The busiest time of the busiest season was Black Friday weekend 2023 (November 24 to November 27, 2023), when traffic increased by +32.7% and conversion rate by +47.9%, compared to the weekend before. 

To understand how consumer activity and behavior change during the holiday shopping season, Contentsquare analyzed over +31 billion page views and 6.7 billion site visits across  1,673 websites from 11 countries from November 1 to January 10. By analyzing the 2023 peak season, we can better understand shopping behaviors and what trends are shaping the retail sector this year.

Peak sales season benchmarks for retailers

Understand the most important digital KPIs—and how to leverage the learnings to nail your peak season strategy. 

Access the benchmarks

So without further do, here are the five top CX holiday shopping trends you should know ahead of peak season 2024.

What are the retail trends shaping the holiday shopping season?

1. Shoppers prefer mobile for browsing and desktop for buying

Visitors prefer to browse and hunt peak season discounts on smaller devices. 

In 2023, mobile had the highest share of traffic during the two big peak event weeks: Black Friday and Christmas. 

Despite mobile bringing in the most traffic, it converts at a lower rate than desktop. The average conversion rate on mobile during Black Friday weekend 2023 was 3.1%, while desktop saw 5.5% CRV—that’s almost a 60% difference in CRV in just a week. 

To combat this discrepancy in device traffic and conversion, retailers should focus on optimizing their mobile checkout experience and provide quick payment options like Apple Pay or Google Pay ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

2. Visitors continue to experience errors 

While increased conversions are a positive outcome of the holiday season, the surge in traffic and orders can cause issues that frustrate and foster customer dissatisfaction. 

Frustration impacted more than 2 in 5 retail sessions during peak season in 2023. And the most frequently occurring frustration factors were JavaScript errors and slow page loads.

To fight this, retailers must find and fix any points of friction as quickly as possible. Here are just a few ways retailers can reduce page load speed: 

• Cache more to lessen the load placed on your original infrastructure. 
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to offload most web traffic from your servers so they don’t get bogged down when there’s high demand.
• Presize your images for mobile and desktop and compress them to improve page load speed.

3. Buyer journeys are long during the holiday shopping season 

There’s no better time to engage your visitors and ensure their buyer journey is seamless than during the busiest holiday sales period of the year. 

In 2023, holiday shoppers’ buying journeys were long, stretching beyond 25 pages, while mobile visitors viewed far fewer pages than desktop. And what’s more, global sessions with a conversion view up to 5X more pages than those that don’t. 

Shoppers are clearly happy to browse more pages of the site to ensure they get the best peak season deal before committing to buy.

Ahead of peak season, retailers can speed up the buyer journey by adding promotion and online sales categories to their site’s navigation, making it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.

Or, like Lovehoney, try moving your main holiday shopping categories out of the filters dropdown and onto your promotional landing pages. Find out how they increased on-page conversion by +30%. 

4. Social struggles to convert holiday shoppers 

Despite the number of active users on social media in the world increasing by +7.1% YoY from 4.62 billion in 2022 to 4.95 billion in 2023—social still struggles to covert. 

During peak season 2023, paid and organic social were the two of the lowest converting marketing channels—barely hitting a 1% conversion rate.

This trend was apparent during Black Friday weekend as well. Both paid and organic social saw a decrease in conversion rate YoY of over -20%. 

On the flip side, paid search drove the highest conversions during Black Friday weekend 2023 at 3.89%. Running promotions on paid search during the long discount weekend has the potential to deliver over +50% higher conversion rates. 

To ensure they stand out and make the most of every single click, retailers can benefit from adjusting and fine-tuning Google search ads. 

5. Black Friday weekend shoppers spend more on desktop devices  

Retailers saw bigger average order values (AOV) during Black Friday weekend in 2023, compared to 2022. AOV also increased on both mobile and desktop devices and by +7.7% YoY overall. 

And not only does desktop convert more, but it also drives order values up. In 2023, desktop AOV was +40.2% higher than on mobile. 

To encourage more customers to splurge more on smartphones, retailers can try providing recommendations of similar discount items and cross-category holiday promotions, particularly on mobile product detail pages (PDPs). 

This makes it easy for users to make holiday purchases and find items on offer that might complement each other, increasing consumer spending on mobile. 

But before making any changes, retailers must understand their unique visitor behavior across devices to optimize online shopping journeys and their omnichannel strategies accordingly. 

One brand leading the way is Sykes Holiday Cottages. Find out how they’re using Contentsquare’s CS Apps analytics to enhance their mobile user here.

Discover more 2024 holiday shopping trends and how to prepare 

Peak season is arguably the busiest and most stressful time of the year for retailers. 

So, before the big holiday season rush takes over, discover the most important digital KPIs and trends in our Retail Peak Season Digital Experience Benchmarks. 

Then, dig into our peak season guide for the most crucial site optimization tips with UX examples from nine big brand retailers, including Harrods, AVON and Early Settler. 

How to prepare for peak sale season

A guide to seasonal site optimization with UX examples from 9 big brand retailers.

Get my copy

The post 5 holiday shopping trends to know for 2024 appeared first on Contentsquare.

New York, NY—March 20, 2024— Retailers have a key opportunity as they face soaring costs on ecommerce’s most critical acquisition channels, Meta and Google, which have driven up costs per visit by 12.4%–above average by 3%-according to Contentsquare’s new 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report. The report highlights influential data and actionable insights retailers can take to meet their customers where they are. Although retailers are hit the hardest, they also have a massive opportunity when considering traffic and revenue trends, especially on mobile, which has become the leading source for ecommerce traffic globally (77%) and accounting for 56% of revenues. With investments in digital customer experience, data shows retailers can experience massive gains in customer retention, conversion, and loyalty.   

