The internet is brimming with CRO case studies, with a quick Google search yielding thousands of results. 

However, if you’ve been in this industry long enough, you know that many of these case studies can be impractical, promising unrealistic results.

Take, for instance, claims of a 400% conversion uplift from merely changing button colors—such outcomes are rarely grounded in reality. 

Far more complex psychological factors influence purchase decisions than just the color of your CTA buttons.

In this article, we’ll cover three CRO case studies we executed, which successfully increased conversions. Unlike many case studies you may come across, we’ll delve into the thought process behind each case, our hypotheses, and the precise results we achieved.

Case Study 1: How Urgency Elements Catapulted Conversions by 17.17%

Let’s say you own an ecommerce website where you get plenty of traffic, but it’s still not showing the intended results regarding conversions. You still face issues like an alarming 82% exit rate and 53% abandonment before checkout—a norm for many online businesses. 

Our CRO team encountered this challenge during their review of a client’s website.

Facing these daunting numbers, our team set out to understand the users. They gathered customer insights through expert reviews and customer interviews, using the Jobs-to-be-Done methodology to dive deep into the user experience.

The Original Page:

As they scrutinized the original page, it became clear that something needed to change since the users needed to make the final purchase. 

Here’s what the original checkout page looked like: 

The Hypothesis and A/B Testing:

The team formulated a hypothesis: inject urgency elements to spur users into purchasing. The A/B testing hypothesis was crafted to boost conversion rates by 20%.

They meticulously designed four variations, with a laser focus on incorporating urgency elements. The urgency was in the language and strategically placed across the page, encouraging users to take action.

Here are the changes they implemented:

And this is what variations 3 and 4 look like:

The A/B test ran for seven days, not just on the desktop but also on the mobile stage. Yet, they reached the necessary sample size within the first three days, a testament to the urgency created by the variations.

The Results:

As the results poured in, they painted a vivid picture of success. 

• The Conversion Rate (CVR) improved 17%, and the Average Order Value (AOV) increased 4%. 
• Version 1 (V1) stood out with a 99% likelihood of outperforming the original.
• Digging deeper, the team found that clicks on Gift Wrapping, Quantity, and the Checkout Call-to-Action (CTA) experienced a positive lift for V1 compared to the original. 

Success was not a fleeting moment—InvespCRO’s team consistently witnessed it on mobile and desktop platforms.
Here are the results as shown in FigPii (InvespCRO’s all-in-one conversion rate optimization tool):

Key Takeaways:

The urgency messaging wasn’t just urgent; it was a catalyst. Users, prompted by the urgency, not only made quicker purchases but also added more items to their carts. 

The Average Order Value surged, validating the strategy. The lesson learned: sometimes, urgency is the secret sauce that boosts conversions to unprecedented heights.

Case Study 2: Optimizing Checkout Process for Free Shipping

Imagine an ecommerce store where potential buyers are eager to make a purchase.

But there’s a catch—the promise of free shipping, a coveted perk, remains hidden until the second step of the checkout process. InvespCRO’s team realized this mistake when analyzing their client’s site. 

During an expert review, they realized that 63% of potential buyers were dropping out at this stage.

Hypothesis:

Invesp’s team proposed the hypothesis that by introducing information about free shipping right from the start of the checkout process, customer engagement and, subsequently, purchase completion would significantly increase.

Here’s the original version as it appeared on the desktop:

Interactive Experiment Design:

InvespCRO created three versions to validate their hypothesis: the original desktop version, Variation 1, and Variation 2. 

Although visually different, Variation 2 conveyed the same message as Variation 1: customers would receive free shipping for purchases over $50. They conducted an 11-day test on both mobile and desktop devices.

Here’s the variation 1: 

And here’s the variation 2:

In a nutshell, 

• Variation 1: Displayed the free shipping offer in a specific way.
• Variation 2: Retained the same message but with a different visual presentation.

Results:

• Variation 2 outperformed, increasing purchases by an impressive 54.19%, with a high confidence level of 99.65%.
• While Variation 1 did not surpass Variation 2, it still performed better than the original setup, boosting purchases by 15.86% and achieving a confidence level of 78.55%.
• A third option, Variation 3, increased purchases by 39.43%, with a confidence level of 97.66%.

Here are the results as shown in FigPii:

Key takeaways from the case study:

• The case study emphasizes the importance of strategically placing shipping details throughout the website, particularly on funnel pages (category pages, PDPs, cart pages, and checkout pages).
• It also acknowledges the distinctive nature of online shopping and the need for periodic reassurance for online customers.

Case Study 3: Elevating Conversions Through Strategic Homepage Enhancements

Upon analyzing a client’s website analytics, InvespCRO made some key observations, including the percentage of buying customers visiting the homepage, the proportion of new users, and the lower conversion rate for new users on mobile devices. 

After these findings, they conducted an expert review of the homepage, revealing limited access to product pages, the absence of mentions of best sellers, and an ineffective “Recommended For You” section. 

The hypothesis aimed to boost the site’s conversion rate by enhancing the homepage with a prominent section. The section showcased bestsellers, featured products, and clear details such as prices and colors.

Experiment Design:

The experiment ran for 18 days, with two versions (V1 and V2) of the enhanced homepage being tested. 

Here’s the original version as it appeared on the mobile:

Here’s what the variations looked like on mobile devices:

Invesp’s team monitored the key metrics, including overall impact, checkout performance, device-based analysis for orders and checkouts, click-through rates (CTR) for bestsellers, and product page views.

Results at the 11-Day Mark:

Overall Impact:

• V1 showed a small increase (+3%) with a directional chance of success (74%).
• V2 had a negative impact of 1.94%.

Checkout Performance:

• V1 experienced a positive change in checkout rates, increasing by 4% (82%).
• V2 had a negative impact, decreasing by -4.85%.

Device-Based Analysis for Orders:

• V1 showed no significant change in mobile orders (-1.03%, 42.82%) but increased on the desktop by 5.60% (80.57%).
• V2 had negative effects on both mobile and desktop orders.

Device-Based Analysis for Checkout:

• V1 showed a slight decrease in mobile checkouts (-3.98%, 26.36%) but positively impacted the desktop with an increase of 8.91% (93.35%).
• V2 had negative effects on both mobile and desktop checkouts.

CTR for Best Sellers:

• The best sellers section had a fair CTR.
• V1 performed better with a CTR of 0.92%.

Product Page Views (PDP):

• There was a modest increase in PDP views, up by 1.76% (99.04%).

Customer Experience Improvements:

• Enhanced Visibility: Both versions increased overall visibility, with V1 positively impacting checkout rates. This suggests an improved navigation experience for users.

• Mobile Experience: V1 positively impacted mobile orders, enhancing the user experience. Conversely, V2 hurt mobile and desktop checkouts, emphasizing the importance of optimizing for mobile users.

• Best Sellers Engagement: V1, with a higher CTR for best sellers, successfully engaged users with featured products. This improved the customer experience and increased the likelihood of conversion.

• Product Page Views: Both versions contributed to a modest increase in PDP views, indicating that users were more inclined to explore specific product details. This signifies an improved and engaging product discovery experience.

Final Conclusions & Insights:

• The current homepage had limited access to specific product pages (PDP).
• Highlighting best-selling products led to a slight increase in PDP visits.
• Featuring best sellers significantly boosted orders and encouraged visitors to proceed to checkout.

