Recently, they shared this ethos at the CX Circle event by Contentsquare featuring Mel Parekh, Head of E-commerce at Hotel Chocolat. Mel took the stage to unravel the complexities of customer loyalty—a subject that has never been more critical in the fast-evolving world of eCommerce. The discussion centered around how Hotel Chocolat has navigated the challenges of a changing world while staying true to its brand values using the power of experimentation.

The Secret Ingredient: Authenticity and Quality

Hotel Chocolat stands out in the chocolate industry for its commitment to authenticity and quality. While most chocolate brands are content to source their cocoa, Hotel Chocolat went all-in, growing their own on the lush Rabot Estate in Saint Lucia. This direct control over their supply chain ensures that they use only the highest quality ingredients while helping craft a brand that’s as genuine as the cocoa it cultivates. 

Hotel Chocolat has witnessed a constant change in the e-commerce landscape. They’ve learned to adapt to these changes while staying true to their brand identity. One of their key initiatives has been to clearly define who they are as a brand and to create compelling reasons for customers to return to their site time and time again.

A Changing Landscape

It’s no secret that the world of eCommerce is in constant flux. Prices are rising across the board—from raw materials to operating costs—and the competition for customers is fiercer than ever.  In this environment, retailers must do more with less, finding innovative ways to stand out. 

As customers increasingly engage with various digital platforms and experiences, the range of choices available to them has become almost overwhelming. In this crowded marketplace, standing out from the competition requires more than just eye-catching design elements.

Moreover, the explosion of data in recent years has made it possible for even smaller companies to leverage insights that were once only accessible to larger players. However, the real challenge lies in capturing this data, interpreting it effectively, and, most importantly, implementing it in ways that drive meaningful results. Hotel Chocolat has embraced this data-driven approach, using insights to refine their strategies and create a more personalized experience for their customers with both Contentsquare and AB Tasty.

Building Lasting Relationships with Customers in a Phygital World

Loyalty is the cornerstone of Hotel Chocolat’s strategy in this new era. As a premium brand, they understand that their customers aren’t just looking for a product; they’re looking for an experience that resonates with their values and desires. This understanding has led Hotel Chocolat to focus on building a brand that not only meets customer expectations but exceeds them by offering a unique, personalized experience.

One of the key strategies they’ve implemented is their “phygital” approach, which blends the digital and physical worlds to create a more personalized, engaging shopping experience. This approach is centered on three key principles:

• Instant: Reducing delay or lag to ensure a smooth customer experience.
• Connected: Creating a more personal connection with each customer.
• Engaging: Giving customers a sense of control over their shopping journey.

 Make the Experience Personal

With over 120 different chocolate recipes, Hotel Chocolat faced this challenge: how do you help customers find the perfect product without overwhelming them? Their solution was gamification—a method that makes the shopping experience more fun and interactive. In Spring 2023, they launched the “Chocolate Love Match,” a quiz that matches customers to one of six flavor profiles. This not only narrows down the selection from 120 options to 20 or 30, making it easier to shop but also helps customers find the perfect gift for friends and family based on their flavor preferences.

The personalization doesn’t stop there. 

Hotel Chocolat also leverages machine learning and tools like AB Tasty to improve their customer experience further. For instance, they’ve been experimenting with “Add to Bag” personalized recommendations. This initiative is crucial, especially as acquisition costs rise, making it more important than ever to maximize the value of each customer interaction.

Using AB Tasty, they tested two variations: one that showed products frequently bought together and another that displayed recently viewed items for easy access. Both approaches tested positively, resulting in a 5.31% increase in average order value and a 2.87% boost in revenue. 

Embracing Data for Optimization

Hotel Chocolat has also focused on optimizing its digital presence, particularly their website. Working with AB Tasty, they undertook a redesign of their homepage, recognizing that the layout and user experience across devices play a critical role in customer engagement. The goal was to create a more visually appealing and intuitive experience that could better connect with customers online—especially when you can’t taste or smell the products.

The results speak volumes. By optimizing the homepage, they saw a 10% reduction in bounce rate, a 1.67% increase in visiting time, and significant improvements in conversion rates—up 0.54% overall and a substantial 7.24% on desktop. This uplift was largely due to better highlighting the most attractive elements on the homepage, such as category tiles that drive higher conversion and revenue.

Loyalty from a Brand Perspective

Mel Parekh left us with three takeaways for building a brand that stands the test of time:

1. Embracing Change: It shows that your brand is up-to-date and ready to adapt. Staying agile ensures that your brand remains relevant and continues to serve your customers, no matter the circumstances.
2. Listening and Understanding Customers: If loyal customers aren’t heard and understood, they’ll lose their preference for your brand and start considering others.
3. Sticking to Your Values: Clearly reward loyal customers for their loyalty, and make sure to differentiate between who is loyal and who isn’t.

Conclusion

Loyalty isn’t just about offering a great product; it’s about creating connections that resonate. Hotel Chocolat has perfected this recipe by blending their commitment to quality with a data-centric culture. Experimentation and data from AB Tasty have allowed them to be able to improve in all areas – whether that is personalization, gamification of their loyalty scheme, or the link between their online and physical shops. Experimentation has improved more than just their CRO but has helped define who they are and what they stand for.

