GANNI is a Danish contemporary luxury fashion brand renowned for its ready-to-wear collections, including clothing, shoes, and accessories.   

Founded in 2000 and known for its effortless Scandi-cool aesthetic, the brand has evolved into a global name, offering a fresh and vibrant take on modern women’s fashion. With a focus on responsible practices, GANNI is committed to positively impacting the planet, aligning with sustainability initiatives such as using organic and recycled materials. Ganni sells its collections online to customers worldwide, including Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia, making its mark in over 40 countries. 

At the heart of GANNI’s business is a community focused on changing a broken fashion system. Led by Ditte and Nicolaj Reffstrup, the brand uses responsible practices as a force of positive change for style, people, and planet. 

GANNI has been creating bold, expressive, and responsibly-minded products for radical optimists everywhere. More than just a fashion brand, Thay embrace innovation for responsible progress, integrating creative approaches into every aspect of its business, from products to brand identity.

What does experimentation bring to GANNI? 

Identifying itself as a ‘progressive luxury’ brand, experimentation plays a crucial role in how GANNIi’s market position, being customer-centric and defining their brand identity.

While they benchmark and look at other luxury brands, they use experimentation to make better decisions on their brand. It allows them to understand how users behave online, how they engage, how they interact and how they see GANNI. Monika Tamics,  Director of Digital Product, explains “We are looking for what customers are struggling with. We identify these, come up with a solution, test it and enhance the online shopping experience by making it easier to find and purchase products, and provide a smoother, more enjoyable shopping journey for greater satisfaction.”

They use AB Tasty to power their experimentation program, successfully running tests that consistently boost conversions and AOV, improve site functionality, and make decisions based on data. By iterating on key features like search, checkout, and more, GANNI continues to improve their site. 

Monika goes on to say: “AB Tasty is a platform where there are no limitations, it’s very user friendly, and anyone at any time can go in to look at the data and provide a better user experience for our customers.”

“AB Tasty is a platform where there are no limitations, it’s very user friendly, and anyone at any time can go in to look at the data and provide a better user experience for our customers.”

Monika Tamics, Ganni Director of Digital Product

Driving brand identity through continuous experimentation

GANNI prioritizes the customer in their testing process by identifying pain points in the user journey and implementing solutions to enhance the online experience. To ensure these tests are effective from a business perspective, GANNI’s team evaluates the entire customer funnel, from the initial interaction to the final checkout. This comprehensive approach has revealed key insights.

By focusing on these incremental changes, GANNI’s experimentation strategy not only improves site performance, but also deepens customer engagement, encouraging browsing and product discovery. With AB Tasty empowering them to scale their experimentation program, Ganni is able to continuously test, learn, and optimize their digital experience. Each change brings deeper insights into their identity, helping to define who Ganni is as a brand.

Testing and learning: the search bar

GANNI conducted a large-scale analysis of their website to identify low-hanging opportunities that could make a big impact. One area they quickly observed was the high number of users searching for specific products, a behavior commonly seen across fashion brands. Site search is a powerful tool, often driving higher conversion rates. In fact, studies show users are nearly 40% more likely to convert than those who don’t use it​. GANNI’s challenge with their search bar was that it wasn’t prominent enough. 

They found that visitors who used their original search function experienced a significant drop in conversion rates. To address this, they focused on making the search bar more visible and user-friendly. They implemented several tests, including adding a border around the search bar, increasing the visibility of the magnifying glass icon, and testing different variations such as a longer search bar with a text hint. 

From these simple yet impactful tests, GANNI achieved a 7.5% increase in conversion rates and a massive 21.9% uplift in users engaging with the mobile search function. 

Another example of incremental learning, GANNI’s test-and-learn mindset allowed them to experiment with changes that significantly improve their user’s customer journey. By optimizing the search experience, GANNIi made it easier for customers to find products they love, driving higher engagement.

Ganni’s checkout challenge

The checkout process presented another key opportunity for GANNI’s experimentation team. Initially, users were required to enter their email address before accessing the checkout page – a step that caused a drop-off in the funnel. GANNI hypothesized that this barrier led customers to assume guest checkout wasn’t an option, prompting cart abandonment. 

Not all tests are winning tests and GANNI’s experimentation on the checkout page is a good example of this. During the first round of tests, designed to clarify the availability of guest checkout, gave inconclusive results. Undeterred by the initial results, GANNI’s experimentation program continued testing. 

They refined their approach, focusing on simplifying the checkout flow by combining the email entry and information input into one step. The team’s determination paid off, generating an impressive uplift in conversions.

Although it was frustrating when the first round of tests didn’t deliver the expected results, GANNI’s Senior Digital Project Manager, Anders Skaarup, notes how they “provided some kind of insights toward the overall purchase funnel or discovery funnel for the user.” By testing barriers in the user journey, GANNI not only improved conversion rates but also deepened their understanding of how small changes can have a significant impact on customer behavior and these learnings led to them adding more and more improvements on the checkout page.

Small changes, big impact

The checkout process or search function can make or break a customer’s decision to complete their purchase. GANNI’s experience is a testament to the power of iterative testing. By identifying key drop-off points and continuously refining their approach, the team is able to remove friction points and unlock valuable insights into user behavior. Not only does this improve CRO and minimize potential revenue loss, but AB Tasty also improves the brand’s overall digital experience. GANNI isn’t reliant on gut feelings or abstract concepts when it comes to experimentation – the team tests, learns and makes data-driven decisions that shape their brand identity. 

A better site for a better customer experience

GANNI wants to speak to their customer group – and the more they can understand them, the better the user’s digital experience. By fostering collaboration across departments, they ensure that all teams are aligned with customer-centric goals. 

As Anders Skaarup, Senior Digital Product Manager states, “This is the way that decisions can be made together – based on data that allows us to become an elevated brand. It also means that we can share insights and help prevent loss – it isn’t simply about gaining more – but being able to capitalize on what is there. At GANNI, we want to speak to our customer group – and the more we can understand them, the better the digital experience.”

