top 10 testing and optimisation best practices

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THE TOP 10 TESTING, TARGETING AND OPTIMISATION BEST PRACTICES

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The Top 10 Testing, Targeting And Optimisation Best Practices

THE TOP 10 TESTING, TARGETING AND OPTIMISATION BEST PRACTICES1. NEw VERSuS RETuRNING: Basic Segments, Big Implications

2. LOCATION-BASED TARGETING: Know Where Your Customers Are

3. PRODuCT BADGING: Highlight Products with Ease and Simplicity

4. INBOuND MESSAGE CONSISTENCy: Don’t Interrupt the Scent Trail

5. PROMOTION TESTING: Find the Right Offer for Each Visitor

6. SHOPPING CART RECOVERy: Revive the Purchase Process

7. TIME-TRIGGERS: Remind and Retain Existing Customers

8. NAVIGATION OPTIMISATION: Avoid the IT Queue

9. THRESHOLD MESSAGES: Make Your Offers More Powerful

10. TABLETS: Audit and Optimise to Boost Conversions

http://pages.monetate.com/demo

http://monetate.com/2012/01/6-ways-to-solve-the-tablet-problem

http://monetate.com/2011/12/the-10-best-tablet-friendly-website-experiences-of-2011

http://monetate.com/2011/12/infographic-black-friday-cyber-monday-go-mobile



INTRODuCTION Deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time.A simple statement, but for many companies, the ability to create a relevant online

customer experience remains a challenge.

After thousands of people downloaded the original 'Top 10 Testing, Targeting

and Personalisation Best Practices' eBook, we were convinced that updating this

valuable resource with new ways for you to optimise your website and create

engaging customer experiences would further enhance its usefulness.

Like its predecessor, we created this edition from the countless number of website

testing and optimisation campaigns that have impacted ecommerce businesses

like yours. Quite frankly, these strategies are proven winners.

So, if you want to create online customer relevance, drive revenue, and increase

conversions and average order value, turn the page to discover 10 successful

website testing and optimisation strategies implemented by some of the best-

known brands in the world.







ABOuT MONETATEExtreme relevance creates extreme revenue.Monetate delivers a completely new class of online customer experience solutions.

By providing companies with a cloud-based suite of marketing optimisation

products and conversion expertise, you can quickly customise content, creative,

and functionality for innovative testing, merchandising, targeting, and cross-

channel consistency that drives online relevance and revenue.

Major enterprise companies, including Best Buy, QVC, Urban Outfitters, Aeropostale,

The Sports Authority, and PETCO, rely on Monetate to achieve a new level of speed

and control that allows them to run 16 times more website optimisation campaigns

compared to industry averages.

By unlocking the full capabilities of the Monetate Agility Suite, you gain the power

to test and deliver targeted content—changing anything, anywhere, on any web

page, based on what you know about your website visitors.







1. NEw VERSuS RETuRNING: Basic Segments, Big ImplicationsOne of the most effective ways to segment website traffic is to distinguish between

new and returning visitors. While this distinction is both familiar and valuable to

those who measure website traffic acquisition efforts, it continues to be overlooked

as a proven method to increase conversion rates and other key metrics.

While a first-time visitor may need to know the forms of payment you accept, how

your items are shipped, or your return policy, conveying this and other information

takes up valuable page real estate that returning visitors and frequent shoppers

likely don’t need or want to see.

Show new customers unique content and callouts, while alerting returning

customers to what has been updated on the website since their last visit. You can

even personalise return visits for customers based on their average shopping cart

value or their lifetime purchase value.

Merchandisers can take advantage of this important customer segment by showing

different product recommendations, such as the most popular products to new

visitors and brand-new products to returning visitors.

Segmenting new versus returning visitors is not only a more efficient use of page

real estate, but can convert more first-time browsers into buyers and increase the

order size of a returning visitor.

New

Returning

Treat new customers to unique content and callouts, while alerting returning

customers to what has been updated on your website since their last visit.







2. LOCATION-BASED TARGETING: Know Where Your Customers Are By using technology that determines the physical location of website visitors, you

can display location-specific messages and offers that help increase conversion.

Two location-based best practices are geotargeting and weather-based targeting.

Geotargeting works exceptionally well to highlight synergies between your online

and physical retail locations. Call out the closest location of a store so the customer

can take advantage of free in-store pickup, or learn about in-store events nearby.

Another way geotargeting can pay dividends in conversion rate lift, higher average

order value, and customer loyalty is to segment international traffic. Start by

checking your website analytics to see how many visitors come from different

countries and how well they convert.

Your international customers will be happy to know that you ship to their respective

country, so tell them with banners, callouts or lightbox treatments. Country-specific

targeting also can be extended to changing website navigation to the native

language of a visitor, as well as converting prices into a different currency.

Cloudy in Chicago? Sunny in Los Angeles? Snowing in Vermont?

While brick-and-mortar retailers can respond rapidly to changing weather conditions,

online merchants have typically been shut out of these sales opportunities. Use

weather-based targeting to overlay the location of the user with real-time weather

data and leverage this insight to deliver a more relevant message.

