You’ve likely read about the effectiveness of urgency before. It’s a commonly used tactic, especially in the eCommerce realm. This case study shows a specific example of how we got a 27.1% revenue lift by adding urgency to the product page.
Results summary
- Customer surveys (n=118) for the company (Bob&Lush.com) found that customers were very often concerned about how quickly they could get the product after running out.
- This gave a testing hypothesis that adding urgency and clarity of delivery time on a product page would push more customers to convert
- After 1,877 unique visitors tested we concluded that adding urgency (via a time-sensitive shipping option) to product pages resulted in a revenue uplift of 27.1%.
- Looking at secondary goals resulted in a stable conversion rate uplift of 9.5% and a 10.1% increase in checkout visits during the testing period. Neither of these were statistically significant, yet they supported the main goal and show a stable performance during the six-week period.
Background
Bob & Lush is a premium dog food supplier in the UK, with an e-commerce site active in several countries in Europe. They pride themselves in using lots of fresh meat and real vegetables. Their products are hypoallergenic with no fillers, sweeteners, or artificial preservatives.
After conducting conversion research according to ResearchXL, and running several treatments on their site, we achieved a stable increase in their conversion rate.
Below, we introduce a treatment that triggered a sense of urgency in their customers and resulted in a revenue increase of 27.1%.
(This case study was mentioned as part of a talk by Viljo Vabrit at CXL Live 2016, see his full talk on Using Urgency to Boost E-commerce Conversions by logging into CXL Institute)
Case Study Details
Customer Research – A survey was conducted on 118 recent Bob & Lush customers (69.5% female, 30.5% male). There were many findings in the survey that provided for various testing ideas. The one finding relevant to this case study was concerning customer’s fears of running out of food for their dogs.
According to Bob & Lush customers, one of the biggest purchasing fears was knowing when the food would arrive. Dog food is a necessary good that is usually only purchased when the customer runs out.
The product page did not have any specifically targeted urgency triggers and our hypothesis was adding a clearly visible urgency trigger would activate the user to complete the purchase straight away.
During one of the multiple tests performed, we added a sense of urgency on the Bob & Lush product page. We wanted customers to come to a faster decision about buying the product, instead of browsing around and possibly navigating away from the purchase page.
The increased urgency added value which enticed the visitor to come to a faster purchasing decision.
Hypothesis:
The customer research provided the hypothesis that adding urgency on the product page would lead to higher conversions as people would have less time to think and would instead follow their impulse to complete the purchase now rather than later.
Data Collection Methods and Operations:
- From Monday to Friday, before 4 PM, an urgency message was added: “Free next business day delivery if you order before 4 PM (UK).”
- This urgency message was placed just below the product name ensuring that it fell into the reading pattern of all visitors interested in the products.
- To ensure the treatment was only shown at the right time and for the right people, we added a condition: The treatment would only be displayed Monday-Friday before 4 PM (UK IP).
- The test ran for two weeks: Jan. 10, 2015 – Feb. 24, 2015.
- Testing platforms utilized: Optimizely (for the test), Qualaroo and Typeform (for surveys).
Treatment Variations:
Findings
- The product page urgency A/B test ran for 42 days (6 full weeks) with 50/50 traffic allocation and 95% confidence.
- After 1,877 unique visitors tested we concluded that adding urgency (Variation 1) to product pages resulted in a revenue uplift of 27.1%.
- Looking at secondary goals resulted in a stable conversion rate uplift of 9.5% and a 10.1% increase in checkout visits during the testing period. Neither of these were statistically significant, yet they support the main goal and show a stable performance during the six-week period.
Conclusion
It goes without saying, but there’s no silver bullet solution in conversion optimization. Urgency often works, but sometimes it doesn’t (it can even backfire).
But according to our research, it made sense to test urgency and product pages and we saw a pretty clear winner.
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