What is Online Merchandising?

Online merchandising is the art of strategically organizing, showcasing, and promoting products on your e-commerce site to maximize engagement and conversions. Think of it as combining the precision of data analytics with the creativity of visual storytelling. Whether it’s through well-optimized product pages, eye-catching images, or personalized recommendations, the goal is the same: making shopping intuitive and enjoyable. 

The Rise of Mobile-First Merchandising 

Mobile is king in e-commerce. Have you ever noticed that smartphones seem to be glued to our hands? You’re not alone. According to Statista, over 54% of global website traffic now comes from mobile devices. For e-commerce, this means a mobile-first approach is non-negotiable.

How to master mobile merchandising:

1. Responsive Design: Online shopping is no longer linear. You have to ensure that your site is responsive across devices for a smoother shopping experience. This means making sure your design is responsive on desktop, mobile, and tablets. 
2. More speed = more spending: According to Deloitte, a mere 0.1s change in loading time can improve the customer journey and improve conversion rates. It’s time to start minimizing code, optimizing images, and reducing redirects to speed up your mobile performance. 
3. Streamlined Filters: Simplify searches with easy-to-use filters that don’t feel overwhelming on a smaller screen. 
4. Mobile-Friendly CTAs and Buttons: On desktops, consumers click. On mobile, visitors tap with their fingers. A CTA (or any button) that’s too small can lead visitors to click on the wrong icon and derail their user journey. The CTA should be an optimal size (around 44×44 pixels) to avoid frustration. 
5. Make your words worth it: With the constraints of a smaller screen, you may need to adapt your copy. Something as simple as changing your CTA button from “Contact Customer Service” to “Contact Us” can have a big impact.

Pro Tip: Dive further into mobile-first merchandising with our Smartphone Survival Guide to see how mobile impacts consumer behavior and how you can optimize your user experience to boost conversions.

Merchandising During Sales Periods

Sales periods like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Singles Day, Valentine’s Day, or other seasonal events are more than just discounts galore – they’re an opportunity to drive traffic to your website, clear inventory, and welcome new visitors. 

How to maximize impact during sales

• Curate Themed Landing Pages: Think “Gifts Under $25” or “Holiday Must-Haves.” Tailored pages simplify the shopping journey and give customers exactly what they’re looking for while saving them time browsing. 
• Urgency Tactics: Phrases like “Limited Stock” or “24-Hour Sale” pressure visitors to buy quicker by creating a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out).
• Bundle Deals: Push more products in your inventory by highlighting bundles. Grouping products into bundles with a “frequently bought together” algorithm increases the average order value while offering perceived savings.

These strategies not only boost sales but also make your customers feel like they’ve struck gold on your website by finding just what they’re looking for.

The Power of Personalized Product Recommendations

Ever added a pair of shoes to your cart and instantly been tempted by a matching belt? That’s cross-selling at work. Personalized recommendations, when done right, are like having a helpful salesperson who’s available 24/7 to help you find what you need. So, how do you implement recommendations? 

Implementing Recommendations:

• Use AI to Analyze Behavior: With experience optimization platforms like AB Tasty, you can implement personalized recommendations by using their AI-powered recommendation engine to predict and personalize what visitors might like based on past activity. 
• Offer Related Products: When visitors start browsing different products, you can show complementary items to help your customers have the most complete purchase. Selling skincare? Why not recommend helpful products to help your visitors “complete their nighttime routine.”
• Personalize Email Follow-ups: Abandoned carts? Send a friendly nudge with personalized email recommendations to remind your customers what’s waiting in their basket.

Want to see the results of recommendations in action? Check out Alltricks’s success story where they saw a +5% in average order value or Jacadi earning +13% more revenue per user with AB Tasty’s recommendations and merchandising solution.

Optimizing Product Pages for Search Engines

Your product pages are like magnets for customers – if they’re SEO-optimized. According to AB Tasty’s E-commerce Consumer Trends Report, nearly half of online experiences begin with a search engine. By improving your SEO and therefore visibility, you’ll make it easier for shoppers to find you. 

Must-Have SEO Features: 

1. Targeted Keywords: The more details – the better. It’s always best to use longer, search-friendly terms like “women’s waterproof hiking boots” rather than generic ones like “boots.” 
2. Enticing Meta Descriptions: In addition to a descriptive title, the meta description is your one opportunity to communicate key information about your product with a short, clickable summary to draw in potential buyers.
3. Alt text for images: Not only does alt text help you meet accessibility standards, but it also improves your chances of showing up in Google Image results.
4. Detailed Product Descriptions: write descriptions that are informative and keyword-rich while avoiding keyword stuffing.

Leveraging Customer Reviews and Returns Data

Did you know that the majority of consumers read reviews before buying? In fact, Gen Z considers reviews to be the most important thing to consider before making a purchase (source). Reviews help build trust and provide social proof which helps undecided shoppers feel more confident in their purchases.

Ways to Leverage Reviews:

• Spotlight success stories: We all love a zero-to-hero story! Highlight top-rated reviews directly on product pages to give confidence to your potential buyers.
• Encourage feedback: Be proactive in building reviews for your e-commerce site by sending a post-purchase email asking for reviews (bonus tip: offer a small discount or loyalty points as an incentive).
• Feature photos: Take your reviews a step further by encouraging your buyers to upload user-generated images of your products in real life to help build trust.

Turn returns into opportunities

Returns aren’t the end of the world, they’re learning opportunities. Analyze return trends to identify products, flaws, sizing issues, or misleading descriptions. Then, tweak your strategy accordingly to reduce future returns. 

Conclusion:

Online merchandising is where creativity meets strategy. By embracing mobile-first designs, leveraging AI, optimizing for SEO, and personalizing the shopping experience, you can turn casual browsers into loyal customers. In today’s competitive e-commerce world, standing out isn’t optional – it’s essential. 

With these best practices, you’re not just selling products, you’re creating an experience worth remembering.

FAQs: Online Merchandising

1. What is online merchandising, and why is it important?

Online merchandising is the process of strategically presenting products on your website to boost sales and engagement. It’s vital because it directly impacts the customer experience and your bottom line.