For example, an outdoor clothing retailer can use weather-based targeting to

promote rainwear to visitors located in a city where it’s currently raining by displaying

a banner that offers a price discount, badging to draw attention to products with

waterproof features, or showing a weather-targeted hero image that reflects the

visitor’s physical environment to strengthen the connection to the message.

Highlight synergies between your online and retail locations. Call out closest location, ship

to store, easy returns, store events, or even hiring opportunities!







3. PRODuCT BADGING: Highlight Products with Ease and Simplicity You’re likely familiar with the merchandising tactic known as product badging and

perhaps have already implemented this strategy on your website’s search results

pages, category pages, home page, or product detail pages. Highlighting specific

items with a product badge can increases sales of that item—as well as the overall

conversion rate—even if you are not discounting the product.

Calling attention to specific products within a group—such as items that are on

sale, newly arrived, or popular with other shoppers—with product badges can be

much simpler and easier to do once you realise that you don’t need creative or IT

resources. Overlay images or use dynamic text on top of existing product images

and free your graphic designer or website developer to focus on other projects.

The specific business rules that you create determine where a badge should be

shown, who should see it, when someone should see it, and the length of time that

the badge should accompany a product image.

Calling attention to selected items within a group of products is one of the oldest selling

strategies in the world-and with good reason, it works. Badging brings this venerable

technique online, where you can test it, tune it, and employ it more effectively than ever.







4. INBOuND MESSAGE CONSISTENCy: Don’t Interrupt the Scent Trail How much time, effort, and money do you spend on generating website traffic only

to settle on single-digit conversion rates? Your inbound marketing channels—for

instance, paid search, display advertising, affiliates, email, and social media—are

huge parts of your business. But once visitors get to your website, you shouldn’t

interrupt the 'scent trail' and leave them stranded.

One example of retaining the scent trail is when you synchronise your email

message with the landing page. We call this 'Email Echo.'

The continuity of your inbound marketing efforts is a great way to increase

conversion rates. Suppose the offer in your email is for free shipping on orders over

£100. If you use a blue serif font inside a big yellow button to promote the offer in

your email, make sure that offer using similar or the same creative appears on the

landing page.

Once you start asking your graphic designer for website creative that matches

each email offer, you can display the images without ever again creating a special

landing page for your email campaigns.

As mentioned earlier, retaining inbound message consistency—the 'scent trail'—

is critical to increasing conversion. Maintaining scent and avoiding the 'bait and

switch' isn’t just a matter of having the same messages, or product, in your email

and on your website. It’s also about using the same colours, themes, and fonts. They

all must come through to the landing page and, ideally, to the entire website.

This 'email echo' campaign carries the same creative theme and message from email to

landing page and throughout the website visit, to keep the offer that prompted the click

front and center while customers shop.







5. PROMOTION TESTING: Find the Right Offer for Each Visitor You hopefully now understand the importance of maintaining message consistency

for your different customer segments. Whether from an inbound channel like paid

search or email, or new visitors and returning visitors, there is a different cost to

convert each website visitor to a customer.

Because your return on investment is different for each customer segment, you

shouldn’t settle for the same special discounts or promotions for all of your website

traffic. Change your promotional offer depending on your cost to obtain each

customer. Visitors who come from paid search could require a higher order size

before receiving free shipping compared to a visitor who arrived from an organic

search.

Your affiliate partner gets a specific percentage of every sale, you have a set AdWords

budget, and your contract with your email service provider is pretty straightforward.

Use this knowledge to your advantage and convert a more profitable website visitor

using effective promotion testing.

You can set a smaller sample size for your promotion campaign to mitigate exposure risk.

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6. SHOPPING CART RECOVERy: Revive the Purchase Process Online shoppers are easily distracted. They are typically convenience-oriented,

actively comparison-shopping, inundated with options, and frequently multitasking.

Because of these and other factors, shopping cart abandonment remains a major

ecommerce concern with about 75% of online cart purchases never getting to an

order confirmation page.

There are numerous best practices around reducing shopping cart abandonment,

including the display of clear reminders that there are items in the cart as the

shopper explores your website, and mouse-over views of cart contents from any

page so shoppers don’t need to go to the cart page to remember what they plan to

purchase. But you will still experience cart abandonment.

Remind returning visitors about the items left in their carts and get them back into

the sales funnel quickly. Try using a lightbox that greets them with a reminder of

their cart items, encouraging them to place their order while supplies last. It might

pay off to add an additional incentive, such as free shipping, to complete the order.

Some of the best personalisation strategies offer immediate and practical benefits to the

customer. What could be more helpful than a reminder of items left in the cart? Plus, a

strong hint to complete the purchase before the items are sold out.







7. TIME-TRIGGERS: Remind and Retain Existing Customers Retaining an existing customer is far more profitable than acquiring a new customer.

Remind returning visitors when it is time to reorder a product that frequently needs

to be replenished.

When a returning visitor comes to your website—for example, 90 days after

the purchase of a product that typically lasts three to four months—and your

data supports that the item typically is reordered, re-engage the customer with

messages about buying that same product again. By targeting this dynamic

customer segment, you not only can impact key performance metrics, but will

provide a customer experience often not found online.

