Good food and the feeling that you’re special are the two main reasons that many people return to the same restaurant. A fallen napkin that is picked up by a waiter within seconds gives you the feeling that the staff is actually there to make your experience a pleasant one. When an employee welcomes you by name, it can make you almost feel at home.
But the online experience is slightly different. If you arrive at a site and they already know your name, it might appeal to some people while others feel a bit uncomfortable. The online experience is highly personal but it is still possible to leverage the feeling of serendipity to make the shopping experience more enjoyable.
Serendipity vs. Creepy – A Very Thin Line
Online serendipity is a phenomenon where users encounter something they like that they were not expecting. Personalization of a website without a user login should be done with discretion to benefit the user experience and conversion without crossing the line into scary or creepy territory.
MagicalFruit is a Reedge client that uses the testing and personalization tool we offer. They started with the usual A/B testing, including buy now buttons, headlines and trust elements.
Combining GEO Targeting and A/B Testing
Magical Fruit used GEO targeting in order to test a targeting technique to a specific segment of traffic. They wanted to find out if their Canadian users were receptive to a modified version of their free shipping offer. They added a small Canadian flag and changed the text from “Free Shipping” to “Free Canadian Shipping.” See the image below to compare the two versions of the form.
It took MagicalFruit only one month to find out that Canadians who saw the personalized version completed the checkout process more often than users who saw the original version. The test resulted in an increase of 18% in checkouts and 23% in revenue.
Personalizing Newsletter Signups
After MagicalFruit got the results on how testing and personalizing could affect their bottom-line, they started testing more frequently. As an example, they hid the newsletter block for everyone that ever saw the variable “?submit=Subscribe” in the website (the confirmation that newsletter sign-up was successful).
This removal of the newsletter allows them to place other content above the fold to users who have already registered to it, which leads to more targeted engagement of users and benefits them in many ways.
Serendipity Targeting
Targeting a specific group based on location is a very simple way of using targeting and segmentation to your advantage. Providing important and relevant information to make a buying decision and removing clutter from the website will help increasing conversion rates significantly; as shown in the case of MagicalFruit.
The next phase will be to anticipate users’ questions and answer them before they are even asked. For example, when users are interested in buying a product, they might wonder what international shipping cost might be, so replacing some of the standard template texts with ones that correspond to the current location or historical location of the shopper will give those answers and removed obstacles in the buying process and checkout later on.