Find out more in Mel’s talk below:

The post Hotel Chocolat at CX Circle: Sweetening Loyalty with Experimentation 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.

Part of this transformation lies in their strategic partnership with AB Tasty and the integration of EmotionsAI to better understand their customers and boost their experience optimization roadmap.

With insurance buyers increasingly seeking reassurance, trust, and intuitive experiences, DirectAsia recognized the need to evolve beyond traditional approaches to meet these demands. Like many financial services, insurance is inherently complex by nature.

DirectAsia ran tests focusing on an area on their website where they knew they had room for improvement. They compared the results of that test on segments selected by EmotionsAI versus a broader audience. Download the case study to find out how EmotionsAI expedited visitor journeys through to their quote page.

The post DirectAsia Simplifies Insurance Experiences with Empathy 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.

Optimize to find your better.

Good things come to those who change.

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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.

The post Customization vs Personalization: What’s the Difference? appeared first on abtasty.

People increasingly ignore irrelevant ads while being more receptive to tailored online experiences that speak to their needs and wants. To keep a competitive edge, marketers need to focus on crafting personalized content and user experiences to increase their ad engagement and boost revenue.

Welcome to the world of behavioral targeting.

Let’s talk about how behavioral targeting is done, what data it involves, six examples of brands that are killing it with behavioral targeting, and some best practices to follow.

What is behavioral targeting?

Behavioral targeting is a marketing technique that segments audiences based on behaviors rather than just demographic parameters.

Simply put, website owners can use the data collected from user behavior to create profiles and hyper-target future advertising for specific groups of customers. Behavioral targeting allows brands and marketers to engage customers and rise above more traditional strategies.

Modern marketers use behavioral targeting to achieve greater engagement in an era where more and more online shoppers have developed strong avoidance habits toward most ad formats.

What data do you need for behavioral targeting in marketing and advertisement?

Behavioral targeting campaigns are data-driven. Behavioral data is often collected with:

• Your company’s web analytics tools
• Collected cookies
• Customers’ browsing history
• Collected IP addresses

The most common metrics collected for behavioral targeting are:

• Geographic location
• Type of devices used
• Visit data
• Transactional data
• Purchase history
• Browsing history

Basically, marketers use any type of data—provided that it delivers actionable insights—that can be used to increase engagement and conversions during a campaign.

The benefits of behavioral marketing and behavioral advertising

• Relevancy: By analyzing a customer’s past behavior, you can create more relevant ads to give users a better (and less spammy) experience.
• Efficiency: Targeting users who’ve shown an interest in your products/services ensures you spend your budget more efficiently. 
• Improved ROI: Increasing the relevancy and efficiency of ads will, in turn, lead to a better ROI. 

Behavioral targeting examples

Retargeting ads examples

You can use retargeting advertisements to show advertisements to your website users that are tailored to their actions on your website. Both Facebook and Google offer retargeting adverts. Retargeting adverts are an excellent way to encourage a website visitor to return to your website by showing the relevant ad based on their past behavior. Here’s how a couple of large brands use retargeting adverts to increase sales:

• Neutrogena

Neutrogena, a well-known beauty brand, used customers’ past shopping cart behavior to increase sales. Knowing that 75% of its customers were purchasing products from one segment of its range, Neutrogena decided to take action to increase the number of products purchased by existing customers.

The company used historic shopping cart data to create product pairings: products that went well together and also reflected historic customer buying patterns — think mascara and eye makeup remover, for example.

Armed with customers’ purchase behaviors, Neutrogena created banner advertisements and videos displaying product pairing, product information, and – last but not least – coupons to encourage sales.

Finally, these product pairing adverts were displayed to customers based on their past purchasing patterns. The results speak for themselves. Neutrogena got a £5.84 return on behavioral advertising spend (ROAS) and exceeded its own benchmark by 289%.

• Aurum Brothers

This luxury male watch brand used its users’ website behaviors and Facebook retargeting advertisements to increase sales and brand awareness.

The campaign segmented the company’s existing website users into three groups: 

• People who had added an item to their baskets
• People who had viewed specific items
• People who had visited the website

As well as designing specific adverts for each group, Aurum Brothers tested different ad settings such as bid options and ad objectives.

Facebook retargeting based on customer behavior was highly successful for the company. They reported 100% increases month on month and an increase of 50% in revenue.

Behavioral Email Marketing

One example of behavioral marketing is behaviorally targeted email campaigns. Email campaigns can be triggered by actions taken on a website, such as subscribing to a newsletter, adding an item to the cart, or viewing the sales page.

Here’s an example of behavioral email marketing in real life:

• Closet London

A clever way to use behavioral targeting is to segment your customers based on their stage in the buying cycle, and then retarget them with email campaigns specific to their shopping journey.  

And that’s exactly what clothing brand Closet London did. 