“At GANNI, we want to speak to our customer group – and the more we can understand them, the better the digital experience.”

Anders Skaarup, Ganni Senior Digital Product Manager

Brand identity

By continuously testing and learning, they gain real-time insights into customer preferences, allowing them to quickly adapt and deliver a digital experience that resonates deeply with their audience.

With AB Tasty, GANNI may gain insights into what drives revenue and user conversion, enabling faster implementation of new designs, but the real benefit is how it informs who they are as a brand and how this relates to their customers. 

This unified approach to experimentation, continuous learning, small iterations and identifying areas to improve helps to build a customer experience that GANNI’s audience love and strengthens their market position.

The post How GANNI Styles Brand Identity Through Experimentation appeared first on abtasty.

A side-by-side comparison of 2 webpages using Contentsquare analysis

 An overview of the integration

When Contentsquare and AB Tasty are used separately, you only get half the success of your test results. Say you want to test a hero banner. Using AB Tasty, you test 2 versions, and find there’s no improvement to your conversion rate. But, perhaps one of the versions increased customer engagement? Without the help of Contentsquare, you’re limited in your view of how your tests impact your entire customer experience.

Or, let’s say you’ve analyzed your customer journey using Contentsquare and discovered one of your conversion pages has a high drop-off rate. You come up with a hypothesis as to why this might be the case and hard-code a change, but this leads to more drop-offs, not less. Without AB Tasty, you’re unable to test your hypotheses, which results in wasted time, resources, and a potentially worse customer experience.

But, it doesn’t have to be this way. By integrating Contentsquare and AB Tasty, you can dive deeper into your customer experience to pinpoint and prioritize the most critical friction points or opportunities to experiment. You can also build better hypotheses based on key metrics, create and run data-informed tests, and better understand why variations perform well (or not). 

With Contentsquare, you gain a more comprehensive understanding of your customer experience, enabling you to conduct more informed, data-driven tests with AB Tasty.

 Benefits of the Contentsquare and AB Tasty integration

Where Contentsquare provides deep and meaningful insights into your customer behavior, AB Tasty empowers you to act on those insights, in real time.

“AB Tasty is a technology partner with Contentsquare. We facilitate A/B testing, experimentation, personalization, and audience segmentation. We help facilitate activation of the data that you get out of Contentsquare to fuel that endless cycle of experimentation.”

Mary Kate Cassh, Head of Growth Marketing, North America, AB Tasty

Using  Contentsquare and AB Tasty together, you get

• Unparalleled insights into customer behavior 
• Hyper-personalization features to deliver tailor-made experiences to boost conversion rates
• A simplified, streamlined workflow that eliminates data silos by having data accessible across easy-to-understand dashboards
• Greater business impact by uncovering hidden opportunities in your customer journey and testing your hypotheses before hard-coding changes
• Comprehensive experiment analysis with easy-to-understand visuals and side-by-side comparisons of your control and variation
• Continuous improvement to your digital strategy

Want to know the fundamentals of how the Contentsquare and AB Tasty integration works? Learn more.

How Contentsquare can inform your testing in AB Tasty

Let’s look at how this works in practice, using the framework of a continuous testing cycle. There are 5 stages to the continuous testing cycle—here’s how the Contentsquare and AB Tasty integration works to optimize each step along the way:

Stage 1: analysis phase

This first stage involves finding friction points or opportunities at each point of your customer journey. Then, it’s about generating test hypotheses to help solve or optimize the points that need the most attention.

You can break down this stage into 2 forms of analysis. 

1. Innovation analysis, where you work out whether your content is optimized for the best customer experience you can provide

2. Troubleshooting analysis, where you uncover errors or friction points in the customer journey, preventing users from moving forward.

With Contentsquare’s Experience Analytics, you can find out how your customers are behaving page by page, from entry to exit, and why. With a suite of capabilities, you can deep-dive into your customer experience and analyze areas that need the most improvement.

 Screenshot of Contentsquare’s Experience Analytics dashboard, open on the Heatmaps capability.

Use Session Replay to find out

• What are the behaviors of customers at critical conversion points?
• What’s causing rage clicks or other frustration behaviors?
• Where are customers encountering errors?

Rage clicks are when customers click on an element (clickable or not) of a website or app multiple times in frustration or anger. They’re often caused by technical issues, confusing navigation, or a cluttered design.

Use Journey Analysis to find out

• What are the top landing pages?
• What is the lowest-performing landing page?
• What is the highest-performing journey to reach your goal?
• What are the most popular journeys?
• Where do customers drop off or bounce?

Use Heatmaps to find out

• What’s the most attractive content/category on the page?
• What’s leading to the most conversions? Is it visible enough?
• In what order do customers consume the page?
• Are there any frictions or rage clicks on the page?

Stage 2: analysis resolution

Now you’ve got a few hypotheses to test, it’s time to work out how to prioritize what to test first.

The focus should be on tests with low effort, high reward and those with the biggest impact on your key performance indicators (KPIs).
Contentsquare’s Impact Quantification can help you prioritize your tests and make better decisions by assessing the impact of each test. All you need to do is clarify your goal and then segment users based on whether they completed the goal of your A/B test.

Contentsquare’s Impact Quantification in action.

Impact Quantification can then be used to compare these segments and confirm how much revenue the success of the test will likely generate.

 Stage 3; experimentation roadmap

Once you’ve established which hypotheses have the greatest potential to impact your KPIs, it’s time to start fleshing out your testing roadmap.

This roadmap will help guide every step of your testing process—from the build to the design and copy and finally, the execution. This roadmap is where you detail who’s doing what and when, giving you an overview of your site. This is especially useful if you’re running tests on multiple pages.

The dos and don’ts of your testing roadmap

Stage 4: start A/B testing

All that hard work has finally paid off—it’s time to put your hypotheses into action and start running tests with AB Tasty.

