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.

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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.

CHALLENGE

Groupama wanted to find a way to better adapt their A/B testing approach to fit customers unique emotional needs. They already had a testing solution in place but were curious about the innovative emotional targeting from EmotionsAI.

TEST IDEA

An A/B test was created focusing on the quotes form. The “Intuitive” segment was shown a reassuring message on the quote form promising the protection of their private data. Meanwhile, the “Rationals” segment was shown the form without the extra messaging, allowing them to continue without distraction.

RESULTS

Within 2 weeks, Groupama had their results. It was an instant win, with targeted messaging from EmotionsAI leading to a 10% increase in quote submissions. They also saw a 2 point increase in passage to the next step of the quote form, nudging customers further through the funnel.

TAKEAWAYS

With an early success of the first test, Groupama decided to implement EmotionsAI due to the immediate return on investment they saw.

The post Groupama increases quote submissions with EmotionsAI appeared first on abtasty.

CHALLENGE

The team at La Redoute was eager to change up the way they optimized the website. They wanted to find ways to improve engagement through optimization, especially on mobile. 

They turned to EmotionsAI by AB Tasty to help deliver the most individualized experience possible for visitors to their site. 

Using AI-powered segmentation to build better experiments, they started to let the psychology behind their customers’ decisions help shape their optimization.

RESULTS

After implementing EmotionsAI and creating new emotions-based audience segments,
La Redoute saw a significant impact on their engagement rates. The enhanced customer experience led to a 4% increase in revenue per visitor as well as a 3% increased conversion rate.

TAKEAWAYS

Since using EmotionsAI, La Redoute has tripled the success rate of their A/B tests, completely changing their approach to optimization. 

The post La Redoute triples A/B test success rate with EmotionsAI 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.

CHALLENGE

The Whitepages’ marketing team set a goal to increase conversion rate and boost memberships for their monthly plan by improving the structure of the pricing page and make it easier for customers to compare the different plans.

TEST IDEA

The layout of the price subscription page was changed so that all three plans were more prominently displayed next to each other in the form of expanded vertical menus to clearly showcase what’s included in each plan. 

Dynamic toggles were also placed at the top so users could compare monthly and annual pricing plans while the bottom of the page featured a larger payment tab under the plans instead of next to them.

RESULTS

With the new layout, the team was able to present a simpler and easier navigation for Whitepages customers to seamlessly compare different plans with just the right amount of information they need to make a decision.

As a result, after one week, the team saw a 23% increase in conversion rate and a 31% increase in monthly membership plans.

TAKEAWAYS

Feature experimentation has given the Whitepages team the ability to quickly make adjustments while running a test, target a specific audience, and turn on or off a test or device type. This has given the marketing team greater flexibility and autonomy without relying on engineering sources which resulted in faster workflows.

The test involved more complex and dynamic elements (such as the inclusion of the contact’s record of the current plan to which the user is subscribed). This required each of these elements to interact with the entire IT system, which was only possible through server-side testing. The team plans to continue using server-side experimentation to test pricing pages to drive more conversions for the plan upgrades for current members and new users.

The post Whitepages Boosts Subscriptions with AB Tasty’s Feature Experimentation appeared first on abtasty.

Learn more about how the e-commerce team at Embark Veterinary leverages experimentation and a data-driven approach to drive improvements across every key performance indicator.

• 7% increase in conversion rate
• 10% increase in revenue per session

​​Embark Veterinary, Inc. was founded on a passion for scientific research and a lifelong love of dogs. Their DNA test kits and online platform enable dog owners to better understand their dog’s breed, health, and much more while helping to advance research into the best ways to care for man’s best friend.

The Experimentation Program at Embark Veterinary

The team at Embark uses a few KPIs when determining the success of experiments. Of course, they always attempt to improve the conversion rate, but they also place a heavy emphasis on average order value.

Lastly, the team analyzes revenue per session as a primary KPI because it takes into account both conversion rate and average order value.

How can you best identify what information to present to customers at the right time and right place?

Because Embarks sells two products, a baseline product and a premium product, the team strives to sell more kits, but they also want to sell more premium kits.