2. How does mobile-first design impact online merchandising?

A mobile-friendly site ensures a seamless experience for the majority of shoppers, who browse and buy via smartphones. This boosts conversions and reduces bounce rates.

3. How can I optimize my product pages for better visibility?

Use targeted keywords, detailed descriptions, high-quality images, and SEO-friendly meta tags to improve both search rankings and user engagement.

4. Why are customer reviews crucial for online sales?

Reviews provide social proof, build trust, and influence purchasing decisions. Highlighting reviews can significantly boost conversions.

5. What tools can help with AI-driven merchandising? 

Platforms like AB Tasty offer advanced AI features to personalize recommendations and enhance the overall online shopping experience.

The post Online Merchandising: Mastering Best Practices appeared first on abtasty.

Ulta Beauty has been a visionary since day one, striving to celebrate the role of beauty in our lives. The largest beauty retailer in the United States, Ulta Beauty is the premier beauty destination for cosmetics, fragrances, skincare products, hair care products, and salon services.

With core values such as Win Together, Improve Always, and Give Wow Experiences, a part of the company’s digital transformation, Ulta Beauty embraced digital experience optimization as a way to deliver on their vision: To be the most loved beauty destination among guests and the most admired
retailer by Ulta Beauty associates, communities, partners, and investors. Ulta Beauty turned to AB Tasty to enhance the retailer’s digital presence by reimagining its Digital Store. The Digital Optimization team, or DOT for short, a dynamic group within Ulta Beauty’s Digital Experience team, was tasked with building and evangelizing an experimentation culture and driving strategic optimization through data-driven insights.

Tasked with improving the overall guest experience
through optimization, DOT outlined four focus areas to
help guide their efforts.

1. Conversion: Focused on reducing friction to capitalize on guest demand to drive increased revenue for digital business.
2. Personalization: Focused on driving an enhanced one-to-one experience for our guests while driving engagement and loyalty.
3. Guided Discovery: Focused on providing our guests with experiences that empower the ability to browse, learn, and experience new brands, categories, products & services.
4. Omnichannel: Focused on experiences that combine digital and physical guest experiences and built upon strong cross-functional partnerships.

Why Ulta Beauty Chose AB Tasty for Their Experimentation Needs

The Digital Store of the Future initiative necessitated a shift towards a more data-informed approach to inform the redesign and drive innovation. Ulta Beauty sought a solution that would enable them to be more agile, move faster, and gain valuable insights from experimentation to meet their business goals.

Upon implementing AB Tasty’s platform, the Digital Optimization team conducted innovative tests aligned with their product roadmap and business objectives. They leveraged features such as the social proof widget to create urgency and ran numerous experiments to continuously optimize the guest experience.

“We just love that willingness to partner with us to build out features that help us do our jobs more seamlessly. That’s a huge differentiator from what we were getting from our previous solution. We’ve been able to set up experiments with six variations and multi-armed bandit tests incredibly quickly – with minimal developer support – which has drastically improved our team’s agility,” added Sasha Ostrozovich, User Experience Optimization Manager at Ulta Beauty.

Results and Benefits

The collaboration with AB Tasty yielded significant results, including notable e-commerce growth and a substantial increase in the number of tests conducted from 20 tests per year to over 65 tests per year, with plans to continue increasing that metric. Ulta Beauty’s ability to gain insights for the redesign and reduce developer dependency was a key benefit of the company’s partnership with AB Tasty. With an eye on driving revenue metrics, the team tested an overlay that included product recommendations when guests added items to their carts.

Original:

Variation:

With the addition of the overlay, Ulta Beauty was able to showcase products that were most relevant to the guest which resulted in a revenue increase of 9% alongside a 15.1% increase in clicks on “add to bag.” Overall the test listed metrics across the board, with a 2.3% conversion rate uplift, a 4.7% increase in items per order, and an increase of 11.5% for bag views.

Not only do the Digital Optimization team’s tests improve business-level performance metrics such as revenue, but they also lend further insight into Ulta Beauty’s guests. These tests prove that the effective use of personalization and recommendations can have significant impacts on the guest experience and help quickly drive results for the business.

Jeff Hamm, Ulta Beauty’s Vice President of Digital Experience and Operations, noted, “2023 marked a phenomenal milestone in our digital transformation. We have a brand new refreshed look and feel, completely overhauled cart, checkout, and guest account features. Not to mention a scalable infrastructure for our future. We’re almost at the finish line, setting the stage for a future filled with growth and innovation. “The transformation has laid a strong foundation, enabling us to scale and enhance our guest experiences. AB Tasty has played a critical role in this transformation, helping our team innovate and validate at a quicker pace with less risk.”

With a heavy focus on innovation, Ulta Beauty has experienced immense digital growth. In a time when guest loyalty is increasingly difficult to secure, Ulta Beauty’s loyalty program grew by 8%, with more than 95% of sales occurring through the loyalty program. Additionally, the work that the team has put into the mobile experience has paid off manifold: over 50% of e-commerce sales occur on Ulta Beauty’s mobile app.

Future Plans

Looking ahead, Ulta Beauty is committed to continuing its experimentation efforts, building a robust personalization strategy, and optimizing the Digital Store to further enhance the guest experience. To achieve this, the team has identified five areas of focus for their testing program.

1. Streamline the checkout process and optimize landing pages to further improve conversion rates.
2. Continue to leverage data and analytics to offer personalized product recommendations and content to build on the guest experience.
3. Prioritize site speed and app performance to
   ensure a positive guest experience.
4. Focus on guided discovery through enhanced site search, contextual search, and AI-driven beauty consultations to better facilitate product discovery and decision-making.
5. Expand options for buy online pickup in-store (BOPIS) and leverage flexible fulfillment means like buy anywhere fulfill anywhere (BaFa).

The post Ulta Beauty’s Palette for Innovation Starts with Experimentation appeared first on abtasty.