Using your roadmap as a guide, start building out your tests in AB Tasty to optimize, personalize, and improve your customer experience.

Stage 5: analysis and results

Get site statistics directly through AB Tasty and couple that with Contentsquare’s customer behavioral insights. 

From AB Tasty, get direct reports based on page statistics—giving you a snapshot of what’s going on in your campaign testing period.

From Contentsquare, as soon as your test goes live, you can watch how your customers behave in the control and variation, side-by-side using Heatmaps and Session Replay. Get a visual understanding of why and how your customers behave differently in your variation and use these insights to inform your next testing phase.

 How the partnership works in real life

Now that you know how the Contentsquare and AB Tasty partnership works, it’s time to see what it’s like in the real world. 

Here’s how 2 leading brands have embraced the integration of experience analytics and experimentation into their CX to drive real growth outcomes.

Clarins

Global skincare company Clarins wanted to find out whether a “wishlist” option on their site would help to increase pageviews and conversions. 

Using the Contentsquare integration with AB Tasty, they tested adding a heart icon to their product listing pages (PLPs) and product description pages (PDPs). This heart allowed users to save their favorite products to potentially purchase them at a later stage.

This test increased the overall number of transactions and resulted in

• +1.54% increase in basket page views

• +1.83% increase in transactions

“We are really passionate about continually optimizing what we’re already doing well plus also testing new theories to drive a great customer experience and continue to drive the commercial priorities of our website.”—Roisin O’Brien, Ecommerce Trading Manager at Clarins UK

Hotel Chocolat

British chocolate manufacturer Hotel Chocolat wanted to optimize its digital presence and improve its brand and on-site customer experience. 

Rather than focusing on conversion rates, Mel Parekh, Head of ecommerce at Hotel Chocolate and his team wanted to focus on engagement and clickthrough rates. 

Recognizing the importance of layout and user experience on customer engagement, the goal was to create a more visually appealing and intuitive homepage. 

WithContentsquare’s integration with AB Tasty, his team redesigned the homepage, focusing on the category tiles, which were found to be the most attractive elements on the page.

By optimizing the homepage, they saw a

• -10% reduction in bounce rates
• +1.67% increase in visiting time
• +0.54% increase in overall conversion rates, +7.24% increase on desktop

Mel Parekh, Head of ecommerce at Hotel Chocolate talked about customer loyalty at a recent Contentsquare CX Circle event. 

Smarter insights with Contentsquare

Contentsquare is the all-in-one Experience Intelligence platform designed to be easily used by anyone that cares about digital journeys. With our flexible and scalable platform, you quickly get a deep understanding of your customers’ whole online journey. 

Our AI-powered insights provide those “ah ha” moments you need to deliver the right experiences. You get to work faster and smarter with the confidence to know what to do next to improve your digital experiences. Leading brands use Contentsquare to grow their business, deliver more customer happiness and move with greater agility in a constantly changing world. Our insights are used to optimize the experience on over 1.3 million websites worldwide. For more information, visit: www.contentsquare.com

The post How The Contentsquare & AB Tasty Integration Improves Testing & Drives Results appeared first on abtasty.

It’s why I’m so excited to give an update on our performance, and how we’ve worked hard to be the best. We’re now providing loading times up to 4 faster than other solutions on the market. 

In a world where every second counts, slow-loading pages are the fast track to lost revenue. At AB Tasty, we know that speed isn’t just about convenience; it’s about delivering the smooth, reliable experience that today’s consumers expect. 

That’s why we’re thrilled to be recognized by ThirdPartyWeb.today for having one of the lowest impacts on web performance among top experimentation and personalization platforms. This acknowledgment affirms our commitment to speed, scalability, and brand satisfaction.

But what does this actually mean for brands using AB Tasty?

Let’s dive into how prioritizing performance can improve your SERP rankings, customer experience (CX), and overall campaign effectiveness.

Why Web Performance Impacts Your Bottom Line

Imagine clicking on a page that seems to take forever to load. Chances are, you’d be out of there faster than you could say “conversion rate.” And you wouldn’t be alone: slow page load times can lead to increased bounce rates, missed opportunities, and, ultimately, frustrated visitors.

Good performance translates into smoother customer journeys, which leads to better engagement and, most importantly, higher conversion rates.

ThirdPartyWeb.today: The Performance Benchmark 

ThirdPartyWeb.today is an independent performance data visualization initiative that analyzes the impact of various platforms on page speed. It ranks tools according to their performance cost, drawing data from nearly 4 million websites to create an unbiased performance benchmark. For brands aiming to deliver a seamless experience without sacrificing speed, ThirdPartyWeb.today provides a reliable guide for evaluating the performance impact of their tools.

Being recognized as one of the most performance-friendly Experience Optimization platforms by ThirdPartyWeb.today means our clients know they’re partnering with a technology designed with speed in mind.

What Makes AB Tasty the Fastest?

Our tech teams have worked tirelessly to make AB Tasty not only an intuitive experimentation and personalization platform, but one that prioritizes high performance. Here’s a quick look at the innovations that make AB Tasty so fast and reliable:

1. Modular Architecture with Innovative Dynamic Importing and Smart Caching Technology
   Our platform is built with a modular architecture, where only essential code is loaded for each campaign. This keeps file sizes lean, reducing load time and resource consumption. Our proprietary smart caching technology ensures that visitors only need to load the data they haven’t accessed before. By minimizing redundant data calls, we significantly reduce load times across all devices. We also provide worldwide API endpoints and have a global CDN presence with multiple Edge locations and regional Edge caches for fast response times no matter where you and your site visitors are.
   
   
2. Performance Center
   AB Tasty’s dedicated Performance Center allows you to monitor your campaign performance in real-time. This tool gives you full transparency into what’s happening behind the scenes, so you can make adjustments as needed to keep things running smoothly. It provides recommendations to help you monitor and improve tag weight. Learn all about it here.
   