“Consumers are strongly voicing their preferences, but data shows brands still have room to meet their expectations. How does that translate to business impact? What brands are losing by not improving customer experience is material, and business leaders need to ask themselves how they can capitalize on understanding customer preferences in order to deliver value,” said Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer, Contentsquare. “The data demonstrates a missed opportunity for brands on mobile. It’s clear that they need to evolve the way they think about mobile and optimize the entire mobile journey, not simply the pages or formatting, so it’s imperative to create more seamless experiences.”

Key Data and Takeaways for Brands:

• Despite the growth in mobile traffic share, conversion rates fell 5.8% as shoppers tend to make shorter, micro-visits while using mobile devices, and spend 60% less time per session viewing fewer pages than on desktop.
• Easy-to-remedy frustrations, including slow page loads and poor visitor responses, reduced revenue by $0.56 per visit.
  • Retailers can combat frustration by combining audience insights with proactive monitoring to consistently deliver experiences that delight their customers.
• “Growth at all costs” is outdated.
  • Instead of focusing simply on driving traffic, retailers need to shift their focus to improving the overall customer experience in order to drive profitability.  
• Conversions are 77% higher on desktop than on mobile
• Retail traffic is increasingly dependent on paid, as opposed to organic, sources, with paid driving 42.6% of visits and nearly half (47.8%) of all new visits to ecommerce sites.
  • Instead of chasing higher traffic volume, retailers’ best acquisition strategy may be a retention strategy. Knowing what constitutes an engaging, satisfying experience which encourages customers to stay, convert, and return is key.
• Apps provide a unique opportunity for retailers and they provide a critical role in delivering the returning customer experience, attracting nearly 4X the share of returning visitors compared with mobile web, according to Contentsquare’s 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report.
  • Although apps are typically positioned as a means to foster strong relationships with existing customers, brands were able to expand the breadth of their audience using apps last year – new visitors accounted for 15% of all app visits, up from 10% the prior year.

Download the full report here. 

# # #

Methodology

The Retail Digital Experience Benchmark is a set of aggregated and anonymized insights of digital performance. Strict aggregation measures are employed to ensure anonymity. These measures include requirements on analysis set size, diversity, and consistency, in order to present credible and reliable information that is insulated from concentration risk.

To qualify for inclusion in the year-over-year analysis, each site must have operated throughout the entire analysis period, in this case October 2022 through December 2023. Frustration analyses are calculated for October 2023. All year-over-year analyses are Q4 2023 / Q4 2022. All other analyses represent Q4 2023. Additional data hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation. Additional data hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation.

This edition of the Retail Digital Experience Benchmark analyzed more than 25 billion sessions and 130 billion page views across 1,673 websites. 

About Contentsquare

Contentsquare delivers the power to make the digital world more human. Its AI-powered platform provides rich and contextual insight into customer behaviors, feelings and intent — at every touchpoint in their journey — enabling businesses to build empathy and create lasting impact. The global leader in digital experience analytics, Contentsquare helps brands everywhere transform the way they do business, allowing them to take action at enterprise scale and build customer trust with security, privacy, and accessibility. More than 1,000 leading brands use Contentsquare to grow their business, deliver more customer happiness and move with greater agility in a constantly changing world. Its insights power the customer experience on over 1 million websites worldwide. For more information, visit www.contentsquare.com

Media Contact:

Erica Ashner

Erica.Ashner@Contentsquare.com

The post Retail Sees Shift to Mobile Driving More than Half of Revenue and Nearly 80% of Traffic, According to New Report appeared first on Contentsquare.

We sit down with Jacqui Dent, Digital Optimisation Specialist at WhistleOut Australia to find out how her team leverages the power of digital experience analytics to derive insight from those clues to drive experimentation efforts and save time.

Hi, please introduce yourself.

My name is Jacqui Dent and I’m the Digital Optimisation Specialist at WhistleOut Australia. As part of the UX & Optimisation team at WhistleOut, my job is to find opportunities to increase conversion rates and the on-site experience for users. I use digital analytics, A/B testing and Contentsquare to understand how and why users interact with different parts of our site – or don’t in some cases!

What are some of your key digital challenges?

WhistleOut has been in the mobile and internet plan comparison space for 16 years and we have a huge audience for our tools and content. However, as a mature website, new audiences are harder to come by, so to continue growing our business, we need to focus on improving the experience for our users. We’ve built some comprehensive tools to help people compare mobile and internet plans. But comprehensive can also be complex. What we want to do now is hone in on what features really help our users, and help people find them as quickly and use them as easily as possible.

How does Contentsquare help to solve these challenges?

Before Contentsquare, we used analytics and other more conventional heat mapping tools to try to understand what was and wasn’t working for our users. But they either didn’t provide the level of granularity that we needed, or they weren’t technically advanced enough to work well with our site. Another problem was that these tools weren’t “always on”, which meant if we realised we needed information about a page, we would have to set up some monitoring and then wait several weeks or more for data to accumulate before we could do our analysis.

Now if we have a question about how users are interacting with a particular tool or page, we can get the information straight away and see not just what users are or are not clicking on but also information like how attractive it was to users, the time to first click, the exposure rate, and even the revenue generated to really build up a picture of what’s going on. We’ve discovered elements buried at the bottom of our pages that look like they’re actually way more interesting to users than we’d imagined. We’ve been able to gain a better understanding of what users seem to be looking for on each page, so we can help them find it more easily. We can direct our time and effort towards what works for our audience and avoid devoting time and resources towards what doesn’t.

