Table of Contents

• What are customer engagement platforms?
• Importance of customer engagement platforms
• What are the 5 stages of customer engagement? How do customer engagement tools help in each of them?
  • 1. Awareness
  • 2. Interest
  • 3. Consideration
  • 4. Purchase
  • 5. Retention and advocacy
• Top 10 customer engagement tools to try
• Measuring customer engagement using a customer engagement platform
• The synergy of customer engagement software and marketing
• Final thoughts
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are customer engagement platforms?

A customer engagement solution consists of a suite of tools and technologies designed to facilitate interactions between businesses and their customers across various touchpoints. These platforms streamline and enhance the customer journey by providing personalized, relevant, and consistent experiences. Whether it’s through social media, email, in-app messaging, or other channels, these customer communications platforms enable businesses to connect with their audience in a meaningful way and increase customer engagement.

These platforms offer a range of functionalities, including:

• Personalized communication: Effective customer engagement tools empower businesses to tailor their interactions based on user preferences, behavior, and demographics.
• Multichannel reach: Whether it’s through social media, email, web chat, or SMS, customer engagement software enables brands to connect with customers through their preferred channels.
• Data-driven insights: These tools provide valuable analytics that help companies understand customer behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns.
• Automated campaigns: Automation features allow businesses to schedule and deploy targeted campaigns, saving time and ensuring timely interactions.

Importance of customer engagement platforms

Why is customer engagement software essential in today’s business landscape? Let’s explore a few key reasons:

• Enhanced customer experience: Customer engagement software enables businesses to deliver personalized experiences, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Data-driven decisions: By collecting and analyzing customer data, these platforms empower companies to make informed decisions and create more effective marketing strategies.
• Brand loyalty: Regular interactions foster a sense of loyalty among customers, making them more likely to stick with your brand in the long run.
• Increased conversions: Personalized and relevant interactions can lead to higher conversion rates as customers feel understood and valued.
• Improved customer feedback: These platforms facilitate the collection of feedback, enabling businesses to address concerns and continuously improve their offerings.

What are the 5 stages of customer engagement? How do customer engagement tools help in each of them?

To improve customer satisfaction, you need a process. This process involves several stages, each representing a different level of interaction and relationship-building between a brand and its customers. Customer engagement tools play a crucial role in facilitating and enhancing these stages. Here are the five stages of customer engagement and how customer engagement tools help in each of them:

1. Awareness

This is the initial stage of customer conversations where potential customers become aware of your brand’s existence. Customer engagement tools contribute to awareness by:

• Social media management: Tools like Hootsuite or Buffer help schedule and manage social media posts across multiple platforms, increasing brand visibility.
• Content creation: Tools like Canva or Adobe Spark assist in creating visually appealing content that grabs attention and communicates your brand’s message effectively.

2. Interest

 At this stage, customers show an interest in your brand and begin exploring your products or services. Customer engagement tools help by:

• Email marketing: Tools like Mailchimp or Sendinblue allow you to send targeted emails to your leads, providing them with valuable information and updates.
• Web analytics: Tools like Google Analytics help you track user behavior on your website, providing insights into what interests them the most.

3. Consideration

During the consideration stage, customers evaluate whether your offerings meet their needs. Customer engagement tools assist by:

• Live chat: Tools like Intercom or LiveChat enable real-time conversations with potential customers, addressing their questions and concerns.
• Personalization: CRM platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce offer personalized content recommendations based on customer preferences and behavior.

4. Purchase

This is when customers make a purchase or decide to avail of your services. Customer engagement tools support customer success at this stage by:

• eCommerce solutions: Tools like Shopify or WooCommerce provide a seamless purchasing experience, from cart management to secure transactions.
• Retargeting: Tools like AdRoll or Facebook Pixel help you show targeted ads to customers who have shown interest but haven’t completed a purchase.

5. Retention and advocacy

After the purchase, the goal is to retain loyal customers and turn them into advocates for your brand. Customer engagement tools contribute by:

• Customer support platforms: Tools like Zendesk or Freshdesk enable efficient handling of customer inquiries and complaints, enhancing post-purchase experience.
• Surveys and feedback: Tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform help gather feedback, allowing you to make improvements based on customer suggestions.
• Loyalty programs: Tools like Smile.io or LoyaltyLion help you set up and manage loyalty programs to reward and retain existing customers and boost customer loyalty.
• Social media listening: Tools like Mention or Brandwatch monitor social media for mentions of your brand, allowing you to engage with customers and address their feedback.

In each stage, customer engagement tools play a role in nurturing the relationship between the brand and the customer. They enable personalized interactions, streamline communication, gather valuable insights, and enhance the overall customer experience. By leveraging these tools strategically at each stage, businesses can effectively guide customers through the engagement process, ultimately leading to increased customer loyalty, advocacy, and business growth.

Top 10 customer engagement tools to try

Here are 10 customer engagement tools that deserve a spot in your arsenal:

• VWO: VWO offers A/B testing and personalization capabilities, allowing you to optimize website experiences for different customer segments.
• Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services): AWS provides a scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure that can power your customer engagement applications and services.
• Netcore: Netcore offers a comprehensive customer engagement suite, including email marketing, AI-driven personalization, and multi-channel communication.
• Moengage: Moengage specializes in mobile engagement, providing personalized messaging, push notifications, and in-app messaging to engage users.
• Twilio: Twilio’s communication APIs enable businesses to integrate messaging, voice, and video capabilities into their customer engagement strategies.
• Zendesk: Zendesk offers customer support solutions that enhance engagement through ticketing systems, live chat, and self-service portals.
• Intercom: Intercom focuses on real-time customer communication, offering solutions for chat, email, and customer feedback management.
• HubSpot: HubSpot provides a holistic platform for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service, facilitating seamless engagement across the customer journey.
• Salesforce Service Cloud: Salesforce’s Service Cloud offers tools for customer support, case management, and omnichannel engagement.
• Freshdesk: Freshdesk is a user-friendly helpdesk software that streamlines customer support, enabling efficient issue resolution and engagement.

Measuring customer engagement using a customer engagement platform

To ensure the effectiveness of your customer engagement strategies, it’s essential to measure and analyze their impact. Here are some key metrics to consider:

• Click-through rates (CTR): Measure the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within your communication.
• Conversion rates: Track the percentage of engaged customers who completed a desired action, such as making a purchase.
• Customer feedback: Gather qualitative insights through surveys and feedback forms to understand customer sentiment.
• Time spent on site/app: Monitor the duration customers spend interacting with your website or app.
• Social media engagement: Analyze likes, shares, comments, and overall engagement on social media platforms.

By regularly monitoring these metrics, you can refine your strategies, gauge customer satisfaction, and optimize your customer engagement efforts for better results.

The synergy of customer engagement software and marketing

Customer engagement and marketing are inseparable partners in today’s business landscape. Marketing efforts are driven by customer engagement, and effective marketing strategies contribute to enhanced customer engagement solutions well. This symbiotic relationship creates a cycle of value creation, where engaged customers become brand advocates, further driving business growth.

Final thoughts

In the digital age, customer engagement is more critical than ever before. It’s not just about selling a product; it’s about building lasting relationships and providing memorable experiences. Customer engagement software offers the tools you need to connect with your audience, understand their needs, and tailor your interactions accordingly. By exploring options like VWO, Amazon AWS, Netcore, Moengage, and Twilio, you can take your customer engagement strategies to new heights, fostering brand loyalty and driving business success. Remember, the key lies in personalized interactions and meaningful connections.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

When you optimize your landing pages consistently to improve user experience by engaging visitors on your website, it signals to Google that your website fulfills the user intent. As a result, Google incentivizes you with a high ranking in the search.  

SEO has evolved from being a traditional keyword-oriented model to a full-blown strategy as Google keeps changing its algorithm. User intent has become one of the top factors for ranking, but at the same time, it has become challenging for marketers to predict visitor behavior while making any changes in their SEO strategy. 