The company split its customer base into four groups based on their past purchases and implemented email marketing workflows specific to each group. The groups were:

• one-time purchases
• repeat purchases
• loyal customers
• dormant customers

If a customer is categorized as a dormant customer, they will be sent an email about the latest collection. Then, if no conversion takes place within two weeks, the brand encourages the user to re-engage by emailing them a discount offer. 

But Closet London doesn’t stop there. The clever clothing brand also sends a variety of other email campaigns tailored to both new users (e.g. a welcome email campaign) and past customers (e.g. an email workflow based on the items they’ve purchased in the past).

If you’re concerned that too many emails may annoy your customers, don’t be. 

By segmenting customers based on their actions on your website, you ensure that you’re sending well-timed, relevant, and useful emails to the correct segmentation of your customers. Do it successfully and you might get results like Closet London — an increase in revenue of 2900%.

Location-Based Advertising

By using location-based advertising (LBA) you can adapt your marketing message based on where your target consumers are geographically. 

It even allows you to tailor your message based on the proximity to stores, the weather, transport routes, and so on. This means that you can create messages that make sense, given the location or the weather they are experiencing. 

Here are some examples of brands using location-based advertising to generate sales and build brand awareness:

• Timberland

Timberland wanted to drive a younger demographic of customers to visit its physical stores and stockists. 

Timberland used a combination of data, including whether a user had recently visited a brick-and-mortar store and how close they were to a store at the time.

The brand used technology to draw polygons around Timberland stores to target people in the “mindset to purchase footwear.” 

The campaign results showed an increase in-store visits by 6.2%, with, notably, 20% of these visits within 24 hours of the user viewing the advertising campaign. 

• Neutrogena (again)

We’ve already discussed how Neutrogena used customers’ past shopping cart behaviors to increase its sales, so we know that the beauty brand is no stranger to behavioral targeting. 

However, its next strategy – to advertise a new sunscreen – was rather ingenious. 

Not happy to only target customers based on weather forecast apps, Neutrogena used real-time UV conditions, the time of day, and the proximity to shops selling Neutrogena to target potential customers. 

Imagine browsing your phone on an unexpectedly hot summer’s day. You flick through Facebook and see a Neutrogena advert. You head to your nearest store and, surprise, surprise, it sells Neutrogena.

Which sunscreen will you purchase? I’m going to bet it’s Neutrogena. 

Again, the results are stellar. Within a couple of months, the campaign increased awareness of the sunscreen from zero to 63% and increased purchase intent to more than 40%. 

Suggested Selling Examples

Suggested selling is simply offering choices based on items that customers have already purchased. Suggested selling can come in the form of upselling or cross-selling, neither of which are new to the retail world. 

• Amazon

No article about suggested selling would be complete without discussing Amazon, arguably the Godfather of this technique. 

According to this source, more than a third of Amazon’s revenue comes from its recommendation engine. That’s massive, but how does it work? Well, in a handful of ways. 

Recommended for You

On Amazon’s home page, you can click on a “Your Recommendations” link. This directs you to a page full of products recommended just for you. By suggesting a selection of products from the categories you’ve already viewed, Amazon aims to encourage you to click and buy additional items. 

Frequently Bought Together

By adding a ‘frequently bought together’ section below your cart, Amazon successfully manages to increase your order value.

Browsing History

Amazon also shows you a history of the items you’ve purchased on Amazon. The fact that you’ve already viewed it signals that you’ve previously been interested in purchasing it, so it’s an easy way for Amazon to remind you of the product. 

• Sunuva 

Sunuva may be a less well-known brand on the list, but its use of behavioral targeting has generated excellent results. 

This UK-based kid’s clothing company wanted to increase sales, but with a small team, whatever the solution, it needed to be automated and easy to implement. 

One of the core elements to increase sales was to focus on and reduce cart abandonment rates. 

After a website redesign, Sunuva was able to use browsing behavior and real-time crowd-sourced data from other visitors.  

This enabled the company to present its website visitors with relevant product recommendations, as well as email campaigns with content tailored to the customer, instead of generic offers. 

Remarkably, the changes increased turnover by nearly 9% from the very first day. 

Why is behavioral targeting slowly replacing demographic targeting?

Demographic data is limited.

Age, location, and income are all great factors in helping marketers create targeted messages. However, demographic data is fairly restricted when it comes to understanding the needs, wants, habits, and pain points of your customers.

Demographic data won’t tell you much about your customers’ behavior. Using strictly demographic data is often a hit-or-miss game.

Using behavioral data, marketers can target their own visitors by knowing which pages they’ve visited and what they’ve left in their carts. It allows for extremely precise targeting that cannot be achieved using demographic data.

Getting customers’ attention is harder than ever.

With more and more people ignoring generic ad formats, marketers worry that traditional PPC advertising and display ads are losing momentum.

Demographic data is used by everyone

Most demographic data can be accessed by anyone, including your competitors.

To keep their edge, marketers should use their own customer’s data to create more personalized online experiences. That way, marketers can achieve greater ROAS and ROI while ensuring their customers are exposed to the right ads, at the right time.