We can also dig deeper into the results of A/B tests that we run on-site. Whereas before, with our A/B testing tool we’d be able to see whether one variant out-performed the other, we wouldn’t get much information about why. Now that we have Contentsquare, we can use Zoning Analysis on the test original and variant to see a detailed picture of user behaviour on each variant and identify where it’s different to figure out what’s driving the results we’re seeing.

Can you share some win(s) you’ve achieved with Contentsquare?

I think one of the biggest wins is just the level of information about our user behaviour that we now have access to – without having to do lots of digging into reports, setting up tracking, waiting and then making guesses based on the limited information that comes back. We’ve saved ourselves a tonne of time on data hunting, and we’ve avoided going down a few rabbit holes because we can now easily see what’s worth our time to pursue.

A big part of this has been our mobile and internet plans search tools. We’ve never had a heat-mapping tool sophisticated enough to work well with this before. These tools are rich in filters and functionality, but until recently we had very little data on how users were actually engaging with these. Contentsquare has very quickly given us solid numbers on what buttons and filters are being used the most and their impact on conversion rates. We’ve been able to use these insights to guide our A/B test plans. And after the tests are finished, of course, we can jump back into Contentsquare and analyse the results, to get more insight. All of this helps us to refine and iterate on the search tool design, which is pretty exciting.

Which teams at WhistleOut use Contentsquare?

Obviously, the primary users are my colleagues and me in the UX & Optimisation team. However, we also have Contentsquare users within the Marketing, Editorial and Product teams at WhistleOut. CS Live and Zoning Analysis are the most popular Contentsquare features outside the UX team. Team members use it to understand which parts of the pages they’re responsible for are driving clicks and engagement, as well as possibly under-utilised elements using the attractiveness rate. The teams use CS Live and Zoning Analysis to analyse organic SEO content, landing pages for our paid advertising, product pages and other areas of the site. It’s taken out a lot of the guesswork when understanding user behaviour.

What do you think is the biggest value Contentsquare offers?

I really love how it democratises UX data and analytics across the business. CS Live is a tool that absolutely anyone can learn to use, and accessing it is so quick and easy that anyone with the inclination can jump in and gain deeper insights into how our users are behaving on individual pages. So no one needs to rely on hunches or wait for the UX&O team to investigate and get back to them.

There’s also just so much information to dig into. If you want to deep dive into a problem or a question, you can do that. Or if you need a quick answer, it can do that too.

Finally, if you were to recommend Contentsquare to a peer, what would you say?

Now that I’ve used Contentsquare, I would feel blind without it. I think once you’ve mastered the basics of UX and Optimisation, it would be hard to get to the next level without a tool like this.

The post Learn how WhistleOut uses Contentsquare to understand user behaviour appeared first on Contentsquare.

New York, NY—February 14, 2024 —Digital ad spend is set to surpass $740 billion in 2024, yet website traffic, consumption and conversion were all down last year, according to the Contentsquare 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report. In fact, 55% of all sites saw lower traffic, 58% saw session consumption fall, and conversion decreased by 5.5% according to the report. Contentsquare, a global leader in digital experience analytics, also found that 40% of all online visits included avoidable friction, including technical website errors, slow page loads and rage clicks. 

“With a dip in global web traffic this year and the cost per visit rising almost 10%, making every visit count is business critical,” said Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer, Contentsquare. “We know from our previous consumer research that shoppers are leaving sites as a result of frustrations that could be easily resolved, such as slow page loads and rage clicks.”

While fixing frustration remains an utmost priority across industries, efforts to optimize mobile app performance are paying off, with apps recording steady customer engagement in 2023 (14 pages viewed per online visit up from 13.8 the previous year) and a conversion rate of 5.6% — 3x the conversion rate of mobile web traffic. Furthermore, app users spend 64% more time in-app than visitors spend on mobile sites.

Mobile, in particular, is the new competitive battlefield. We’ve seen gains in terms of engagement for apps this year, but mobile optimization as a whole is not as mature as it could be given the intelligence we have today on customer behaviors and preferences.

Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer, Contentsquare

Contentsquare’s latest Benchmark Report further revealed:

Mobile Visits Are Micro-Visits 

Despite mobile driving 70% of website traffic in Q4 2023, browsing time on mobile web is 60% shorter than on desktop. These “micro-visits” contribute to a decline in conversion rates, highlighting the gap between consumer expectations and current mobile web optimization practices.

A Shift to Paid Sources, With Search Driving 4x Conversion of Paid Social

Paid sources drove one-third of all traffic to websites this year, and 36% of new visits. For mobile web, paid sources account for 40% of traffic — twice as much as for desktop. While overall traffic is down, paid social is one of the few channels that saw traffic growth in 2023. However, social traffic struggles to convert compared to paid search, which still drives 4x the conversion rate of paid social. The report indicated that visits from social are less intentional, with a 41% higher bounce rate than paid search. Visitors from social may have inadvertently tapped through to a website because of a compelling story or influencer without the intention embodied by visitors coming from paid search.

The High Cost of Frustration

Frustrating visitors is a surefire way to waste visits. Sites that are slow to load (those taking more than three seconds) and perform poorly in responding to visitor interactions combine to reduce the engagement by 15%.

Rage clicks (clicking at least three times in less than two seconds) continue to frustrate visitors, and were found in 5.5% of all online visits. 