Mademoiselle Bio, a leader in French organic cosmetics, partnered with AB Tasty to tackle the challenges of rising acquisition costs and the shift away from cookie-based personalization.

By implementing AB Tasty’s cookie-free personalization technology, the brand transformed its online shopping experience, leading to a 9.2% increase in sales, a 1.9% boost in conversions, and a 6.5% rise in average basket value.

Personalized product recommendations and intelligent e-merchandising helped guide customers through their shopping journeys, delivering tailored experiences that significantly enhanced engagement.

This successful project highlights how Mademoiselle Bio brought the personalized touch of in-store shopping to its online experience, creating a smoother and more intuitive journey for customers.

By tailoring product recommendations at every stage of the customer journey, Mademoiselle Bio not only boosts customer satisfaction but also builds stronger loyalty and increases sales.

Download the full case study to discover how Mademoiselle Bio maximized revenue and adapted to the evolving digital landscape without relying on cookies.

The post The Impact of Cookie-Free UX Personalization in E-commerce: Mademoiselle Bio appeared first on abtasty.

To capture consumers’ attention, brands need to focus their attention on crafting unique user experiences to deliver 1:1 personalization based on data.

One of the most important focal points to convert visitors into customers and build customer loyalty is 1:1 personalization. More and more customers feel less motivated to complete a transaction when they’re online shopping if their experience is impersonal. Let’s take a look at some data from Forbes:

• 80% of consumers are more likely to complete an online purchase with brands that offer personalized customer experiences.
• 72% of consumers explain that they only interact with personalized messaging.
• 66% of consumers share that coming across content that isn’t personalized would deter them from purchasing.

Customers want personalization. Think about when you walk into a physical store and an employee really listens to your needs, helps you find exactly what you’re looking for, or goes above and beyond your expectations to help you. That is exactly what customers want in the digital marketplace.

A unique, digital one-to-one personalization experience strategy gives companies the potential to customize messages, offers, and other experiences to each website visitor based on data collected about each user.

Digital one-to-one personalization starts with concrete data. Are you leveraging data to better serve and convert your visitors?

To help you answer “yes” to this question, we’ll take a deeper look at:

• What is 1:1 personalization?
• What data helps you know your customers better?
• How to find data?
• How to leverage the data you find 
• What messages should you personalize?
• Examples of one-to-one personalization

What is one-to-one personalization in marketing?

Delivering a unique (or one-to-one) experience to each online consumer is a technique known as one-to-one personalization in marketing.

By mastering the technique of 1:1 personalization, brands can deliver an exceptional level of customer service by providing personalized messages, product recommendations, offers, and specialized content at the right time based on the user’s needs and expectations.

This type of unique user experience is only made possible thanks to the availability of extensive customer data. If you don’t get to know your customers based on their interactions with your brand and user behavior, you’re missing an opportunity to meet your customers’ expectations.

One goal of personalization is to create a “wow” effect. This means you should be making the customer think, “wow, they really know me.” The more information that a company knows about a certain customer, the more personalized the user experience will be.

Without extensive, personalized data, one-to-one personalization isn’t achievable.

What data to collect to improve your customer experience with personalization?

On a wider scale, it’s important to understand the location of your customer, their demographic information (age, gender, education level), purchasing habits, and website browsing information. However, in the hypercompetitive world of personalization, this surface-level data is not enough.

Brands need to move beyond knowing who the customer is and understand how the customer behaves.

Knowing that your customer is a recent college graduate who lives in New York City and spends a lot of time making Pinterest boards will not be enough information to create a strong buyer persona to achieve a unique and pleasant user experience.

Enhancing your customer’s profile will require you to collect relevant data about how your customer interacts with your brand on all channels, what motivates them to purchase, and what makes them tick on top of knowing who they are.

More specifically, robust personalized data will help you better understand:

• Location and demographics
• Interests and hobbies
• Shopping and purchasing habits
• Device and channel frequency
• Where and how they prefer to shop and purchase
• Satisfaction level
• Likes and dislikes

All of this information will allow you to create a sophisticated customer profile. Understanding their motivations, preferences, and expectations helps you characterize users into intricate market segmentations to give them the best possible experience imaginable.

Ideally, the customer will have a positive experience and feel unique based on the information derived from the robust data collection.

How do you find user data?

Extensive data can be found and refined by cross-indexing information stored on separate databases.

For example, you can harvest personalized data from a customer’s interactions with your business by analyzing and storing comments on social media sites, ratings on review sites, mobile app usage vs. desktop usage, customer service interactions, download requests, and more.

How to leverage one-to-one personalization with personalized data

As you can see, personalization cannot exist without data. To achieve one-to-one personalization on your digital channels, your brand must have the ability to transform the collected data into action.

After monitoring and gathering rich data on your customer’s interactions, history, and behavior on your site, it’s time to convert this personalized data into a refined customer buyer persona to serve your customers better.

By segmenting your profiles, you will be able to better understand your customer’s preferences and pain points, which will help you craft these personalized messages and display them at the right time.

How to personalize interactions with customers:

Once you have substantial personalized data collected about your visitors, you can determine the best way to interact with them. There is a fine line between being helpful by displaying personalized messages and being invasive.

The difference in these two feelings will depend on the amount of prior engagement that the customer has with you. For example, a customer who is subscribed to every newsletter has a company discount card and frequently completes transactions on your website will expect you to know their preferences fairly well, like a regular coming into a coffee shop. On the other hand, a first-time visitor will not expect you to know much about them, but they will expect to be welcomed.

The best way to understand how to serve your customers is by asking yourself how you would want to be interacted with at their level of engagement with your brand. What would make you feel welcomed and what would make you feel overwhelmed or uneasy?

What messages should you personalize?

The possibilities for personalized messages can stretch as far as your mind (or your software capabilities) will allow.

Think about personalization in a broad sense. Let’s say a company wants to put its logo onto personalized gifts for its employees. The company’s logo can be put onto t-shirts, pens, stickers, coffee mugs, phone cases, backpacks, sunglasses, golf balls, holiday baskets– the possibilities are nearly endless. The same goes for personalized messages for your own customers.