The next step of behavioral marketing: emotional personalization

Emotions play a pivotal role in every step of the buying process. To truly connect with consumers, brands must decode not just their behaviors, but also the emotional motivations behind their decisions. Purchasing decisions are not always rational, and not everyone reacts in the same way.

With AB Tasty’s new hyper personalization software, EmotionsAI, you can craft tailored messages for each visitor type, analyze data to discern their desires, conduct experiments to refine messaging and design personalized journeys that cater to specific emotional triggers.

Stay ahead of the curve in experience optimization with EmotionsAI – the ultimate tool for mastering emotional personalization. Dive into emotional personalization with sophisticated algorithms to anticipate buying patterns and tailor experiences accordingly.

5 Behavioral targeting marketing and advertisement tactics

1. Leverage upselling & cross-selling

Knowing what your customers love and how they interact with your business is a massively powerful tool to suggest additional products to them.

Take Spotify. They track the music we listen to and the frequency at which we do it, and then craft personal ads based on our preferences to sell concert tickets and bring us back to their app. Behavioral marketing is that powerful.

If your company has any e-commerce activities, then you’re likely already familiar with cross-selling and suggested products: techniques that are also powered by behavioral marketing.

As an example, Macy’s uses product recommendations to promote related products based on customers’ data, to increase basket value.

2. Use behavioral email marketing campaigns

According to FPS research insights, email marketing still delivers the highest conversion rates when it comes to selling products and services.

Knowing this, marketers can strengthen their email marketing campaigns by using behavioral targeting tactics.

Basically, behavioral email marketing consists of sending targeted emails to users based on their past actions on a website (cart abandonment, pages visited, newsletter subscription, etc.).

Take this example: Quora’s goal is for you to return to their website as much as possible.

By knowing which pages you’ve read in the past, Quora is able to send personalized emails highlighting similar topics to pique your interest and draw you back to their site.

This is behavioral targeting on an individual scale.

3. Leverage Facebook, Google, and other retargeting services

Retargeting and remarketing are common tactics used to target potential customers who’ve previously visited your website by showing them ads on other websites (like online publications, social networks, or even game sites).

There are several ad networks that support retargeting.

Among them, Facebook and Google are the most common options because they reach large audiences and provide accurate data and analysis on the generated sales. They also boast a lot of integrations with third-party data analysis tools.

Nowadays, the number of factors that can be tracked is impressive:

• Which pages have been visited?
• How long were the sessions?
• Which products were bought?
• What was the average order value?
• How many products were purchased?
• How long has it been since a visitor’s last session?
• Which customers have added a product to the cart and then abandoned it?

Once marketers have gathered enough behavioral data, they can proceed to create user segments based on behavioral traits and show them highly relevant ads.

Here’s an example of retargeting:

Let’s say your e-commerce generates high cart abandonment rates.

You can create a user segment based on people who have abandoned a specific product (say, your best seller) in their cart and create an ad that will target these users. To increase its efficiency, you can create a sense of urgency by offering them a discount provided that they buy the item now.

If you successfully target the right people, your ad’s audience is now exclusively composed of potential customers who already know your product, thus generating much higher conversion rates.

Although we’ve talked a lot about Facebook and Google’s retargeting features, do not forget that other advertising platforms (like Outbrain or Criteo) can also provide remarketing services.

Your retargeted ads can appear on many websites, including major online publications such as Forbes or WSJ, depending on your audience’s habits and digital media consumption.

4. Go granular with precise geographic targeting

Whether you’re selling products or services, knowing the precise geolocation of your visitors (thanks to their IP addresses) can make a huge difference in your campaign’s success.

Let’s pretend that you run a clothing company that sells year-round fashion. Using your data analytics tool, you could create user segments based on their geolocation to advertise clothes that are relevant to them, given their current browsing location.

Geo-targeted ads can also be served at a city level, meaning that marketers can tailor ads to reach a restricted but qualified audience. This can be especially useful for companies that rely on their respective offices to carry out their business activities.

Using geo-targeted advertising, marketers are able to create specific, tailored audiences that leverage both behavioral and demographic parameters to ensure their campaign’s success.

5. Experiment with personalized coupons, offers, and discounts

Website personalization consists of crafting customized experiences based on consumers’ wants, needs, and past actions as opposed to offering a single, generic experience to all consumers regardless of their preferences.

Retail and tech giants like Amazon have long started to implement some level of website personalization (like wishlists and recommended products). Displaying different content based on a visitor’s personal preferences has become an essential marketing technique.

People don’t hate ads, they hate irrelevant ads.

Knowing this, marketers can create segment-based ads to increase relevancy and boost engagement.

This targeted pop-up ad has an offer enclosed to deter users from leaving the site. By using an all-in-one CRO solution (like AB Tasty) you can implement customized content on any page you want and craft your own display rules based on your consumers’ data.

How to create a personalized experience

Our team at AB Tasty knows how much of an impact customized experiences can make on our clients’ online revenue. So, we implemented a loyalty overlay pop-up for one of our French fashion retailers. This overlay pop-up would only appear for loyal customers and reward them with a limited discount.