To learn more, download the full Benchmark report here.

# # #

Methodology

This edition of the Digital Experience Benchmark analyzed more than 43 billion sessions and 200 billion page views across 3,590 websites.

The 10 industries analyzed include: 

• Consumer Packaged goods
• Energy, Utilities, & Construction
• Financial Services
• Manufacturing
• Media
• Retail
• Services
• Software
• Travel & Hospitality
• Telecommunications

The Digital Experience Benchmark is a set of aggregated and anonymized insights into digital performance. Strict aggregation measures are employed to ensure anonymity. These measures include requirements on analysis set size, diversity, and consistency, to present credible and reliable information that is insulated from concentration risk. 

To qualify for inclusion in the year-over-year analysis, each site must have operated throughout the entire analysis period, in this case, October 2022 through December 2023. For current period analysis, the analysis period is Q4 2023. Additional hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation.

About Contentsquare

Contentsquare is a leading digital experience analytics platform that empowers businesses to understand and optimize the user experience across web, mobile, and app platforms. Its AI-powered platform provides rich and contextual insight into customer behaviors, feelings and intent — at every touchpoint in their journey — enabling businesses to build empathy and create lasting impact. More than 1,300 leading brands use Contentsquare to grow their business, deliver more customer happiness and move with greater agility in a constantly changing world. Its insights are used to optimize the experience on over 1.3 million websites worldwide. Founded in Paris and with offices around the world, Contentsquare is backed by leading high quality investors, including funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Bpifrance, Canaan, Eurazeo, Highland Europe, KKR, LionTree, Sixth Street and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. For more information, visit www.contentsquare.com.

Media Contact:

Contentsquare

Erica Ashner

erica.ashner@contentsquare.com 

The post Nearly Sixty Percent of Brands See Drop in Online Traffic and Consumption in 2023, According to New Report appeared first on Contentsquare.

Contentsquare recently surveyed over 600 US consumers about their online behaviors, attitudes and opinions when shopping during the holidays. The results shine a bright light on what matters most for consumers and what brands need to prioritize.

Below are the biggest pet peeves and digital experience frustrations, with UX tips to help you solve them.

1.Slow loading pages

Slow website loading time was the top pet peeve around online holiday shopping. The 2023 Digital Experience Benchmark found the same key learning—users are easily frustrated by slow-loading pages, causing them to bounce, abandon carts and never return.

However, this doesn’t have to be the case. To improve your site speed, consider minimizing characters (where appropriate) in your HTML, CSS and JS coding. For cookie banners, load them asynchronously so they don’t rely on the page rendering and ensure they’re responsive. As always, regularly monitor and optimize your Core Web Vitals metrics. (For more tips, see our guide, How to improve your website performance.)

2. Too many pop-ups

We’ve all experienced unwanted pop-ups. Whether it’s a CTA to subscribe to an email list, a discount announcement or any other type, they can negatively impact the user experience when done wrong. Many consumers are intent-led during holiday shopping, looking for specific items to purchase instead of casual browsing. Using pop-ups can slow down or completely stop their user journey, blocking them from completing their goal to purchase.

With this in mind, if you’re set on having a pop-up, ensure it’s quick loading and easy to exit out of or ignore. Use a high contrasting overlay to avoid confusion within the use journey. And again, ensure your site loads quickly to eliminate misclicks and unintentional redirects that can create confusion and frustration.

3. Item unavailability

There’s nothing more disappointing than finding an item you want and then learning it’s unavailable at checkout. Showing unavailable items or not properly marking low or out-of-stock items can quickly diminish consumer trust and trigger frustration.

On your product description pages (PDP) clearly tag items that are low stock or out of stock with bold and contrasting text. Clearly, indicating the number of that item in stock not only helps customers’ expectations but showing limited stock can trigger consumers into taking action faster than they normally would.

4. No quick-purchase checkout options

The payment experience is the last hurdle to conversion and arguably the most important—especially during busy seasons.

Offering a variety of quick one-click payment options like Shop Pay, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and more can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes a user to complete an order. Instead of entering all their personal information in form fills, the one-click pay option adds convenience and reduces their chances of abandonment and friction.

5. Negative mobile experience

More consumers shop on mobile devices than any other. If a site has a complicated user interface (UI) or a confusing user journey, visitors will quickly abandon it. Consumers shop while standing in line, waiting for the train, between meetings and any time throughout the day when they have a few minutes to spare. If your digital experience can’t match expectations at that moment, you may lose that user for good.

A mobile-first strategy is not a quick fix but a long-term strategic shift. Start by simplifying your mobile user journeys by streamlining things like the navigation bar and above-the-fold homepage displays. (See our guide, How to optimize mobile experiences to drive growth).

6. Poor search results

It’s frustrating not being able to find what you’re looking for. Visitors who use your search bar are often more intent-driven and are more likely to convert. So, creating a seamless and intuitive search experience can boost your conversions and revenue.

Within your search bar, use categorized autocomplete to help users quickly find the items they are looking for in the correct product category. Bold non-keywords to ensure clarity and prevent misdirection in the user journey. On the search results page, limit the number of results per page to prevent confusion while keeping the search window visible at all times.

7. Promotion codes that don’t work

Broken promotion codes and unclear promo requirements quickly lead to frustration. It can often deter users from making a purchase at all.

To ensure a seamless experience with promotions and discount codes, clearly and concisely describe the parameters. However, it’s important not to overload the visitor with too much information at the beginning of their journey because it can cause confusion. Additionally, automate the application of a discount or promo code when connected to a specific item or cart value to reduce checkout steps.