In marketing communication, some of the most common outlets for 1:1 personalization are:

• Product recommendations
• Emails (subject lines and content)
• Intro and exit banners
• Pop-up messages
• Conversational marketing (chat boxes)
• Offers and discounts
• Language
• Landing pages
• Pricing
• Greetings

To attract and retain your customer’s attention in a market filled with saturated messages, your brand should focus on personalization as much as possible and in as many channels as you can.

What platform to use for one-to-one personalization in marketing?

The journey to a seamless one-to-one personalization, or one-to-one marketing, experience for your customers starts with sophisticated and intuitive software to help transform your ideas into reality.

AB Tasty is the complete platform for experimentation and personalization 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.

What is omnichannel personalization?

In marketing, employing one-to-one personalization across multiple channels, platforms, and touchpoints is commonly referred to as omnichannel personalization.

Customers crave personalization wherever they are – on a mobile device, desktop, social media platform, mobile app, or email. When customers receive a personalized experience, they expect this standard of communication across all channels or platforms that they are interacting with.

Achieving omnichannel personalization requires a seamless flow of customer data from one platform or channel to the next. By gathering information on user preferences, behavior, and interests from all virtual touchpoints, your customer’s profile strengthens.

By receiving this consistent level of personalization across all channels, consumers will be inclined to purchase more and to purchase again from the same brand that made them feel seen and heard.

What are the advantages of omnichannel personalization?

1. Higher conversion rates
2. Increased average order value (AOV)
3. Reduced cart abandonment
4. Improved brand value and customer loyalty
5. Higher customer lifetime value
6. Delivering messages at the right time and place

8 Examples of 1-1 Personalization strategies from retail brands

1. ASOS’s Social Connection

Online retailer ASOS prides itself on offering both new and existing customers a range of personalized discounts and deals, which vary depending on if:

• It’s a new customer 
• It’s a returning customer that’s demonstrated a particular interest (e.g. shoes)
• A regular customer (who could then be offered premium next-day delivery, for example)

But how does ASOS get this information? One method they might use is encouraging customers to log in to the site using social media platforms, which would allow ASOS to access further details such as age, gender, and location—which can then be used to tailor even more personalized messages.

Why it works: The ability to use a social platform for account creation makes the process simple for shoppers, while giving ASOS more insight into what deals or promotions would be of the most interest to them.

2. Nordstrom Remembers Your Size

Nordstrom gave its online shopping cart a simple yet effective personal touch: remembering returning customers’ clothing sizes. This may not seem like a massive approach to deliver a personal experience, but it creates a more seamless checkout for the user and brings them one step closer to the purchase. It’s a rather clever move from Nordstrom that hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Why it works: Remembering the customers’ preferred size (based on previous purchases) instantly shows the brand’s attentiveness while making checkout even more simple.

3. Clarins personalization and gamification

Before the booming holiday season, Clarins, a multinational cosmetics company, saw an 89% increase in their conversion rate and a 145% increase in the add-to-basket metric by implementing 1:1 personalization and gamification with AB Tasty.

On Single’s Day, a few weeks before Black Friday, Clarins saw a perfect opportunity to experiment and learn culture by implementing a “Wheel of Fortune” concept in certain countries. The gamification gifts were personalized according to each country’s local culture. Any visitor arriving at their website would play the digital game, spin the wheel, and receive a gift automatically in their inbox. This ease of automatic implementation was a great user experience, especially for mobile visitors.

Read the full story here: How Clarins Uses AB Tasty for Personalization and Retention

4. Amazon’s ‘Recommended For You’ Approach

Amazon is no stranger to personalization marketing. In fact, it could be argued they were the first major e-commerce retailer to really put personalization into action. The company has become known for its product recommendation emails and personalized homepages for logged-in customers. Using their own algorithm, A9, Amazon goes above and beyond to first understand customers’ buying habits and then deliver an experience that’s been deliberately designed for relevance. 

Why it works: Customers feel valued and understood by the retailer when seeing emails and recommended “picks” that are tailored to their interests. Consistency also plays a part in Amazon’s approach, as they continue to deliver an even more granular personalized approach for customers.

5. Nike and Their Customized Approach

Nike always goes the extra mile to personalize the shopping experience, as we’ve seen with their SNKRs app that allows premium (loyalty, Nike+ shoppers) access to a large catalog of products that they can then customize. It’s the perfect way to cement customer loyalty by offering them the unique opportunity to tailor items to their exact liking.

Why it works: By giving customers a certain degree of autonomy with design, Nike is giving customers the freedom to express their individuality, even while the company continues to produce the same style of shoe around the world. Despite being a huge brand, Nike has created a great loyalty program that engages customers and stokes their excitement about buying Nike products.

6. Net-A-Porter’s Personalized Touch

Luxury online retailer Net-A-Porter has adopted the ‘recommended for you’ approach but with a unique twist to appeal to its high-end customers who want a more premium service when they shop. The company gives away freebie products to customers based on previous purchases, adding a personal touch to an otherwise standard online shopping experience. This is not unlike Amazon’s recommended emails, except Net-A-Porter customers receive a physical product — and who doesn’t like a gift!

Why it works: These gifts show the appreciation Net-A-Porter has for its customers and help to bring the luxury shopping experience online.

7. Coca-Cola’s Name Campaign

In 2011, Coca-Cola launched its Share a Coke campaign in Australia, printing thousands of names on their diet and original soft drinks. This simple yet effective campaign made sales skyrocket, supporting the notion that consumers engage with brands that address them by their first name (albeit in a rather broad sense!) Personalized bottles became all the rage, with people trying to find their own names along with those of their friends and family members. The campaign was globally recognized and started the ball rolling for other brands such as Marmite, which also saw great success with a naming campaign.

Why it works: Is it the simple notion of vanity that makes these name campaigns so popular? Consumers love to see their own names on popular products, making them almost ‘gimmicky’ with a collectible edge that makes people feel special!

