April 2020 | Roboboogie.

Roboboogie Optimization Guide: Triage Edition

The global pandemic is rapidly shaping a new digital economy. Huge behavioral shifts are happening as much of the world is relying on web-based businesses for everything from basic food needs, to complex work challenges.

Shopping online is simply a safer, more accessible way to buy right now. In fact, it’s the only way many items can be purchased due to shuttered stores. As a result, many who were not previously comfortable shopping online are turning to the internet out of necessity. E-tailers in certain sectors i.e. grocery, home goods, and health are seeing considerable growth and sales.

Hopefully, your online business is steady or growing. We’ve compiled a quick list of considerations you should be mindful of when looking for ways to optimize your website in this new digital economy.

Are you welcoming new users?

Keep in mind, people visiting your site for the first time might not know who you are, what you sell, or how to find what they need. Also, remember that they might not be coming through the front door (homepage) due to search. Keeping a consistent and persistent message about your value proposition throughout the purchase funnel will help drive conversions. The use of icons and other visual aids can be really helpful in communicating this in a concise and non-intrusive way.

PRO TIP: When looking for trends and insights in your analytics, be sure to consider both new and returning visitor segments. You will likely find they each have unique needs and paths through your site.

Are you considering visitors who are less web-savvy?

An intuitive and guided digital experience is key to converting first-time visitors to lifetime customers. Make sure you provide enough helpful guidance for those who need it but don’t set roadblocks for returning users who are more familiar with your site. Tooltips, FAQs, and online chat are all helpful opt-in features that can help new users without getting in the way of more experienced ones.

PRO TIP: Keep in mind new visitors could be broadening your demographic reach. Be sure to evaluate readability and ADA standards across your site.

Do your product categories make sense (outside your organization)?

An intuitive merchandising strategy is critical for shoppers quickly trying to understand available product options and what makes each unique. Product categories commonly translate directly to navigation options, so keep labels clear and concise, and try to limit the number of top-level options to 4 or 5, allowing the user to drill-down from there into the sub-categories.

PRO TIP: Do a simple card sorting exercise for your product categories with someone unfamiliar with your product mix. You might discover opportunities to refine, regroup, and/or rename categories to improve usability and ultimately conversion.

Are you adjusting your messaging?

Huge shifts to a work-from-home economy present new opportunities (and challenges) for many companies. Quickly finding your place and adapting is critical. Look for opportunities to shift your messaging to align with current needs and demonstrate how your products/services make life better/easier in this stay-at-home economy.

PRO TIP: Be cautious about using overt messaging like ‘COVID-19 Clearance Sale.’’ For some, these messages can be perceived as insensitive or off-putting. Instead, look for creative ways to soften the message (i.e. Working from Home Sale). People understand the challenges all businesses are facing right now and why.

Are you still A/B testing?

Ongoing optimization is critical during times of rapid change. We recommend an ongoing process of constant observation, hypothesis creation, testing, and implementation. If you are not A/B testing, you’re leaving money on the table. Testing can not only improve site performance significantly over time; it can also show you so much about your rapidly changing audience’s needs and motivations.

PRO TIP: Analytics and session capture platforms like FullStory are powerful tools to actually see how customers experience your site, and identify roadblocks and pain points that could be costing you a lot of money.

Are you facing inventory shortages?

Many websites are facing inventory challenges due to supply chain issues and panic buying. Don’t lose a potential sale just because you don’t have inventory. Be sure to at least include a ‘notify me when this product is available’ option. You might be pleasantly surprised by how loyal, understanding, and patient your customers are during this time.

PRO TIP: This is a great time to build up your email list to nurture new customers and activate existing ones. Customers appreciate open and honest communication. So, while you might not have what they want now, keep in touch with them and they’ll likely come back when you do.

Are you making smart add-on and cross-sell recommendations?

As people rely more and more on online shopping, convenience remains a top contributing factor for customer satisfaction. Most shoppers would prefer to buy from fewer, trusted retailers, rather than manage accounts across multiple websites – particularly if they can save on shipping (Amazon is a giant example of this).

PRO TIP: Presenting smart add-on items upon cart add, that are truly complementary and add value, will boost average order size. Just make sure they are truly beneficial to the customer, otherwise, they will actually hurt conversions. Great opportunity to A/B test to get it right.

Hang in there!

We wish you all the best in health, happiness, and financial security during these difficult times. We hope these tips and pointers help guide your ongoing optimization efforts. Please feel free to reach out with any questions. We’re all in this together and happy to offer you some FREE advice if it will help your business.

This month, we sat down with Carlos to chat about all things A/B testing, from emerging trends in the industry to leveraging partners to take experimentation to the next level.

What is your role at AB Tasty all about?

As Partnerships Director, my main goal is to cultivate win-win relationships that drive value for the customers shared between AB Tasty and our partners.

I’m responsible for building out AB Tasty’s North America partner network. This includes recruitment, onboarding, and go-to-market activation across Digital Experience Agencies, System Integrators, and key ISVs.

From your perspective, what qualities make up a good agency partner?