Our goal was to increase customer retention while maximizing revenue from returning customers, boosting brand loyalty in the very competitive French fashion environment.

Getting Started with Behavioral Marketing

Behavioral marketing is a powerful way to carry out your marketing strategy. It uses the behaviors of your website visitors and customers to create highly relevant content that encourages them to make a purchase at your website or even in your online store.

This article has discussed some examples of brands successfully using behavioral marketing, but now it’s over to you to try it out for yourself.

Start by choosing one of the tactics shown in this article and see how it can make your advertising more relevant and successful.

The post 5 Behavioral Targeting Tactics to Boost Conversions (with Examples) appeared first on abtasty.

On The Beach is a UK travel company specializing in beach holidays. Known for their vibrant and dynamic brand image, they provide hassle-free and affordable beach holiday experiences. 

They strive to appeal to a wide range of travelers, offering a wide selection of destinations, accommodations, and activities.

Often highlighting the excitement and joy of beach vacations, their website showcases the company’s commitment to creating unforgettable holiday experiences. By promoting transparency, flexibility, and excellent customer service, On The Beach has established itself as a trusted and sought-after brand in the UK travel industry.

Fine Tuning the Customer Journey

As On The Beach caters to a wide range of customers, it’s important to ensure that their website provides a personalized experience according to each customer’s needs.

Customers start the journey of looking for their perfect holiday, they may often visit a website multiple times before making a final decision and reaching the final stage of purchase.

This means they have new or returning customers coming to their website. The company should be able to show it understands its customers by providing personalized and targeted messaging along the different stages of the customer/purchasing journey.

This is where testing and experimentation become vital as On The Beach finds the right messaging with the highest positive impact on its different user segments. The Conversion Rate Optimization Manager, Alex McClean, explained,

“We’re trying to look at how we can take our different customer types and give them a better, improved journey”.

An example is when they used different badges to recommend holidays to individual segments coming into their site. With the help of AB Tasty, they discovered that new users preferred a recommendation marked “Bestsellers” and that returning users reacted better to “Our pick”, as they already had trust in the brand.

Testing these various types of messages allowed them to determine the right messaging for each user group, ultimately leading to increased bookings.

The Roll-Out of AB Tasty Across the Company

On The Beach understood the advantage of being able to test and learn after seeing the impact that A/B testing has on their business. In this way, after trying simple tests, based on content and product placement, they started to increase the number of tests they did a month while bringing in other team members. 

By sharing test results, learnings, and best practices, On The Beach ensured that all departments, including marketing, product development, and customer support, had access to the latest information. This cross-team collaboration enabled the company to make data-driven decisions, implement successful optimizations, and continuously enhance the overall user experience, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and business growth. A real experimentation culture was fostered.

Key Support from AB Tasty

One of the great advantages for On The Beach, as their testing program expands, is being able to learn at speed, as well as the support they receive from AB Tasty’s teams. 

With a responsive and knowledgeable support staff, AB Tasty assists On The Beach in setting up tests, interpreting results, and implementing optimizations. They offer timely and personalized assistance, guiding the company through the testing process and offering expert advice on best practices.

Alex explains,

“For us, the real reason that we chose AB Tasty, and what differentiated AB Tasty from the competitors was the level of service that we were offered. We have complete access to developers, really attentive CSMs, It’s really beneficial to keep things moving where we don’t need to go to our development team”

The support from AB Tasty means that On The Beach can leverage and grow at speed. The learnings that are achieved through testing mean they can improve their site experience and conversions, re-iterate, and grow to provide a customer experience that speaks to their audience.

The post On The Beach Tests the Water with Personalization appeared first on abtasty.

Headphones are on, now it’s time to get inspired.

Like the iconic CDs of yesteryear, this ebook is a 2023 compilation of the top hits in experience optimization case studies.

Dig into a curated playlist of real-world scenarios where our global customers have pushed their experiences further with AB Tasty through features like web experimentation, feature experimentation, AI-powered personalization and more.

From A/B testing banners and copy to more in-depth CRO strategy shifts, discover how leading companies have leveraged data-driven strategies to elevate their customer experiences, boost conversion rates, and drive remarkable results.

Explore the success stories and innovative approaches that can inspire your own journey towards achieving customer-centric excellence.

Find out what it takes to achieve chart-topping success in experience optimization!

Download your copy of “Now That’s What I Call AB Tasty” today.

WEB EXPERIMENTATION CASE STUDY

Galeries Lafayette Asks How Quality of Product Images Impacts User Behavior

Working with AB Tasty and technology partner Contentsquare, the team at Galeries Lafayette created a test to display premium images of products worn by models to measure impact on conversions. The results were immediate, leading to a 49% increase in clicks and…

Top hits in experience optimization featuring real-world  AB Tasty customers

Grab your copy of “Now That’s What I Call AB Tasty” today.

The post Now That’s What I Call AB Tasty appeared first on abtasty.