Beyond the CRO Case Studies: Your CRO Action Plan

These case studies paint a vivid picture of the transformative power of CRO. But how do you translate these takeaways into your own success story? 

Here’s a quick checklist:

1. Strategic Urgency Messaging:

• Integrate Urgency Elements Thoughtfully: Place urgency messages strategically in the checkout process to evoke a sense of immediacy. At the same time, craft compelling language that motivates users to take prompt action during the purchase journey.

• Monitor User Interaction with Urgency Elements: Track user engagement with urgency elements, including clicks on CTAs and specific product features. Don’t forget to analyze how urgency messaging impacts different stages of the conversion funnel to refine strategies.

2. Transparent Shipping Information:

• Sprinkle Shipping Details Across the Website: Ensure shipping information, especially free shipping offers, is visible on key pages like product listings, cart, and checkout. Providing clarity early in the user journey also helps instill confidence and reduces hesitation during the purchase process.

• Reinforce Shipping Benefits Consistently: Reiterate shipping benefits throughout the website, especially on funnel pages, to reassure users and enhance their overall shopping experience. Use clear and concise messaging to communicate shipping perks effectively.

3. Homepage Optimization for Engagement:

• Feature Best Sellers Prominently: Highlight best-selling products and featured items on the homepage to capture user attention and encourage exploration. Optimize visual elements and product placements to create an engaging and visually appealing homepage.

• Tailor Homepage for Desktop and Mobile Users: In a world where everyone is hooked to their mobile phones, don’t overlook designing the homepage with responsiveness in mind, ensuring a seamless and enjoyable experience for desktop and mobile users.

4. Mobile-Focused Enhancements: 

• Optimize Checkout Process for Mobile Users: Streamline the checkout process for mobile users, minimizing steps and providing a user-friendly interface. Once you optimize your site for mobile devices, don’t forget to test and iterate mobile-specific features to enhance navigation and conversion rates on smaller screens.

• Leverage Mobile-Specific Engagement Strategies: Implement mobile-specific engagement tactics, such as interactive elements and personalized recommendations, to captivate mobile users. 

5. Continuous Testing and Iteration:

• Embrace Regular A/B Testing: Conduct regular A/B testing to evaluate the impact of changes on key conversion metrics. Also, test different variations of elements, including urgency messaging, shipping details, and homepage layouts, to identify optimal configurations.

• Iterate Based on User Feedback and Metrics: Continuously analyze user feedback and metrics to identify areas for improvement. In addition, iterate on strategies based on insights gained from testing, aiming to enhance the overall user experience continuously.

CRO Case Studies…Final Thoughts!

Do the cart abandonment blues get you down? These three real-world CRO case studies reveal actionable tactics to transform hesitant clicks into delighted purchases. 

It’s not just about fancy landing pages or endless A/B testing—it’s about understanding your shoppers’ desires and unleashing the conversion beast within your website.

Key Takeaways:

• Urgency Ignites Action: Craft strategic messages and visuals that nudge users towards immediate purchases. 
• Transparency Builds Trust: Be upfront about shipping, discounts, and customer perks. 
• Homepage: Your Conversion Portal: Showcase best sellers, personalize recommendations, and streamline navigation. 
• Mobile is King: Streamline checkout, leverage interactive elements, and make every tap a step towards buying.
• Test Continuously: Don’t guess – A/B test and analyze data relentlessly.

Remember, CRO is a journey, not a destination. Implement these strategies, experiment fearlessly, and watch your conversion rate soar.

The post 3 CRO Case Studies For E-commerce Websites appeared first on Invesp.

Background: Our conversion optimization clients tend to be on the large side. The cost of the experimentation software for these clients is expensive. In 2013, we built FigPii, an internal platform to help clients conduct split testing, heatmaps, video recording, and online polling. The platform is available as part of our consulting work. 

FigPii was internal for many years, but more and more clients were suggesting that we need to make it available to the public. 

Fast forward to 1/22/2020 – FigPii is available to the public for the first time. 

Since then, I noticed an alarming trend. Several companies sign up every day for an account, but they do not install our analytics tracking script. 

This post covers the different steps we took to increase our activation rate by 3 folds from 20% to 62%.

Define the building blocks

Before taking any action, we needed to have the correct metrics defined and tracked. We also needed to integrate with marketing automation software since it plays a part in the activation campaign.

Account activation milestone: this is the step a user must take in order for them to start using the platform. For FigPii, the activation milestone was installing the FigPii script on the site. Without installing the script on the site, new users have no way to use FigPii or explore its features. 

Our code installation rate hovered around 20% in March. 

We needed to understand why users were not installing the script and fix the problems they are facing.

Account engagement metrics: A new user could install the script on his site but if he is not using the platform, then he is not active. A non-active user is a user that could potentially leave. For FigPii, we track how often do users create heatmaps, video recording, polls, and AB tests. We also track the frequency of someone logging in to the platform. The less a user logs-in, the higher the chance of them leaving.

The more users use our platform, the more engaged they are, and the less chance they have of churning.

Marketing automation. For marketing automation, we integrate with ActiveCampaign. We AC to look closely at how users interact with FigPii, how often they login, and what pieces of the software they interact with. 

With the building blocks defined and tracked, it was time for me to take a closer look at these new accounts and figure out how to activate a higher percentage of them.

The following are the general steps I followed. This is by no means perfect, but trying to do this while running consulting projects and making sure that our marketing and technical teams are running smoothly can be challenging. 

1. Email sequence

Previously, when users signed up for a new account in FigPii, he received a single welcome email. A welcome email that I wrote three years ago without paying close attention to it. 

It was time to change that. 

When a user signs up for FigPii, we push the data to ActiveCampaign. So, I needed to create the right workflow automation there.

I created two email sequences: one sequence is for users who install the FigPii script on their site. The other sequence is for users who do not install the script. The goals of the sequences are different. 

Email sequence to active users (installed the code): This sequence contains six different emails. It has a straightforward goal: Educate new users on how to get more value from FigPii to create a user-friendly site. After sending this campaign for the last two weeks, I am seeing a consistent open rate of 83%. Not bad at all!

Email sequence to inactive users( did NOT install the code): This sequence also contains six different emails. This is a more sophisticated email sequence based on how the user responds to the different emails. The goal of this flow is to get these users to install the FigPii analytics script. This campaign has an open rate of 48%.  

2. Connect with new users personally on Facebook/Linkedin.

This was a bit unusual, but we look up the person who signs up for FigPii and connect with them. Most of the connections happen via LinkedIn with a clear message. There is a smaller group of users who sign up for FigPii from two Facebook groups. These users know me as the founder, so there is always a good chance that I am connected with them already. If not, I send them a message asking if they would be willing to connect. These connections have kept me busy over the last few weeks.

A side benefit of these connections is the increase in engagement rates on my Linkedin posts!

3. Customer interviews: Why is FigPii hired or not hired?

We implement the Jobs To Be Done #JTBD framework in our conversion practice. It was time to run #JTBD interviews for FigPii.

If are you not familiar with JTBD – here is the 60-second overview. People hire (use) products to accomplish some sort of job in their lives. The terminology is a bit strange when you hear it first but you get used to it quickly. Think of the different needs that you have in your life as jobs. There are different candidates that apply for the job. We subconsciously decide which of these candidates to hire and which ones we turn away.

Example: I will be hanging out with my family later tonight. We are looking for something entertaining to do (job). We have several options (candidates) to do the job. We could watch TV. We could play a board game. We could just sit around and share stories.