   
   
3. Single-Page Application (SPA) Compatibility
   AB Tasty’s platform is SPA-compatible without requiring custom code, making it easier for developers to integrate AB Tasty into their tech stack. AB Tasty is running on a native Vanilla TypeScript framework. Our tag is compatible with modern JS frameworks, including React, Angular, Vue, Meteor or Ember. The tag is unique for all environments and doesn’t require any additional implementation. Many of our customers have left their previous provider due to challenges with SPA pages. In these tools, changes are often not “sticky” or flicker when there is a dynamic content load. SPA tests in these environments often require custom code for each test, which makes testing more complicated and less user-friendly.
   
   
4. Flicker-Free Experiences
   AB Tasty’s tag uses a blended approach of both synchronous and asynchronous scripts to eliminate flicker, while maintaining optimised performance. Other solutions will prescribe “anti-flicker” snippets to eliminate flicker, which is not a recommended practice. It means hiding the body’s content while the tag loads, which ultimately delays the rendering of the site. This causes a worse user experience, increases your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric, and may ultimately lead to increased bounce rates and decreased conversions. In contrast, AB Tasty’s synchronous tag uses 3kb of render-blocking to allow the tag to execute quickly before the page loads, as opposed to blocking the visibility of the page for the full package size.
   

And that translates to…

First loading time < 100ms
Caching loading time < 10ms
Execution time < 500 milliseconds
Minimal Lighthouse Core Web Vitals impact

Cheers to Our Product and Tech Teams

This wouldn’t be possible without the dedication of our Product and Tech teams (thanks team!). We’ve dared to innovate, pushing the limits of what’s possible with web performance in the experimentation and personalization space.

The Bottom Line

When brands choose AB Tasty, they’re choosing a platform that prioritizes both innovation and performance. By minimizing impact on web performance, we’re helping brands deliver faster, better experiences that delight customers and drive results.

Curious to learn more about? Contact us today to discover what else sets us apart.

The post Why AB Tasty Delivers 4x Faster appeared first on abtasty.

Understanding the E-Commerce Landscape During the Holidays

The holiday season, particularly around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, represents a critical period for e-commerce businesses. Last year alone, consumers spent over $9 billion on Black Friday. With more and more customers shopping online, the opportunity for e-commerce businesses to capture market share is immense.

However, this opportunity comes with challenges. The influx of traffic can strain your website, and the sheer number of competitors vying for attention can make it difficult to stand out. That’s where a well-designed strategy comes into play.

Prioritize Website Performance and Reliability

One of the first steps to ensure a successful holiday season is to prepare your website for the surge in traffic. Testing your website load is crucial. Even a one-second delay in page load time can lead to a 6% reduction in conversions.

Start by simulating high traffic volumes to identify potential bottlenecks. Optimize your servers, compress images, and streamline your code to ensure your website can handle the holiday rush. Remember, a smooth user experience is non-negotiable.

Craft Compelling and Urgent CTAs

The holiday season is all about urgency. Limited-time offers, countdowns, and exclusive deals create a sense of urgency that drives conversions. We can’t emphasize enough the importance of A/B testing your calls-to-action (CTAs) to find the most effective wording, design, and placement.

Experiment with phrases like “Limited Time Offer,” “Exclusive Black Friday Deal,” or “Shop Now Before It’s Gone.” The goal is to create a sense of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) that compels customers to take immediate action. A/B testing here is an ideal way to help you find the messaging that works best for your audience.

Personalization is Key

Consumers expect a personalized shopping experience, especially during the holidays. Tailoring your content and offers to individual users can significantly increase engagement and conversions. Use previous interactions, browsing behavior, and purchase history data to deliver personalized recommendations and offers.

For example, if a customer frequently purchases tech gadgets, highlight your latest electronics deals in your email campaigns and on-site recommendations. We strongly advocate using dynamic content that changes based on user behavior, ensuring that each visitor sees the most relevant offers.

Optimize Your Mobile Experience

With more than half of all e-commerce transactions now happening on mobile devices, optimizing your mobile experience is no longer optional—it’s essential. A seamless mobile experience can differentiate between a sale and an abandoned cart.

Ensure your website is responsive, with easy navigation, fast load times, and simplified checkout processes. Test your mobile site thoroughly, focusing on the user experience from landing to checkout. Our mobile-first world demands a smooth mobile experience, so it’s crucial to run mobile-specific A/B tests to identify and fix any friction points.

Leverage Social Proof

Social proof is a powerful tool in the e-commerce arsenal, particularly during the holiday season. Customer reviews, ratings, and user-generated content can significantly influence purchasing decisions.

Consider showcasing recent customer reviews on your product pages or adding a “Trending Now” section highlighting popular items. Social proof can increase trust and encourage hesitant shoppers to make a purchase.

Experiment with Pricing Strategies

Pricing plays a crucial role in holiday season sales. Dynamic pricing, flash sales, and bundling products are just a few strategies that can entice customers to buy more. Running A/B tests on pricing strategies can help you determine what resonates most with your audience.

For instance, you might test a “Buy One, Get One Free” offer against a “25% Off” deal to see which drives more conversions. The key is to stay flexible and willing to experiment until you find the ideal message for your audience.

Use Email Marketing to Drive Conversions

Email marketing remains one of the most effective channels for driving holiday sales. A well-crafted email campaign can keep your brand top-of-mind and encourage repeat purchases. Segment your email list to target different customer groups with personalized offers.

You can test subject lines, send times, email content, and more to optimize open rates and conversions. Consider sending reminder emails for abandoned carts and exclusive early access deals to your most loyal customers.

Streamline Your Checkout Process

Cart abandonment is a major challenge during the holiday season, with many shoppers dropping off at the checkout stage. To combat this, ensure your checkout process is as smooth and simple as possible.

Minimize the number of steps required to complete a purchase, offer multiple payment options, and provide clear shipping information. Test options like a one-click checkout option to see if it reduces cart abandonment rates.

Invest in Retargeting Campaigns

Retargeting is a powerful way to re-engage visitors who have shown interest in your products but haven’t yet made a purchase. During the holiday season, retargeting can help you recover lost sales and boost your conversion rates.