Other examples of time-triggered messages include upselling warranty expirations

or other pertinent product messages, such as when a previously desired out-of-

stock item is back in inventory. You also can send valuable post-purchase triggered

messages requesting that frequent shoppers leave a product review or asking them

to provide valuable feedback via a website survey.

Don’t forget to re-order! Remind returning visitors to buy replenishment items at common

usage intervals (e.g., 90 days post purchase).







8. NAVIGATION OPTIMISATION: Avoid the IT QueueMaking a change to your website’s primary navigation would seem like a

monumental task. Besides convincing others to move forward with even the

simplest change, the time it typically takes to get such a change through the

development queue means you’ve likely moved on to another challenge. There are

definitely risks involved when you alter how visitors interact with your website. And

that’s why testing changes to your navigation before deploying them site-wide has

quickly become a best practice.

Change the text colour of a 'Sales Items' link to better stand out, or move the

'Clearance' or 'Close-out' links to the top of the navigation for shoppers who have a

lower average order value.

Try swapping categories or brands—even hide them altogether—or highlight

specific navigational items based on known customer segments, such as gender,

location, and most-popular categories or brands. You can even try disabling

navigation hovers to see how they impact the clickstream of your visitors.

Test different messaging in your website navigation before deploying a potential risky

change site-wide. Highlight a specific navigation element to known customer segments

such as gender, location, or most-popular categories.

ON-SALE







9. THRESHOLD MESSAGES: Make Your Offers More Powerful Free shipping, in most cases, proves to be a silver bullet with consumers. But for

your business, offering free shipping can be a slippery slope. That’s where free

shipping thresholds come in. By requiring customers to meet a defined minimum

total to qualify for free shipping, you can attract sales without hurting profit.

Test a threshold slightly above your website’s average order value (AOV). If you have

products with disparate price ranges, the overall site AOV might be biased high or

low. In this case, consider using multiple shipping thresholds attainable by both

customer segments.

To make free shipping threshold offers more powerful, present real-time calculations

on how close shoppers are to qualifying for the deal. Also consider adding product

recommendations in the target price range (or higher) to these messages.

Use real-time calculations to show visitors how close they are to free shipping thresholds

and other special offers. Test these messages with banners using dynamic text throughout

your website or within the checkout process.







10. TABLETS: Audit and Optimise to Boost Conversions As more consumers replace their computers with devices such as an iPad or Kindle

Fire, they expect a website that takes advantages of the products’ features and

functionality.

Look at your analytics for the top activities visitors are doing on mobile and tablet

devices. You may find that site search, store locators, account log-in, or certain

categories are browsed more on tablets. Use this insight to drive easy modifications

to your tablet experience that call out and move customers more quickly to these

popular areas.

Besides taking a deep dive into your analytics, do a qualitative audit of how your

website performs on the most popular devices to determine whether it’s delivering

the features and functionalities those users need. Optimise your website features

that don’t function the way you want them to on a tablet—think Flash and the

iPad—and serve up static content instead.

Navigation is also important. On a touchscreen, drop-down features will either take

the visitor to the main top category or won’t stay open, which means visitors are

stuck and can’t navigate properly. Supporting flyout navigation for “touch click” will

allow your navigation to work as intended on these devices.







Make it easier for visitors to navigate your website on a tablet with bigger buttons

to help optimise tablet browsing. Don’t stop there. Try implementing features like

predictive search, because fewer keypad strokes result in a better user experience

for tablet browsers.

Clean, streamlined product pages also are critical to improving tablet conversions.

One way to take advantage of this is to think about what you already show in your

product 'Quick Views' and use a similar approach for tablet browsers. Allow visitors

to pick a size and colour, add the product to the basket, and then head to checkout.

Although tablet shoppers may still drive a small percentage of overall ecommerce, they

can convert at rates higher than consumers shopping via desktop computers. Quantitative

and qualitative analyses of your website on tablet devices can provide ways to improve the

customer experience and increase conversion rates.

Larger Navigation Store LocatorWeather Targeted

Hero Image

GeotargetingOverlay

Waterproof BadgingFinger-Friendly

Swiping

Tablet Accessories







GOING FuRTHER Are you eager to put these best practices to the test against your business

challenges? And maybe more than a little curious to see just how much potential

conversion rate lift you’ve been missing?

We can relate! At Monetate, we live to move the needle, to blow away KPIs and lift

every metric that matters. That’s why we made it quick and easy to get Monetate

onto your website so you can start implementing these best practices immediately.

As marketers the world over are beginning to see the tremendous value relevance

has in acquiring and retaining customers while increasing share of wallet, there’s

never been a better time to ramp up your testing, targeting and optimisation efforts.

As you may have noticed, most of the illustrations of the best practices you just read

are from existing Monetate clients, companies that are leading the way in building

a better online customer experience... and driving record online revenue in the

process. Why not join them?

GET STARTED TESTING, TARGETING AND OPTIMISING yOuR wEBSITE TODAy! Learn more:[email protected]





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