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How to Overcome the 5 Challenges Threatening Retail Success 1

Thriving in the Era of Personalization5 Personalization Success Strategies for Retailers

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 01 Keeping Up with Rapidly Changing Consumer Expectations

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CHAPTER 02 Standing Out in a Saturated Market

p.13

CHAPTER 03 Optimizing for New Customer Acquisition vs. Lifetime Value

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CHAPTER 04 Delivering Seamless Cross Device Experiences

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CHAPTER 05 The Struggle to Convert Browsers to Buyers

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Introduction

When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, it sparked a retail revolution — even if Bezos didn’t know it yet. Today, Amazon’s model has changed how, where, and why we shop, and the company’s ubiquity — both in the variety of its product offerings and its consumer reach — is threatening the future of many retail brands.

In fact, according to one report, Amazon now accounts for 51 cents of every dollar in e-commerce growth and over a quarter of e-commerce sales.1

Bring this up to a retail executive who works for a company not named Amazon, and you’ll likely hear them raise concerns about competing against the giant on price and shipping. While both are legitimate concerns given the economies of scale Amazon enjoys, a 2015 study suggests those factors aren’t what really set Amazon apart.2

Instead, the report found that Amazon’s ability to leverage data and analytics to

1 Macquarie Research , 2015, 2 Swirl Networks , 2015, 3 Swirl Networks , 2015

personalize each customer’s shopping experience was one of its most powerful differentiators.

In fact, 56% of consumers say Amazon demonstrates an understanding of their individual preferences and needs on a regular basis—a number that dwarfs consumers’ feelings about traditional retailers3. Even more interesting, however, is the value that consumers place on personalization and connected cross-channel experiences. According to the report:

Herein lies the challenge for retailers today.

88% of consumers say they’remore likely to shop with

retailers that deliver personalized and connected cross-channel experiences.

87% say those connected,customized experiences

would also increase their loyalty to that brand.

56%

of consumers say Amazon demonstrates

an understanding of their individual preferences

Introduction | P3 5 Challenges for Retailers to Overcome


Today, your brand isn’t just competing with Amazon on price, shipping, or ubiquity. You’re also competing on the quality of the end-to-end experience. And you’re being asked to do that at a time when consumer behavior is increasingly ephemeral and, at times, completely irrational.

Capitalizing on the Customer Experience Opportunity

The good news? Thanks to the increasing sophistication of tools built to optimize every aspect of the customer experience, retailers can now overcome the challenges that keep them from delivering the Amazon-like experiences their customers expect.

What are those challenges? And how can your brand convert them into competitive advantages? In the coming pages, we’ll explore five challenges that are unique to retail and provide tactical tips to help you:

• Keep up with—and, ideally, get aheadof—rapidly changing consumerexpectations

• Stand out in a saturated market andcompete against retail giants

• Optimize the user experience toimprove loyalty and increase lifetimecustomer value

• Create truly seamless, conversion-driving cross-device experiences

• Convert “browsers” into “buyers” andreduce shopping cart abandonment

As you read on, keep this in mind: Delivering truly optimized, personalized customer experiences isn’t just about including someone’s name in an email. It’s about understanding behavior at a granular level and continuously ensuring your customers get the experience they want. By the end of this paper, you’ll have a framework to overcome these challenges and achieve your goals.

What are those challenges?

And how can your brand

convert them into competitive

advantages?

Introduction | P4 5 Challenges for Retailers to Overcome


CHAPTER 01

Keeping Up with Rapidly Changing Consumer Expectations


3 Ways to Embrace the Evolving Customer Ask 10 people questions about their shopping habits and it’s immediately evident that they’re all extremely different. For retailers, this means one thing:

You cannot assume anything.

It’s necessary to embrace the ephemerality of modern shopping behavior and optimize around it. In order to do the latter, you must possess a deep understanding of the key trends that will shape the future of retail and develop the capabilities to do something about it. To help you do that, here are three ways to embrace rapidly changing consumer expectations:

01 Continuously test andoptimize page layout

The average consumer visiting a website has an attention span of 8 seconds4. Put another way, you have 8 seconds to capture someone’s attention when they land on your website. Apart from offering great products, numerous on-site factors contribute to the rate at which you convert browsers into buyers. Layout is one of the key determining factors; product detail and checkout pages are particularly important. Friction there can bring conversions to a screeching halt. This is why it’s critical to optimize your site to make it as fast and easy to navigate as possible.