Set up retargeting campaigns that display personalized ads to users who have visited your site or abandoned their carts. Timing is so important when it comes to retargeting—start your campaigns early and increase frequency as the holidays approach.

Offer Free Shipping and Easy Returns

Shipping costs and return policies can make or break a sale, especially during the holidays. Offering free shipping can be a strong incentive for customers to complete their purchases. Likewise, a hassle-free return policy can reduce the perceived risk of buying online.

We suggest promoting these benefits prominently on your website and in your marketing materials. Consider running tests to see how different shipping and return options impact conversion rates. Another great option is to test using a progress bar to encourage larger orders in exchange for free shipping.

Plan for Post-Holiday Retention

While the holiday season is a prime time for acquisition, it’s also an opportunity to focus on retention. Customers acquired during this period can become repeat buyers if nurtured correctly.

Post-holiday, consider running loyalty programs, offering exclusive discounts for future purchases, and sending personalized thank-you emails. Maintaining engagement with your customers beyond the holiday season will build long-term loyalty.

Conclusion: Prepare, Test, and Optimize

The e-commerce holiday season is a marathon, not a sprint. To truly win big, it’s crucial to prepare in advance, test rigorously, and optimize continuously. By implementing the strategies outlined in this blog—and leveraging the proven tests from AB Tasty’s “30 Tests for Black Friday“—you can position your business for success during the most critical time of the year.

Remember, the key to a successful holiday season lies in your ability to adapt and respond to the ever-changing needs of your customers. Stay agile, keep testing, and make data-driven decisions to maximize your holiday sales.

The post Winning Big During the E-Commerce Holiday Season: Strategies and Insights appeared first on abtasty.

Finding the right areas to test can be tricky, but knowing where to focus is important for getting results quickly. That’s why we’ve identified five key questions to help guide your experimentation efforts:

• Is the content relevant to “me” (the visitor)?
• Is the next action clear?
• What may be distracting?
• What could cause anxiety?
• What is creating urgency?

By addressing these questions, you can start identifying the areas on your website—what we call Experimentation Hotspots—that offer the most potential for improvement. In this guide, we’ll explore these important areas, from the homepage to the checkout funnel, that are ideal for testing. Whether you’re optimizing for mobile, app, or desktop, these tips will help you kickstart your experimentation journey and start making impactful changes. 

1. Homepage

The homepage is where you show people who you are and what your brand means. It serves as the gateway to various sections, from product categories to special offers, and is where users often return mid-session. Your homepage often sets the tone for the rest of the user’s journey, making optimization crucial.

One effective strategy is to experiment with the placement and labels of your call-to-action (CTA) buttons. Ensuring that users can quickly locate key actions, such as signing up or starting their shopping journey, can make a significant difference in engagement. Testing different CTA labels, such as “Explore Now” versus “Shop Now,” helps determine which drives the most conversions.

Additionally, it’s essential to test the layout and how content is presented. Category links, sales promotions, and other critical pieces of content should be placed in a way that draws attention without overwhelming users. Small adjustments—like changing the placement of sales banners or highlighting popular categories—can enhance the overall user experience and increase interaction with your content.

Areas to optimize

• Header
• Main Navigation
• Categories
• Content Pushes
• Layout

AB Tasty customer success in action

The beauty brand, Lush, shifted its homepage messaging by testing two variations—one focused on self-care and another on gifting care packages. The version centered on gifting led to a 250% increase in engagement, showing how even minor tweaks in messaging can significantly improve user interactions.

2. Product listing page (PLP)

The product listing page (PLP) is where users begin narrowing down their choices. This page is most effective when visitors can scan and compare products easily, helping them make decisions more efficiently. While it might seem like there’s limited space to display information, there’s a lot of room for optimization that can smooth the path to purchase.

Testing how high-quality images, clear pricing, and CTAs like “Add to Cart” are displayed can improve product visibility. Adding reviews or badges like “Best Seller” can boost credibility and urgency. Experiment with hover effects to show additional details when users hover over a product.

Experiment with the placement and functionality of filters to make product discovery easier. Test whether a sidebar, dropdown, or dynamic filtering works best for your users. Simple adjustments to category labels or sorting options, like by price or ratings, can enhance the shopping experience.

Areas to optimize

• Product Card Information (e.g., imagery, price, CTA)
• Reviews and Badges
• Hover States
• Filters and Sorting Options
• Headers/Banners

AB Tasty customer success in action

Clarins UK reintroduced the wishlist functionality to their PLP and PDP. This allowed users to save their favorite products for later, which led to a 1.54% increase in basket page views. It also increased the number of transactions by 1.83%, showing the value of small user experience enhancements. 

It’s also important to consider the differences between mobile and desktop experiences when testing. A solution that works well on desktop might not perform the same on mobile due to varying user behaviors. Despite a long-standing focus on mobile optimization, it’s still common to overlook these differences. 

3. Product display page (PDP) 

The product description page (PDP) is the centerpiece of any e-commerce experience and at the center of a customer journey. Many retailers are now asking, “How can we make the PDP feel more like a landing page?” With more customers arriving directly on PDPs from social media, rather than the homepage, the PDP often serves as the first touchpoint. This makes it even more crucial, as it’s where customers ultimately decide whether or not to make a purchase. Reducing friction and providing clear, relevant information are essential to driving conversions at this stage.

Testing how high-quality images, clear pricing, and CTAs like “Add to Cart” are displayed can improve product visibility. Adding reviews or badges like “Best Seller” can boost credibility and urgency. Experiment with hover effects to show additional details when users hover over a product.

Experiment with the placement and functionality of filters to make product discovery easier. Test whether a sidebar, dropdown, or dynamic filtering works best for your users. Simple adjustments to category labels or sorting options, like by price or ratings, can enhance the shopping experience.