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

The logical resolution to the problem of figuring out what Google and visitors want from your website is rigorous testing of your SEO efforts.

This is good news because a) it is possible to run A/B tests without impacting SEO negatively and b) Google encourages A/B testing as long as it is done bearing in mind recommended best practices.

SEO conversion optimization is another key factor here that not only improves your website’s visibility on search engines but also ensures that the visitors coming to the website are offered an optimized experience that encourages them to take the desired actions.    

In this blog post, we have covered the basics of SEO testing and how A/B testing can help you optimize your SEO efforts. 

What is SEO testing?

SEO testing enables businesses to optimize their website performance on search engine result pages (SERPs). If you have ideas to optimize SEO for your website, you can do so by testing your ideas before you execute them at scale, which otherwise might pose a negative impact on your business if you ship the changes untested.

Testing is an important CRO practice that aims at optimizing critical elements to improve conversion rates. Moreover, SEO testing also allows you to make well-informed decisions that facilitate the planning of a smooth CRO roadmap in terms of both — strategy and budget. 

The big advantage here is that Google encourages you to A/B test your SEO changes. You may test pages such as product pages, category pages, and elements like meta tags, copy format and relevancy, headlines, call-to-action buttons, and other SERP features.

These modifications are crawled by Googlebot and help Google learn new information and assess the implications of changes on your website for ranking. 

Another key benefit of conversion rate optimization and SEO testing is that it allows you to optimize and choose the best version of elements that heavily impact user behavior such as page load speed, headlines, CTA copies, page layouts, and so on. 

However, unlike A/B testing in conversion rate optimization, SEO testing is influenced by a couple of unique factors which are explained in the following sections.

SEO testing is different from A/B testing, as explained in the following sections.

What is Googlebot?

Google defines Googlebot as the crawler that visits web pages to include them within the Google Search index. In simple words, it is computer software or a bot that keeps learning new information on your web page and indexes the changes in Google’s database. It supports the latest JavaScript features that help them render the web pages to make ranking decisions. 

Google declared the bot as the new evergreen Googlebot. And yes, there is just one Googlebot and it doesn’t like crawling duplicate pages as duplication confuses it. Let’s understand its function in bot-based testing.

Bot-based testing

With SEO bot-based testing, you run the split URL test and assess the control and variation response in a given period. It is done either to accept and deploy the changes to similar pages on your website or to reject the changes before moving on with your next experiment. 

For example, let’s consider that you want to test your call-to-action (CTA) buttons as part of your SEO conversion optimization strategy. The goal is to rope your visitors in organically, which is why you want to compare the copy and positioning of the CTA on your website by running a split test.

The bot in such a test will be presented with unique web pages with unique CTAs that you want to test. It will crawl down the web pages to index the new information that you have presented through the test, thereby mitigating the chances of confusion for the bot. You will get the winner once the test signals a significant influx of visitors into the sales funnel, which eventually will be reflected in SERPs. 

On the contrary, if you want to run an A/B test for CTA copy and positioning, you present a control version to a set of visitors and a variation to another set of visitors. Here, the bot may not be able to distinguish between the two pages (until you use link attributes to your original page, as discussed in best practices below), and it may confuse your testing situation with cloaking—a practice lethal for your SEO.

How do A/B testing and split URL testing impact SEO?

Simply put, they don’t. Your SEO and conversion rate optimization activities are not negatively impacted by testing activities as long as you’re not deliberately trying to confuse Googlebot. 

Also, A/B testing and split URL testing are not the same. Your visitor will land on a variation or control purely by chance in an A/B test, whereas in split URL testing, they will land on statistically similar groups of pages as tests are hosted on different URLs. So, in A/B testing, you split users to test experiences, and in the latter, you split pages with distinct experiences. 

For example, if you want to test your title tags which are key to SERPs, you can compare your title tags with SEO split testing, which will allow you to create groups of pages, say product pages, where you want to ship your changes to.

These pages are categorized into unique testing groups and hence appear alike to visitors and Googlebot. This type of testing is straightforward and effective for SEO conversion optimization. Whereas, it gets a bit tricky in A/B testing if you don’t follow the best practices. 

Split URL testing is preferred for SEO conversion optimization when you need to test major changes like content format, navigation, design, etc. However, you can A/B test your SEO efforts as well keeping in mind a few factors that we will discuss in the following sections.

Best practices for A/B testing SEO activities

When it comes to A/B testing in SEO conversion optimization, Google has created stringent guidelines that must be followed to avoid any kind of negative impact on page visibility, user experience, or other key SEO factors.

Avoid cloaking

According to Google Webmaster guidelines, cloaking is showing one version to humans and others to bots. It’s deceptive to the search engines, bringing more harm to your website. Try always to serve the original content, otherwise, Google can demote your website.

Use 302 redirects

Always use a temporary 302 URL rather than 301. You may need to redirect some of your URLs to consolidate similar content pages into one or move your site to a new address.

Use rel=“canonical” to avoid duplication

While running an A/B test for minor changes on your web page, always add a link attribute to your alternative URLs for your testing pages. This linking enables Google to distinguish between the original and the variation. This is a key factor that can have a positive impact on your SEO conversion optimization efforts. For example, Google can index your homepage as a test variation if you want them to understand that you are running a test on your homepage. You can do so by identifying the page by using rel=”canonical”. It also signals to Google that other variations are close copies and should not be confused with the original URL.

Experiment runtime

Figure out what you want from the changes on the website. Since Google changes its algorithm all the time, be mindful of your test’s duration as your SEO might get affected if Google updates its algorithm while your test is running. This may, in turn,  impact the metric you are testing. Such situations certainly get you skewed test results. A common advice that applies to both conversion rate optimization and SEO is not to run tests for long periods, unmonitored. If you want to see the positive impact of the variation, then you may want to conclude the test and make the changes live. However, if you want to gauge the scale of impact, then wait until your test reaches statistical significance. 

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

How does VWO help in running A/B tests and split URL tests without impacting SEO?

According to Google webmaster, website speed is one of the key factors impacting website ranking. Your SEO conversion optimization strategy must ensure that changes to the website have minimal impact on the loading speed. 

This is where the VWO Asynchronous SmartCode comes into the picture. 

It loads in parallel with your website, thereby having zero impact on your website load time. You can customize time-out parameters for the VWO SmartCode to execute and make sure that your visitors do not experience any inconsistent behavior while using the website. If the VWO SmartCode fails to execute within a specified time, it stops and then loads the original content of the page.

Watch the video to learn more about VWO sync and async SmartCode:

VWO Testing ensures that there is no negative impact on your website ranking while A/B testing your SEO elements. For example, if you want to A/B test some minor changes in the website, such as the copy, image, or color of a button, it usually has no impact on the page’s search result snippet or ranking. However, if you want to make changes like copy length and redesign your website, it is recommended that you follow best practices such as using query parameter rel= “canonical”.

For instance, if you have two different URLs ending with A.php and B.php, you can use the below code on B.php to avoid content duplication: 

<head>

    <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://vwo.com/A.php” />

</head>

Although Google will index both pages, you are enhancing Google’s knowledge to consider the original A.php for SEO by adding the above code. 

Conclusion

SEO is a black box. Nobody knows the future of Google’s algorithms and how the search engine perceives your unique web pages. 

The closest you could get to understanding it is by acknowledging that Google is getting smarter every minute as you read this blog piece. The only way to boost your SEO conversion optimization activities is through consistent research and experimentation. 

Just like the COVID vaccines. There are so many other factors at play you can only say with some reasonable amount of confidence that you can expect the results to come out a certain way.

Kevin Indig, Head of SEO, Shopify

The only solution to crack SEO conversion optimization for revenue generation is to keep testing, and keep optimizing your website experience!