4 Microsoft Research , Spring 2015

Challenge 01 | P6 5 Challenges for Retailers to Overcome

We need to embrace change. It’s inevitable. It’s not a choice and it’s rapid. It’s about survival.

— CHRISTOPHER MCCANN, PRESIDENT, 1-800-FLOWERS


Tips for Optimizing Key Retail Pages

Page Tips to Improve Performance

The product detail page

This page is a key part of the path to purchase. Spend time optimizing these pages to increase conversions and revenue.

Clear Descriptions — The product description is very important for your product’s discoverability for both humans and search engines. Make your descriptions human and packed with keywords. Descriptions are good places to answer FAQs about your products.

Fantastic Images — Abundant high-quality product photography or videography is vital. A/B testing different image types - such as images with or without models—is a smart tactic to increase conversions on all products.

Eliminate Uncertainty — Add FAQs, user reviews, and live chat,to boost shoppers’ confidence.

Transparent Shipping — Shipping is a determining factor in whether or not a visitor will buy. Being transparent early on can help set expectations and make people more likely to checkout.

The checkout funnel

For most retailers, the online path to purchase consists of a set of pages with mandatory forms. Opportunities abound to make this a seamless,high-converting flow.

Painless Forms — You can make web forms slightly less painful by using inline validation to reveal errors.

Remove Distractions — Remove the site navigation from the checkout to keep shoppers focused and less likely to bounce out of the flow by clicking on a link.

Include Context — Include a progress bar so shoppers know where they are in the process. Make shopping cart contents and total price easy to view so shoppers are not tempted to leave to find this information.

Guest Checkout — Offer it. Requiring shoppers to make an account is a proven barrier to conversions. Allow shoppers to check out anonymously and see conversions increase.

The homepage

The homepage is often the highest traffic page on an retailer’s website. This page is critical in leading customers to the things they should want to buy.

Clear Navigation — Use navigation to highlight what you offer that’s different from competitors. Put the most popular links in the top left position.

Compelling Offers — Which offers are most compelling to your different customers? Is it prominent enough to generate interest?

Clickable Images — Include clickable, eye-catching images that link directly to product collections. A/B testing your images is a very smart tactic to increase click through rate.

Be Relevant — The homepage is a great opportunity to target content, products and offers based on data you have about the visitors.



To avoid wasting precious time, mature optimization programs use data to focus their testing and personalization efforts on key opportunities to make an impact.

Use these reports to uncover actionable test ideas:

Funnel report - This website analytics report shows you each step in your conversion funnel and how much traffic is dropping off at each one. Identify bottlenecks and pages with the most drop off. Focus optimization efforts there.

Heat maps, click maps, scroll depth reports - These reports visualize your visitors’ behaviors on your site. Use them to visualize how much of the page visitors see on initial page-load, how far they actively scroll, where visitors click on the page. With this information, you can better decide where to place high-value content.

High traffic & high bounce/exit rate - Run this report to understand which pages are turning your highly valuable shoppers away. Compare high traffic + high bounce/exit pages to high traffic + low bounce/exit pages to find any differences.

1



How REVOLVE Increased Engagement & Conversion with a Simple Experiment

Through optimization, Revolve has found more effective ways to pique shoppers’ interest upfront in order to turn more browsers into buyers and decrease bounce rates to competing sites.

One experiment Revolve ran that highlights this principle was a test on their desktop site navigation.

By repositioning the brand’s unique “Hot List” page—a place for visitors to discover the most recent, popular styles in a customized manner—the company saw an immediate lift in engagement, a drop in bounce rate, and an increase in purchase conversion.

CASE STUDY:



02 Pay close attentionto every step in the mobile journey

Don’t assume that shoppers only use your mobile site for research. With their mobile websites and apps, retailers should support all steps in the path to purchase on mobile devices.

In a study on mobile shopping, ThinkWithGoogle offers design tips for four stages in the path to purchase on mobile devices5.