Key areas to experiment with

• Product Imagery and Descriptions: Ensure your images and descriptions are high-quality, answering common questions about the product (e.g., size, fit, material).
• Call-to-Action Buttons: Test the wording, design, and placement of your CTAs to find what drives the most conversions.

Additional areas to optimize

• Page Layout (order of information)
• Product Images and Videos
• Shipping & Return Messaging
• Cross-Sell Items
• Call to Actions
• Reviews and User-Generated Content
• Experience for New Visitors
• Mobile vs Desktop Experience
• Add-to-Cart Behavior & Mini Cart

AB Tasty customer success in action

French beauty product L’Occitane implemented a social proof widget on its PDP, showing how many people had recently viewed a product. The first variation displayed “X people are viewing this product,” while the second version said “Selling Fast.” This simple tweak created urgency and reassurance, leading to a 5.76% increase in transaction rate and a 3.36% increase in revenue per visitor. 

Social proof taps into user psychology—when customers see that many others are viewing or purchasing a product, it creates a sense of urgency and reduces anxiety, helping to drive sales.

4. Checkout funnel

The checkout process is where the real magic (or frustration) happens. It’s the final step in the customer journey, and even small obstacles here can lead to abandoned carts. Simplifying the checkout funnel can make the difference between completing a sale and losing a customer at the last moment. This stage is not just about speeding up the process—it’s also about building trust and ensuring customers feel confident in their purchase.

Optimizing your checkout involves refining everything from the mini basket to the confirmation page, making the experience as seamless as possible. 

Testing opportunities

• Product Imagery and Descriptions: Ensure your images and descriptions are high-quality, answering common questions about the product (e.g., size, fit, material).
• Call-to-Action Buttons: Test the wording, design, and placement of your CTAs to find what drives the most conversions.

Additional areas to optimize

• Basket Summary
• Step Progression
• Login and Guest Checkout Options
• Account Creation
• Form Field Labels & Microcopy
• Payment Methods
• Coupon Field Visibility & Design
• Cross-Sells & Product Recommendations
• Confirmation Page

AB Tasty customer success in action

Calvin Klein ran a test where they displayed a “last viewed” carousel on the empty cart page after a user removed all items from their cart. This reminded users of previously viewed products, reducing the bounce rate by 4.19% and increasing orders by 7.5%. By preventing the cart from feeling empty and offering product recommendations, the brand successfully retained potential customers and increased conversions.

5. Personalization

Personalization is key to creating a unique and engaging experience for each visitor. In an online shopping survey, 88% of respondents rated personalized product recommendations as helpful when asked to score them on a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being very helpful and 1 not helpful). By understanding user behavior and segmenting audiences, you can deliver tailored content that enhances user satisfaction and drives higher conversions. Personalization not only improves the shopping experience, but also fosters customer loyalty, encouraging repeat purchases over time. 

Start with

• Behavioral Targeting: Personalize content based on how users interact with your site. For example, use data on past clicks or scrolling behavior to serve more relevant offers.
• Abandoned Cart Reminders: Encourage users to complete their purchase by reminding them of items left behind.

AB Tasty customer success in action

French fashion retailer, Maje created a personalized campaign for users who abandoned their carts. When those users returned to the site, they were shown the products they had previously left behind, making it easy for them to continue shopping. This strategy resulted in an 11% increase on click rate on the pop up, with a significant portion of those users completing their purchases.

In addition, AB Tasty tools like Emotions AI can help recognize emotional triggers or online body language (e.g., scroll behavior or clicks) to tailor content even further, providing users with the most relevant experiences.

Wrapping up

From optimizing your homepage to personalizing the user experience, every aspect of your website offers an opportunity for growth. Even small tests—like changing the placement of a carousel or adjusting CTA wording—can lead to significant results.

By regularly experimenting and optimizing key hotspots on your site, you can improve user engagement, reduce friction, and ultimately increase conversions. Remember, every site is different, so test frequently and use data to inform decisions. This approach helps ensure that you’re continually refining your site for optimal success.

If you want to get all the details. – watch the webinar below.

The post Experimentation Hotspots: Proven Strategies to Optimize Key Pages 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.

In this webinar, we’ll cover

• The Mobile Customer Journey: Understand how smartphones change consumer behavior and how to create a seamless omnichannel experience.
• Optimizing Mobile Space: Discover techniques to enhance user navigation and highlight key content above the fold.
• The Thumb Zone: Design for accessibility by placing important content and CTAs within easy reach.
• Effective CTAs: Learn best practices for creating compelling CTAs that convert.
• Streamlining Processes: Simplify checkouts and forms to reduce friction and encourage purchases.

Register now to save your spot!

The post Mastering Mobile Optimization for Modern Commerce appeared first on abtasty.

At the end of 2023, nearly 70% of the world’s population are smartphone users. And with an increasing number of people owning more than one phone, subscriptions have outpaced ownership at an estimated 7 billion this year (and is expected to reach 8 billion in 2028).

Smartphones have transformed how consumers interact with brands, creating an almost instant connection between inspiration and action.

Mobile website traffic peaked at 59% in 2022 before settling at 54% in 2023.

However, mobile conversion rates lag behind. Desktop and tablet conversions lead at 3.1% and 2.8%, while smartphones trail at 2.3%.

So, why the gap?

In our e-book, “Mobile Optimization Guide: Tips for Smartphone Survival,” we explore consumer behavior, industry trends, and mobile optimization tests from AB Tasty clients. Discover how smartphones impact the customer journey and learn strategies to optimize the user experience and boost conversions.

Topics discussed in this e-book include:

• Smartphones and the customer journey
• The importance of speed
• The thumb zone
• Maximizing available space
• Optimizing the call-to-action
• Streamlining processes

74% of Gen Z say they most often reach for mobile devices when shopping online.

Download your copy of the “Mobile Optimization Guide” today and start transforming your mobile strategy!

The post Mobile Optimization Guide: Tips for Smartphone Survival 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.