8. Target’s Guest ID

The US retail giant Target decided to up its personalized campaign game by assigning each customer a guest identification number on their first interaction with the brand. Target then used the data to obtain customer details like buying behavior and even job history! Target used personalized data to understand the consumer habits of its customers and to create a view of their individual lifestyles. Target focused particularly on customers who also had a baby registry with them and even used their marketing data to make ‘pregnancy predictability scores’ for customers who were browsing particular items!

Why it works: Arguably, delivering a personalized experience for every customer visiting a physical store is a tough job for any retailer. By assigning a ‘guest ID’, Target was able to understand buying behaviors and patterns from their customers in-store and use the information to make suggestions on products they may be interested in.

Everyone wins with one-to-one personalization

The data you collect equally benefits your brand and your customers. By understanding what your customers are looking for, you save them time by providing them with informed recommendations, personalized messages, and unique experiences to solve their pain points.

Without proper data collection or genuine segmentation, it’s nearly impossible to provide users with a 1:1 personalized experience. Loyal customers want to feel like their brand really knows them and what they’re looking for. Achieve one-to-one personalized experiences by correctly analyzing and leveraging personalized data. If you’re looking to serve your customers, increase sales, and build brand loyalty at the same time, you’ve found your blueprint with personalization.

The post What is One-to-One Personalization in Marketing? (With 8 Examples) appeared first on abtasty.

In 2022, Patyka undertook a digital acceleration project, focusing on optimizing their user experience to increase conversions and sales. By implementing AB Tasty’s intelligent e-merchandising, personalized product recommendations, and automated features like “recently viewed products” and “abandoned cart recovery,” Patyka significantly improved the relevance and fluidity of its customer journey.

The results were impressive—13% of visitors exposed to product recommendations used them, and users of the “recently viewed” products feature spent twice as much as others. Additionally, the automation of manual tasks freed up valuable time for Patyka’s teams to focus on high-value projects, further enhancing brand image and customer satisfaction.

Download the full case study now to learn how AB Tasty can help your brand achieve similar success.

The post Patyka Boosts Conversions and Enhances UX with AB Tasty appeared first on abtasty.

In this webinar, Tula Skincare, the renowned probiotic skincare brand, outline the challenges they face in getting data-driven personalization and customer engagement.

We explore how to access first-party data, including implicit and explicit data, to enhance the customer experience.

We share strategies on how to make customers feel valued and rewarded for sharing their information. How to do that while creating a seamless customer journey. Fun ways you can engage with your audience. Lastly, get insights into the collaborative teams and processes necessary to be able to test and experiment in these areas!

Webinar Highlights:

• Accessing first-party data: Implicit and explicit insights
• Engaging through interactive quizzes: Tula’s success story
• Seamless data collection: Adding value without interruption

The post Mastering Customer Engagement with Tula appeared first on abtasty.

Now Cynthia Bevilacqua, who leads EMEA
e-commerce CRO & digital product roadmaps,
wants to harness it.

• 6 Markets Testing
• 11 tests per month
• 1 Year WIth AB Tasty

When it comes to the beauty industry, competition is fierce. New brands pop up every day and that means legacy brands need to evolve or risk getting left on the shelf.

With a company philosophy rooted in the artful blend between beauty and science, Shiseido has fully embraced digital transformation in pursuit of being the leader in the data-driven beauty industry.

Today, the company works with AB Tasty to optimize e-commerce experiences for brand Shiseido and NARS in the EMEA region. Just one year into the partnership, Shiseido is now actively running around 11 tests per month across six markets.

But it wasn’t always like this.

At the start of 2022, Shiseido wanted to transform their existing but constricted experimentation strategy into an intuitive and scalable optimization program. The product team was eager to reach a new level of A/B testing capabilities as well as better optimize the time and resources spent on implementation and execution.

Cynthia Bevilacqua, digital product and user experience manager at Shiseido, knew it was time for a change. “This was March 2022, so the CRO mindset was new. We were doing some A/B tests, but it was limited to three or four tests in one year,” she recalls. “Up until this point, optimization was not a core focus. And I really wanted to change that.”

Place alternative payment options closer to “add to cart”

Offering payment installments is one way to motivate users to add more items to their cart. Even if a user doesn’t take advantage of the offer, having the option helps alleviate hesitancy around pricing.

The team at Shiseido wondered whether moving the Klarna payment copy block closer to the “add to cart” CTA could improve the click rate. With an A/B test targeted to the NARS and brand Shiseido UK markets, the team tested placing the price, Klarna copy and CTA closer together.

This small layout change led to a massive improvement with 129% increased clicks on “add to cart” for mobile and 159% for desktop.

ORIGINAL / VARIATION

Mobile

• 129% increased clicks on “add to cart”
• 24% increased clicks across all payment options

Desktop

• 159% increased clicks on “add to cart”
• 72% increased clicks across all payment options

New partner. New mindset.

A large global footprint requires a lot of cross-team collaboration. From their vantage point within the regional division, Cynthia’s team fields incoming requests from their local markets while also balancing strategic brand ideas from the global HQ in Tokyo.

With oversight on A/B testing and CRO strategies for the Shiseido EMEA region, Cynthia’s next hurdle would be setting a strategy for experimentation across each of the region’s unique markets. More frequent testing enabled by AB Tasty meant simply replicating any test in a new country wouldn’t cut it if they wanted to grow strategically.

“When we made the switch to AB Tasty, we wanted a partner who could help us with specialized testing in each market. We knew a one-size-fits-all did not work for our brand. You cannot say that because a test works well in the UK, that it will equally be successful in France or Germany because the consumer behavior can be quite different across each market.”

To sift through the prioritization of rolling out tests to new regions, Cynthia leveraged AB Tasty’s testing capabilities to implement internal processes. First, evaluating hypotheses through testing and data. Then, successful tests are added to the development roadmap, while the learnings from unsuccessful ones are shared with regional stakeholders and a new round of iterations starts.

“This process helps us ensure that we are not wasting valuable resources and bandwidth. AB Tasty not only enables us to quickly validate the hypothesis with data, but they also help us to say ‘no’ to a request because the data shows it’s not beneficial to the end customers.”