For product and web teams, the prospect of mobile is both wonderful and terrifying. The wonderful: your product or website is available all the time! The terrifying: you now have to create and develop two (or three, or four) user experiences, all at once.

While your customers probably walk around with their phones all the time, they may also spend the majority of their workday on a desktop computer. They might browse your mobile website or app during sporadic free moments throughout the day, then finish their customer journey later, when they’re not limited by small screen sizes and thumb-based typing.

The bottom line? Your entire product experience needs to be seamless, and combined across all platforms and devices. When you’re building an app, chances are you’re building a desktop version for web browsers, and at least two versions for mobile: iOS and Android. Given that people might also use the app on their phone’s web browser—a different experience than on a desktop but not quite the same as a native phone app—it’s easy to wonder where to start with the design process!

Below we’ve outlined some key tips for doing just that.

Plan an Entire Digital Experience

Regardless, your designs across both desktop and mobile have two requirements right out of the gate: they must be intuitive, and they must be accessible for people with disabilities.

You’ll also want to consider the fact that designing apps with a “mobile first” mindset is now a standard, because 1) users will expect to be able to access your digital ecosystem from their phones, and 2) web apps that are optimized for mobile rank higher on Google, which can lead to more conversions.

Before you start designing your app, make sure you plan to accommodate the key differences between desktop and mobile:

Both desktop and mobile experiences are crucial for customer conversion and retention, but often in different ways and in different circumstances. Below, we’ll take a look at best practices for keeping your mobile and desktop experiences updated and healthy for your sales funnel.

Best Practice for the Mobile Digital Experience

Whether your mobile experience exists within a dedicated iOS or Android app or simply as a responsive web-based app, there are some key best practices to be aware of when building your design strategy to maximize conversions and retention.

1. Keep it accessible, always

If your website or app is used by the public, it legally must comply with accessibility standards. These include:

• Text size options
• Large, easy-to-use buttons and CTAs
• Minimum color contrast ratios
• Simple touchscreen gestures
• Adjustable screen orientation
• Compatibility with screen readers
• Content translation ability

2. Make sure your mobile content is consistent with desktop

If your users regularly hop between their computer and phones, it’s important that they can easily and consistently find what they need. This can include information, tools, actions, products, and more. If they’re available on desktop, they should also be available on mobile!

For example, if you have a menu on your desktop app that offers users different ways to contact customer service but it’s missing on mobile, it will likely cause frustration when users are trying to get help on the go.

3. Consider your mobile users’ needs

Ask yourself: What data, tools, or functions will your users be accessing? Make everything easy to find, navigate, and use. This might start with an intuitive navigation system that lets users easily:

• Make purchases
• Find specific tools they love to use
• Manage their account or subscription
• Get help from your support team

You’ll also want to consider what your different users will be trying to do and from where. Will they be using cellular data (slow) or wi-fi (fast)? Will they be reserving certain actions for mobile vs. desktop? Will tasks that may have started on a processor-heavy desktop app later migrate to mobile (or vice versa)?

For example, a video editor might need to use a desktop app to edit terabytes’ worth of cinema-quality video before switching to mobile to share the final piece on social media. Personal workflows might vary, but it all gets down to having the right tools on hand at all times.

4. Check how your site and app perform across different devices

You’ve built your iOS app. You’ve built your Android app. Your responsive website’s parameters are set so they’ll adjust responsively for users accessing from phones and tablets.

Now comes the testing. App Store or Google Play installations should work seamlessly. Each button, form, menu, and action must work flawlessly. Load times should be fast, and there should be little to no latency between screens (though this can vary with web-based apps, depending on how they’re constructed).

For responsive sites, each element will have CSS parameters that dictate how it will appear on a phone, tablet, or desktop computer. You don’t need separate versions of your website, but each element must be tagged correctly so it renders properly on each device.

5. Make UX choices that encourage conversion and retention

Good UX (user experience) comes from good user research and robust product analytics, but it’s customer conversion and retention that will keep your app alive. If users buy items or services through your app, you’ll want to keep these top UX tips in mind:

• Never hide menus and navigation options.
• Make search bars easy to find.
• Make product browsing simple.
• Choose familiar, suitable icons for cart checkout processes.
• Label all icons, buttons, and navigation items.
• Make checkout funnels easy (including credit card selection/adding), or incorporate simple payment options like Apple Pay or Google Pay.
• Consider adding a subscription option so users can set it once and forget it!

Don’t forget that there are product analytics tools available to analyze the particular actions your users take, including Session Replays. These help you identify which parts of your UX design are working and which parts are causing friction.

Best Practice for Desktop Optimization

Desktop apps (many of which are web-based) are also commonly used and have more screen real estate to work with. Here are five tips to optimize your desktop experience to convert (and retain) new customers:

1. Create an engaging homepage

A great UX on your homepage can make or break conversion rates. When you’ve spent time and resources optimizing SEO, you’ll want to give potential customers a good first impression with a strong design. Here’s what we recommend to maximize conversion and retention:

• Keep your design simple with a single, clear CTA.
• Make sure it meets accessibility standards.
• Use a catchy headline and simple buzzwords to make your value proposition clear and concise.
• Choose the right colors by employing and understanding color psychology.
• Differentiate hyperlinked text with an accent color.
• Embrace white space! Space around your text can keep people reading it.
• Use well-lit, professional images and videos where they fit organically.
• Again, make sure your site is responsive to serve mobile users!