Here are some of the top recommendations:

A. Show in-store availability knowing whether a product is availableat a shopper’s local store is a key to delivering an omnichannelexperience.

B. Provide full product details on mobile even though you have lessscreen real estate, provide all necessary detail about your products.

C. Make your form fields larger form usability is notoriously a pain onmobile. Make it easy for shoppers to tap into a form field.

D. Let shoppers purchase as a guest similar to desktop, requiringan account to check out is a proven point of friction.

E. Don’t overwhelm shoppers with promotions allow them to dismisspromotions easily and get on with their shopping.

5 Mobile Retail Apps and Sites: Designing a Better Experience for Shoppers, Think with Google



03 Deliver tailored experiences in real time based on behavior

Delivering truly optimized, personalized customer experiences isn’t just about including someone’s name in an email. It’s about understanding behavior at a granular level and continuously ensuring your customers get the experience they want.

We’re all different and delivering different experiences to play into these differences is not only a lucrative, but a vital practice for retailers. Retailers today can deliver unique con-tent to shoppers in real time based on their behavior.

Retailers can start delivering targeted, personalized content, and offers based on these common segments:

Past purchasers - If you know what they’ve purchased, highlight add ons to that product.

Viewed a product page - If a visitor views a product, show them more products in that category if they navigate back to the home page.

Return visitors who have not purchased - Try different offers to compel visitors in this segment to make a purchase or take an important action such as sign up for your email newsletter.

Audience segments are the building blocks you need to develop in order to deliver more relevant experiences to your shoppers.



Actionable Next Steps

Audit of your mobile site and find low hanging fruit for improving the user interface.

Test your checkout funnel and see where people get stuck.

Map out opportunities for personalization on your site. Identify content areas of the page that can change for different audiences. This will help you establish a basis for setting up personalized campaigns.

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02

03



CHAPTER 02

Standing Out in a Saturated Market


When Dollar Shave Club released its now iconic viral YouTube video in 2012, the brand’s concept was unique. Why go to the pharmacy and pay out the nose for razors when you can have them shipped directly to your door for a fraction of the cost?

That uniqueness—and the company’s brilliant marketing—drove incredible growth in Dollar Shave Club’s first year. But today, the business has more than a half dozen competitors—a group that includes bigger brands like Gillette and Schick.

The same is true of subscription box companies like Trunk Club and Stitch Fix, and online mattress companies like Casper, Leesa, and others.

In all likelihood, your company is probably facing a similar challenge. At a time when it’s easier and cheaper than ever before to start (or copy) a business, standing out amongst that sea of diverse competition can be incredibly difficult. So, what can you do to differentiate?

Apart from the products you sell, the experience you provide is a major lever to distinguish you from the competition.



3 Strategies to Distinguish Yourself from the Competition

01 Tailor the site experienceto the shopper

On what basis should you segment your shoppers? Good news, retailers have a innumerable ways to tailor the site experience to the shopper.

Innovative retailers are make online experiences more customized and relevant by using the data they have about their visitors.

02 Embrace and promoteyour differentiators

While it’s not always feasible for every retailer to match much larger retailers on shipping and pricing, there are things about your brand that set it apart. What makes the customer think of you and only you?

Are your products used or worn by celebrities? Do you provide intense transparency into the supply chain like Everlane? Do you offer free try-at-home options, similar to what Warby Parker offers? Or does your brand donate a portion of its proceeds to a charity with every purchase like TOMS shoes?


If our customer doesn’t see the perfect dress for her on the first page she visits, she’s likely to move on to the next app or site vying for her attention. It’s absolutely necessary to show her what she wants as soon as she comes to us—even if she doesn’t yet know what that item is.

— GRACE HONG, VP OF PRODUCT AND DESIGN, REVOLVE

While many shoppers are price conscious, unique value propositions and strong social proof can help you differentiate your retail experience beyond price.

Often-overlooked places to find key differentiators include:

User reviews - Do you notice any themes in why people buy your products or how they describe them?

Social media - You are already listening to what consumers are saying about your brand on social media, start aggregating it to see if any other common threads emerge.

A/B tests - When you have ideas for copy, taglines or images that get to the core of your unique offering, A/B test them and find out which one creates the most engagement.