“AB Tasty not only enables us to quickly validate the hypothesis with data, but they also help us to say ‘no’ to a request because the data shows it’s not beneficial to the end customers.”

Cynthia Bevilacqua
Digital product and user experience manager at Shiseido

Boost engagement with a higher visibility virtual try-on CTA

Shiseido collected insights that showed customers who interacted with a feature during their decision-making process had a tendency to convert.

Focusing on the French market, the team set up a variation giving the virtual try-on CTA a complete makeover. A small image, camera icon and brighter button color helped increase the CTA’s visibility on the product page.

Compared to the original CTA (which saw an average of 10% click rate), the revamped virtual try-on button saw a whopping 95% increase in clicks. “Add to cart” clicks also increased by 73% for those who used the feature.

ORIGINAL / VARIATION

• 95% clicks on virtual try-on
• 73% clicks on “add to cart” for virtual try-on users
• 16% overall clicks on “add to cart”
• 61% in transaction rate

Celebrating a culture of experimentation

After a year of working with AB Tasty, the team at Shiseido is thrilled by the tangible results and internal adoption of a CRO mindset. Since moving from four tests per year to over 10 tests per month with AB Tasty, Shiseido has significantly improved the customer experience. The success from 2022’s experimentation rollout resulted in an opportunity for Cynthia to grow the expertise of her team notably on strategic decision-making and roadmap management.

“The partnership we have with AB Tasty’s customer success team is great because we strategize together about our objectives. They feed us different ideas for testing and understand what’s working from other clients. It is fuel to get us thinking about our roadmap and what we should try to implement next.”

The experimentation mindset also fits perfectly into Shiseido’s desire to be a key player within data-driven beauty companies. With stakeholders invested in the testing mindset, Cynthia’s team is empowered to continue putting ideas to the test first before rolling them into a development roadmap.

“The test-and-learn approach is important to have because it’s not about what you think. ‘I think’ is not something we can use. We need data to tell that story,” Cynthia explains. “And now, this is our new reality with AB Tasty.”

WINNING TOGETHER
5 tips for operational excellence

It’s not easy (or practical) to tell someone their opinion is wrong. That’s why Cynthia Bevilacqua, digital product and user experience manager at Shiseido, advocates for using experience optimization platforms like AB Tasty to deliver data-driven decision-making from individual team members all the way up to stakeholders. It’s essential to sustainable growth.

Here are five tips to optimize team operations:

• Monthly team meetings for individual tests and results
• Quarterly stakeholder meetings for KPI deep dives and macro-insights
• Clear KPIs and tracking dashboard
• Gradual data-backed rollout to other relevant teams
• Business performance or customer pain points at the center of every test

Deepening the partnership with AB Tasty

One learning that Cynthia’s team is incorporating into their 2023 strategy is giving tests more room to breathe in order to collect better data. Launching fewer tests and running them for a longer duration of six weeks with a minimum detectable effect (MDE) calculation allows the team to gather accurate data to inform the actions for the next iteration.

Entering year two of the partnership with AB Tasty, Cynthia is looking to unlock the next level of experience optimization by expanding the solution to Shiseido’s other EMEA brands. For Shiseido’s mature markets, the team plans to introduce personalization campaigns and build more mature testing. And by encouraging digital to local market teams to incorporate experimentation and the testing-first mindset, Cynthia is further driving Shiseido’s data-driven beauty company vision.

“Initially, we were focused on setting up the team for success through processes and an embedded CRO strategy. Now, we’re ready to accelerate with AB Tasty by using the data intelligence from the past year to drive our global experimentation program,” Cynthia says. “We won’t test just anything — we need to always make sure our tests are addressing a user pain point.”

Download PDF

The post Shiseido revitalizes experience optimization strategy with AB Tasty appeared first on abtasty.

Clarins uses testing and experimentation for all feature or product launches on their site. Learn how it informs their work and how they measure impact with AB Tasty.

Clarins is the number one global company for premium skincare and beauty products with a commitment to responsible beauty and an entrepreneurial spirit that informs everything they do. Their vision is to promote well-being and cosmetics for all women.

With over 150 markets around the world, the UK market is one of the strongest performers so we popped over to the Clarins UK office to speak with Roisin O’Brien, e-commerce trading manager, and Alejandra Salazar, e-commerce content manager, on their experimentation strategy.

Both Roisin and Alejandra use testing and experimentation as part of their everyday work. Their priority is to create the best experience that they can for their users. Data gathered from testing is analyzed to help them better optimize and personalize the customer experience.

The Importance of Continually Testing and Experimenting for Clarins UK

For Clarins, experimentation is woven into the fabric of the company. With the help of AB Tasty, their global team has enabled the company to become a leader in digital transformation, launching e-shops around the world and ensuring a consistent brand experience online and offline.

Clarins only pushes out significant features or products online once they have done testing first. As Alejandra describes it, “For us, backing up all experimentation with data is very important. The importance is that customers find products and what they need on the website, rather than complicating their journey.”

For us, backing up all experimentation with data is very important. The importance is that customers find products and what they need on the website, rather than complicating their journey.

Alejandra Salazar
E-commerce Content Manager

In order to drive that experience, both in-store and online, experimentation and optimization are key to how they continuously improve. Experimentation enables them to try out new ideas, improve the customer journey as well as reach their commercial targets.

We wouldn’t be able to drive the numbers that we do without being able to test the experiences that we offer. We always run tests on new promotions and offers to make sure that we’re delivering a great customer experience as well as ensuring the commercial priorities of the website 

Roisin O’Brien E-Commerce Trading Manager

Two variants that allowed the Clarins UK to effectively promote their gift sets with AB Tasty

Testing Gift Set Promotion

Because of this culture of experimentation, the UK team has deployed many different tests on their site – and shared those results with the global team.

One of their most successful tests was one where they encouraged users to opt for a gift set when shopping for certain items. Using AB Tasty to badge different products that were available as a gift set on the product listing and description pages, this simple test not only increased awareness, but also improved the transaction rate.