The post 7 holiday shopping frustrations and how to fix them appeared first on Contentsquare.

To design user experiences that actually convert in the age of distraction, Scott Shillinglaw, Senior Digital Product Manager at Koala, lives by three words – less is more. 

At CX Circle Sydney, Scott reflects on how embracing simplicity helped the team improve engagement and conversion metrics. He also talked about removing a feature they thought would help, but didn’t. 

Scott shares his three essential tips on designing user experiences that can help convert even the most distracted users. 

1. Too much information might be hindering conversion

When we design user experiences, we often add more features and information, thinking that we’re helping our users by providing them everything they need to guide them to checkout. 

After all, more must be better, right? 

However, this sometimes unintentionally creates complexity in the user journey. Too much information can lead to cognitive overload, distracting people from taking the next step toward purchase. 

How Koala’s delivery tracker widget looked like before checkout

The problem was, Koala’s delivery checker was solving a problem for the business. Customers had logistics-related questions, and having delivery details shown upfront saved Koala’s customer service team time handling these inquiries. 

Consulting Contentsquare, Scott and his team found people spent an average of 43 seconds on Koala’s website across all page groups — not enough time to sell a visitor on a high-end furniture product emotionally. Having more information could hamper the decision-making process. 

The Koala product team A/B tested moving the delivery checker widget later in the funnel, and found that this improved add-to-cart, conversion rates, and checkout stats: 

Information overload is real, and removing distractions for your visitors can give them a better experience.

2. Test your assumptions 

Conventional e-commerce wisdom says cross-selling helps to increase your average order value (AOV). 

It’s worked for businesses like Costco and B&Q.

But unlike Costco, Koala’s luxury furniture wasn’t the type (most) people bought on a whim. An average basket size of $1000 meant slower purchase decisions over a few days. 

If you’re spending a thousand dollars, a few hundred more on a recommended item isn’t chump change. Therefore, was a cross-sell widget a good fit for Koala’s UX and selection of high-end products? 

The team used A/B testing and Contentsquare’s Zoning Analysis’s click metrics to validate their assumptions. In the Japan market, they focused on only cross-selling super-relevant and discounted products, improving year-on-year cross-sell rates by 16-20% 

Once again, applying the less is more principle helped Koala improve add-to-cart rates and order completions, bringing in over AUD 350k incremental revenue per quarter.  

3. You can’t learn if you don’t fail 

When to comes to experimentation, it’s better to fail a few times than to always succeed. To walk the talk, Scott’s team removed a feature that they thought would be helpful but wasn’t. 

At Koala, visitors usually have a multi-session purchase journey. After seeing a product on the Koala website for the first time, they’ll take a few days to research product reviews and competing products.

Consulting Contentsquare, Scott and his team saw apparent differences in how people browsed the website depending on where they were on their decision journey. 

The team hypothesized shorter buying processes would help conversions. They developed a ‘favorites’ feature for customers to save products they were interested in, making it easier for customers to continue the buying journey. 

But after deployment, they realised that people weren’t using the feature as much as they thought. There was in fact, minimal impact on add-to-cart, order completion, or revenue metrics, which led the team to removing the feature. 

The learning? Even though you thought something was going to be useful for users, always listen to the data and always put your users first. 

3 user experience tips from Scott on designing for simplicity in a chaotic digital world 

1. More information doesn’t always work for people with short attention spans: Too much information at the wrong stage of the customer journey can be detrimental to UX and business metrics. Ask yourself if the information is necessary, and always A/B test to validate your assumptions. 
2. Review and test your assumptions at least once a month. Questioning if conventional e-commerce best practices applied to Koala uncovered hidden opportunities for improvement. 
3. Embrace failure and be ready to kill your darlings:  Sometimes things just don’t work as expected, and that’s okay! Either iterate or prepare to kill the feature if people don’t find it helpful or if there’s no significant impact on your usage metrics. 

If you couldn’t attend CX Circle Sydney, don’t worry because we’ve got you covered. You can catch all sessions on demand here. 

The post How Koala adopts simplicity in their UX and product design appeared first on Contentsquare.

The clue’s in the name: Peak seasons are always a big deal for eCommerce brands. Whether it’s Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day or Cyber Week, the holiday season is invariably the busiest time of year for retailers.

However, it’s never been as critical as it is now to take advantage of seasonal surges.

Over half (57%) of retail sites saw less traffic YoY in 2023, according to our 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report. At the same time, ad spend rose. This pushed cost per visit up by +12.4%.

This means it costs more than ever to attract visitors to your site. And to make matters worse, the visitors you manage to attract will also have less money to spend on online shopping.

According to Bazaarvoice’s Shopper Experience Index (SEI) 17, 73% of consumers have changed their spending habits due to the cost of living crisis, with 77% choosing to spend less on non-essential products.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for online retailers.

The peak season opportunity (backed up with some Black Friday data)

With cash-strapped shoppers looking to find the best bang for their buck in 2024, brands have plenty of scope to attract and retain new customers right now. Indeed, Bazaarvoice’s Shopper Experience Index reports that 70% of shoppers are currently willing to switch brands

And peak season, when shoppers are primed to look for the best deals on offer and eCommerce sales figures tend to spike, is the perfect time to capitalize on this opportunity.

To get a handle on just how big the peak opportunity is, let’s look at some eCommerce peak season stats from Contentsquare’s 2024 Retail Peak Season Benchmarks, an analysis of website performance over 2023’s Black Friday period.

