it could yield any positive results.

Having this in mind, AB Tasty helped the brand introduce a stress marketing tactic based on the urgency principle.

In order to do so, we implemented a sticky banner at lunchtime on their mobile app to urge customers to pre-order. The idea was that they could pre-order to guarantee a satisfying delivery time and avoid late deliveries.

The results were very positive. They saw a 3% increase in cart order confirmations.

Amazon

As the largest e-commerce company in the world, Amazon is an obvious choice when it comes to scarcity and urgency examples.

On top of their nearly perfect product pages and listing pages, Amazon also has a “Today’s Deals” section where limited offers are displayed.

Their product listing cleverly displays your savings in order to highlight the price difference.

Furthermore, some products come in a limited quantity: Amazon uses this scarcity method to display the remaining stock.

In this case, 33% have already been claimed.

Using this strategy, Amazon manages to create a real sense of scarcity and urgency while not being too pushy in the process.

Basecamp

Basecamp is a famous communication and project management software known for making teams’ lives easier.

Besides its fancy visual identity, this company uses clever urgency tactics to make you feel like you’re missing out on something if you don’t use Basecamp.

By quoting real numbers from clients’ statistics, Basecamp clearly illustrates the benefits of using their product.

They even mention how many businesses have signed up in the last week.

On its “Real Results” page, Basecamp displays a huge number of customer reviews. Seeing all of these reviews could make you feel like the whole planet is using it, and that’s exactly what they want: The end goal is to trigger your FOMO.

Benefits of scarcity and urgency marketing tactics

In the hypercompetitive marketplace today, brands need to focus on winning customer attention in order to increase conversions.

Scarcity and urgency marketing are two very important approaches that can help increase the conversions that you’re after, gather new leads and close more deals. Just remember to apply urgency and scarcity responsibly – you don’t want your visitors to lose trust in your company.

These tactics can help you avoid the overuse of pushy advertisements on your website but still add light pressure on visitors to complete their purchases.

Encourage your visitors by using some of the urgency or scarcity tactics highlighted in the article above to see your conversion rate skyrocket.

The post 5 Clever Scarcity and Urgency Examples to Boost Your Conversions appeared first on abtasty.

Forget about Blue Monday, this webinar is designed for you to remember the reason why you got into CX in the first place. Let’s focus on the fundamentals of CX and what makes a digital experience memorable and meaningful.

In partnership with Contentsquare we will be discussing:

• How to identify friction and bad user experiences on your site
• Create real empathy with your audience by understanding their needs and frustrations
• How to move quicker and faster in order to improve the customer experience on your site
• Testing, optimization, personalization, customer discovery journey  – all the ways you can delight your customers!
• Real-life practical examples from our customers

Find out how to optimize your site, quickly and efficiently, based on data in order to make memorable user experiences that will drive customer lifetime value and brand loyalty.

Save your seat below!

The post Learning to Delight Customers With Meaningful CX appeared first on abtasty.

However, investment in product development and targeted marketing is even more important during times of economic uncertainty. In this fireside chat, our panel will discuss the following topics within the context of today’s economy.

• Understanding Your Customers’ Entire Journey.
  Get a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior by analyzing unified data from across the customer lifecycle, including website, mobile, email, and more.
• Powering Personalized Customer Experiences.
  Deliver unified, targeted customer experiences across every channel to drive more efficient acquisition and effective retention.
• Making Better Product Decisions.
  Identify areas of drop-off and conversion so you can prioritize marketing efforts and product features that drive user engagement and retention.
• Promoting a Data-Informed Organization.
  Empower your entire team by democratizing access to data with easy-to-use, self-serve analytics on top of unified customer datasets.

The post Future-Proof Your Business with Innovation appeared first on abtasty.