The premium kits include information about dogs’ genetic health (not included in the baseline kits), and this particular experiment was designed to help customers understand the benefits of knowing additional health details for their pets.

The Embark team wanted to understand if different types of product copy would result in higher sales for their premium dog DNA test kits. In order to determine this, the team developed two tests: an initial test to understand the style of product copy that resonated with customers, ranging from clinical to emotional, and a second test to understand the impact of including examples in the product copy.

Test #1 included three variations of product copy ranging from more emotional to more clinical.

In this test, the team prepared three variations of copy. Variation 1 featured more “emotional” copy, variation 2 featured more “clinical” copy, and variation 3 struck a balance between “emotional” and “clinical.”

Results

The first test resulted in a very clear winner, not only indicating that the product copy makes a difference for customers but also that clinical copy resonates the most with their customers.

The clinical copy in variation 2 resulted in a 4% increase in conversion rate, a 3.5% decrease in average order value, and a 1% increase in revenue per session with the increase in conversion rate compensating for the decrease in average order value.

Test #2 included 3 variations of product copy with health examples ranging from less severe to more severe.

In this test, again, the team prepared three variations featuring examples ranging from “less severe” to “more severe.” Variation 1 included a “more severe” example, variation 2 included a somewhat balance example, and variation 3 included a less severe example.

Results

The addition of examples in the product copy made a huge difference. Showing customers a real scenario where they may need to have their dog’s additional health info has a direct impact on revenue. The “less severe” drove the most impact with a 7% increase in conversion rate, a $9 increase in average order value, and 10% increase in revenue per session.

Key Learnings

Understanding your customers and their needs is core to driving growth and delivering a better buying experience.

The Embark team always keeps a “what’s next” mentality. After seeing the potential impact of product copy through the first test, the team asked “what’s next” to figure out how to use a second test to draw more value out of that component of the product detail page.

ABOUT EMBARK

Embark Veterinary, Inc. was launched in 2015 with a passion for scientific research and a lifelong love for dogs. Starting with its best-in-class canine DNA test, Embark is building a powerful platform for scientific discovery that will accelerate advancements in personalized dog care. Embark offers the most scientifically advanced, most trusted, and highest-rated dog DNA tests on the market that helps dog owners, breeders, and veterinarians learn about their dog’s breed, health, and ancestry. Customers gain hundreds of actionable insights that inform more proactive care, and every test fuels new research to help all dogs lead longer, healthier lives. Embark is an official research partner of Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, was named to the Inc. 5000 list for the past two years, and was included on Forbes‘ next billion-dollar startups list.

For more information, visit Embark’s website at EmbarkVet.com.

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The Social Proof Hypothesis

“Social proof is one of the most useful tools of persuasion a brand can employ. Used well it can enrich the customer experience and help customers make an informed decision based on what others are doing” explains Beth Hodge, Head of Optimisation at Conversio. “Working together with Hunter Boots and AB Tasty we wanted to measure whether social proof can improve the experience for Hunter customers and ultimately drive incremental value. Importantly we also had to consider how to serve a message that aligned with the Hunter brand and how it should be applied to different geographic segments considering Hunter Boot’s broad international customer base”

 To do this Conversio defined a strategy to test and measure AB Tasty’s social proof capabilities and individually measure the impact on UK and US customers. Conversio’s detailed data-first approach wanted to establish which messaging and metrics most resonate with the customer, which pages and locations social proof has the highest impact and the optimum thresholds that define exposure. “It’s critical that when launching social proof you optimize all the elements of the experience to maximize your results, it’s about the continuous refinement of the experience” adds Beth.

About Conversio

Conversio is a leading independent optimization and analytics agency, headquartered in London and partners with AB Tasty. They are down-to-earth e-commerce experts who use data, insight, and continuous experimentation to sustainably grow your business

IMPLEMENTATION

After an initial proof of concept and refining the experience with optimized messaging and positioning social proof demonstrated a +9% conversion rate improvement for the UK site and +6 for the US site.