• During Black Friday weekend (from Black Friday to Cyber Monday), traffic shot up by +32.7% in volume from pre-peak levels
• Conversion rates also jumped (from 2.4% to 3.55%) over Black Friday weekend
• And order volumes for the Black Friday weekend period increased from the previous year, too, with Average Order Value up +7.7% YoY

The pressure is on to make the most of the next eCommerce peak season—and we can help you take some of that pressure off.

In this in-depth article, we run through some tips for preparing your website (and app) for peak season success.

And there’s more where that came from.

To learn more strategies for getting your website ready for peak (complete with examples of big eCommerce brands optimizing their digital experiences to drive better outcomes, both in and out of peak season) download our handy how-to guide.

How to prepare for peak sale season

A guide to seasonal site optimization with UX examples from 9 big brand retailers.

Get my copy

3 steps to prep for eCommerce peak season

In the dynamic realm of eCommerce, preparation is the key to thriving during peak shopping seasons like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Valentine’s, Halloween and Christmas.

Digital leaders know that planning thoroughly in advance is essential for not only surviving but excelling during these periods of heightened online activity and customer demand.

But how can you make sure that your eCommerce business’s site is ready for the peak season?

It’s a three-step process…

Step 1: Optimize your website and app for the best customer experience

The first and arguably most pivotal step is to evaluate and optimize your existing digital channels well in advance of the peak season frenzy.

Know your visitor (before they visit!)

Of course, what the ‘best customer experience’ looks like depends on the sort of customer you’re serving. With that in mind, it helps to understand what the typical peak visitor will look like.

While this naturally differs for every business, you can get a general idea of what to expect by checking out our 2024 Peak Season Benchmark data.

This tells you (among other things) that last year’s peak visitors:

• Were overwhelmingly browsing on mobile
• Mostly arrived via paid or organic search
• Were mostly new visitors (though returning visitors had a much, much higher conversion rate)
• Were frustrated first and foremost by JavaScript errors and slow page loads

One traffic trend to be aware of (a trend covered extensively in Bazaarvoice’s Shopper Experience Index report) is the growing importance of social media.

Bazaarvoice reports that over half (58%) of shoppers say they often discover a product or service through social media—and among 18-34 year olds, 73% have bought products via social media in the last year.

Cultivate customer satisfaction with Digital Experience Analytics

Whoever your visitors are, and however they arrive on your sites, your goal when preparing for peak is to ensure that your digital experience (and therefore their holiday shopping experience) is as engaging and frustration-free as possible.

Visitor frustration is a big problem in the digital experience domain, and our 2024 Peak Digital Experience Benchmark data shows that 2 in 5 (40.2%) of sessions were marred by some form of it over the course of 2023’s Black Friday season.

By drawing insights from prior experiences and harnessing data from an Experience Intelligence platform with Digital Experience Analytics (DXA), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), Voice of Customer and Product Analytics capabilities, you can make informed decisions to reduce frustration and maximize engagement.

A great Experience Intelligence Platform will enable you to:

• Evaluate the performance of your page and screen elements so you can make adjustments to your page and screen layouts, copy, imagery and the positioning of content
• Identify and fix visitor frustration in your experience and investigate root cause so you can quickly fix technical errors and UX-design issues
• Compare your performance to your industry peers and understand how seasonal trends are impacting your numbers during eCommerce peak season by accessing real-time industry benchmark data
• Access real-time, 360-degree insights into your catalog’s performance and optimize (by, for exampling pricing competitively when high prices are impacting your bottom line)
• Understand the impact of user generated content on your KPIs and how to optimize its placement and timing in your visitor journeys (see below).

Want to learn more about Digital Experience Analytics and Digital Experience Monitoring? Watch our short explainer videos below.

Deploy User Generated Content to foster trust and drive online sales this eCommerce peak season

For eCommerce brands, it’s become increasingly important to provide site visitors and app users with the social proof that comes with User Generated Content (UGC).

Customers trust other customers more than they trust brands. Bazaarvoice’s Shopper Experience Index survey found that 78% of customers feel more confident in making a purchase when they can see UGC on the product page—and 55% say they’re unlikely to make a purchase without it.

And with the cost of living crisis making every purchase decision a little (or a lot) weightier, and customers looking for endorsements to give them confidence, UGC is becoming ever more pivotal: 35% of customers globally (and 43% of US customers) rely on UGC more in the current climate, according to Bazaarvoice.

Featuring UGC on your product pages is one proven strategy to drive better outcomes during peak season—but it’s far from the only one.

Don’t forget to check out our guide to seasonal site optimization for more tips on driving conversions through smarter site and app design.

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Step 2: Follow the user journey, from campaigns to conversion

On-site optimizations can do a lot for you, but not everything happens in-site.

As you read this, you’re probably running at least one advertising campaign (and maybe even several at once) that’s driving traffic to your site and consuming your budget.

It wouldn’t be wise to lose sight of how all that inbound traffic arrives on your site, or to forget to ensure that, wherever they come from, their journey is as smoothly integrated as possible.

Establishing seamless connections across your digital ecosystem is imperative. If you’re to perform at your best during eCommerce peak season, you won’t have time to consolidate data and information across different platforms.

So make sure you integrate your Google or Adobe Analytics campaigns with your Experience Intelligence platform to create a comprehensive monitoring framework in advance.

This integration equips you with the ability to track and comprehend the performance of your marketing campaigns, thereby enabling the development of a digital experience that optimally directs traffic and enhances conversion rates.