Understanding the job that you get hired to do is important. You might think that you are getting hired for one thing and discover that users hire for something completely different.

We started to conduct #JTBD interviews for FigPii, we divided the pool of interviewees  into two groups:

• Active users
• In-active (churned) users.

The goals for each interview is different:

Bonus – JTBD interviews are VERY different from typical user research interviews. If you are interested in listening to an interview, then I invite you to join our private Facebook group – I posted a recent interview I conducted there.

Results of the activation campaign and next steps

When we first started the campaign our user activation rate was at 20%.

After running the activation campaign for two weeks, FigPii activation rate is at 62%.

That is a 3x improvement.

The insights that came out of the interviews helped us redesign the FigPii site completely.

But we are just getting started. There are many more things that we will be doing in the next couple of weeks, so I will give you a sneak peek. 

In-app activation

Since we determined that installing the code is an important milestone, we are making a tough decision: Users will only access the platform after installing the FigPii tracking script. When the user logs to the application, he will see with a layover that prompts to install the code. The user will not be able to click out of that layover until he installs the code on his site. 

This approach is too aggressive! What if the user does not have a way to install the code himself on the site? There is no way for him to see anything in FigPii until that step is done. I can see how some people will get annoyed with this. 

We will test this out and see what responses we get. 

Testing the email sequences

testing-emails

We need to fine-tune our activation campaigns. I will be doing a lot of testing for the active campaign sequences in the next few weeks. The main areas that I will focus on:

1. Email subject lines
2. The copy of the activation emails is good in some instances and not so great in others. 
3. Timing between emails

Moving from a freemium model to a free trial model

The starter FigPii account comes with a lifetime free subscription. 

The benefit of offering a freemium account is to give companies a chance to try FigPii without any commitment. The downside of providing a freemium account is this lack of commitment. Users who sign up for the free account are not fully committed. They have no skin in the game. 

It is nice to wake up every day and see more and more users signing up for the new accounts. However, it is a vanity metric. It means nothing in terms of additional revenue. Actually, these accounts are bad for FigPii financially. While we are on the startup plan with AWS, yet we still use several other hosting providers. Some of them are expensive. The main culprit here is MongoDB. We saw our MongoDB bill double month to month. For a self-funded startup, this can spell disaster. 

Over the next few weeks, we will be testing a move away from the freemium model to a free trial model. 

Can you help us out?

If you enjoyed this post, please share the twitter thread…

How we tripled user activation rate on FigPii

In 2013, we built FigPii to help clients conduct split testing, heatmaps, video recording, and online polling.

In January 2020, we made FigPii available to the public.

But we noticed an alarming trend.

THREAD …

— Invesp (@invesp) June 3, 2020

And if you’d like to stay up to date with our user activation campaign and stories like this one, then please join our email list.

If you did not get an account on FigPii yet, please go ahead and check it out!

The post How we tripled user activation rate on FigPii appeared first on Invesp.

The point of this long week debate came down to: process, process, process.

If you follow a sound CRO process and are careful about missteps when it comes to AB testing, you can achieve amazing results and have a successful program.

But for most companies, this is simply too hard.

Now there are some “easy” processes that you can follow to improve your site, but I’m at a point where I can say with confidence: experimentation and testing is best left to the experts.

Most people end up cutting corners, others end up claiming to reach a $97 million dollar in revenue although they have major flaws in their experiments. The process ends up becomes a footnote and not following specific AB testing guidelines is no problem.

Well, in this case study, I will walk you through our process as well as explain the results to close out our weeklong debate with a solid AB experiment and case study.

Company Background

Founded in 1902, this billion dollar retailer is one of the largest general merchandising retailers in the USA. This retailer sells products through their over 1,802 stores, or online through their digital properties. The focus of this test was on their online photo store.

Problem Description

Although the client had an extremely high volume of visitors to their online photo store, the conversion rate left much to be desired. Because this was a well-known retailer their average conversion rate was over 22% of over 1,000,000 visits.  The average order value, however, was just $8.48 because digital prints do not cost much. There were two ways to complete the checkout process: ship to home or ship to store. For our client, shipping the prints to customer’s home was more costly.

We did a number of evaluations on their site, both qualitative and quantitative. We polled visitors and conducted a usability study to monitor their flow.

There were different paths that we identified on the site:

• Visitors that arrived through homepage but razor-sharp focused to purchase prints
• Visitors that arrived through homepage because of brand/store
• Visitors that arrived at a product detail page through an optimized keyword, and just purchased that particular product (if anything at all)
• Visitors who browsed multiple products, but were most likely not to buy anything at all.

The low AOV was indicative of the fact that visitors did not purchase or visit the breadth of products beyond digital prints. The way the company had positioned itself, however, was a quick digital shop, and not a personalized photo product shop.

Our objective was to increase AOV and conversion rates by:

• Showing more variety of products starting on the homepage
• Showing visitors how easy it is to place an order for digital prints
• Displaying offers/discounts more prominently
• Emphasizing the store’s value proposition to promote the wide breadth of customizable photo products offered

Hypothesis

By rearranging elements to enhance the value proposition and feature more products, you will increase average order value and conversions.

So, for this particular test, all other elements were simply rearranged to highlight the variety they offered.

The A/B test

The test was a bit challenging and went through three iterations. I’ll explain why we didn’t give up on this below.

The variants (challengers)

A/B test results

The first launch, the test ran for 11 days. The results were pretty inconclusive, with low significance levels:

We decided to make a final iteration and launched the test for the 3rd and final time. Again, the changes were trying to address and solve a specific problem. When the impact was so little for the first A/B test, we went back to investigate why. With the second launch, the impact was even lower. The third AB test was our final attempt to see whether or not our hypothesis was even valid because otherwise, we would needed to determine a different hypothesis and solution for the test.

We finally reached results that made sense, had a high significance level and were validated through sample size.

Post-test analysis

Although first two iterations of the AB test were inconclusive, they showed that the changes we were making were slowly moving us towards an increase in conversions albeit with very little confidence. Another side effect of running the test was that the number of visitors navigating to the specialty photo products increased over 30%. The website overall average order value jumped to $10.50.

But why didn’t we give up on the test? Ultimately, we had identified a strong problem on the page. That is what drove us to iterate and find a better solution to that problem. Secondly, we saw small incremental increases, which showed us that the solutions were performing better, but still not at the level that we could conclude and required further improvements.

With the final iterations, the page was simpler and cleaner than it had ever been.

We succeeded in changing the overall value proposition and propagated it throughout the site in different ways. What was key in this test is we recognized a problem on the site, so what was critical was to change and iterate accordingly to the results with the best possible, most updated solution

The post $60 billion dollar company pivoted value proposition for a 14.72% increase in conversions appeared first on Invesp.

Even if your website is riddled with elements causing fears, uncertainties and doubts (FUDs), we have found that offering great incentives counter FUDs and persuade visitors to convert.

We are not promoting the idea of having a site riddled with FUDs causing elements, however, remember that every visitor loves a bargain.

Incentives come in different shapes and forms.

They could be as simple as a free shipping offer, or a special discount on limited items, to more complex, unique approaches such as scarcity and urgency. Scarcity incentives point customer to the limited number of items available, while urgency incentives point to the limited time left on the offer.