Try experimenting with

CTAs and messaging on

high-conversion pages that

show off your personality and

call these characteristics out.


03 Embed customer feedback intoyour experience development

Empathetic, customer-centric choices are table stakes for companies who provide great experiences, both online and offline. Listening to the customer and making decisions with data instead of relying on the intuition of the people inside the company is a strategy that has helped propel many retailers to the top of the pack.

What can you do to be a better listener?

• Ask for feedback - Web surveys are still great ways to betterunderstand your customers. Give incentives for people torespond to your survey to increase the conversion rate.

• Make it easy for customers to give feedback - If customershave questions, ideas, make it extremely easy for them toget in touch with you. Live chat is an increasingly popularchannel retailers are using to connect with shoppers.

• Testing - Out of all the customer-listening strategies, testingis one of the most scalable, providing immediate insight intohow hundreds of thousands of people respond to changes.

Whatever you do, make sure you are ready to receive and act on the feedback. Assign a person or a team to this task so the data gets into the right hands.


Always keep the customer at the center of what you do.

— KAREN KATZ, PRESIDENT AND CEO, NEIMAN MARCUS GROUP

6 2016 Best Digital Marketers in ECommerce, Internet Retailer

Examples from Best-in-Class Retailers:

Wayfair, who Internet Retailer ranked #1 overall for best e-commerce marketing of 2016, takes a highly data-driven approach to its advertising.6

“We have to ensure that we’re pulling the right levers…” Bob Sherwin, Wayfair’s Senior Director of Marketing told Internet Retailer. “That means we have to constant test new ads, new platforms and new ways to drive people to buy.”

RueLaLa takes the second spot on the Internet Retailer email-effectiveness ranking thanks to the data-driven and highly targeted, tailored approach they take to email marketing. With segments like “female luxury brand buyer”, RueLaLa’s dedication to testing different copy for different segments has led to an 1% increase in open-rate, a big number considering the e-commerce brand sends 4 million emails in one blast. What can you do to be a better listener? Whatever you do, make sure you are ready to receive and act on the feedback. Assign a person or a team to this task so the data gets into the right hands. Empathizing with the customer and making decisions with data instead of relying on intuition is the not-so secret sauce an increasing number of the world’s most innovative companies use to design their best customer experiences.


01Look at your analytics data to understand how your visitor traffic breaks down. This will help you prioritize which segments to target first.

02Showcase what sets you apart from your competitors. In user research, ask whether or not the differentiators are easy to notice by looking at the site.

Collect customer feedback. Whether it be through surveys, tests or other methods designate a person and a process for collecting feedback from customers.

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CHAPTER 03

Optimizing for Customer Acquisition vs. Lifetime Value

18xmore valuable than

an average customer

94% of companies see “higher engagement and conversion rates” as benefits of a commitment to customer experience.7

7 Customer Experience Optimization Report , Econsultancy, 8 RJ Metrics , 2015

Top

1%customers are


Lifetime value is more than how much a customer spends in one transaction or one year. It’s a long-term relationship you cultivate over time and many touchpoints.

At a time when acquiring new customers is increasingly competitive, retailers are compelled to do everything they can to improve relationships with existing customers because data shows that they are more likely to turn into your most valuable customers.

A recent report from RJmetrics focusing found that:8

• The top 1% of a brand’s customersare worth 18 times more than anaverage customer

• Across industries, new e-commercecustomers are worth $154 in theirfirst year

• 69% of that spending happenswithin the first 30 days of someonebecoming a customer

• The fastest growing e-commercecompanies have a 79% higher customerlifetime value than their peers

By improving the experience of your best customers and extracting more value from them, you’ll increase the likelihood that those customers will stick around longer, buy more, and organically promote your brand.


The more customers feel

like your business is tailoring

the customer experience

to them, the more likely it is

that they’ll remember your

brand and come back for

repeat purchases.

3 Vital Factors Influencing the Customer ExperienceSo, what levers can you pull to have the biggest impact on customer lifetime value? Let’s start with one that has been a hot topic for years and may be obvious: personalization.

01 Personalizing the on-site experience in real time

The more customers feel like your business is tailoring the customer experience to them, the more likely it is that they’ll remember your brand and come back for repeat purchases.