With an increasing number of companies choosing to opt for the right conversion rate optimization (CRO) solutions, this partnership is positioned to elevate the CRO and experimentation arena in the Japanese market. 

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

VWO’s robust experimentation platform and award-winning customer support combined with Gaprise’s expertise in digital marketing technology and ever-widening global network of technology vendors will help fast-growing companies in Japan expand their CRO avenues through experimentation. 

With this partnership, Gaprise takes a giant leap forward towards its vision to scour the best technology solutions from around the world and in turn offer greater value to its customers. The company aims to uplift the digital marketing environment in Japan by helping clients get the most out of their experimentation roadmap through VWO, and in the process, grow their business.  

“We’ve partnered with VWO considering their flexible pricing structure that Japanese customers can choose from, and also as the platform supports native Japanese – again something that hugely benefits the market. As a solution partner offering consultancy services, we are sure this partnership will help our clients strengthen their CRO activities and accelerate their digital growth.”, says Keiji Doi, Chief Operating Officer, Gaprise.  

With over a decade of experience, Gaprise has a unique foothold in Japan through its strong alliances with hyper-growth startups like Monday.com, Yotpo, and ContentSquare, among others. 

For VWO, this partnership strengthens its position as a leading A/B testing solutions provider in the Asia-Pacific region. With a product suite that caters to every requirement of effective experimentation – from visitor behavior insights to validating the CRO roadmap through testing – the company is strategically placed to add further impetus to the growing CRO market in Japan. 

“We’re very excited to have Gaprise join our growing partner network. This partnership strengthens our commitment to enable Japanese brands to build delightful digital experiences. We’re optimistic that our easy and intuitive experimentation platform combined with Gaprise’s consulting expertise will go a long way in creating a significant impact on clients’ businesses through well-suited optimization strategies.”, says Sparsh Gupta, Co-founder & CEO, Wingify (makers of VWO).

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

About Gaprise

Gaprise is a company that supports digital business, with a focus on digital marketing. We search the world, and especially Israel, for ground-breaking and valuable technology solutions, and present our discoveries to markets and our client companies. Many of the technologies we handle have functions that enable deeper analysis than is possible with the technologies of our Japanese competitors or have functions that are unique and already becoming the global world standard but have yet to gain major recognition in Japan. With our eye on the markets of the future, we commenced sales activities in 2012.
As a result of many growing companies incorporating these technologies into their businesses, we have also contributed – albeit in a modest way – to the conception and creation of new markets. Furthermore, with partners that are publicly listed companies – such as monday.com and Riskified – or that have grown into mega-businesses by successfully procuring capital in the order of several hundred million dollars – such as Contentsquare and Yotpo – Gaprise is demonstrating increasingly stronger leadership in a diverse range of markets.

About VWO

VWO helps more than 2500 brands like Domino’s, HBO, eBay, and Disney create and deliver digital experiences loved by their customers. It is a connected platform that offers insights into visitor behavior, planning, and A/B testing capabilities, and easy deployment of changes – all within the same environment – to empower businesses to improve conversions across the entire customer journey. Conversion rate optimization experts in more than 90 countries trust VWO to perform data-driven A/B testing on their products and apps. 

Customer buying behavior is continuously evolving. This is why converting website visitors to paid customers is becoming increasingly difficult. If your goal is conversion optimization, I am confident you will resonate with the fact that ‘just’ having customer data is not sufficient to build relevant experiences.

Download Free: Landing Page Optimization Guide

You could be sitting on a pile of data containing customer interactions, behaviors, preferences, and buying journeys across various customer data platforms, ABM tools, marketing automation systems, and other similar data repositories. But is that enough? How you leverage all this data is central to optimizing experiences, and it’s what changes the game in your favor. What you need is the ability to test your ideas and target an experiment based on patterns found in such data repositories.

Now, we make this simple for you with the VWO Experimentation Platform. We have rule-based personalization where you can target an A/B test to a specific segment of visitors based on the data you have on them. Not just this, you can also personalize the experience, i.e. make one landing page and show a different copy to different visitors using individual data via dynamic text.

VWO gives you the flexibility to perform advanced tests like multivariate, multi-device, multi-page(the funnel), and mutually exclusive tests and also enables you to formulate a hypothesis by looking at real-time behavioral insights of your website visitors. The advanced targeting and dynamic text capabilities help you further personalize your experiences and target specific customer cohorts important to your business.

This article will help you dive into how VWO’s advanced customer targeting can validate your personalization ideas, create relevant experiences, and boost ROI.

Let’s dive into how you can run testing campaigns using advanced targeting

Firstly, let’s discuss what capabilities advanced targeting brings to the table. With advanced targeting, you can target audiences in your tests in three ways – using

• Pre-defined Audiences 
• Attribute-based Uploaded Audiences
• Third-Party Data Audiences

Pre-defined Audiences are different behavior-based visitor segments on your website created on the basis of actions like clicks on an element, time spent on a page, page scrolls, and exit intent. Attributes List helps you target VWO campaigns to a specific audience using visitor attributes. You need to create a list with visitor attributes such as Cookie values, JavaScript Variables, or any other identifier and upload it to VWO. Third-Party Audiences are custom segments you create by connecting VWO to your tech stack so that you can use data specific to your customer cohorts.

Depending on the third-party integration, this can be a behavioral segment like anonymous users, repeat users, users inactive for 90 days, or ABM metrics like revenue range, industry, etc. You can also build complex segments by combining the three using logic conditions and saving them for reuse later.

Now, let’s see how you use this capability to validate your testing ideas.

Imagine that you have customers across Europe and North America, and data tell you that 10% of your European customers have been inactive in the last six months (which says you are tracking by Lytics). As part of your digital strategy, you would like to test whether a promotional offer communicated to this particular set of customers would motivate them to reactivate their accounts. With Advanced Targeting capability, you can run an experiment to target a variation with the promotional offer to only the traffic originating from Europe and fulfilling the inactive condition. Our client-side experimentation interface makes this easy to do for even non-developers.

Watch how easily you can set conditions and pull third-party customer data (which in this case is behavioral data from Lytics) to create said customer cohorts, and run personalized A/B Test campaigns from within the VWO platform.

Our robust, easy-to-understand reporting will help you determine if your hypothesis is true. Suppose your variation is giving an uplift from your baseline conversion which is also statistically significant, don’t worry, the VWO Bayesian-powered Stats engine takes care of recommending the next steps. In that case, you can confidently and quickly deploy the winning variation to your customer segment and convert your testing idea into an excellent experience for your customers. 

Use cases for Advanced Targeting

Experimentation with advanced targeting capability opens up a whole set of new use cases that were (almost) impossible earlier using the conventional targeting methods that focus on demographics – device, browser, location, etc. Some examples of value-based use cases are:

• Campaign to make anonymous visitors convert by showing them a specific promotion while running a different promotion for highly engaged visitors. 
• Delivering customized content using visitors’ company or industry type. 
• Experiment to deliver personalized, relevant content using visitors’ company revenue range and employee range.

Let’s expand a use case in detail to see how it evolves into a personalization idea. Say you want to create a variation in an experiment for a visitor who has displayed the following attributes.

You can create a custom segment with the above attributes from within VWO. Watch how easily you can add conditions to segment your audience and target them with a personalized variation.

Let’s assume your data confirms that visitors with these attributes come with the specific intent of understanding your product in more detail and exploring the pricing options available. You can then personalize the sales message you want to display on the home page specifically for these visitors. Finally, your A/B testing tool targets this specific set of visitors by showing them the variation with the personalized sales message and gives you results on whether the messaging is a hit or a miss.

Download Free: Landing Page Optimization Guide

Where can the data come from? Almost anywhere.

Third-party Integrations

Ideally, you should integrate your experimentation platform with your data tools to run A/B tests at scale with the unique customer cohorts from your data repositories. 