Beyond marketing campaigns, as a general rule, integrate as much customer information as you can. VoC, APM solutions, Web Analytics, A/B Testing… all of them could work together and enhance and supercharge your marketing tech stack.

To get an even more comprehensive understanding of your visitors and what makes them engage, return and convert, you should use Product Analytics to track and analyze user journeys across multiple sessions spanning your website, app and other branded experiences.

Obtaining this knowledge is crucial not only for your ability to respond in the short-term, but also for future analysis and to lead you to better and more efficient campaigns.

Step 3: Embrace real-time analysis and automation

Customer data flows incessantly during peak seasons—and you can’t rely on manual methods to make sense of it. It’ll be too time-consuming and slow.

Instead, you should embrace automation as your ally in efficiently managing the inundation of data. Implementing integrations that automate routine tasks and decisions will enable seamless operation when the crucial moment arrives.

The capacity to analyze data in real-time is equally indispensable.

Leveraging machine learning and AI-driven insights empower you to make instantaneous, data-supported decisions, identify trends, make predictions regarding customer behavior and mount proactive responses.

Such real-time adaptability can determine whether you capitalize on surges in demand or miss out on valuable opportunities.

Contentsquare’s Experience Intelligence platform empowers businesses with various real-time analytic capabilities, including:

• Advanced AI that helps you understand the customer experience in real time. Metrics such as Frustration Score can make sense of diverse information (Rage clicks, load times, hesitation, …) to understand when customers are struggling in real-time.
• Real-time alerts and dashboards, to keep control of your most important KPIs and trigger alerts that bring the most urgent, disruption-causing issues to your team’s attention
• Reporting and communication tools that get the right alert to the right team using the right channels, whether in the form of a a Jira Ticket or a Slack message

Retailers, hit peak eCommerce peak season performance with Contentsquare

Our Experience Intelligence platform provides thousands of retailers and eCommerce brands with insight into shoppers’ behaviors, feelings and intent, helping them to build more effective customer experiences on their websites and apps.

For eCommerce brands looking to make their next eCommerce peak season pop, one of our key integration partners is Bazaarvoice, a full funnel user generated content (UGC) platform for eCommerce brands.

As we mentioned earlier, UGC is hugely important for driving conversions—particularly during peak season, when shoppers are bombarded with rival promotional offers and are looking for reasons to buy from your brand.

By integrating Contentsquare with Bazaarvoice, you can get a better understanding of the impact that user UGC, ratings, and reviews are having on your engagement metrics, conversion rates, and online revenue.

You can read more about how this integration enhances both Contentsquare and Bazaarvoice here.

Want to see exactly what Contentsquare can do for your brand as we approach peak season? Book a demo: We can’t wait to show you.

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This article seeks to answer all these questions and looks at practical examples from the recent CX Circle talk given by Katie Hardisty Smith, Head of eCommerce at LOOKFANTASTIC.

What is phygital customer experience? (And why should you care?)

Today’s forward-thinking brands seek stronger connections with their customers. They’re looking for more loyalty, deeper engagement, and an increased customer lifetime value (CLV) based on trust and long-term relationships. For many, the phygital customer experience is the answer.

If you hadn’t sussed it out yet, Phygital is a portmanteau word combining (phy)sical and dig(ital). It describes the process of using technology to link the customer experience in the physical and digital spaces. For traditional brands, this means taking the best of the in store experience and replicating that personal service online. For digital-first brands, it means finding ways to expand the digital experience into the physical and add elements of the classic in store experience for customers.

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Phygital also means unifying the customer experience across digital and physical channels. There must be synergy. Or, as Katie Hardisty Smith put it in her talk: “Brands need to establish the same aesthetic and identity both digitally and physically to create a circular approach that people want to engage with.”

Brands can do this in different ways. It might be as simple as allowing easy online ordering for in-store pick up. It could mean installing tablets or other digital devices in physical stores where customers can search for specific stock or place orders. Or it could involve creating real-world events that customers can attend in person or stream online.

Smartphones are embedded into our daily lives, taking up around 40% of our waking hours, on average. Phygital is the natural response to this. Customers want to be able to access their favourite brands at any given time via any channel. In that sense, the phygital experience is also the natural next step from the concept of the omnichannel customer experience.

The benefits of phygital customer experience

There are many potential benefits for brands that create compelling phygital experiences.

Loyalty and retention

The first is to increase customer loyalty and retention. Brands that can provide seamless experiences across channels will stand out to customers. By contrast, those that can’t will frustrate and irritate customers, driving them away.

Consider a brand which offers a quick and easy store locator and gives you a choice of locations for picking up online orders. Or a clothing store that allows you to order online and then offers to pick up any returns from your door.

Offering consistency and personalised service across channels is table stakes in today’s competitive eCommerce environment. Get it right, and customers will keep on returning.

Brand awareness

Another key benefit of Phygital is increased brand awareness. Setting up an engaging pop-up stall in a buzzing shopping mall can drive traffic to a brand’s website to take advantage of exclusive offers, for example.

Curating and serving the right content to customers via social media, messaging apps and email can generate a huge amount of buzz around a brand, especially if those messages are tied in with physical events like the in-store launch of a new product that digital subscribers get notified about in advance.

Competitive advantage

Creating phygital experiences can help you stand out from your competitors. In her talk, Katie Hardisty Smith mentioned an example of a poor phygital experience. In her case, a clothing store had persuaded her to buy multiple items at once thanks to personalised messaging, tailored web pages and tailored offers. Sadly, she had to return some items. To do so involved visiting a physical store where the service was terrible.

