Barbara Thau
Contributor
When it comes to retailing in the digital era, technology is often hyped as the key to knowing the long unknowable, a means to reveal deeper truths about what shoppers want and how they want marketers to deliver it to them.
Indeed, the party line on consumer insights to be gained from big data — information gleaned from shoppers’ online and mobile purchasing patterns and activity on social media sites — would, in theory, nullify that iconic quote from department store inventor John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.”
A General Nutrition store in Ypsilanti Twp., MI (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The reality is that retailers are grappling with how best to analyze the explosion of data that’s been created in the last few years to generate meaningful, actionable insight that boosts sales and profits.
Monetate, a digital marketing firm specializing in email and mobile marketing, says it’s done just that for retailers’ e-commerce sites via A/B Testing.
A/B testing is a way marketers test changes to their website, email and social content to determine which ones produce the best results and customer experience. It’s a method designed to validate that any new design or change to a retailer’s online marketing efforts is improving shopper engagement and conversion rates – the percent of site visitors who make a purchase – before making changes to website code.
Here’s how Monetate says its A/B testing helped health and wellness chain GNC, kitchenware merchant Sur La Table and ModCloth, the online fashion retailer, improve their online sales and margins.
GNC used A/B testing to reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts during the online shopping process.
GNC
Challenge:
Push shoppers to utilize GNC’s express checkout options via PayPal versus regular checkout. (The express checkout is for shoppers with GNC accounts who are signed in. By signing in, their details are saved, and GNC is able to expedite the checkout process.)
Push shoppers to utilize GNC’s express checkout options via PayPal versus regular checkout. (The express checkout is for shoppers with GNC accounts who are signed in. By signing in, their details are saved, and GNC is able to expedite the checkout process.)
•Increase overall revenue and revenue per session.
Solutions:
•Test addition of “Checkout with PayPal” button at the top of the page, creating an “above-the-fold call to action for shoppers on smaller-screen devices,” Bruce Ernst, vice president of product development at Monetate, told Forbes.
•Run a test to 100% of all website visitors that featured a “Checkout with PayPal” button at the top of the shopping cart page.
• GNC used Monetate’s ActionBuilder module to implement the test. ActionBuilder simplifies campaign creation with a point-and-click visual editor that “makes it easier for marketers to modify any part of their website, preview changes in real time, and immediately apply the experience to a specific customer segment,” he said.
End Result:
• Generated a 3.8% increase in the PayPal conversion rate, the proportion of online visitors who make a purchase.
• Overall Average Order Value (AOV) rose 2.4% when the PayPal button was moved to the top of the page.
•4.03% increase in overall revenue, a more than $600,000 increase over a nine-week period.
“Monetate gave us the flexibility to quickly implement this test without the need for technical resources from our ecommerce platform provider,” said Nathaniel Kennedy, ecommerce director for GNC.com, according to the case studies on Monetate’s website.
“Monetate gave us the flexibility to quickly implement this test without the need for technical resources from our ecommerce platform provider,” said Nathaniel Kennedy, ecommerce director for GNC.com, according to the case studies on Monetate’s website.
Sur La Table sought to home in on a free shipping promotion that would drive online sales.
Sur La Table
Challenge:
•Develop a free-shipping promotion that drives sales.
•Improve shopper response rates via free shipping offers without sacrificing profits.
Solutions:
•Sur La Table launched an A|B test with four different free-shipping options that were displayed in a site-wide banner.
•The retailer kept the featured image the same across all pricing variations “in order to present a true test of which shipping offer customers preferred,” Ernst said.
•Based on initial results, Sur La Table refined the test to put the two top-performing shipping offers against one another, and each of these offers against a control group that received no offer.
•The retailer narrowed the free shipping campaign down to the winning offer – a $50 purchasing requirement for free shipping – against the no-offer control group, trying different creative approaches to see what would connect best with customers.
•The retailer narrowed the free shipping campaign down to the winning offer – a $50 purchasing requirement for free shipping – against the no-offer control group, trying different creative approaches to see what would connect best with customers.
End Results:
•Sur La Table reaped a double-digit increase in both conversion and new customer acquisitions.
•Gained significant improvements in average order size and median order size.
•Due to the campaign’s success, Sur La Table made $59 the purchasing threshold for free shipping in a site-wide promotion for all customers.
“My favorite part of this campaign was that we were able to do it quickly without having to involve all of our IT resources,” Kevin Ertell, vice president of ecommerce at Sur La Table, said in the case study. ”We were able to make changes in response to each new piece of insight we learned throughout the process. We could just go into the Monetate tool and make things happen.”
ModCloth
Challenge:
•To increase acquisitions — “which refers to when a customer purchases an item from a category, such as tops, that they had not previously purchased from the company,” Ernst explained — up sells and cross-sells of the fashion retailer’s vintage-inspired apparel and accessories.
•Determine how to best use customers’ historical and in-session shopping behaviors to boost ModCloth’s performance.
Solutions:
Solutions:
•Recommend best-selling products to new visitors.
•Test a “people also viewed” filter on product detail pages for returning visitors.
•Suggest grouped products for returning visitors, “such as multiple pieces for an outfit – a dress, shoes and necklace, or items of clothing all with an animal theme,” Ernst said.
End Results:
•ModCloth generated a 16% leap in conversion and acquisition rate in the tops apparel category. “For example, a customer always shops for dresses on ModCoth, but recently purchased a top,” he said.
•The retailer saw a 30% average order value increase among the 50% of ModCloth returning visitors seeing the best-seller recommendations in the tops apparel category.
•ModCloth also registered a 9.53% conversion increase, and 2.11% cart abandonment improvement for the intimate apparel category via the product recommendations carousel.
The process helped ModCloth tailor the online experience to its shoppers, said Eric Koger, co-founder and CEO of ModCloth, in the case study.
“For a long time, retailers have relied primarily on gut instincts to guide their businesses. But at ModCloth, we’re also relying on experimentation and data to help us better understand our customer, which helps us inspire her with an extremely relevant and fun shopping experience.”
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