For example, if you’re managing an eCommerce store on Mixpanel, you want to run an experiment on the checkout page only for visitors who are part of your store’s loyalty program. Our native integration with Mixpanel will allow you to select this cohort as the audience for your experiment on the checkout page. 

Similarly, if you use DemandBase for your personalization needs, you can deliver personalized content to any user from a specific company’s IP address and test its impact, or run A/B tests only for targeted companies meeting certain criteria, for example, all fortune 100 companies located in the US.

The comprehensive ecosystem of integrations that VWO offers, and is constantly building upon, empowers your experimentation program. You can leverage the data from customer data platforms, ABM tools, and marketing data repositories by seamlessly importing rich data cohorts defined outside of VWO in third-party tools like Demandbase, Triblio, Clearbit, 6sense, and Lytics. You can then run campaigns on them without re-configuring the audience within VWO again.

With the integrations supported by VWO, you can:

• Quickly build B2B audiences using the attributes imported from the integrations.
• Use the imported audiences as targeting conditions in VWO for A/B testing campaigns.
• Test and optimize the experience for a specific set of audiences with targeted messaging to validate your personalization ideas.
• Create a view for capturing recordings of this specific set of audiences. This will get insights into how your key audience segments interact with your website differently.

Uploaded audiences

Let’s say you wish to target a particular campaign to all the premium users of VWO. Let’s assume there were 100K visitors; all of those would have a unique cookie value in the user_id cookie. One way is to get in touch with the engineering team to get the list of every user ID that qualifies as a premium user. It is achieved by generating a cookie for people who match the user id in the list, which VWO then uses for targeting. 

You can then upload this list of user ids to VWO. The Attributes List feature requires you to create a list (.csv or.txt) with the 100k user ids, upload it to VWO, and use it as a campaign targeting condition. All this, without the support from the engineering team. It’s that simple.

The final word

When it comes to conversion optimization, the ability to target an experiment based on user behavior or account-level attributes is a powerful lever in the hands of a marketer like you. But instead of shooting in the dark, you need to make data-backed decisions and validate your personalization efforts before rolling out new experiences for your audiences. Your experimentation platform, therefore, needs to possess two crucial capabilities:

1. Advanced customer targeting allows you to run experiments on customer cohorts built on complex conditions easily.
2. Easy integration with customer data portals without the need to import the data into your A/B testing tool to run experiments.

With VWO, you can start right away. Sign up for a free trial and explore the advanced targeting capabilities. You can also request a demo with our product experts or learn more about customer segmentation and the latest, most exciting product updates.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

What does it mean to be a leader in the A/B testing space?

With Software as a Service (SaaS) penetrating the broad spectrum of businesses, VWO has established itself as a leading A/B testing platform helping 2,500+ brands like Domino’s, HBO, eBay and Disney improve their key business metrics by empowering businesses to easily discover customer insights, A/B test hypotheses, and improve conversions across the entire customer journey. 

The no-code Visual Editor of VWO enables businesses to create and run A/B tests easily without relying heavily on developers. This helps brands ramp up their experimentation velocity, allowing for faster optimization and thereby results. VWO offers a platform where you can study visitor behavior, log insights, create hypotheses, run experiments, and analyze results without moving in and out of the environment. For example, visitor insights gathered from heatmaps and session recordings can be fed into different A/B tests for improving conversions on your website. 

VWO advocates cultivating the culture of experimentation in every organization that wants to grow in the new-age economy consistently. 

What is G2?

G2 (previously G2 Crowd) is a business technology review platform where professionals flock to gather insights on various tech products, software, and services. Before investing in a new piece of software, professionals consider many aspects, including usability, implementation, troubleshooting, services, etc. G2 helps prospective buyers make a purchase decision by offering them information such as credible reviews and real experiences of fellow professionals. 

How does G2 evaluate tools?

VWO Testing has been hailed and primarily adopted by mid-market companies, as per G2’s momentum grid report for Winter 2022. G2 uses its proprietary algorithms to designate a score to a tool under evaluation based on specific parameters such as customer satisfaction, popularity, usability, and quality of user reviews. A comparative analysis of all the evaluated tools over a grid provides a visual representation of individual performances. 

VWO has established its spot in the market by consistently optimizing its own products through regular feedback from its users and keeping itself up to date with the business dynamics in its domain.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

Awards won by VWO

In its Winter 2022 report, G2 has recognized VWO Testing as a leader in the A/B testing domain under multiple categories as listed below: 

• Leader in the mid-market implementation

VWO Testing has been placed as a top leader in the mid-market implementation index category by G2, based on the high user ratings and market presence. 

• Momentum leader grid

VWO Testing has been recognized as a top leader in the momentum grid report by G2, which calculates a score based on customer satisfaction, popularity, and quality of reviews. 

• Leader in the mid-market relationship and the result index

Based on customers’ convenience of doing business with the seller, satisfaction with the product’s quality of support based on reviews, and likelihood to recommend each product based on reviews, VWO Testing ranked high in the mid-market relationship and result index reports.

• Leader in the mid-market usability index

The mid-market usability index report is a scoreboard having tools ranking as per the scores based on their ease of use (as rated by G2 users for customer satisfaction with the ease of use for each product), ease of admin (as rated by G2 users for the ease of admin for each product), and whether the tool meets requirement. This is the fourth category wherein VWO Testing claimed its spot as a top leader. 

Try VWO Testing to enjoy ease of experimentation

VWO Testing provides robust and efficient features to set up and scale your tests. VWO’s asynchronous SmartCode reduces your page load time during a test. The platform’s segmentation capability allows segmenting visitors in a test based on their behavior on a web page. Also, you can run multiple tests on a page by allocating visitors to specific variations without running into the risk of skewing your test data.

VWO’s Bayesian-powered statistical engine enables you to make smart business decisions based on intelligent test results, wherein you are not required to look for a p-value every time a test concludes to measure its statistical significance. With SmartStats, you can comfortably rely on the test results, conclude tests faster, and increase your conversions by testing new ideas quicker.

VWO offers a 30-day all-inclusive free trial to organizations that want to fuel their CRO strategy through rigorous experimentation. Request a free demo to know more and embark on your A/B testing journey today.

In its classical form, A/B testing operates as a binary model—a null hypothesis that needs to be rejected to accept the alternative hypothesis. Owing to the complicated process of deriving insights from an experiment and taking crucial business decisions based on them, CRO practitioners have been adopting the more credible and intuitive model over the classical Frequentist one. It’s the Bayesian model.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

The Bayesian model proves the evidence of the reasoning behind an experiment you run. In this blog post, we have explored the Bayesian model in detail, compared it with the classic Frequentist approach, and discussed its use cases.

What is the Bayesian approach?

Bayesian reasoning is fundamentally a belief-based approach with its foundation in Bayes’ theorem. The theorem presents a mathematical framework to update your existing beliefs with the influx of new information. 

Here is an example for you. A doctor can diagnose a medical problem in a patient following either one of the approaches. As a Frequentist, he would have a fixed model set up against a patient’s specific symptoms for his diagnosis. He may probe the patient for them and identify the cause based on the fixed model he has in place. 

Contrarily, as a Bayesian, the doctor would still have a model. He would probe the patient for gauging his condition and identifying symptoms, and in addition, he would like to know the history of any past pains in the patient. Hence, his diagnosis will include the current symptoms and historical symptoms in identifying the actual cause. This approach will update his existing model with new information, which can lead to faster innovation with no extra cost, time, or energy spent in the process of diagnosis. 

An example from StackExchange makes this concept even simpler.  

Say you’ve misplaced your phone, and since this happens all the time, you have got yourself a phone locator. Your phone has an instrument attached to its base, which signals it to start beeping when you press a button on the phone locator. The problem is, from where should you begin your search in the house?

If you are a Frequentist, your built-in model would be identifying the area based on the direction of the sound of beeps. Thus, you will run after the beeps to find the device’s location in the house.