To have incentives work for your site, you need to follow strategies of placing them at the right moments of the sales funnel as well as finding the best suiting designs:

1. Some incentives work better at certain points in the funnel. You should also beware of overusing them, and making sure there is an honesty policy behind them (like if time will expire on a cart/offer etc. it really should).
2. To the second point, incentives are only effective if the visitor actually sees them. We have been flabbergasted by clients who have the most amazing offers and incentives, however they are hidden or cluttered with other unnecessary copy or elements, so they go unnoticed.

In the following case study, we optimized an incentive that was already offered on the website. We worked on optimizing the moment of the offer, in the sales funnel, as well as the look and feel of the design.

The results we got are inspiring: 13.98% increase in conversion on mobile product pages and 17.75% increase in conversion on mobile cart page.

Company Background

Our client is one of the top e-commerce marketplace in South Asia selling female apparel and accessories.

The majority of their 4 million monthly visitors come from social media and paid traffic.

The website offered its visitors plenty of incentives: constant discounts, a cashback program on every purchase, and free shipping on items over a certain price point (most of the products exceed the price point, so most qualify for free shipping).

Problem Description

After conducting multiple qualitative polls and surveying site visitors, we concluded that about 65% were unaware of the plethora of incentives the site offered.

To begin with, we looked at just the free shipping incentive, which applied to 95% of the purchases of the site. We determined that users’ attention was not effectively directed to this benefit, considering where in the funnel the free shipping appeared, as well as where and how it appeared on the page.

Assessing the page, there were two areas that could attract user attention to the free shipping incentives: either in the form of a banner at the top of the page, or near the CTA, so the visitor would see it upon clicking “Add to Cart.”

On mobile product pages the free shipping incentive appeared right next to the price. However, because of the discrepancy in font size between the price and free shipping wording, as well as the discount information below, the incentive could be missed by a visitor.

This is how the area between product name and CTA looked in the original:

Cart page is also a critical area along the funnel, to include free shipping. But, surprisingly, the cart page did not mention many of the incentives promoted on the product page such as:

• Free shipping
• Discount on price

At the same time, while “free store credit” was listed, it did not match the wording on the product page. The cart page used the word “credits,” rather than “cashback,” as it was on the product page.

Original of the cart page:

Hypothesis

The hypothesis for both the product detail page and cart page revolved around the same idea and elements, specifically, the placement and look and feel of the free shipping incentive.

We hypothesized that, by decluttering, reducing FUDs, and highlighting incentives, visitors would be persuaded to proceed to the next step, which would increase conversions.

The test goals differed slightly since each page was at a different point within the purchase funnel.

For the product page, the goal was to increase the number of visitors adding items to cart. We looked at the macro conversions as well (purchases).

For the cart page, the first goal was to increase the number of visitors proceeding to checkout. We looked at the macro conversion as well.

TESTS

Test 1: Product page

The original product detail page had 6 challengers. The test had two variables:

• Free shipping offer
• Discount percentage badge

Each of the challengers had a combination of the variables.

The free shipping offer either appeared as a top banner on the page:

 

Or as copy below the CTA:

*Note: the language below the CTA differed depending on whether the item qualified for free shipping or not. If an item did not qualify for free shipping the language would just note that reaching the price limit would allow them to enjoy the incentive.

While the discount percentage element was present on all challengers next to the price, we decided to duplicate it by adding a sales badge on the product image on other challengers.

Besides that, there were overall adjustments and general clean-up which applied to all challengers:

1. Social proof (information on the last person who bought the item) was removed from the area around CTA and placed on a pop-up that slid out and then back in. This was going along with our theory of reducing clutter and allowing each incentive to shine on its own.
   
2. Elements located in the area between the product name and CTA were rearranged.

For the placement and design of the free shipping, we tested two placements: banner and below CTA. We wanted to ensure that whatever was at or near the CTA was clearly presented.

Previously the price, free shipping, a discount percentage in a box, and “in stock” elements were located in that area.

As mentioned before “Free shipping” is in smaller font size and a medium grey color which makes it unnoticeable. “In Stock” and discount percentage are both in green which makes them stand out. Questions we needed to answer with this test:

• Can the visitor capture all the main elements (obviously, incentives, not “In Stock”) at a glance?
• Is the order of the information relevant to the visitor?

The video recording and heat map data showed that the visitors were mostly focused on product image and moved their attention below it only when they were in the consideration phase.

That’s why we put “In stock” as the first element, because if the visitor is interested in a product, they would need to be reassured that the item is actually in-stock.

Discount percentage and price before discount were also crucial for the visitors, because the polls we conducted indicated visitors were price sensitive. So, we changed the color of the discount percentage square to red and on other challengers, as discussed above, we placed a badge with discount percentage on the image.

Finally, the “free shipping” offer was removed from the area next to the price. When we suggested to move that particular element and change its look, function, and design, our client was skeptical about our proposal because of the fact that free shipping applied on 95% of products they offered and they thought that it was not a deal breaker for their audience.

We ended up with 6 challengers that looked like this:

Challenger	Free shipping		Discount badge
	Top banner	Text below the CTA
1	Yes	Yes	No
2	Yes	Yes	Yes
3	Yes	No	No
4	Yes	No	Yes
5	No	Yes	No
6	No	Yes	Yes

Test 2: Cart page

A similar process was followed for the cart page, where we tested the same elements (emphasizing free shipping and discount offers) in 6 challengers.

In the original, when you went to cart, you were able to see only the price after discount. We found problematic the lack of continuity between the pricing display on the product page and on the cart page. Emphasizing incentives, and often repeating them on subsequent pages, and in some cases within the same page more than once, is encouraged.

Our team opted to emphasize discounts in two different ways:

• The original price near the price after discount was stroke through (e.g. 569 $)
• The amount saved was underlined as a separate line before the order total (Your total saving: $ 569).

Below you can see free shipping incentives in purple and price incentives in green:

Below is the original page again for your reference and quick comparison.

The complete list of challengers:

Challenger	Free shipping		Price before the discount
	Top banner	Text below the CTA
1	Yes	No	Yes
2	No	No	Yes
3	Yes	No	No
4	No	No	No
5	Yes	Yes	Yes
6	No	Yes	Yes

In addition to highlighting incentives, we tried to reduce the FUDs the visitors could have about “Cash on Delivery” by unifying language throughout the site about the program, and adding (?) marks that, when clicked on, revealed short instructions on what “Cash on Delivery” was.

Results

The test on the product detail page (PDP test) ran at first for one week. All challengers showed improvement in conversions against the original page. This proved our hypothesis that emphasizing the incentives did indeed improve conversions.

Our next step was to determine which challenger had the best impact. Looking at the results, there were two challengers that showed the greatest improvement, challengers 3 and 6. Their results were very close to each other.

Challenger	Free shipping		Discount badge
	Top Banner	Below the CTA
1	Yes	Yes	No
2	Yes	Yes	Yes
3	Yes	No	No
4	Yes	No	Yes
5	No	Yes	No
6	No	Yes	Yes

 

We relaunched the test after eliminating all the other challengers, and the results came back with a clear winner: Challenger 6!

The winning challenger had the free shipping incentive below the CTA and discount badge on the product image. It showed improvement in conversions by almost 14% at 99.24% confidence.This gave us a nudge in the right direction when running the test for the cart page, which we launched right after the conclusion of the PDP test.

It ran for one week and the results were, as expected, consistent with the first test: almost 18% improvement with a 97% level of confidence.

Analysis

The consistency between the winning challengers on both pages was:

• placing free shipping incentive below the main CTA and
• highlighting price incentive in a highly noticeable area to that respective page

This proved that not only discounts are important for our client’s audience, but also free shipping placement on the page and throughout the funnel are both critical considerations.