Roisin confirms: “Testing, experimenting, optimizing are all really important to continually improve on what we are already doing” We wouldn’t be able to drive the numbers that we do without being able to test the experiences that we offer. We always run tests on new promotions and offers to make sure that we’re delivering a great customer experience as well as ensuring the  commercial priorities of the website.”

Adding the wishlist functionality to the product listing pages and the product description pages allowed users to save their favourite products and remember to purchase them later on.

Creating a wish list for customers

Many e-commerce managers are aware of how important the PDP pages are to tell the story of your brand. Today, they can often be the point of entry for your users on your site, which means they need to quickly communicate a sufficient amount of information about your brand. With that in mind, using AB Tasty, Clarins was able to provide an option for visitors to create a wishlist on these pages.

This test meant users could save a product they liked, or keep an eye on their favorite products to buy them later. The test proved to be a success as it resulted in a boost to their basket page views and a 1.84% increase in transactions.

As Alejandra explains, “By adding the wishlist option, you’re simplifying the customer’s journey and you are also making their decision a little bit simpler once they decide to convert.”

AB Tasty helps Clarins to test and experiment at speed. In a short space of time, they can assess whether new features or changes are working on the site in order to give a seamless customer journey. As Roisin points out, “We’re really passionate about continually optimizing what we’re already doing well, whilst also testing new theories to drive a great customer experience.”

Download PDF

The post Clarins UK Invests in Continuous Testing and Learning appeared first on abtasty.

• 30  Markets Worldwide
• 10 Experiences/Month
• 20 Global Projects/Year

The business of Clarins is beauty. And at the heart of their efforts is making women feel comfortable and beautiful at every stage of their lives.

Imagine: Your e-commerce team builds tons of impactful customer experiences, works seamlessly together in an agile environment, and deploys experiments with ease around the world.

This is the reality at Clarins.

The globally-renowned beauty brand was an early adopter of experimentation, using it as a tool to improve user experiences as part of their CRO strategy. Thanks to this investment, Clarins, which operates in over 150 countries and 30 e-commerce markets, has not only turned testing and personalization into a competitive advantage, but also grown local markets through a flourishing culture of experimentation.

For the past decade, the team has championed pairing dynamic digital experiences with offline-quality service. Just ask Stephanie Gaspar and Ryma Ziani, who head up the digital customer experience at Clarins.

“Experimentation has always been part of Clarins’ DNA. Testing new products, formulas, and ideas is part of our culture,” says Stephanie, a 12-year veteran of the organization, who currently manages the digital customer experience team. “The advantage of experimenting is that it helps validate our hypotheses quickly, make faster roadmap decisions, and better leverage user experiences to ‘wow’ our customers.”

Experimentation woven into Clarins’ DNA

Clarins has long been a leader in digital transformation, launching e-shops around the world and ensuring a consistent brand experience online and offline. In recent years, experimentation and data analytics have been the focal point of that transformation, so much that robust practices are now built into day-to-day business operations at Clarins.

What is key for us is leveraging our data to provide personalized, one-to-one service and experiences online. Customers, after all, are at the heart of everything Clarins does.

Stephanie Gaspar
Global Digital Director

Knowing exactly which experience is best suited for which customer and in which country is no easy feat — after all, not all personalizations are created equal. This is where the partnership with AB Tasty comes into play, enabling Clarins to quickly identify high-impact growth strategies and avoid low-performing actions through a test-and-learn approach.

The team cites AB Tasty’s experience optimization platform as the game-changer in helping them with easily setting up tests and collecting insights to validate ideas, make data-centric decisions and accelerate time to market.

Ryma, Clarins’ UX project manager who’s been with the brand for more than eight years, is quick to acknowledge the value that AB Tasty’s low-code solution and worldwide customer support coverage has added to the e-commerce and UX teams.

“It gave us the ability to accelerate our rollout at both global and local levels, drive more engagement on our website, and deliver a seamless user experience — without needing to enlist the help of our tech development teams,” she says.

AB Tasty’s platform enables different markets to duplicate experiences and adapt the learnings to a regional context. This knowledge-sharing ethos fosters an exchange of ideas and learning culture, which has also produced a community aspect within the organization.

AB Tasty has changed the way we work together. Today, we have almost 30 markets [onboarded], building a community of users and co-constructing the experimentation roadmap to optimize UX across all our touchpoints.

Ryma Ziani
UX Project Manager

Clarins’ center of excellence encourages teams around the world to share and find inspiration from their experiments. That’s how the US team ended up duplicating EMEA’s “Wheel of Fortune” gamification test (left) for their Mother’s Day campaign (right).

A concrete example of both the collaborative, knowledge-sharing aspects and the adaptability of a global approach across local markets is Clarins’ “Wheel of Fortune” experiment, which leveraged gamification during a key promotional selling period.

With the support of the AB Tasty team, Clarins ran a one-day pop-up offer where customers could “spin the wheel” on their website and win a special offer — a free product or a discount coupon. This discount was then automatically applied to the basket. Here, the Clarins team had developed a clever, engaging offer and coupled it with AB Tasty’s solution, enabling them to easily duplicate experiments across markets and drive conversion and revenue.

Originally rolled out across EMEA for Singles Day, this test saw such strong results (585% increase year over year in revenue for Ireland, alone) that the US Clarins team duplicated it for their own high-season period: Mother’s Day. “Literally, we made the decision in a couple of weeks,” says Marine de Valon, senior director of e-commerce and digital transformation for North America.

With AB Tasty’s dashboard, each market has access to all tests and the resulting engagement data. “AB Tasty allowed all the countries to innovate, create, measure and share experiments, which made a significant impact on our overall global e-commerce,” Marine explained.

Four essentials to building a center of excellence

Building a culture of experimentation goes beyond test execution; it requires heavy knowledge transfer, strategic oversight, and the investment of time and resources alongside the right partner to foster the right mindset. Here are the four things you need:

1. Agility: Equipping the team with scalable processes that allow them to act independently, rapidly test hypotheses, make faster decisions, and pivot quickly should a test prove unsuccessful.