2. Improve website speed

Nothing deflects a website visitor faster than a glacially slow load time. To avoid losing possible customers, you can:

• Optimize your images by saving compressed versions at 72dpi.
• Limit the number of assets needed to load your page correctly—this can help reduce HTTP requests, which speeds up load times.
• Limit the use of external scripts.
• Remove unnecessary text, white space, and comments from CSS and Javascript files.
• Use browser HTTP caching—this can offer faster load times for users who frequently visit your site.

3. Develop intuitive site navigation

Site navigation—typically in the form of a top menu, side-bar menu, or organized icons—shows users what to do once they reach your site. Use descriptive labels for each item, and simplify drop-down menu structures so users won’t get overwhelmed.

4. Make it easy to search for terms

Adding a search bar to your top menu can be a great way to give users a way to search your site for any term (or action) they want. This gives them a shortcut to find exactly what they need!

5. Ready your desktop site for final steps of conversion and retention

Often, consumers are more likely to say that desktop offers a more “convenient” shopping experience than mobile, and a majority of people complete purchases on a desktop.

As such, desktop websites are still used and still valuable, particularly for final conversation and ongoing retention. Whether it’s because customers are making complex purchases or simply seeing your checkout funnel more clearly on desktop, it’s essential to make sure every step of your experience is seamless.

Once you’ve converted customers, it can also help to keep track of their preferences so you can personalize their experience going forward.

Gain Valuable Insights with Heap

This is a guest blog written by Ben Lempert, Head of Content and Web at Heap.

Heap And AB Tasty provide businesses with the ability to collect and analyze user data efficiently, leading to more informed decisions and higher conversion rates. This dynamic combination offers a comprehensive solution for optimizing web experiences and increasing revenue through data-driven strategies.

Curious how you can find out what your users are doing across both desktop and mobile? Heap offers tools to help you track, measure, and ultimately optimize every touchpoint of users’ journeys across your entire digital experience.

The post Best Practice for Optimizing Mobile vs. Desktop Experiences appeared first on abtasty.

CHALLENGE

As we moved past the Covid pandemic, hospitality brands have been hungry to gain back lost revenue. It is key for brands to level up their customer experience (CX) to withstand intense competition.

TEST IDEA

For this experiment, the team was interested in uplifting overall bookings from couples and families. They theorized that creating a linked end-to-end experience for this audience group would uplift revenue, and AB Tasty was the perfect tool to support their personalization goals.

Two audience profiles were created from multiple data sources in a customer data platform and shared with the front-end marketing tools. These audiences were Families and Couples.

Using this audience data, a personalized digital experience was powered. Website visitors were directed to custom landing pages, which featured banners and offers tailored for their segment.

RESULTS

The results were impressive. The team saw a 35.3% uplift in visitor-to-book and a 32.1% increase in search-to-select.

Couples and families who saw a personalized experience were 21% and 31% more likely to revisit the site respectively, compared to the control group.

Clicks on the homepage hero banner and navigation usage dropped significantly, proving that personalization enabled users to convert without extra website navigation.

The post Pan Pacific Hotels Group Uplifts Revenue with Audience Segmentation appeared first on abtasty.

With over 15 years of experience in digital businesses, David Mannheim has helped many companies, such as ASOS, Sports Direct and Boots to improve and personalize their digital experience and conversion strategy. He was also the founder of one of the UK’s largest independent conversion optimization consultancies – User Conversion.

With his experience as an advisor helping e-commerce businesses to innovate and iterate personalization and creativity at speed, David has recently published his own book where he tackles the “Person in Personalisation”, why he believes personalization has lost its purpose and what to do about it. David is currently building a solution to tackle this epidemic with his new platform; Made With Intent – a product that helps retailers understand the intent and mindset of their audience, not just their behaviors or what page they’re on.

AB Tasty’s VP Marketing Marylin Montoya spoke with David about the current state of personalization and the importance of going back to the basics and focusing on putting the person back in personalization. He also highlights the need for brands to build a relationship with customers based on trust and loyalty, particularly in the digital sphere instead of focusing on immediate gratification.

Here are some key takeaways from their conversation. 

Personalization is about being personal

David stresses the importance of not forgetting the first three syllables at the beginning of personalization. In other words, it’s imperative to remember that personalization is about being personal and putting the person at the heart of everything- it’s all about customer-centricity.

For David, personalization nowadays has become too commercialized and too focused on immediate gratification. Instead, the focus should be on metrics such as customer lifetime value and loyalty. Personalization should be a strategic value add rather than a tactical add-on used solely to drive short-term sales and growth. 

“If we move our metrics to focus more on the long-term metrics of customer satisfaction, more quality than quantity, more about customer lifetime value and loyalty as well as recognizing the intangibles, not just the tangibles, I think that puts brands in a much better place.”