“What was clear from our analysis of those customers exposed to social proof was that we needed to apply specific tactics and design by market to maximize the value of this feature, for example, it was clear that product view data had a bigger impact on US customers than it did in the UK” explained Beth.

Hunter Boots now had a solid foundation on which to grow and expand their use of social proof.

As part of Conversio’s approach to further refining the customer experience of social proof they worked closely with the AB Tasty team to make use of the social proof API. This gave Hunter Boots greater flexibility about where and when to serve these messages to their customers. This included intelligently rotating two different social proof metrics on the product pages vs. a single message which had shown the initial promising results. This further improved on the conversion uplift already seen by 2% in the UK and 1% in the US.

Next Steps – Building on the success

“We are pleased to see the addition of social proof resonating so well with our customers, we have worked with Conversio to ensure the messaging feels on-brand while still highlighting product popularity. This is especially impactful for the rollout of new footwear product categories like commando boots and sandals as customers are less knowledgeable on these products. Social proof really helps us drive newness, and supports conversion rate across our well-known rubber boots. We are excited to see where we can optimse this experience going forward”

 Bryony Longden – Head of eCommerce Operations

Conversio already has plans in place to trial social proof badging on the product list pages as well as using it in the post-add-to-bag experience. Providing extensive experience and end-to-end conversion expertise, applying pre-eminent data analysis, insight and testing methodology to the optimization of e-commerce businesses by means of continuous improvements to their website performance and efficiency.

TAKEAWAYS

The implementation of social proof on Hunter Boots’ website proved to be a successful tactic, resulting in a significant increase in conversion rates for both the UK and US sites. A data-first approach and optimization strategy allowed for the refinement of the social proof experience, tailoring it to specific markets and product categories. It provided Hunter Boots with greater flexibility and opportunities for further optimization.

This success serves as an example of how social proof can be a valuable tool for brands to enrich the customer experience and drive incremental value.

The post How Hunter Boots Drove Value with Social Proof appeared first on abtasty.

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

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

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

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

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

But it wasn’t always like this.

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

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

Place alternative payment options closer to “add to cart”

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

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

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

ORIGINAL / VARIATION

Mobile

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

Desktop

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

New partner. New mindset.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cynthia Bevilacqua
Digital product and user experience manager at Shiseido

Boost engagement with a higher visibility virtual try-on CTA

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

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

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

ORIGINAL / VARIATION

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

Celebrating a culture of experimentation

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

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

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

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

WINNING TOGETHER
5 tips for operational excellence

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

Here are five tips to optimize team operations:

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

Deepening the partnership with AB Tasty

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

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

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

Download PDF

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CHALLENGE

Peek & Cloppenburg knows a customer’s experience doesn’t end when they leave the store, it continues with them online. To provide a seamless online experience for customers and improve site performance, the team turns to consistent testing of site architecture and usability.

This commitment to experience optimization led to a focus on improving search. They decided to talk to Epoq, an AB Tasty solution, about implementing intelligent search. With functions such as error tolerance and faceted navigation, Epoq was perfect for testing the impact of AI-powered search on sales KPIs.

IMPLEMENTATION

Once integrated into the existing Peek & Cloppenburg website, Epoq’s intelligent search solution was trained on a knowledge base of current product data, industry knowledge and customer purchasing behavior.

Epoq’s AI search algorithm then used this information to help customers find what they are looking for and nudge them toward conversion.

Additionally, features such as error-tolerant search, product sorting and landing page forwarding were incorporated to provide more accurate results.

RESULTS

To determine success, the impact of the implementation on post-search sales KPIs was measured over a four-month period and compared to the same period from the previous year.

Looking at orders placed after a customer used the search function, the average order value increased by 10% and the number of orders increased by 29%. The percentage of total sales coming from search also increased by 10%.

Epoq’s intelligent search function had a positive effect on the performance of the online store. Additionally, the team was able to cut down on costly administrative time.

TAKEAWAYS

Following a successful integration, Peek & Cloppenburg will continue to expand site functionality with additional intelligent search and recommendation features including targeted banners displayed throughout the site.

The team also looks forward to finding opportunities to incorporate more personalization into other phases of the customer journey.

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