At the same time the top banner with free shipping incentive showed the worst results. Banner blindness is a common issue that impacts the effectiveness of that element on major transactional pages.

The post How Decluttering and Highlighting Incentives Increased Conversions by 13.98% on Product Pages and 17.75% on Cart Page [Case Study] appeared first on Invesp.

There is an art and science behind how incentives can best impact visitors, whilst saving you a lot more in the process, and maintaining the integrity and trust on your site.

For one of our clients, a poorly placed incentive as well as difficult to locate trust elements on the cart page became an obstacle to increase conversion. But by recognizing the opportunity, it eventually allowed us to achieve a 6.89% increase in conversions for a billion-dollar company.

Incentives

“Buy 2 get 1 with 70% discount” or “free shipping” are some examples of incentives you may have experienced. The goal is to boost sales because everyone likes free or almost free things. Thus, when visitors see a great incentive, they consider the opportunity to save, which may transform an otherwise uninterested visitor into someone interested.

Using urgency with these incentives prompts a greater response for visitors. If you decide to run a free shipping campaign, consider to run it for only 24hrs. This will give user a sense of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). The more FOMO users have, the more persuaded they will be. However, you must use these tactics sparingly, otherwise they lose their luster and impact with your site visitors.

Look at an email below. Forever 21 reduces free shipping limit (normally you can get a free shipping if you buy for more than $50), but only for one day:

In a brick-and-mortar store, incentives and sales are usually advertised using big banners or labels so that they grab the attention of the customer.

But what about an online store?

Incentives are only powerful and impactful, if they actually grab visitor’s attention. So online, they must be located and designed in such a way that visitors can notice them easily.

However, in brick-and-mortar stores, in most of the cases, for customers it is obvious what to do next, in an e-commerce store, the challenge is to provide them with as clear as possible instructions. In other words, you must have a CTA near to your incentive.

On the example below, Sephora informs its customers how much is it left till they can get free shipping and immediately offers them to continue shopping:

A call to action button can be one of the significant elements on any e-commerce website page because people don’t want to spend much time on thinking what to do next,they want to understand immediately what is next. If they have to make an effort to understand what is the next step towards what they want from your website, most likely, they will move on to another website which doesn’t make them think

Thus, if your incentive has no CTA it becomes useless for your website visitors and only irritates them more. Those, who are committed (minority) will attempt to find how to use the incentive, but the large majority will simply ignore it (best case scenario) or just leave.

Also, adding some unrelated images or texts near the incentive area can be a distractor for your visitors. Customers may relate those images or texts with your incentive.

Therefore, they can be misled about the conditions of your incentive.

On the image below Wayfair put two incentives too close to each other which may be confusing to some of the visitors:

To avoid that, incentives should be placed separately. For instance, if you want to place two incentives in the same page, make sure that two of them have a distance so people can focus each of them at a time. Here Asos.com separates two offers from each other by adding some distance and using different colors:

Trust

Everyone wants to deal with trustworthy websites but even a tiny detail can destroy the trust. So, you have to care about building trust on your website.

There are many ways for establishing trust. One of them is telling people who you are. People want to know there is a person behind your website. They want to feel it. To do that, you can give your contact information and describe your team in casual and welcoming way like DSTLD did it:

But how can you establish trust on a cart page where people are almost ready to commit and buy something from you?

There you can add a security seal stating that your checkout process is protected and safe. NY Watchstore place the security seals in such a manner that it would be hard not to notice them:

Another way to communicate that your website is trustworthy is by displaying credit card logos that increase buyer’s confidence and reduce cart abandonment:

With these steps, you can build your trust and make people buy from you.

Case Study

The Billion Dollar Company

Established in 1935, our client is an USA-widefast-fashion retailer. The bulk of their business comes from brick-and-mortar stores. Several years ago the company decided to expand its business and start an e-commerce website, and rest is history.

The website visitors are mostly young females who went to college and have a job. They are fashion-conscious and in the market for moderately-priced “junior-size” or “plus-size” clothing reflecting the latest design trends.

Background

After reviewing site analytics, conducting heuristic evaluations on the desktop and mobile versions of the website, and discussing the results with our client, we were able to draw a number of conclusions about the site visitor and what appeals to them.

• Site visitors tend to wait until the 15^th and end of the month before making a purchase on the site (those times are when sales on the site peak).
• Most of the website visitors use the cart on our client’s site as a wish list to save items they like and comeback to buy them later.
• The functionality of the cart however, doesn’t allow for a clear continue shopping.
• Additionally, usability studies suggest that some visitors believed that they could get free shipping only when they had a special coupon.
• Another challenge was less obvious. The brand of our client was well -known in urban areas and big cities; however, it had almost no presence in suburban environment and malls. Because of this, visitors unaware of the brand may have trust issues.

Clearly, there were items lost and unclear on the website. What is the best way for a visitor to continue shopping? How could we clarify that free shipping is applied to all orders over $50? How can we help our client appeal to a broader audience through design?

Hypothesis

We assumed that if we address the following issues in the test, it will lead to increase in conversions:

1. Color of the top banner: making it more prominent on the page will force more visitors to pay attention to the free shipping incentive.
2. Position and copy of the second free shipping incentive on the page: again, our goal is to make it to draw more attention to it.
3. Call to action in the second free shipping incentive on the page: we should provide users with easier way to continue shopping immediately after they see the incentive.
4. Trust icons: we want to make the page and the website more trustworthy by putting them closer to the CTA.

Original design vs. challengers

This image shows the original design of the checkout page:

The A/B test focused on the following problems of the checkout page:

• Pale grey banner didn’t attract enough attention to the free shipping option which was a very important incentive for customers.
• It was not clear what are the conditions of free shipping. The banner and the free shipping incentive below the product image mentioned that you had to buy for $50, but some of the visitors thought that they needed a coupon to be able to utilize free shipping incentive.
• The free shipping incentive under the product description didn’t have a continue shopping button.
• Trust and security elements (Norton security icon) were at the very bottom of the page. Visitors could have doubts about the page and checkout, if they didn’t see those elements.

The team introduced three challengers to run against the original design:

1st Variation:

In the first variation, the team presented several new elements:

• The banner is now brighter and grabs visitors’ attention.
• Free shipping incentive is moved closer to the main CTA. It now has explanation that visitors don’t need a coupon to qualify for free shipping: “Reach $50 to automatically qualify for free shipping”. Also, “Continue shopping” CTA is added to make the overall user experience better.
• The trust elements such as security and payment system icons are moved closer to the main CTA and become visible in the above-the-fold area.

2nd Variation:

Variation 2 is almost identical to the first one except the free shipping incentive area. The shape of the incentive area is the same as in the original design, but it has a call to action button that makes next steps clearer for the visitors.

3rd Variation

This variation has the same new orange banner and trust icons under the main CTA as in variation 1 and 2. However, the free shipping incentive area only appears when visitors press on the checkout button on the cart page. It is a popup informing them how much is left to qualify for free shipping and offering to continue shopping or go to checkout.

The results

The test had been running for 16 days. Variation 1 won by showing 6.89% increase in conversions with 97.4% confidence.

The post Case Study: How Incentives and Trust help a Billion-Dollar Company Increase Conversions by 6.89% appeared first on Invesp.

Some case studies often bring up surprising results that challenge widely held beliefs about CRO. In this post, I’m going to share 9 such CRO case studies with you.