He further argues that there is a sort of frustration point when it comes to the topic of personalization and who actually does it well. This frustration was clear after David interviewed 153 experts for his book, most of whom struggled to answer the question of “who does personalization well” and found it difficult to name any brands outside of the typical “big players” such as Netflix and Amazon.

This frustration, David believes, stems from the difficulty of replicating an in-store experience in a human-to-screen relationship. Nonetheless, when customers are loyal to a brand, that same loyalty should be reciprocated from the brand side as well to make a customer feel they’re more than just a number. The idea is to achieve a sort of familiarity and acknowledgment with the customer and create a genuine, authentic relationship with them. This is the key to unlocking customer-centricity. 

It’s about offering a personalized experience that focuses on adding value for each individual customer, rather than exploiting value where only customers end up with a commercialized experience geared towards driving growth for the company itself.

Disparity between brands’ and customers’ perceptions of personalization 

Citing Salethru’s Personalization Index, David refers to a particular finding in their yearly report where 71% of brands think they excel in personalization but only 34% of customers actually agree with that.

In that sense, there’s a mismatch between customers’ expectations and brands’ own expectations of what is competent customer service.

He refers to recommendations as one example that brands primarily incorporate into their personalization strategy. However, he believes recommendations only address the awareness part of the AIDA model (Awareness, Intent, Desire and Action).

“Product discovery for me is only one piece of a puzzle. If you take personalization back to what it’s designed to be, to be personal, well, where is the familiarity? Where’s the acknowledgment? Where’s the connection? Where’s the conversation?” David argues.

What’s missing is a core, intangible ingredient that helps create a relationship between two individuals, in this case, a human and a brand. Because brands have difficulty pinpointing what that is, they choose instead to base their personalization strategy on something more tangible and visible – recommendations.

For brands, the recommendations narrative is fully immersed within customer expectations and so encompasses the idea of personalization, particularly as that’s the approach that the “bigger” brands have adopted when it comes to personalizing the user experience. 

“It becomes an expectation. I go on X website so I expect the bare minimum which is to see things that are relevant to what I search for or the things that I’m interested in…..This is what people associate personalization to,” David says. 

Recommendations are an essential first step of personalization but David argues the future of personalization requires brands to go even further.

Brands should focus on building trust

In order for brands to build that sense of familiarity and truly become more personal with customers, brands need to take personalization to the next stage beyond awareness. For example, customers should be able to trust that a brand is recommending to them what they actually need rather than what makes the most profit.

David believes that the concept of trust is missing in a human-to-screen relationship, which is what’s hindering brands from reaching that next level.

In other words, it’s all about transforming the whole approach of personalization along with its purpose to demonstrate greater care with the few rather than “trying to get the many” to establish trust with customers. Brands should shift their focus to care, which David believes is what makes a brand truly customer-centric.

“I think it’s an initiative, if you can call it that, to focus on care. It does make the brand more customer-centric. You’re putting the customer, their experiences and expectations first with the purpose of providing a better experience for them.”

 In that sense, two crucial aspects play into the concept of trust, according to David: competence and care. 

Brands need to be able to be competent in that customers can trust they’re being recommended the most suitable products for their needs rather than the one that has the higher profit margin; in other words, recommending products that are best for the business instead of the customer. At the same time, brands need to demonstrate care by being more personable with customers to be able to create a connection between brand and consumer. 

“The more caring you are, the more you can demonstrate trust,” David says.

Think of banking. Banking demonstrates all the competence in the world, but no care whatsoever. And that therefore destroys their trust. Think of the other way around. Think of your grandma giving you a sweater at Christmas. I’m sure you trust your grandma, but you won’t trust her to buy you a Christmas present, for example.”

For David, context is a prerequisite for trust and the best way to understand user context is through intent, which is where the difference between persuasion and manipulation lies. This is why he has been busy building Made With Intent for the past 8 months focused on that very same concept. 

When it comes to recommendations, in particular, it’s essential to contextualize them and understand customer intent. Only then can a brand excel at its recommendation strategy and create a relationship of trust where customers can be confident they’re being recommended products unique to them only.

What else can you learn from our conversation with David Mannheim?

• His take on AI and its role in personalization
• Ways brands can demonstrate care to build trust and familiarity with their consumers
• How brands can shift their personalization approach

About David Mannheim

David has worked in the digital marketing industry for over 15 years and along with founding one of the UK’s largest independent conversion optimization consultancies, he has worked with some of the UK’s biggest retailers to improve and personalize their digital experience and conversion strategy. Today, David has published his own book about personalization and is also building a new platform that helps retailers understand the intent and mindset of their audience, not just their behaviors or what page they’re on.

About 1,000 Experiments Club

The 1,000 Experiments Club is an AB Tasty-produced podcast hosted by Marylin Montoya, VP of Marketing at AB Tasty. Join Marylin and the Marketing team as they sit down with the most knowledgeable experts in the world of experimentation to uncover their insights on what it takes to build and run successful experimentation programs.

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