Yet, as a Bayesian, you would recall the locations where you found it the last time it went missing. Did you find it on the kitchen slab or buried under the laundry? You will have reasons behind putting the phone in those places. Apart from the sound of the beeps, recalling this information will act as a prior that can assist you in making an evidence-based decision. In this case, it will figure out where to begin the search.

The critical aspect of Bayesian thinking is that it enables you to explore the pre-existing beliefs (priors) during your research, and these beliefs get updated with evidence data resulting in new beliefs (posteriors). 

In the context of A/B testing, why is the Bayesian approach more beneficial than Frequentist?

You can hear a Frequentist, who does not like to talk about one-time events, murmuring—”Did I arrive at the truth correctly?”. On the contrary, a Bayesian, who cares more about updating opinion based on data than finding the ultimate truth, can be heard out loud declaring—”I don’t know what the truth is, but I believe my initial opinion would change now since I have a new piece of information with me!” Pretty confident? Well, yes!

We ran an A/B test using VWO to check if a banner appearing on the exit intent of visitors can increase lead generation on our blog. Looking at it through the Bayesian lens, we see a varying degree of confidence in all possible conversion rates in the graphical representation. We concluded that control (no banner) is the winner, and also, there has been an overlap in the conversion rate between 0.25% and 0.6%.

On the other hand, the Frequentist approach returned a p=0.042, also concluding that the control is the winner. 

The Frequentist approach is steadfast in reaching a significant number of visitors to return a p-value, which is hard to put in a business context. What can you discern with a p=0.042 here? It’s likely to leave you confused.

As a marketer or a growth leader, you would want your tool to do the heavy-lifting when it comes to statistics and give you results that help you make good business decisions. 

Bayesian provides a more sensible and intuitive way to optimize your CRO efforts. It updates your opinions backed by evidence when you deduce your prediction and induce the learning in the experiment cycle with a knowledge update, as shown in the image below.

VWO SmartStats—the Bayesian way

VWO goes the Bayesian way with SmartStats, a Bayesian-powered statistics engine for A/B testing. This engine gives you intelligent results to make smarter business decisions and reduces your testing time. 

The Bayesian approach enables you to incorporate knowledge into your experiments iteratively. SmartStats catalyzes this approach using a non-informative prior where all conversion rate possibilities are equally likely. In addition, it ensures that you stay in control and can monitor the test as it progresses and reaches its significance over a period of time before it concludes. 

Let’s go back to the exit-intent banner example discussed in the blog. For the test, we observed that the distributions were wider initially. However, as shown below, you can figure out that they started to shrink with more data.
The probability to beat baseline during the start of the test was close to 50%, but as the test progressed, it reached 95% confidence after reaching 1000 visitors, declaring the control as the winner.

If you look at the progress of this experiment with respect to time and traffic, it looked like this with the lowest number of visitors, showing variation leading (non-significantly):

And, this with ~1000 visitors, variation dropping steeply and control expanding:

The final graph declaring control as the winner:

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How does Bayesian A/B testing allow faster innovation?

With the ability to incorporate belief as part of the experiment, the Bayesian approach enables you to make faster decisions with lower experimentation costs as compared to a Frequentist approach.

It is common to use a Bayesian approach where running an experiment is costlier, and you don’t have enough data to make a decision, whether it is a medical diagnostics test to discern the probability of having cancer or the email being spam.

Also, the Bayesian approach allows you to feed a posterior of one experiment as prior to another. Therefore, an A/B testing tool based on this model enables you to consistently and quickly optimize your experiments for conversions. You do not have to learn new data from your experiment every single time, instead, feed the posterior (read: update) to a prior, iteratively, to significantly determine improvement with less data.

With the exit-intent banner experiment, extensively discussed in the blog, we took a quick decision looking at the progress of the test as soon as it reached its significance. We did so to mitigate the loss of the opportunity metric that was MQLs in this case. The test was concluded with an observation that an exit-intent banner doesn’t work on our blog. This observation can act as data-backed evidence (posterior) to be fed as a prior to our subsequent experiments around blogs.

So don’t wait. Take a plunge, fail fast, learn effectively, and grow exponentially with iterative A/B testing that promises opportunities for innovation in your business to witness astronomical conversions.

However, it is just as much an issue linked to user experience (UX). Indeed, if the good practices aiming at increasing conversions are known and numerous, there comes a stage where it is essential to know the users better. It is then a question of finely analyzing the customer/user journey, building personae… in a nutshell: applying user-centric methods. 

Design Thinking is both a method, a state of mind and a process. Its goal is to solve problems with a product or service in terms of user experience. It is a method that allows us to go deeper into understanding users, innovation, and design. 

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Upstream, Design Thinking makes it possible to focus the design of a product on customers and users. This process represents a powerful asset for companies because it makes it possible to optimize the project on its target and maximize the chances of obtaining conclusive results.

This allows marketing teams, designers, developers, etc. to not rely on intuition but rather on human-centered research, reflection, and design.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) can be compared to the Design Thinking methods as its field is to set up a clear process to optimize the conversion rate of a website for very specific actions. This process is similar to that of Design Thinking in that it is also based on research, hypothesis, and testing.

Since markets, personas, and industries can be very complex at times, it’s impossible to know what improvements will optimize the conversion rate. As with Design Thinking, intuition and opinion don’t really have a place here. Considering that it is impossible to know what will work when it comes to conversion, innovation and testing are the main points to build on.

A common state of mind

The common mindset, therefore, is first of all to accept several truths:

The opinion does not count: Whether in Design Thinking or in CRO, subjective opinions do not really have their place here. It is impossible to put yourself in all users’ shoes and fully understand them at first glance. You have to put your intuition aside and focus on reliable data. Of course,  innovative ideas, opinions, suggestions can be offered, but they must come systematically from observations made and must then be tested.

It’s impossible to know what will work: Of course, there are some basic universal rules to improve performance, like loading speed or accessibility. But when it comes to CRO, it’s impossible to know in advance what will work. This is why the tests exist.

There is no such thing as a magical layout: No placement, no layout, no color is better for conversions. No universal rule exists to maximize the chances of optimizing conversions. The best practices that can be found all over the web work on some sites, but not on all sites. We must therefore stop thinking about “good practice” and instead think about “process”.

And that’s the huge common point between CRO and Design Thinking – both involve a very clear process: collecting data, finding solutions, making hypotheses, testing and analysis.

One way to make the most of data, rather than relying on opinions, is to use tools like VWO Testing and VWO Plan to build a knowledge base of learnings from completed tests. This way, you can really ensure your tests are impactful.

Understanding, empathy, and research

Whether in a process of Design Thinking or optimization of conversions, the first step is to empathize and put yourself in the shoes of the users.

It is important here to get to know the users in question with regard to their goals, fears, motivations, desires, demographics, geographies, etc.

Quantitative and qualitative data must therefore be collected in order to have the most advanced and precise understanding of users possible.

For the purpose of optimizing website conversions, the goal is to focus your UX research on the usability of the website and on the possible sticking points that can lower the conversion rate.

This research step can take into account several techniques:

• Data analysis on Google Analytics: Quantitative data makes it possible to understand users and also the quality of the interface. It is possible to observe the most used browsers, the most frequent age group, or other demographic data. Regarding the interface, the bounce rate or the conversion rate on particular pages also allow a better understanding of the effectiveness of the website.

• Polls / Surveys / Interviews: In terms of collecting qualitative data, the objective is to ask relevant questions directly to the users concerned. Whether it is through direct discussions with users or through online surveys, the goal is to obtain answers around possible improvements of the user experience.

• Click/tap Tracking: Click tracking is also an effective method of understanding the habits and behavior of users in relation to the website interface. It captures the scroll and clicks of a group of users in order to establish heatmaps.

In any case, the ultimate goal here is to achieve empathy for users and understand as best as possible the different issues they are facing on your interface.