Opportunities for personalized touches include:

• Creating homepage messagingspecifically for shoppers with certainbrowsing patterns

• Customizing product recommendationsbased on past purchases

• Automatically issuing promotions foryour most loyal customers

• Giving return visitors an option toexpedite the checkout process



Solution - Blu Dot replaced the Email submission form on their landing page with an offer to get a “Free Catalog” They hypothesized that shoppers would see greater value in signing up for a catalog by mail than they would in providing their email address for a newsletter. The catalog request modal increased conversion rate by 124%.

CASE STUDY:

Blu Dot finds sweet spot between customer acquisition and added value

Challenge: Acquiring customer information to provide a highly-tailored and unique experience and at the same time adding value to their customers.



02 Site performance

Simply put, performance matters. A lot. Online retailers need to be conscious of how load time because it can be directly related to conversion rates and revenue. As of Spring 2015, the median time to interact for the top 100 retailers was 5.2 seconds.9

How does your site performance stack up?

One quick way to optimize your site speed: decrease the size of your images which typically comprise 50 to 60% of a page’s size.

03 Shipping speed

The reality is that Amazon has changed the game for retailers when it comes to shipping, making free two-day shipping an expectation rather than a perk.

How can you stay competitive when your customers expect free?

• Set minimum free shipping thresholds - This motivatesshoppers to buy more products, increases your averageorder value and makes customers happy that they’ll get theirproducts quickly.

9 The State of the Union for Ecommerce Page Speed and Web Performance , Radware

• Use limited-time free shipping - Offering a window of freeshipping creates a sense of urgency in shoppers and canincrease conversion rates.

• Be transparent about how long a product will take toship - In the long run, (remember the statistics about loyalcustomers) it’s better to set expectations fairly and generatetrust than ship products to angry customers.

• Invest in the ability to buy online and pickup in store -Talk about competitive edge, retailers with brick and mortarpresence should take advantage of this opportunity tocircumvent shipping entirely.

Ultimately, however, the goal should be to test every point of the customer journey to identify points of friction and opportunity. When the shopping experience is smooth and seamless, and cus-tomers feel like it’s been custom-ized for them, research has re-peatedly shown that people buy more and stay customers longer.



01Take an inventory of the largest images on your site and decrease the size by either saving it in a new format or decreasing the dimensions before uploading it to your site.

02According to Shopify, a good rule of thumb for image file size is 70kb.

Start thinking about a personalization strategy. Download Optimizely’s Personalization Toolkit to get started with the foundation: building your customer segments. to get started with the foundation: building your customer segments.

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CHALLENGE 04

Delivering Seamless Cross-Device Experiences

10 Facebook IQ , 2016


At no point in the history of retail have consumers had more choice.

Customers shop whenever and wherever they want (via websites, social media, mobile apps, etc.) and expect great experiences at each touchpoint. All of this is great for consumers, of course, and offers helpful guidance to retailers for which experiences to focus on.

But a few things are true: your customers don’t think in channels, they think in experiences and those experiences are erratic.

According to a 2016 study by Facebook IQ, 60% of shoppers say they plan to start making more purchases on their smartphones in 2016.10 Even more interesting, 54% those people say they’re more likely to shop with a retailer that makes it easy to buy on several devices and platforms.

“It’s not a straight line,” Natalie Malaszenko, Senior VP of Marketing at Overstock said about the purchase funnel. “That means that the onus is on marketers to get our message across in different ways on different platforms all without irritating people.”


Mobile isn't going away anytime soon, so being able to fine-tune and personalize the mobile experience is an ongoing challenge.

— GRACE HONG, VP OF PRODUCT AND DESIGN, REVOLVE

Based on this data (and numerous other studies that tell a similar story), it is critical not to overlook mobile—be it your mobile website, app, or social channels, which see the majority of their traffic from mobile devices. To get started, here are three tips to help you create engaging cross-device experiences:

01 Make shoppers aware of your mobile presence

Before shoppers can actually use your other channels, you have the important task of making them aware that these channels exist. Consider the staggering fact that two thirds of consumers don't know if their favorite retailer offers a mobile app.11 Promoting your mobile website and app on your desktop site is critical. Brands that maintain strong customer loyalty use their app for special offers and tailored post-purchase experiences.