There are are a few qualities that I’ve seen time and again in fantastic agency partners:

They have a deep customer knowledge. These partners have a sharp understanding of their customers’ motivations, goals, and preferences. They’ve taken a 360 approach, researching personas, industry trends, use cases, etc. to understand not just what the customer needs now, but what they will need in the future.
They know their differentiation. They’re able to explain their company’s unique value proposition with absolute precision. Their mindset is to go narrow and deep as opposed to wide and shallow. Vertical specialization or use-case driven solutions are two examples of this.
They’re focused on business outcomes. They’re constantly prioritizing results in their communications; they know or can estimate what business improvements customers can expect from their services.
They have executive sponsorship. This one is often overlooked, but you would be surprised at how much faster a partnership can move when the right people are involved from the get-go.
They can be trusted. Being open and transparent—with the good and the bad—is crucial for collaboration.
They’re a cultural fit. Do we enjoy working together? Do we have fun together? These are two elements that do wonders for productivity in partner relationships.

Why has AB Tasty chosen to look to partners to support customer success, rather than building out the services internally?

In the Saas world, the scaling of internal services can be expensive and time consuming. At AB Tasty, we’ve decided to place our focus and energy in what we do best: continuous product innovation and differentiation. Partners provide us with industry knowledge and a broader range of innovative, on-demand, skills that supplement our in-house resources (while also allowing both us and our partners to continue focusing on specialization in our respective fields).

What has been one of your proudest moments while working on the AB Tasty Partnerships team?

I joined AB Tasty about 2.5 months ago, but even in this short amount of time, I’m proud that I was able to hit the ground running. I was able to quickly create a feedback loop with our partners to help accelerate our collaboration and keep the channels of communication open—and already the perspectives they’ve shared with us have influenced the AB Tasty product roadmap. It’s huge to be able to demonstrate the value of our partnerships, and show how their feedback is instrumental.

What has been something that has surprised you about working with partners that you didn’t expect?

If there’s one thing that continues to amaze me, it’s how open and honest our partners can be when trust is earned. Our partner feedback is highly valued, and the unique perspectives they provide really do impact our product and processes in such positive ways.

AB Tasty is emerging as a leader in the experimentation and optimization space on the global scale in a competitive space. Where does the origin of that vision and culture come from?

AB Tasty’s vision begins with our founders: Alix and Remi. They both started out in web analytics and realized that the majority of web traffic didn’t convert. This was a telling insight on the state of digital, user behavior, and how quickly that landscape was changing. The idea of customer loyalty was waning: people wanted seamless interactions with brands across digital devices. They wanted tailored experiences and were quickly prioritizing convenience and utility.

Alix and Remi saw this disconnect between businesses and the customer, and the continuous integration of digital (well, everywhere). And in response, they created AB Tasty, which offers businesses the ability to continuously optimize their digital experiences and products through experimentation, analytics and personalization.

The test-and-learn mindset of AB Tasty is very much rooted in the culture of experimentation. Every test is a crucial learning opportunity that allows companies of all sizes to adapt, iterate, and continue at speed: to cultivate resilience and agility in a landscape that’s rapidly changing.

Where do you hope to see the AB Tasty Partnership program in 1 year? How about 5 years?

We recently launched our Global Partner Program, and have been making great strides in building a comprehensive network of agency partners and ISVs to support our customers. In one year, the goal is to have a solid, scalable structure in place. In five years, with the collaboration of our partners, we believe this program will be a leader in establishing digital experimentation as a must-have practice across industries.

Why are you excited to bring Roboboogie into that Preferred Partner network?

Roboboogie brings highly specialized knowledge across experimentation, personalization, UX and analytics, which of course is strongly aligned with AB Tasty’s mission and focus. Having Roboboogie join our growing ecosystem is really exciting for the shared expertise we can bring to our customer base. We trust their domain expertise and are confident they’ll help our customers not only improve their win rates, but more importantly adopt a test and learn mindset.

It’s also a plus knowing Roboboogie supports complementary technologies like FullStory (another partner of ours) as this helps to provide customers with a unified support experience.

If someone is interested in learning more about the partner program, what steps should they take?

For anyone interested in becoming an AB Tasty partner, or learning more about our program, registration is available via our website. Or, even better, they can email me directly at carlos.enriquez@abtasty.com. I’m always happy to provide more details with respect to onboarding, certification, go-to market, and answer any questions they may have.

Ok, now on to the most important question… if you could have any one super power, what would it be?

Teleportation! Having the ability to travel in the blink of an eye would certainly make my life easier—plus, it’s better for the environment ;). I also love to see new places and explore, so that’s a no-brainer for me.

Thanks, Carlos! Our partnership with AB Tasty adds a top-notch experimentation platform into our quiver of technologies we can use on our quest to optimize digital experiences for our clients. Stay tuned for more collaboration between our two organizations in the months to come!

Looking for some more interview action? Check out our conversation with Harrison White, Partner Manager at FullStory.

Month: April 2020

Optimization Tips Amidst a Global Pandemic