1. Removing product descriptions and buying options increases conversions by 15.3%

Conventional wisdom says that customers landing on a product page want to know more about the product.

There is also a firm belief – backed by plenty of evidence – that offering more payment or purchasing options increases conversions.

For one website, however, the opposite rang true. This website is a large affiliate store for college textbooks. Nearly all of its users are college students looking for cheap books.

On their original landing page, they had lots of product details as well as multiple buying options:

For a student looking to find the cheapest possible textbook, this was too simply way too much information.

This is what the redesigned page looked like:

This page goes against convention and actually removes product related information. Some of the major changes include:

• The product description was removed since shoppers are college students who already know about the book.
• The “Buy Now” section listed the retailer with the lowest prices – the only thing college students actually care about.
• Distracting buttons such as the “Sell this book” link were removed.

The Result: The redesigned page led to a 15.3% increase in conversions.

The Lesson:

Instead of focusing on best practices, understand your customers and give them the experience they want. For this website’s users, low price was the biggest priority. It didn’t matter which retailer they got the textbook from as long as it was usable.

Additionally, while things like product descriptions might be necessary when you’re targeting customers at the top of the funnel, they hurt conversions for bottom of the funnel customers. In this case, the website’s users knew everything they needed to know about the product (the textbooks) already from their classes. The only thing they needed was a quick way to buy it, and that is exactly what the redesign delivered.

2. Removing trust elements increases conversion rates

Basecamp is a web application which hosts a variety of tools which help teams communicate and complete projects.

Highrise, their solution for sharing contacts and managing communication was already effective in yielding high sign-up rates through their landing page. Despite this, the team decided to focus on testing an entire design change to monitor outcomes.

Here’s the original landing page:

From a “best practices” perspective, this page checks a lot of the right boxes. It has:

• Multiple testimonials from customers – including video testimonials (which acts as powerful social proof).
• Visual cues directing users to important page elements, such as the on-page arrows.
• Strong color contrast, especially in the CTA.

While this was good enough to get strong conversions, the team at Basecamp wanted more. But instead of focusing on small aspects such as color of the background or copy in the headline, they radically changed the design of their website.

Here are 6 of their redesigns along with their conversion rates:

They decided to:

• Include an image of a smiling person. Smiling, according to studies, increases trust level.
• Highlight only one testimonial in large text which not only informs what their service does but also how it provides value.
• Removed visual clutter from their page.

The Result: The design change yielded a 102% increase in conversions

The Lesson:

• Sometimes, less is more. Instead of covering your page in social proof, try limiting to just 1-2 testimonials.
• Many CROs advocate making small incremental changes while testing. Sometimes, however, throwing out an old design and starting from scratch works better.

3. Showing users a “preview” increases newsletter conversion rates by 83%

The World Wildlife Fund wanted to get more subscribers to its monthly newsletters. However, instead of following tried and tested “best practices”, they made a few small tweaks that led to big improvements in results.

Here is the original layout:

And here is the re-design:

This redesign doesn’t do anything radically different. In fact, it even eschews a few best practices – such as making the “Sign-up Now” CTA larger and removing number of fields.

Yet, this new design was effective because:

• Visitors were told exactly what they can expect from the newsletter before entering any information.
• Altered placement of call-to-action button to the left to align with the reader’s visual reading path from left to right.
• The newsletter image gives readers a visual idea of what they can expect.
• It addressed users’ FUDs about giving away their mobile number.

The Result:  As a result of the changes, WWF experienced an 83% increase in sign-ups

The Lesson:

• Show, don’t just tell. Whenever possible, give users a preview of what they can expect after they perform an action.
• Address user FUDs clearly, especially when asking for their contact information or credit card data.

4. Image converts better than a video

Brookdale senior is a company which operates a chain of senior residence facilities.

In an attempt to increase converting visitors searching for a community to live in, the company tested changes which go against conventional wisdom.

Here is their original page:

The page contains no graphics, testimonials or content which would encourage visitors to convert.

And here is the re-design which included testimonials, content, and credibility logos.

While this redesign converted much better – it checked all the best practices boxes (testimonials, strong CTA, trust markers, etc.) – they tested another variant with a video instead of an image:

One version contained an image and the other, a playable video.

Studies suggest that videos convert much better than images (80% higher, according to one source).

In this case, however, the image version outperformed all other variants with a 4% increase in conversion as opposed to 1% with video.

Why could this be?

• Brookedale is already an established brand and the video serves as a distraction. People who come to their site have done their research and come knowing what they want
• The demographic browsing the website is likely older and may have slower internet where videos do not load smoothly or they may autoplay confusing visitors and causing them to leave.

The Result: The redesigned landing page (with the image) increased conversion rate by 3.92%, increasing revenue by $108,000.

The Lesson: Don’t blindly follow trends when making design decisions. Video might convert better than text or images on average, but it won’t necessarily do the same for you. Consider your target demographics and the strength of your brand before you jump aboard a trend.

5. Removing social login gets 3% higher conversions

Blivakker is a Norwegian online cosmetics retailer with over NOK 100M in annual sales and 350,000 registered users.

On e-commerce sites people frequently abandon carts during checkout if they are forced to sign-up to proceed for payment. Blivakker wanted to reduce cart abandonment by improving their check-out process by offering a social login option – a popular trend you’ll see across websites and industries.

To do this, Blivakker added Facebook login to its sign-up page. Data from social labs shows that 50% of online shoppers are already signed into Facebook so it serves as an attractive medium to bypass sign-ups.

Here’s what their sign-up looked like when they offered Facebook as an option:

And here is the same page without the Facebook login option

Though that was the only difference between the two landing pages, the results surprised BliVakker

The checkout page without Facebook login as an option increased conversions by 3% – something that goes against conventional wisdom.

What could explain this?

• People may not want their social networks to have access to their shopping data to avoid targeted ads.
• They may fear their friends and family being inadvertently shown their online purchases

Additionally, Norwegians care a lot about privacy. Norway ranks among the top 5 countries when it comes to its citizen’s privacy.

The Lesson: Always carry out your own testing instead of following a popular trend. Offering social login can seem like an easy way to get more people to sign-up, but it might not work for every business.

In the above case, it is also important to keep cultural context in mind. Norwegians care about privacy, perhaps more so than their peers down south. The popular trope of scandinavians being averse to extroversion also means that Norwegian shoppers might not want to share their shopping lists on Facebook.

6. Following a traditional design increases revenue per customer

Sometimes, following tradition can actually work out in your favor.

Take the case of SmartWool, a boutique clothing line which uses Merino wool in its clothing and accessories.

Though their website was already well designed and following best practices, the team wanted to experiment with different page layouts.

A common belief on e-commerce portals is that showing larger images of products and breaking the monotony of aligned equal-sized boxes can increase conversions.

Here’s how SmartWool’s original page with different-sized product images looked like:

Below is the more traditional design which was used as the test.

The redesign is as conventional as it comes. Gone are the varying image sizes and the large “featured” product images.

The Result: After testing for over a week, the results showed that the more traditional category page increased revenue by 17.1% per customer.

The Lesson: Don’t be quick to throw out conventions for the sake of creativity. If customers are used to seeing a format, it is better to stick with it than to try something new.

In SmartWool’s case, some reasons for the better conversions of the traditional layout could be that:

• Increasing product image size may lead to more click-throughs but that does not always translate to paying customers.
• Customers may get distracted by having their attention drawn towards products they actually don’t want.