Tips to promote app downloads:

• Offer an incentive for shoppers to download the app such as 15% off firstin-app purchase

• Promote any unique features the app has such as loyalty member exclusives.

• A/B test the way you promote the download, the placement and timing ofthe offer as well as the offer itself.

11 eMarketer, 2016 http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Aware-Consumers-About-Their-Favorite-Fashion-Retail-Ap-ps/1013619?ecid=NL1014



Original

Variation

REVOLVE drives more shoppers to its mobile app

Increasing app users is a key initiative for Revolve because in the app, Revolve can provide relevant, personalized experiences—such as notifications and special offers—that make shoppers convert.

Using Optimizely’s mobile testing platform, the team designed and tested a new mobile experience that increased app installs by 350%. They directed half of their mobile web visitors to a new splash page with an aggressive promotion to download the mobile app. The other half saw the original splash page with a soft-er promotion.

CASE STUDY:


02 Leverage UX best practices on mobile

With mobile commerce, the last thing you want is to distract customers with conflicting CTAs or products they might not actually buy. Screen real estate is limited and shoppers can only take in so much information at once. Instead, your strategy should be to drive the user to follow a certain order based on contextual information (i.e., the customer has clicked on a specific product or link, or viewed a specific collection of images).

03 A/B test your checkout experience onevery device

Your customers are completing purchases on their mobile devices more often these days. Keep in mind that the shopping cart renders differently on all screen sizes with different breakpoints. Do not let the checkout — one of the most vital experiences on your site — slip through the cracks. It’s a responsive web design best practice to design your site agnostic to device screen specs. This allows you to future proof your design and emphasize page layout instead of being beholden to specific sizes. Widths of today’s devices can be starting points for testing.



Every channel we use is good at one or multiple things. But none of them can achieve everything we’re seeking to do. It’s our job to figure out how to use each for what they’re best at.”— BOB SHERWIN, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, WAYFAIR



Trunk Club validates new mobile feature

The Trunk Club mobile team wanted to find a way to allow users to engage with the app in a way that wouldn’t inundate stylists with requests—but that also wouldn’t reduce qualified trunk requests they were receiving through the app.

The team designed a low-risk way for app users to “like” garments — a new action that would give shoppers something to do besides just browsing or requesting a trunk, while also sending useful data to the stylists. They tested the feature a limited amount of their app traffic to mitigate the risk of killing their app KPIs.

CASE STUDY:



Using Optimizely, the team was validated the new “like” button feature was a success!

Members would “like” products 10-12 times in a sitting, shattering engagement expecta-tions and offering a great window into the member’s wardrobe preferences and style. “We also found that people were more likely to submit a trunk request when we got them to like things in the app,” says Hughes.

10% of users in the experimental treatment engaged with the feature and merchan-dise requests increased by almost 9%.

Backed with the confidence from the test, the Trunk Club team began to doubled up on the amount of app users with the new feature.

By testing the introduction of the “like” feature, the team was able to ensure that clothing requests were not cannibalized by the new behavior, and proved that introducing liking was actually beneficial for both user engagement and trunk requests, the team’s top-line metric.


01Count the number of promotions you have for your mobile presence. If mobile is a goal, consider testing the messages you’re using to drive downloads.

02Examine the checkout experience on all devices. Do user testing to get initial feedback on ease and find ways to improve the funnel.




CHALLENGE 05

The Struggle to Convert Browsers into Buyers

Let’s say you do a great job of attracting traffic to your mobile and desktop sites. Shoppers are looking at multiple pages, scanning through product galleries, and adding items to their cart. That’s all good news, right?

Sure. The only problem: If those visitors aren’t converting, and actually making purchases elsewhere then what good is that traffic? If you are attracting visitors but not converting them then changes need to be made.

3 Tips to Improve Conversion RatesTo fight against it, many retailers make the mistake of assuming the solution to increasing low conversion rates is to simply drive more traffic to the site. With a higher quantity of shoppers, logic suggests there should be a larger number who buy.

