Author: Martin P.
Title: Content Marketer
EP 43: Why Experiment?
I miss the personalization Las Vegas was; there were showroom captains and all the dealers knew the gamblers by their first name. — Wayne Newton
What’s up folks?
Martin P from Speero here.
The only thing I’m gonna say is, are these emails too long? We want to share a lot, but no one has time to read everything they want.
Why not reply and tell me what you think?
A simple Yay or Nay will do.
Now, let’s see:
This Week in Experimentation:
Maturing of the week: [Strategy & Culture > Strategy > Personalization/Targeting]
Blueprint of the week: Why Experiment? — since 2000, this scientific method has been used to improve and learn from web pages. Prove this to your boss so they may become interested in experimentation. Link.
Talk of the week: The Power of Personalization — how retail inventory management impacts conversion rates, why it's vital to personalize in eCommerce, how to use customer data to create a unified journey across different channels, and more. Link.
Read of the week: Why Experiment, Two Narratives — Experimentation lets you adapt and learn fast and fosters a culture of innovation and creativity. Link.
Event of the week: Experimentation Culture Awards — yearly global award show celebrating the growth in experimentation culture by individuals, teams, and orgs. Link.
Speero Story of the week: Visible Address Fields, Yay or Nay? — The address fields required the users to go through an extensive amount of steps. We decided to cut that. More on this below.
Maturing of the Week: Personalization/Targeting
Pillar: Strategy and Culture
Subpillar: Strategy
Activity: Personalization/Targeting
How robust is your experimentation program at targeting the experimentation efforts? Is there no personalization, with experiments running on every page?
Are you even separating desktop from mobile users?
Or is segmentation at the core of your optimization strategy?
Personalization is a real-time website individualization that suits each user's unique wants and needs and guides them through a customer conversion funnel.
What you get out of it is more conversion rate, revenue, time on site, page views, retention rate, and a lot more.
Here’s the kicker: It’s not so easy to do personalization right.
How to level up (Internally):
Define clear goals and objectives — is it conversions, engagement, or LTV? Without clear goals, you can’t measure the personalization’s success. Can help: Goal Tree Maps
Collect relevant data — you need it to deliver customized experiences. While it's easy to burn money through AI and third-party data, focus on first-party data to understand the customer patterns better and gain first-hand insights into what your customers really want.
Ensure data quality — accurate, complete, and up-to-date data gives you the right and correct insights. Performing regular analytics health checks to ensure this.
Focus on the customer experience — this must be your key goal, right? Otherwise, you’ll bleed the existing pool of customers for short-term revenue gains. Plus customer loyalty is what drives business growth over the long term.
Build personalized content — Personalization goes beyond just changing the layout or design of your website. Create personalized content that speaks directly to your target audience and addresses their pain points, interests, and goals.
Use a testing and optimization framework — find frameworks that let you test different personalization strategies, measure their impact, and optimize your approach over time. This ensures you're delivering the best possible experience to your users. Can help: PXL.
How to level up (Externally)
External agencies can provide frameworks, personalization strategies, segmentation strategies, and more.
Blueprint of the Week: Why Experiment?
There isn’t a scientist or a doctor that doesn’t know about randomized controlled trials. At least, not among the goods ones.
However, since 2000, this scientific method has been used to improve and learn from web pages.
The research is double-blind (the researcher and visitor don’t know they are in the experiment, there is a hypothesis that is ‘proven’ until it’s falsified.
Use Cases:
— Prove that A/B-testing is a scientific research method
— Show the history behind experimentation
Talk of the Week: The Power of Personalization
The Conversion Show podcast brought an interesting guest — Ashland Stansbury, founder, and CEO of Because. She shared her insights into personalization and how it can help you increase your conversion rate.
Together with the host, Eric Christiansen, they talked about:
— Challenges of managing inventory in retail and its impact on eComm conversion rates.
— Why it’s important to personalize in ecommerce.
— How to use customer data to create a connected journey across different channels.
— How merchants increase conversion rates through dynamic website content.
Read of the Week: Why Experiment, Two Narratives
When you constantly test and iterate, you can stay ahead of the game. You can find new opportunities, and finally drive meaningful growth.
Sounds easy, right? But here’s the tricky part:
— People don’t like change, especially when salaries are tied to the status quo.
— Businesses and bosses don’t like risk or failure.
— Qualitative data on human perceptions is downright uninterpretable.
Truth is, we all know we gotta experiment to build adaptation systems to (changing) market environments. Here’s the kicker: It’s not so straightforward to get there.
Still, there are two vital reasons WHY companies should experiment:
1 — Experimentation lets you adapt and learn fast.
2 — Experimentation fosters a culture of innovation and creativity
Event of the Week: Experimentation Culture Awards
The Experimentation Culture Awards is the yearly global award show celebrating the growth in experimentation culture by individuals, teams, and orgs.
They plan to broadcast summaries of all nominations and mixes through their keynote presentations. The winners of this Culture Awards edition will be revealed during a live broadcast on June 15th, 2023, 6 pm UTC.
Speero Story of the Week: Visible Address Fields, Yay or Nay?
While working with a client, we came upon a problem. The address fields required their users to go through an extensive amount of steps. To be honest, it was quite overwhelming. For the users that is.
So, we thought about what do to. Then it came up.
If we hide most of the information on the checkout page (while still providing customers the option of manually entering the address), we will be able to draw more attention to the address lookup field and increase checkout completions.
Scorecard:
Outcome: Winning!
By hiding the manual address fields on the checkout/delivery page we observed a significant increase in progression to the payment page (+38.06% at 100% CTBC) that positively impacted transactions (+3.74% at 86% CTBC). All revenue metrics also showed a positive signal.
Heatmaps data indicates that a higher percentage of visitors were using the manual address fields on control, which indicates that customers are not reading the supporting copy & understanding how the first address field works or that they get distracted by the (more familiar) manual address fields below.
The significant increase in “Proceed to payment” CTA clicks indicates that visitors on control were more likely to abandon the process if they got frustrated by the lengthy form fields.
Next steps: Implement
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