7. Removing video above the fold increases conversions

There is a ton of data showing that adding video to a page increases conversions and engagement.

• A study of fashion retailers showed that websites that used video on product pages saw a 134% lift in conversions.
• A marketing survey found that 71% of marketers say that video is the best converting form of content.
• One retailer found that people who watched a video on its site were 144% more likely to convert than non-video viewers.

All this data indicates that if you add video to your page, you should see higher conversions.

In one case, however, the opposite happened.

GoSection8.com, which offers rental listing for the Section 8 housing market, used this as its original landing page:

This is very standard design for landing pages. The video is above the fold and helps viewers understand the value proposition (also above the fold) better.

The redesign pushed the video below the fold and replaced it with text instead.

Also, note how the CTA was pushed above the fold.

The Result: The redesigned page increased conversions by 88.46%!

The Lesson: Video is helpful in persuading and engaging people, but only when it actually adds value.

In this case, the video was mostly fluff. Underscoring the value proposition could be done just as well with text instead of video – something the redesign focused on.

More importantly, the video was taking up prime real estate above the fold. The CTA, on the other hand, was much lower down the page, giving users no easy way to take action.

Keep this in mind when you design your landing page’s above the fold area.

8. Removing social sharing buttons increases conversion rates

You can never really have enough shares to your product pages.

For Finnish hardware retailer Taloon, however, this wasn’t quite the case.

Following common consensus, the platform used social sharing buttons on their product pages to boost sales and add social proof to their products.

Here is their product page with social sharing options

The user has the option to share via Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest

In a bid to increase conversions, the site removed these social sharing buttons from the page.

Here’s what the redesign looks like:

You’ll notice that it’s largely the same, except for the missing share buttons.

The Result: Removing social buttons increased conversion by 11.9%.

The Lesson: Two things:

• Low social share count can act as negative social proof since people might construe poor shares as poor product quality.
• Social sharing options may be helpful on pages which are informative or funny but on product pages they act as a distraction and clutter.

Remember this before you blindly add buttons to a page where they aren’t really needed.

9. Adding clarity to pricing improved conversion rate by 34%

When you have price conscious customers, it makes sense to show as low prices as possible, right?

That’s what one large retailer of Indian ethnic wear used to do. This retailer offers customization options for every product. Selecting an option, however, does not update the shown price.

This practice wasn’t specific to the retailer alone, it was done by nearly every retailer in this category.

In a bid to increase conversions, the retailer broke from convention and redesigned its product pages:

Now, if a customer selected a customization option, the price would update instantly.

This gave the impression that the price was higher and the retailer expected to suffer a loss in conversions.

The results, however, were surprising.

The Results: Adding clarity to the price increased conversions by 34%.

The Lesson: For this retailer, it was common practice in the industry to obscure the price as much as possible. Since its customers were shopping mostly on price, it was expected that updating the price might impact conversions negatively.

Instead, the opposite happened. Customers appreciated the clarity in pricing over the industry convention.

Conclusion

These case studies show the importance of testing every feature and design on your site. Though industry best practices and norms may indicate what works best generally, they are not hard rules that can’t be broken. Every case is unique and following norms blindly may actually drive users and business away from your site.

The best method to achieve maximum results is to continuously analyze, test, refine, implement and repeat. And remember: conversion rate optimization is an ongoing process.

The post 9 Surprising CRO Case Studies (and What They Can Teach You About Testing) appeared first on Invesp.

As a result, you end up with e-commerce product pages that have all the information the visitors need;but difficult to use because the information is unorganized. Conversion optimization is about anticipating the information that the visitor needs, and presenting that information to the visitor at the right time and in the correct placement and location.

This case study demonstrates how presenting information at the right time and the right location, as well as removing distractions,will result in more conversions. We have discussed other case studies where designing for cognitive progression increased conversion rates by 90%.

1. The company & Background

Established in 1999, our client was a major affiliate website that specialized in selling college textbooks. The website visitors represented two unique segments:

• College students who are looking for text books for a specific class which they are attending.
• Parents of college students who are looking to buy books for their children who are attending college.

While the two segments come to the website to essentially complete the same task, they behave differently. One of the most striking differences between the two segments is their use of technology and how price conscious they are.

Since our client operated an affiliate website, one of the main goals of their website layout and functionality was to drive visitors to college textbook retailers which paid the highest affiliate commission.

The product listings page of the website offered visitors the ability to compare prices for the same textbook from 30 to 50 different online bookstores. Since some of these bookstores paid higher affiliate commissions, our client used a “featured bookstore” widget in a prominent location on the page to display the prices from these higher paying websites (advertisers).

The challenge is that some of these ecommerce websites, while paying higher commissions, they did not offer the best prices on the book.

Since the website is an affiliate website, conversion does not take place on the website itself. When the visitor likes a book and clicks on the “Buy it Now” button, he is directed to the e-commerce website. There is nothing unique about this. Affiliates are at the mercy of the advertiser website and can only hope that the checkout process on the advertiser website works well.

For the purposes of this test, we considered a click from the affiliate website to the advertiser website (click-through) as a conversion.

2. Test hypothesis

Offering visitors a clear and easy way to buy the products with the lowest price will increase the website conversion rate.

3. Original design vs. challengers

This image shows the original design of the product page:

Both qualitative and quantitative research conducted by Invesp indicated that the page suffered from 4 main problems:

1. The featured bookstore widget confused visitors since some of the stores listed did not have the lowest price on a book.
2. Asking the visitor who is ready to make a purchase about“selling a copy” of his book, caused confusion and cluttered the page
3. Both analytics and heatmap data showed that visitors did not use the social share icons on the page.
4. Qualitative research conducted by Invesp (focus group and one on one interviews) reflected that visitors were presented with too many competing product details. The most striking piece of information which visitors did not bother with was the product description. Visitors where relying on the ISBN number to identify if the book they are looking at is the correct one or not. Visitors are not reading these books for pleasure. They are buying them because they are a mandatory assignment for the class.

Having identified the top 4 problems on the page, the team produced the following designs to resolve the above problems.

Design challenger 1

The new design addressed each of the above 4 problems as follows:

1. The featured bookstore widget remained constant, since it represented a significant revenue stream for the client, but introduced a new “Quick Price Check” widget which displayed the lowest prices for the book.
2. Removed the “sell your book” from the buy page
3. Changed the location of the social share icons so they are in a close proximity to the page main CTAs
4. Did not display the product description on the page by default and instead allowed visitors to access the description by clicking on an HTML option which expanded to show display the text.

Design Challenger 2

The 2^nd challenger was similar in design to first challenger however it used a different color for the “Quick Price Check” widget

4. Results

The test ran for a period of 3 weeks. Design1 won reporting 15.3% increase in conversions with a 98.8 confidence.

5. Marketing Insights

Whenever we conduct an AB or MVT test for our clients, the most important part besides the uplift for our client, are the actual learnings we gain from the test. The lessons from this test told us:

• Visitors to this site are price conscious, and need an easy way to filter and find the best prices.
• Visitors to this website are already familiar with the product they need, and do not need additional information that will only clutter and take prime real estate from the top portion of the page.
• Displaying secondary CTAs above the fold is distracting and causes FUDs in the visitor.
• Any element that is not conducive to conversion, should be removed from above the fold on the page.

The post Anticipating Visitor Needs On Product Pages Increases Conversions By 15.3% [Case Study] appeared first on Invesp.