Define and analyze

Whether in a Design Thinking or CRO process, it is important to take stock of your qualitative and quantitative data in order to store and analyze it.

The goal here is therefore to start to understand the data and its impact on your conversion metrics. To do this, it may be interesting to bring together recurring user behaviors in personas, for example.

In this step, two questions concerning the data collected must be asked:

• Is there a common problem faced by many different users?
• Are there answers that come up often?

It is important here to sort the data and transform it into real observations which will help you to create hypotheses later.

This step therefore serves to clarify what to focus on to optimize the user experience and the conversion rate of the product in question. The goal is therefore to analyze the potential solutions and to choose those which will be the most coherent for the project.

Ideation and hypothesis

In a Design Thinking process, ideation consists of generating innovative ideas in order to find solutions.

Brainstorming and group work are therefore favorable here. Each member of the team can share their ideas in order to create a debate and make intelligent hypotheses.

With all the qualitative and quantitative data collected before, the goal of this final step is to find hypotheses to be implemented in future tests.

The objective here is to generate as many hypotheses as possible.

Finally, it is best to organize and tidy all the assumptions made with a rating system according to the ease of implementation and the impact on the user experience.

The important thing is to prioritize the assumptions that have great potential in terms of optimizing the conversion rate. This will allow you not to focus on details that are not worth investing in.

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How does it work in practice?

A great use case is the one of UNICEF Spain who wanted to ​​improve the donation funnel and avoid the abandonment of its users.

With the help of live recording tools, a number of problems were identified on some pages, and with this data, Making Science carried out different tests with users to discover what was wrong in the process. 

We discovered that a large number of users left the page in the first step due to usability issues and a process perceived as too long by the users. With this data, applying the user experience knowledge of the agency, and based on the results of the tests, it was decided to modify and reduce the funnel from 4 steps to 2, to see if this improved the percentage of user abandonment.

The result was an improvement of 86.3% of the conversion rate and 47.40% of the revenue.

Watch a webinar to learn more about the role of UX research in the testing strategy.

The necessary expertise

In a Design Thinking process, collaboration is essential. It makes it possible to call on several expertise necessary for research, design, and testing.

For the optimization of conversions, it’s the same thing. There are many aspects that must be mastered to develop conversions for a website.

Here are examples of roles that an effective Design Thinking team must contain to optimize conversions:

• Data Analyst
• Project manager
• UX / UI Designer
• UX Copywriter
• Front developer

This also requires a mastery of many analysis and research tools such as Google Analytics, Tag Manager, VWO, and others: prototyping software like Figma or Sketch.

All these specialties are different and each have very specific objectives but they are complementary to optimizing the conversion rate.

CRO is often seen as an area reserved for large companies. However, Design Thinking, which is more popular, ultimately has the same objective as CRO: to generate and test innovative ideas in order to improve the user experience, the product or the conversion rate.

Design Thinking is therefore an ideal process for carrying out a CRO strategy. 

Check out our conversation with Brian Massey on the VWO Podcast to know how data can be used to drive growth and conversions.

It’s imperative, however, to understand that the journey you are about to embark on starts with user testing, and ends with an improved customer experience. The improvements you make could be the key to brand growth that you have been missing all along. 

Download Free: Usability Testing Guide

So, let’s dive right in. This article will cover: 

• What is user testing? 
• Three steps to conducting impactful user testing
• How well-run user testing can drive conversions (with examples)

What is user testing?

User testing is a pillar of customer research and conversion rate optimization, leveraged to reveal usability issues on your eCommerce site. Properly implemented, it can open your eyes to key pain points of your users and a host of quick wins to improve their experience. 

User testing can show you more than usability issues

While user testing is an excellent application of user research, you often already know general behavioral metrics like time on page, exit rates, etc., before you begin to test. The key is to expand your collection and include the context of quantitative and demographic data. 

By creating a more holistic picture of your customer’s journey, you will uncover usability issues and overall expectations that shoppers have for your brand. 

User testing vs. user research

While the terms user testing and user research are used interchangeably, user research is an umbrella term for various research methods. This includes interviews, surveys, focus groups, and more. User testing is just one branch of the user research tree.

Successful user testing can be highly effective in identifying customer pain points and sticking areas of your website. But, everything hinges on the way you screen and select users for tests. 
So, that’s how the steps to conducting impactful website usability testing start.

Three steps to conducting impactful user testing

Step 1: Be selective about your panel

Connecting with the right users for your test will offer not only better data but contextual clues and insights to indicate consumer motives, not just performance. 

To gather accurate test results and data, start by identifying your core audience demographics. Sift through your website’s data to collect sample data on age, gender, and location to understand on a base level who is converting and who is not. 

Use this demographic data as the first selection criteria for your panel. Most user testing services allow you to screen for gender, age, and location simply by checking a few boxes. 

Now, take things a step further to make sure you encompass more unique characteristics of your audience. To do so, you will need to craft some thoughtful screener questions. The answers to questions will help you identify psychographics that match your unique audience profile at a deeper level. 

For example, what is your approach to shopping for home decor?

• I go low stress. I prefer to make easy decisions from a few options to save myself time. [Reject]
• I take my time. I aim to find the best deal at the lowest price. [Reject]
• I take my time. I aim to find the best product, and I prioritize quality over cost. [Accept]
• None of the above. [Reject]

In order to convert more website visitors into buyers for clients, start with a clean slate and target consumers who have not already learned the nuances of a site. This way, the user isn’t naturally overlooking pain points that they learned to navigate in previous visits. 

To do this, screen for potential user testers who have heard of your in-market competitors but don’t know your site or brand. 

Here’s an example: 

Which of the following brands have you purchased from?

• Competitor 1 [Accept]
• Competitor 2 [Accept]
• Your site [Reject]
• Competitor 3 [Accept]
• Fake company [Reject]
• None of the above [Reject]

After you screen for the most critical criteria, you also want to consider how users shop and their intent to purchase. Avoid users who have no intention to purchase, and consider screening for panelists who shop online at least once a week. 

In summary, as you select your user testing panel: 

• Screen for your unique audience demographics
• Layer on psychographic questions that align with your ideal user profile
• Avoid users that know too much about your site/brand
• Talk to users with an intent to purchase

Now, you are on your way to a successful user test, but this is where the real work begins.

Step 2: Ask the right questions to surface meaningful feedback

The thoughts and responses you get from user testing make the efforts worthwhile. So how do you make sure you are surfacing meaningful feedback? It’s all about the questions you ask and what you task your carefully selected panel with. 

While specifics will change based on your brand and goals, below are a few guidelines to help navigate the creation of your user testing questions. 

1. Avoid biasing your audience by forming an intro question that does not prime users with the purpose of the site. Here is an example: Imagine you are browsing for home decor online. Without leaving the homepage, describe in your own words what you think you can do on this site? What would you come here for? 

2. Outline key pain points from data you already analyzed to help structure your questions and tasks. This will reveal why users behave the way they do on your site. For example, if you notice from the data that users are most often abandoning the product page, you may want to focus some of your questions on what content is working there and what isn’t. For example, what, if anything, is missing from the product page that you would need to know in order to complete your purchase?

3. The first few minutes of a user testing session are typically mimicking the most ‘natural’ interaction someone has with your site. A frequent mistake is being too narrow-minded or specific with tests and losing the user’s natural behavior. To avoid this, use a time limit and after a few priming questions, start testing with “Explore this website in whatever area interests you. Spend no more than a few minutes on this task.” This produces close-to-natural behavior that will show you what’s grabbing user attention and how they would organically behave on-site before moving to the next task. 
4. Before launching user testing, always run a pilot (a small-scale, preliminary test) to uncover unclear questions and areas for improvement in your test. 
5. Don’t run too many tests. A study has found that roughly five users per usability test uncover about 80% of usability issues.

Review these guidelines with each user test you conduct. Even trained researchers review the basics continually during their work and studies. Learning to remove bias, set learning goals, and avoid unnatural behavior will build higher impact user tests.