2. Toolbox: Collating guidelines, best practices, examples and outcomes of experiments, and customer data will ensure all teams are equipped to deliver engaging and innovative digital experiences across Clarins’ global e-commerce.

3. Market maturity: Leverage mature, high-growth markets to scale your business by presenting a wealth of test ideas from which other markets can find inspiration and subsequently build their own experimentation roadmap.

4. Community: Fostering the culture of collective experience and knowledge and understanding what’s worked and what hasn’t worked across markets have undoubtedly been a key to the success of Clarins’ digital experimentation strategy.

Delivering innovative experiences with AB Tasty

Clarins has achieved a lot over the past two years partnering with AB Tasty, adopting a considered approach to guard against overexposure and inconsistent messaging to their consumers.

By focusing first on developing testing and experimentation protocols, Clarins has built a template of experiences and overarching guidelines that ensure authenticity as a brand. The last step in this roadmap — grow the community of engaged users — fosters increased collaboration and synergy across teams. But the work with AB Tasty does not end there.

“We want to deliver more innovative brand experiences to our customers, by bringing more entertainment on our website and leveraging gamification in consumer engagement,” Stephanie shares. “Our goal is to push the experimentation program with AB Tasty one step further, to become even more user-centric in how we leverage our data for that one-to-one approach.”

ABOUT CLARINS

Jacques Courtin launched his namesake company in 1954 in Paris, with a mission to enhance women’s beauty and well-being. Today, Clarins is present in more than 150 countries and 10,000 employees around the world. The French company continues to pursue a long-term vision focused on strong customer relations, continuous innovation, and a commitment to responsible beauty.

DID YOU KNOW?

The team at Clarins are also strong believers of responsible beauty, sourcing only the best ingredients through their love of nature and plants. That’s the story of the Domaine Clarins, which was founded in 2016 in the French Alps to offer a responsible farm-to-jar approach to beauty. The team uses traditional farming techniques and minimal technology to develop the highest quality plant ingredients for consumers.

The post How Clarins Scaled Their Global E-Commerce Through Agile Experimentation appeared first on abtasty.

The e-commerce team at Clarins is a true “testing lab,” managing their 5 websites (Germany, Spain, Ireland, Benelux, and Portugal) and helping the other nearby countries to grow their e-commerce business. The goal of this ‘incubator’ is to create an internal community of experimenters to help share testing best practices. This approach paid off with the creation of the ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ a gamification concept launched on Singles Day, November 11, 2020.

While testing using AB Tasty was initiated by the International Content team, Clarins decided in 2020 to not only extend its partnership with AB Tasty to include a commercial component but also to expand to the regional and local level. The tool that the EMEA teams were using previously was limited to creating pop-ins, which wasn’t enough to tackle Clarins’ goals involving retention and personalization.

Personalization via gamification

For Célia Rigaux, E-Commerce Director, EMEA, this was an opportunity to instill a test and learn culture across the EMEA teams. “Our goal is to exchange with our customers, to create a link with them, and to inspire loyalty, by bringing them value through our websites. AB Tasty’s experimentation capabilities enable us to challenge our CRM, Acquisition, and E-store teams using innovative tests that we weren’t able to run before.”

With the strategic holiday season approaching, the time was right to launch a far-reaching test across all of the sites managed by the EMEA e-commerce team. Singles Day (celebrated on November 11 in many countries) was the perfect option, seeing as it was also only a few days before Black Friday. All that was left was to decide what kind of game to display.

Everyone’s a winner

At the end of September 2020, Clarins got in touch with their Customer Success Manager at AB Tasty to see if their idea was feasible. After a few exchanges, they decided on the right set-up that struck a perfect balance between technical feasibility and a smooth user experience. 

The idea was simple: Every person who visits any of Clarins’ EMEA websites, whether on desktop or mobile, sees the game appear. If they click on it, the wheel spins and stops at one of 6 gifts. The gifts are promo codes, automatically applied to the winning visitor’s basket, which makes for a great user experience (especially on mobile).

“We were able to launch our tests in two weeks,” explains Anaëlle Thomas, E-store Project Manager EMEA, who was responsible for the development of the project. One of the major advantages of AB Tasty was the ability to duplicate each experiment for each of Clarins’ sites. If the first test took 20 hours to implement, this number shrank by 5 for each of the other 4 sites. This experience is now live for all of the other countries Clarins’ is present in, and adaptable for other offers.

4x the orders

The first gamification test was a success for Clarins’ EMEA e-commerce team. The game, buoyed up by the increased web traffic brought on by the pandemic, performed very well. Live for 24 hours (from the 10th to the 11th in the evening), the total number of orders completed on the 4 main sites (Germany, Spain, Ireland and Benelux) quadrupled when compared to the results of November 11, 2019. Ireland stood out, with an order increase of +495% and a +585% increase in revenue.

The conversion rate did well, increasing by +89.34% compared to 2019. Finally, the add-to-basket rate increased by +145% compared to the 2020 average.  It should be noted that, though the game performed well in all countries, it was Ireland that attracted the most visitors, with 61.37% of visitors trying their luck.

“We systematically test on all our sites to see how each country reacts according to the local culture. So we shared the success of this experiment with the other countries,” elaborated Anaëlle Thomas. “South Africa was particularly interested and launched their own version in December. The United Arab Emirates also ran the test during the 4 days of Black Friday.”

Pursuing personalization in 2021

Previously known mostly as an A/B testing tool, AB Tasty has attained the level of ‘business partner.’ The EMEA teams even share their experimentation tips via Teams. Next step: Further develop their personalization strategy, especially by learning from other AB Tasty clients’ experiences. See you in 2021!

“The ability to duplicate tests in AB Tasty allows us to exchange more often with the other EMEA countries and to share experiments. We rely on AB Tasty to guide us in driving our personalization strategy forward.”

– Célia Rigaux, E-Commerce Director, EMEA, Clarins

The post How Clarins Uses AB Tasty for Personalization and Retention appeared first on abtasty.