Capturing attention and standing out in a market saturated with so many options is a challenge now more than ever. To overcome the digital noise, many businesses are aiming to enhance the customer experience with two approaches: customization vs personalization.

What’s the difference between customization and personalization? Are they two terms we can use interchangeably or are they two entirely different concepts? 

You guessed it – customization and personalization describe two very different, but not entirely unrelated, practices. Though not the same, (mass) customization and personalization strategies revolve around people’s deep-seated desires for self-expression and recognition – as well as their limited attention spans in a loud, digital world.

Let’s take a deep dive together into the sea of information we have about customization vs personalization.

What’s the difference between customization and personalization?

Customization and personalization are often thought of as synonyms, but while some crossover certainly exists, they are very different terms referring to very different practices. They overlap in their ability to make the customer feel as if they have a unique relationship with the brand in a way that the mass marketing of the past could never achieve.

Both practices have proven particularly well suited to Millennials, the largest consumer age group, who have an instinctive mistrust of older forms of advertisement but are more influenced by both customization and personalization-based marketing. So what exactly are the differences and how do they work?

Customization Definition: Giving the power to the users

The most common form of customization comes in the form of product customization and is typically found online. Product customization is particularly popular for clothing outlets, whereby shoppers can design a piece of clothing from an online template, using different colors, fabrics, and shapes to make their own ‘unique’ product.

Customization examples:

Nike is one of the most important innovators in the field, allowing you to customize every aspect of your sneaker.

Another brand that has used product customization to great effect is Burberry, which has gone from strength to strength in recent years, partly due to being an innovator in the field of product customization.

This is sometimes referred to as ‘mass customization’ whereby online tools allow the customization process to produce bespoke products at mass-produced prices.

What is mass customization?

Mass customization is all about customer experience, sometimes referred to as CX, which marks an enormous shift from shopping habits that were once almost entirely about the product.

Interacting with brands and producing individual styles, or at least appearing to, is at least as important to Millennials as the functionality of a product, and there is little reason to think that subsequent generations will not have similar expectations in the future, especially with technology becoming so ubiquitous and powerful. Wherever retail goes in the near future, CX is going to be an essential part of it. While the cutting edge of customization is not a major preserve of older generations, the need to keep such platforms simple and easy to use should not be ignored.

One of the issues facing businesses offering product customization is how quickly can each purchase be produced? Convenience is also thought to be a major concern for shoppers in the 21st century, and patience is not seen as a virtue. This goes to the heart of the customer experience and will likely inform how successful the model is for each business. The more complex mass customization becomes, the larger on-demand mass production will be.

One thing is for sure, what was once the preserve of the burger joint or ice cream parlor, customization is fast spreading to all aspects of retail, and as a result, is changing everything.

Personalization Definition: Tailor your user’s entire experience

Personalization is one of the most misunderstood marketing terms of all.

Often misunderstood for customization, recommendation, and even optimization, it is instead a set of well-defined practices with an overall purpose or goal. Unlike customization, which offers a very specific set of tools for customer interaction, personalization has far-reaching methods and possibilities and is currently at the very beginnings of its potential. It also touches upon issues of privacy, politics, and generational divides.

In the broadest sense, personalization is marketing designed with the individual in mind. Obviously, there is no single human observing individual tastes to present products or services that are most relevant. This is where highly sophisticated algorithms come in.

One type of personalization is the recommendation engine, although it should be noted that personalization is not a type of recommendation. The most common of these are websites and streaming services, such as YouTube or Netflix. If you have ever used these sites you will know that certain box sets or videos are recommended based on previous viewing habits. To begin with, these were obviously connected programs.

For example, if you had watched a basketball documentary, there’s a good chance that one on baseball would interest you. So far, so simple. But, as recommendation engines become more sophisticated, seemingly unconnected content works just as well. The same type of algorithms are used in retail, most famously by Amazon, and include Email campaigns that are tailored to the individual and addressed personally. This is the beginning of personalization.

Personalization also uses segmentation, for example, individual traits, such as age, gender, or location, all of which can profoundly change how marketing information is presented. Beyond that, a person’s politics, browsing behavior, and even ethical concerns can be taken into account.

We should pause here to consider the two main versions of personalization, rule-based and machine learning.

• Rule-based personalization relies on the previously mentioned segmentation model, whereby the audiences are broken down into both broad and granular segments, such as age or location. 
• Machine learning personalization, on the other hand, uses algorithms. These can be those used in recommendation engines and even parts of segmentation marketing, such as behavior. 

Whereas basic algorithms can provide broad data, such as what is trending, recommendation engines, and the like, provide more in-depth information for the individual.

Personalization vs customization in e-commerce

Customization can come in many forms, from fast food restaurants that encourage customers to design their food their way, to online stores that allow visitors to design their own clothing.

Personalization, on the other hand, is a far more complex practice that takes into account customer (or potential customer) behavior in order to market the right products, to the right person, at the right time. Using big data and powerful algorithms, personalization is becoming a more powerful tool every day, with a diverse number of businesses implementing it to great success.

Getting the most out of both practices requires an understanding of how they both work and the major differences between them.

You can certainly see the similarities between customization and personalization:

• Both aim to make consumers feel uniquely understood and marketed as individuals. 
• Both put a high value on self-expression and personal tastes and experiences. 
• Both create the illusion that consumers are being given white-glove treatment and have a one-on-one relationship with the brand. 
• Both, in a way, involve the consumer as a co-producer of value – for customization, it means relying on their predilections to craft the product, and for personalization, it’s sharing their data (unbeknownst to them or not) to create personalized marketing messages.

Ultimately, through a product strategy on the part of the company, mass customization is driven by the consumer. Especially appealing to Millennials, it’s a way of validating their own sense of self through ‘build-a-bear’ style product production.

With personalization, the onus is much more on the company to bring value and deliver meaning to the consumer audience they’re targeting.