Launching a pilot test, and moving in small, iterative testing cycles means you’re never taking risks by investing precious resources into a potentially faulty test. 

Now is the most exciting part of the user testing process: receiving and analyzing results to create winning strategies for your brand. 

Step 3: Analyze and leverage your data for winning strategies

Though exciting, analyzing and leveraging the data you collect from user tests can be an intimidating item on your to-do list. 

Your tests have likely pointed out a host of usability issues and maybe even some customer experience pain points. Below you’ll learn how to sift through data, prioritize issues, and come up with winning A/B tests and strategies to improve your site.

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Analyze the results

As a starting point for analyzing the results of your test, always return to your objectives. Remind yourself of the goals you had for the tests, and pick out insights and feedback that will get you closer to those goals. 

Then, while you sift through the results of your user tests, remember that the suggestions made should not be taken literally. While feedback from consumers is valuable, it does not often address the root of the issue. Gather the insights efficiently so you can come up with a solution that meets the needs of the customer and the business, not the self-identified frustration or problem. 

Another technique to better understand the sentiment of users is to pull quotes from the testing sessions. This can help identify areas of misunderstanding, i.e. when the user says they are going to do one thing but gets lost along the way. Direct quotes also offer insight into user expectations that are not being met.

Always remember as you go through results to take the user ratings with a grain of salt. For example, some users will rate a website as highly navigable even though they took much more time than ideal for reaching the desired result. This could be because they think they failed at navigating the site when really the site failed them. To do this, pay attention to how long tasks take. 

Identify improvement areas

Once you have analyzed your user testing results, it’s crucial to prioritize the issues to be addressed. You first want to solve the most common or frequently encountered problems and then move to minor or specific glitches. 

One way to do this is to create a spreadsheet of all the identified problems. You can organize the document based on the impact the issue had on user experience and the frequency at which it occurred. That sheet becomes a prioritized checklist for optimization. 

Check out our insightful conversation with Kevin Anderson to know how you can use this data and build a culture of experimentation within your company.

Run A/B tests with VWO

With a prioritized checklist in place, it’s time to create solid hypotheses around the identified problems and start running experiments. VWO’s A/B testing tool enables you to optimize key business metrics by figuring out visitor behavior, test ideas, and engagement across the users’ entire journey.

Ubisoft increased its lead generation by 12% utilizing A/B testing. Their team collected visitor data using heatmaps, on-page surveys, scrollmaps and analyzed data to build a hypothesis for an experiment to simplify the buying process and increase conversion on the Buy Now page, which was their key performance indicator. Below is a screenshot of the winning variation:

The layout of the entire page was redesigned and a test was run for 2 months. The redesigned version increased the lead generation rate from 38% to 50%. 

Start your free trial on VWO and create an iterative and data-driven process for consistent improvements in your website conversion goals. 

Well-run user testing can drive conversions

Now you know the three steps to conducting impactful user testing. Let’s take a look at the results that can come from your efforts. 

At the end of the day, the reason you are gathering this data is to improve your site and, in turn, drive more conversions. 

Take the DTC office furniture brand, Fully, as an example. As the world transitioned to work from home in 2020, the brand had longer lead times on key products like their Jarvis standing desk. While this could have been an out-of-stock issue, user testing and creative thinking turned it into an opportunity to highlight other equally well-made products. 

Fully conducted remote usability testing, using a similar 3 step process as outlined above. Heatmap analysis showed high engagement with the filters and indicated that users who were not already familiar with Fully might not know what office furniture best suits their needs.

As a solution, improved product filters and categories were tested to increase visibility for the lesser-known product lines and provided users with a focused approach to navigating the entire catalog. This one test, which started with user testing, resulted in a 75:1 ROI for the brand.

Another example of powerful user testing driving conversions comes from Beckett Simonon, a hand-crafted leather shoe and accessory brand. 

The brand was looking to ensure paid acquisition efforts were converting effectively. They needed a website optimization solution that would result in sustainable, long-term improvements on their conversion rate. 

With remote user-testing sessions, it was revealed that users relied heavily on product images to make purchasing decisions. It also became apparent that users did not understand the differentiator of the brand. 

To solve this, the integration of value-based messaging in key image-driven moments of the customer journey was tested. Below is the original site and the variant tested based on insights from user testing. 

This result not only better demonstrated the core values of the brand but also resulted in a predicted annualized ROI of 237%. 

User testing unlocks insights that can drive results like Fully’s and Beckett Simonon’s for your eCommerce brand.

Get started with user testing

So, you’re ready to get started with user testing. Beyond usability, you now know that user testing is about both the action and understanding the thought behind each action. 

As a jumping-off point for your user testing, try out a tool that allows you to filter user-testers by age, income, gender, country, internet expertise, and type of device used to access your site. There are plenty of well-established options available. 

Remember, user testing is not just a pre-launch strategy for eCommerce brands. Ongoing testing is the best way to keep your customer journey enjoyable and the path to purchase smooth. That is the backbone of conversion rate optimization: constantly optimizing your website to keep customers happy, purchasing, and coming back.

Download Free: Improve Conversions In 60 Days Guide

As an eCommerce store owner, you need to make sure your store’s website user experience is at its peak—and one place we see user experience being neglected the most in eCommerce? The homepage.

eCommerce brands can put in the work to optimize product pages, category pages, and even checkout processes. But if your homepage is one of the first touchpoints your customer has with your brand, it makes sense to optimize your homepage for the best customer experience that drives more sales.

And how important customer experience has become indeed. We’re also not only referring to the new shopping habits of consumers as we enter a post-pandemic world — where almost 40% of surveyed participants claim that in the future they prefer to do more shopping online but only visiting sites that deliver great experiences. But we also mean even Google is doubling down on the importance of user experience and how it affects your overall rankings on search. Its newest 2021 update urges users to consider core web vitals and a host of other factors that elevate a user’s experience on your site.

To help you create a better user experience for your site visitors, here are 7 eCommerce homepage best practices that you might want to implement in your business.

1. Design your website for mobile-first

With 7.1 billion mobile users worldwide, more and more people are doing online transactions using their smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. Mobile users are not only searching online, but also performing various mobile eCommerce transactions like shopping, paying bills, and booking tickets. 

With the rise of mobile eCommerce, it has become necessary for eCommerce websites to follow a mobile-first approach in web development.

A mobile-first approach means designing a website for smaller screens first and then working up towards larger screens. Part of the approach is to have a responsive design, which enables on-site elements to automatically adjust and rearrange themselves to fit the screens of different devices. 

With this approach, the content of the website is displayed in a way that’s comfortable for the users. It removes the need to perform operations like zooming, panning, resizing, or scrolling when users browse through the website. It contributes to the website user experience positively.

According to Alex Williams of Hosting Data, “A responsive site is of prime importance as people nowadays are mostly doing their shopping on their mobile devices. It won’t be surprising if one day we realize that we do most or all of our shopping using our phones in the future. So future-proof your eCommerce store as early as now and check if everything operates right on mobile.”

2. Optimize your homepage loading speed

Page loading speed refers to how quickly your content loads when a user visits a specific page of your website. It’s one of the factors that determine how long a site visitor stays on your website. A slow loading time will turn most people off and go somewhere else. 

But how fast should the homepage loading speed be? It turns out, site users will not wait for more than 3 seconds for an eCommerce page to load. A slow loading time is a contributing factor to page abandonment and kills conversions.

According to research done by Google, as page load time goes from 1 to 6 seconds, the probability of the user abandoning the site (bounce) increases 106%. It’s safe to say, a slow homepage loading speed is a dealbreaker for many site visitors.

If the user experience takes a hit, it can have a negative effect on sales for an eCommerce site. The opportunity to engage site visitors and make sales vanishes when they abandon the site.