Optimizing bottom of the funnel pages boosts profits of e-commerce sites. For example, increasing conversion rate on product pages or the checkout process produces a greater impact on your bottom line compared to increasing the conversion rate of the home page or category pages.

The conversion framework elements which influence visitor action differ based on the type of page you are optimizing. Visitors who navigate through your website and get all the way to the product pages are more committed than visitors who just landed on an entry page for the website.

On an entry page, the visitor (subconsciously) is asking:

• Did I land on the right website?
• Can I trust this website?
• Do they have what I am looking for?

As the visitor navigates through, his trust in your website gradually increases. On your product pages, the visitor asks a different set of questions:

• Is this the right product for me?
• Is this the right price for this product?
• Am I going to be satisfied with this product?

When optimizing an e-commerce product pages for conversion, you must:

• Add clarity to the page (in terms of product specifications, including pricing).
• Reduce any FUDs (fears, uncertainty, and doubts) visitors might have.
• Provide information that supports different stages of the buying process.

Find in the case study below some of the elements you should keep in mind when optimizing online retailers’ product pages.

The company

Established in 1995, the client is one of the largest and most recognized online retailers for Indian ethnic wears. Based in India, the company services customers worldwide with over 50% of its customers in North America.

Background

When reviewing the website analytics, the Invesp team noticed that over 60% of website visitors navigated to the product pages. This percentage indicated most visitors did not struggle with trusting the website.

On product pages, visitors were presented with several options to customize the product they were viewing:

Each of the options had a specific price next to it.

Trying to stay competitive, the client’s team decided product price would not update even as visitors clicked on the different options. While this seemed strange to our team, it appeared to be standard practice for online retailers of this segment.

None of the clients’ competitors were updating their product price as visitors chose or changed options. If price increased as visitors added more options, the product would look costly compared to competitors.

Our team felt this was an area we should test to validate the client’s assumption.

The client was hesitant. Adjusting the product price would make them appear more expensive to visitors. They could lose sales as a result.

The test hypothesis

By reducing anxieties of how customization and sizing will be captured, as well as adjusting the price of customization on the product page, conversions will increase.

Original product page design vs. new product page challengers

Here is the original product page design:

The A/B test focused on four problems of the product page:

1. The price of the product did not update as visitors added or changed the customization options.
2. The website unique value proposition was not emphasized on the product pages.
3. The product customizations were not explained well through copy.
4. The social media icons placement was a distraction from the page primary conversion goal.

The team introduced two challengers to run against the original design:

1st Variation:

In this first variation, the team introduced several new elements:

1. When visitors clicked on the different product options, the product price updated accordingly.
2. A new emblem appeared on the product image, focusing on the custom tailoring offered by the website (unique value proposition).
3. Social media share icons were removed.
4. New copy was added around the product customization.

2nd Variation:

In terms of design, variation 2 was identical to the first one:

1. Over the image, a new emblem of a logo focusing on the custom tailoring provided by the website (unique value proposition)
2. No social media share icons
3. New copy around the product customization

When it came to product pricing, variation 2 behaved the same way as the original product page. As visitors clicked on the different customization options, the product price did not update.

The results

Simply put, trying to trick visitors will not work. Online shoppers are savvy and do not appreciate it when an online retailer lacks clarity in pricing.

Variation 1 (with the price updating) was the clear winner of the test with a 34% uplift in conversions.

The post Case Study – Adding clarity to product pages and reducing visitor anxiety increases conversions by 34% appeared first on Invesp.

The post How Addressing Personas Resulted in 238% Improvement in Conversions appeared first on Invesp.

We will discuss several case studies, which ultimately led to a 48% increase in overall website conversion rate . This webinar will show you how to gain incremental increases on each page and will teach you how to optimize the other pages throughout the site using the marketing insights gained throughout the process.

This webinar answers the following questions:

• How is a conversion optimization test conducted on a site?
• Which pages to optimize first?
• How does the tester identify the issues and roadblocks on a given webpage?
• What changes are made to different pages?

How does the conversion optimization process flow?

Before you perform conversion optimization tests, it’s necessary to do thorough due diligence. Just running tests to optimize conversions won’t give you the kind of results you want. The following process will help you get to the bottom of the problem and get your site converting optimally:

First comes the discovery phase, where you study every page of the site and analysis user experience

This is followed by an analysis of the site’s competition, what they offer, at what rates and so on

Once all this is in place, you can start playing around with page elements, run tests and compare results. You routinely incorporate user feedback analytics data to run even more strategic tests.

Based on the results of the initial tests, you create a conversion roadmap, to give the site owners a sense of what to expect within the next 2-3 months. The conversion roadmap is essential for mapping out page element priority.

Conversion Optimization Case Studies

The client, an online bookstore seller, offers discounted college books to students to buy or rent.

Discovery:

The site was facing high bounce rates on its home pages.

There was too many ways to interact with the site, which were causing confusion.

Overall, the messaging was reducing the value proposition, causing more confusion

Approach:

The approach was to work on the site elements in an effort to emphasize sales without killing other the rent option. The idea was to identify visitor pain points and work on them. The e-retailer did not have a proper audience analysis or defined audience persona. The various buyer personas were defined, in order to be able to highlight the site’s USP in such a way that the visitor knows exactly what is being offered.

Case Study 1

The testers used cognitive progression (anticipating what actions users will take) by clarifying the value proposition through the design. The Search box was placed centrally, and Search options were added so user would know what to do next. Users could now search by ISBN, Author or Book Title. The messaging was kept concise by using distinct colors for the Rent and Buy buttons. The first test saw 11.2% percent increase in the conversion rates.

Case Study 2

A combination of low product page effectiveness and high average time spent on a page was noticed. There was confusion with buttons and too many competing product options. Value proposition messaging similar to Case Study 1 was applied to every other page. Clear indicators were provided to the users through copy and design. Copy density was reduced along with irrelevant product description. Continuity for action was established throughout the website, to positively impact progression from page to page. These changes brought forth an additional 9% increase in conversion rates.

Case Study 3

Scent was increased by reducing clutter and enhancing copy and design to match visitor expectations. There were too many social media icons that were distracting users. These icons were moved to a place above the fold without scarifying too much real estate. The social media icons were not removed, as they are beneficial when it comes to generating more leads. Product prices were displayed in blue for easier recognition. Elements that were not adding value were removed.A quick price check was added right next to the products in the product pages for quick purchase. This change addressed a major visitor pain point. After this cleanup, a whopping 15.3% increase in conversion rates was observed.

Case Study 4

Product filtration options weren’t being used effectively on the site. This was rectified. Also, adding a quick price check made it possible to visitors to use product pages more effectively. The Buy and Rent links were changed to buttons next to the Quick Price. Unnecessary widgets were removed as well. In this study, trust and confidence elements were added in close proximity to the CTA to help ease visitor anxieties. Also, some text declaring specific value proposition statements were placed on the right-side of product pages, in a box. The CTA buttons were moved to the left, so the text would be visible. These changes brought forth the best conversion rate increase thus far – 18.67%.

Cumulative Insights

The 4 case studies offered a cumulative increase in conversions of 48% over 4 months. User feedback and data analytics were incorporated into the conversion roadmap. The site owners were given instruction on how to run optimization tests regularly, and how to compare and merge two different tests to create variations. At each stage, specific changes that worked the best were noted; these were the winners. Changes that did not impact conversions positively were removed. The winning changes were retained and further tests were run according to the roadmap.

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