While that might be true, the reality is that the sheer number of visitors you bring to your website doesn’t really matter as much as the quality of those shoppers. So, how can you optimize for high quality shoppers who convert into buyers? Here are three tips to better leverage your data and analytics to make improvements that turn browsers into buyers:

01 Evaluate activity at the page level

By pulling a site search report, you can evaluate what customers are looking for, where they’re looking for it, and whether or not your content is giving it to them. When you have this data, you can optimize images, CTAs, and messaging to ensure they appeal to your customers’ immediate needs, interests, and intentions.



Evans Cycles Drives 4% More Revenue with Simple but Powerful Test

During user research sessions, customers said they were trying to buy a bike but based on the product page and “Add to Basket” button appearance, they assumed the bike was out of stock.

The Evans Cycles team tested a version of the product page that made the add to basket button more visible. This simple change caused a 49% uplift in add to basket metric and 4.3% more revenue generated. This test demonstrates how a few user research sessions can lead to immediately actionable test ideas.

Original Test

12 Baymard Institute , 2015

CASE STUDY:


02 Analyze exit points

Where are your customers dropping off? Is it at checkout? On the product pages? Your homepage? By running a report that tells you exactly where you’re losing shoppers, you’ll collect valuable intelligence that can help you optimize the steps in the customer journey that are most likely to kill conversions.

According to a 2015 report by the Baymard Institute, 69% of all consumers abandon their shopping cart—often for a number of very predictable reasons.11 Shipping costs and general product research are two big ones, but a handful of others are directly tied to customer experience—having to create a new account, payment security, a confusing checkout process, etc.—and they’re all easily fixable if you know how to identify, test, and optimize them.

03 Avoid total redesigns

Instead of revamping an entire customer experience and then unleashing it on the world, your best bet is to follow to an iterative process that tests the impact of small changes on user behavior. Over time, these small tests will build up to inform the new design. Retail companies have suffered from all-at-once redesigns. Don’t let that be your experience.

homepage product detail page

checkout

EXIT

category page


01Make sure the analytics and optimization teams are closely tied. The analytics team can provide endless optimization opportuni-ties based on the onsite analytics.

02Think twice before starting a page redesign without data to inform your new direction.

Many redesigns end up performing worse than the original.



More specifically, here are some best practices to keep in mind:

• Continuously experiment, test, and iterate—preferablyin small increments - Don’t assume that you know yourcustomers or how they want to experience your brand. Testvirtually everything, evaluate the results, and make smallchanges over time.

• Get granular to focus on encouraging logical conversionpoints - Evaluate exit points. A/B test images, productdescriptions, and CTAs. Study customer behavior in real-time.Look for opportunities to optimize how customers progressthrough their journey. The goal should be to gather enoughinformation to make it easy to deliver experiences that feeltruly personal.

• Invest heavily in mobile optimization - And pay specialattention to mobile shopping cart and checkout functionality.Data shows that mobile conversions are on the rise andthose numbers won’t go down.

When you follow those practices successfully, the benefits can be significant. More customers will discover your brand. They’ll like what they see when they land on your website. They’ll feel more compelled to convert. And they’ll be more likely to turn into long-term customers who willingly spread the word about your brand.

In an era where Amazon will only continue to evolve its personalization efforts, that’s how you’ll differentiate. And, ultimately, it’s how you’ll win the battle to deliver the absolute best customer experiences.

Will You Thrive or Fail in the Era of Personalization?At the end of the day, most retailers understand the threat posed by Amazon. And they’re beginning to see the value of differentiation through personalization. The challenge with personalization, however, is that it’s not something that can be accomplished on a whim. To deliver experiences that individual customers actually respond to, your business must commit to creating a culture of perpetual testing and optimization. This approach should inform the products you offer, the design changes you make, the messaging you create, and the promotions you offer.


About Optimizely | P40 5 Challenges for Retailers to Overcome

About OptimizelyOptimizely is the world’s leading experience optimization platform, providing website and mobile A/B testing and personalization for the world’s leading retailers.

The platform’s ease of use and speed of deployment empowers organizations to conceive of and run experiments that help them make better data-inspired decisions. Optimizely meets the diverse needs of thousands of customers worldwide looking to deliver connected experiences to their audi-ences across channels. To date, those customers have created and delivered more than 30 billion optimized visitor experiences.

Optimizely powers experiences for the world’s leading retailers.

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