To speed up your homepage, here are some best practices you may want to keep in mind and implement right away:

• Compress your images. Large image files will significantly slow down your page, so use compression tools like Smush or Website Planet to squash out excess data that could be bloating up images.
• Minify your HTML. Another element of your homepage and eCommerce store in general that can tend to slow down your loading speed is your HTML. Minification is the process of optimizing your site’s code, like deleting unnecessary or redundant code or shortening code when possible.
• Enable browser caching. When you enable caching, any resources and elements that load on your site are “remembered.” What this then does is allows your homepage to load faster since elements like logos and photos don’t need to reload every single time.

3. Simplify search and navigation

A complex website design makes it difficult for users to navigate your site. Unnecessary clicks and extra steps to find the relevant content will negatively impact their user experience. If they don’t find what they are looking for right away, they will give up and move on.

When designing an eCommerce homepage, you should take into account users’ expectations and what they find most useful. Easy navigation enables them to find things more quickly and efficiently.

The design elements must be logical and intuitive, from the placement of the search box to the location of the menu and toolbars. The structure should give users the ability to navigate between pages effortlessly. This contributes to a great user experience and ensures that they stay engaged while navigating through your site.

Because of this, consider adding a search bar at the top of your homepage menu so that users can easily navigate to different products, categories, promos, and even news and blog posts on your site.

For best results, conduct an A/B test for your search bar. Experiment with different search bar positions and designs to see which one brings higher conversions. 

For instance, in this A/B test conducted by Best Choice Products for the search and navigation bar on their eCommerce store, their results found that a bigger search bar on mobile, versus a simple magnifying glass icon, gave them a boost in conversions.

We can infer that this is because users may not see the search bar right away when it’s only an icon on their phones. So by stretching out and revealing the actual bar where they can tap and type their query, it can help facilitate searches through their eCommerce store.

Of course, for your own store, it’s best to base this on your customers’ preferences, so this is where the A/B test comes in handy: you’ll know what’s the best way to simplify search and navigation with actual user data. Start A/B testing your design ideas to boost UX with VWO Testing 30-day free trial.

Download Free: Improve Conversions In 60 Days Guide

4. Maximize the space above-the-fold

Above-the-fold in website design refers to the section on a web page that is visible to the user without scrolling. This concept dates back centuries ago, to the beginnings of the printing press. 

Since newspapers are printed on large sheets of paper, they have to be folded, with only the top half of the paper visible when they are displayed on the newsstands. The newspaper industry found a way to use it to advantage by putting attention-grabbing headlines, sensational stories, and eye-catching imagery above the fold.

In the case of websites, the fold pertains to the scrollbar. So, any content that is not immediately visible and requires users to scroll down is considered below the fold. 

A good example is this page of FreshBooks. All the relevant information, links, and call-to-action are displayed above the fold. This makes it easier for leads and customers to know what to do next when they land on a page using their mobile phones.

Applying the above-the-fold concept to websites is not as simple as the newspaper version because not all screens are the same. Different devices have different screen sizes and resolutions, so it’s quite tricky to determine where the fold line is. 

There are no hard and fast rules but a good starting point is to know how the website’s dimensions appear to the user, taking into account the different screen sizes of devices. To maximize the space above the fold, put the most relevant, the most engaging, and the most important content that users expect to find once they land on your homepage.

Don’t be afraid to get creative and think out of the box. By implementing a split URL test, you can even see how an entire redesign of your homepage might help you boost your conversions and make more sales from your store.

This way, you can really make big changes in your above-the-fold elements to see which one performs best. Experiment with different copy, images, or call to action to see which homepage converts the most over a period of time.

5. Highlight your most popular products

It might seem counter-intuitive to promote products that are already popular because logic dictates that you should be making efforts to draw customers’ attention to products that are not selling well. But there’s a method to this madness.

Popular products already have a lot of buyers. In that sense, these products fulfill a need or solve a problem. People tend to be attracted to products that are popular because their popularity is perceived as a testimonial of sorts to the quality and benefits of the products. 

By highlighting popular products on your eCommerce homepage, you are not only attracting potential buyers to purchase the popular products, but you are also creating an opportunity for them to buy other items from your product catalogue.

By doing this, you also can provide a better user experience for return customers. Your loyal buyers might be looking to repurchase their favorites. By making it ridiculously easy to spot then purchase their popular picks right from your homepage, you can encourage faster checkout every time.

Also, if you are looking to boost conversions, listen to our engaging conversation with Rishi Rawat, Founder of Frictionless Commerce, where he explains how you can optimize your product pages and increase sales.

6. Streamline your checkout process

Getting customers to visit your site is just the first step in their purchase journey. Even if they add items to the online shopping cart, it does not guarantee that they will push through and complete the transaction. 

According to the Baymard Institute, 69.8% of customers who add items to their cart will leave and not proceed to the checkout process. While there are several reasons for cart abandonment, one that deters people from completing a purchase is a long and complicated checkout process.

Creating a streamlined and customer-friendly checkout process has a positive impact on user experience and helps increase conversion rate. You must establish a clear route to the final purchase so that they can go through the process smoothly without distractions such as excessive upselling.

If you bombard customers with too much information and options, they are likely to get confused and abandon the cart out of frustration. You must remove unnecessary steps required to complete a purchase. Fewer clicks mean faster checkouts. Some platforms make it possible to have a two-step checkout process for eCommerce stores. Amazon has a 1-click checkout option which makes purchasing extremely fast.

It’s also important to present a clear order summary with a breakdown of quantity and cost so they know what they are buying. You must also provide an option to remove items and make it easy to go back and continue shopping.

The streamlined checkout process must be complemented by an easy payment process. This requires carrying out research on the payment preferences of your target audience so that you can integrate the payment gateways into your site.

7. Make it easy for your customers to come back

Every business wants to acquire new customers and get repeat sales from returning customers. High-quality products and excellent customer service usually do the trick. But a few strategies can make it easy for your customers to stick around. 

Repeat customers help generate a steady stream of income for your eCommerce business, so it’s important to give them a reason to shop again. Incentives like loyalty programs, discounts, free shipping, and special offers can all be integrated into your eCommerce site so that they will be encouraged to visit more often. 

But more than the incentives, it’s the constant improvements on your site that will make customers come back. If you make shopping more convenient for them, they are likely to return, even with just the occasional email reminder.

Customers want to have an easy way to contact you if they have questions or concerns. You can make your customer service team available through a live chat integrated into the site itself. This also improves your interaction with them and you can get valuable feedback which you can use to further improve your service.

Online purchases require customers to have some level of trust in your eCommerce site. They want assurance that their data is safe when they transact business through your online platform. You must give that assurance for their peace of mind.

The ability to track their orders and shipments is a great way to get customers to come back to your site. If they are on the site, there’s always a chance that a product or an offer will get their attention, which is another opportunity to make a sale. More so, if they get personalized recommendations and tailored content that will encourage them to engage with your brand.

Another way to help customers keep coming back to your site is through the use of push notifications. eCommerce stores and websites have increasingly been making use of this relatively new feature to get their customers’ attention and have them return to their site even if the browser is not currently opened.

Set up a push notification opt-in on your homepage, so when a visitor subscribes, they’ll get notified for any new promotions, offers, or flash deals your store might want to share. And because push notifications get much higher click-through rates than email, you can increase conversions without worrying that customers aren’t receiving your notifications.

Key takeaways

When customers reach your eCommerce homepage, they expect to find relevant information about the product they wish to buy and want a quick and hassle-free online transaction. Your job is to meet and exceed customer expectations by providing them with a positive user experience at every step of their purchase journey. 

Following these seven eCommerce homepage best practices makes it easy for visitors to interact and engage with your brand and it increases the likelihood of completing a purchase. When your customers have an enjoyable shopping experience, they are likely to return and repeat the process all over again. Start a 30-day free trial or request a demo to get started with optimizing your homepage to boost UX and conversions on your eCommerce website.