People naturally crave to be in control of their surroundings and personalization techniques create a cherry-picked environment that feeds into that need. Bargain hunting for low-priced kitchenware from your favorite outlet? If ads for the very items you’re looking for suddenly appear all over the internet, it somehow creates a feeling of empowerment, as if in some impossible way, your wishes and needs automatically manifest.

As for information overload, this is the classic argument that contemporary consumers are exposed to a dizzyingly high number of marketing messages, far too many to consciously register, remember, or act on. Personalization strategies both (hopefully) limit the number of marketing messages a consumer is exposed to in the first place, as well as stimulate the brain to recognize these stand-out strategies, as opposed to letting them sit in the background of our consciousness. This is the idea of selective attention or the fact that your brain will automatically pick up on potentially important stimuli – i.e. those most relevant to you.

Web Personalization And Privacy Concerns: Customization and Personalization

Privacy is a major concern for many consumers and personalization has sometimes seemed more like an unwelcome stalker to some as a result. With legislation being debated in various corners of the world, what is deemed as overstepping the mark should be a concern for all.

All generations have some concerns regarding personalization and privacy, not helped by various data leaks and hacks of major companies. The truth of the matter, however, is that personalization shouldn’t be “creepy.” Transparency is a great way to instil trust with customers. Personalization need not be a back-door practice, where using personal data is hidden behind jargon and misleading declarations. Most website visitors are happy to share data as long as they know how it’s being used, especially if there is some advantage in it for them.

Being able to opt-out is another great way to make customers feel as if they have some control over the process. In some cases, the personalization process itself can be customized. While most users won’t bother engaging, they will appreciate the option to.

Evolution From Mass Marketing To One-To-One Marketing

Mass marketing is where a product or service is marketed to an entire population. It essentially treats everyone the same, with the same needs. Although that is clearly not the case, the philosophy revolves around the idea that the more people who receive the message, the more likely you will reach someone who is interested. It’s essentially the practice of selling low-cost and homogenous items at high volumes. While it’s more miss than hit, mass marketing was well suited to mass media markets, such as television, which had the majority of the population engaging with it on a regular basis.

Mass marketing began in the 1920’s, with the advent of radio. The popularity of this form of media made it ripe for advertisers to market products in a way that wasn’t possible before. As attitudes shifted over the decades, mass marketing’s influence rose and fell until the 1980’s and 1990’s, when it reached its peak.

History of mass marketing timeline:

• 1920’s – Begins with the advent of radio
• 1930’s – The great depression reduces its influence
• 1940’s and 1950’s – With income rising, its effectiveness becomes relevant again through the “Mad men” era
• 1960’s and 1970’s – A rise in anti-Capitalism sees its influence wane again
• 1980’s and 1990’s – The peak years of mass marketing during the economic boom

The history of one-to-one marketing is essentially a history of the Internet. When the first HTML dialogue occurred on Christmas Day, 1990, it set in motion the beginnings of personalization. Also in 1993, Webtrends was founded, which was essentially the first commercial web analytics program. Unfortunately, only those well-versed with the technology had any idea of how to read the data, so its effects were minimal.

Things carried on at pace, however, and log file analysis made it possible for non-tech people, most importantly marketers, to make use of the data. This was soon followed by hit counters and Javascript tagging, which became important as the Internet began to use more imagery. With few people using the Internet, however, the advances made during this time were not to be truly helpful for a few years to come.

It wasn’t until 2004 that the type of web analytics we know today began to appear and by 2005 Google had released Google Analytics. This allowed website owners to dig further into the data than had been previously possible, with concise visuals that allowed for easy reading of in-depth information. It’s at this point that personalization becomes more tangible, with conversion rate optimization becoming a particular focus.

Machine learning personalization, such as recommendation engines, soon began to be useful in a way that was not possible before, as algorithms began to exponentiate their capabilities, with Amazon and Netflix leading the way. From Email campaigns to accurate predictions of preferences, the practices of personalization became ubiquitous by 2008.

Mouse tracking and eye tracking also added profound data that improves visitor experience and thus increases interaction. With a deeper understanding of customer habits, personalization is beginning to become more accurate, focused, and effective.

With the advent of multiple devices using the Internet, Google released Universal Tracker in 2012. With more profound data at its fingertips, demographics, behavior, and lifestyle began to be segmented more accurately, further categorizing customers for more predictable results. App personalization becomes more and more important as phone use begins to outstrip laptops/desktops for online use. Machine learning on mobile soon improves.

Soon after, personalization magnifies the effectiveness of CRM (Customer Relation Management), which focuses on user experience and customer retention. This only becomes possible as big data is collected at ever higher rates, allowing companies to truly understand their customer’s needs.

With the use of A/B testing, the future of personalization is now highly managed from beginning to end. No longer is trial and error at the forefront of designers of websites or marketing campaigns. Behavior on site is monitored to a level thought unimaginable just a few years ago and personalization is becoming truly individualized. User experience is now at the heart of personalization, and with the likelihood of more powerful algorithms and customer understanding to come, personalization seems to be very much in its infancy.

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How to start your personalization strategy

Website personalization shouldn’t be a complicated undertaking. In fact, it is becoming easier, and therefore more widespread, every day. With several tools at a business’s disposal, there are many ways to go about creating personalization that works for each business. In other words, personalization should be personal for each business using it.

The first place to begin is getting to know an audience. Too many start with the concept that the product is key and then try to persuade an audience that they are right. This is similar to a waiter insisting that the customer has made the wrong order when they chose the duck and bringing them beef instead. As should be clear now, customer experience has become one of the most important aspects of personalization, and that cannot be achieved without getting to know exactly what it is your customer expects from the interaction with your website.

Want more on personalization? Read our E-book: Your Guide to Personalization

What’s Better: Personalization or Customization?

You want your customers to feel unique and have a positive experience with your brand. For you, this could mean implementing personalization tactics or dabbling into the world of product customization. Bettering your customers’ experience could mean focusing on customization, personalization, or a mixture of both. If you design your roadmap with your customers in mind, you’ll find customer loyalty and satisfaction along the way.

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