This created a disconnect between the online and physical environments, which is deadly to providing a true, phygital experience. Most brands still don’t do this well. As a result, those that do really stand out in the minds of customers. In her talk, Katie went on to mention the superb click-and-collect service provided by one of the UK’s biggest grocery stores, ASDA. Free advertising to a room of marketing professionals—all from a single positive phygital experience.

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Increased conversions and sales

While there are many more potential benefits to getting this right, the main one is of course the boost brands receive in sales and conversions.

Offering a great omnichannel experience across phytigal and digital, leads to driving more footfall to stores from online traffic, and more online traffic from store visitors. It means building a real bond with customers which makes your brand top of mind for them. And it means they’ll prefer to buy from you over others in your space.

Examples of phygital customer experiences

It’s all well and good talking about what phygital is and its potential benefits. You likely want some ideas about how to incorporate this with your brand. This is where Katie Hardisty Smith’s recent CX Circle talk proved very useful, as she went through several examples of where her online beauty brand LOOKFANTASTIC. had applied the concept successfully.

This is especially interesting since LOOKFANTASTIC. is a digital-only brand which operates without any physical stores. How can a brand without a permanent physical presence get phygital?

Pretty easily, it turns out, with a little strategic thinking and the help of some clever technology.

Example 1: Live shopping at Coachella

The first example she gave was of a LOOKFANTASTIC trip to the Coachella Valley arts and music festival in California. The company took a couple of beauty influencers on the journey and brought the whole experience to life for their customers via their social media channels.

They hosted Q&As with their influencers. They streamed live shopping on TikTok. In short, they digitised the physical experience, recreating it for the thousands of customers who would never get the chance to visit Coachella.

To boost brand awareness, they set up their own pop-up stand in the Arndale Shopping Centre in Manchester and the Battersea development in London.

“This allowed us to interact with our customers, build our brand, give experiences new life and meaning digitally—so we could then drive a sustained experience,” Katie said.

Example 2: Foundation finder

One really impactful phygital experience involved the introduction of the Foundation Finder tool to their website, which Katie described as “a game changer”.

“Traditionally, finding the right foundation for you has been a visit to one of the numerous beauty counters within a large department store where we put our faith in a makeup artist already wearing too much foundation herself to actually find the right match in those lights,” she said.

The Foundation Finder asks a series of questions, for example about the customers’ skin tones and preferred coverage, with a database of 3,500 swatches from multiple brands. This helps the user to find their shade in the foundation of their choice based on what they currently use.

The secret to great phygital experiences

“Whether you’re a working mom that needs a fast alternative foundation or you’re a Tik Tok-obsessed beauty lover that wants that full community experience, we have got something for you and we are there with you whenever you need us,” Katie concluded.

This is the secret of success when it comes to creating your own phygital experiences. Focus on your customer needs and—with the help of the right technology, strategic thinking and some experimentation—you’ll be able to come up with experiences that your customers will love too.

The post Why “phygital” is the future of customer experience appeared first on Contentsquare.

The company attracts tens of thousands of customers daily, and any opportunity to improve customer experience is a potential revenue generator. Investing in digital experience analytics is helping them reduce customer friction and better understand their customers. 

Speaking at CX Circle Melbourne, Kelly Truong, MyDeal’s Experience Design Lead, shared how Contentsquare helps MyDeal’s UX team track non-interactions, proactively spot frustration and make data-driven decisions.

Here are three tips from MyDeal to help you optimize your customer journey. 

#1. Observe non-interactions to get a complete picture of customer behavior 

Experience metrics like hesitation time, attractiveness rate, and scroll rate hold clues to why your customers behave the way they do and how you can improve their digital experience to drive conversions. 

However, traditional web analytics platforms don’t track these non-interactions. You’ll need to do some serious guesswork based on your existing data or set up specific event tags to collect the data. 

Both options aren’t ideal in the long run. Here’s how MyDeal navigated this sticky situation. 

Challenge 

Data tracking was a pain for Kelly’s team before Contentsquare. Their existing tools couldn’t collect data retroactively, so they had to know the goals and digital components they wanted to monitor beforehand. 

As a result, they didn’t have any data on questions they didn’t expect—relying on assumptions, industry best practices, and gut feel to fill the gaps. 

In Kelly’s eyes, this was not proactive or effecient, so they turned to Contentsquare to get the answers they needed. 

Action: 

On Contentsquare, Kelly’s team first created workspaces for each of their key pages to monitor performance across pages and zones. The team also made custom alerts to detect performance anomalies. 

What’s more, Contentsquare’s tagless implementation meant Kelly no longer needed to painstakingly pre-plan event tags to get data. Contentsquare automatically captures every click, scroll, hover, and swipe, helping Kelly’s team answer questions they weren’t expecting with confidence. 

Results: 

Kelly and her team can now track the non-interactions they need to analyze what visitors found engaging, helpful, or frustrating. Together with Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis and Session Replay features, she has a 360-degree view of how customers use their digital platforms. 

The new experience metrics Kelly can access to measure customer behavior with Contentsquare

These insights unlocked a more flexible and efficient way for her team to work. At a glance, Kelly knows what’s working and needs improvement, helping her team address issues more proactively. It’s also easier for Kelly’s team to choose specific segments or journeys to optimize further, allowing the UX team to be more proactive and less reactive. 

#2. Don’t wait for users to complain

Every minute customers spend having a frustrating experience on your website can be thousands of dollars in revenue lost. And according to our 2023 Digital Experience Benchmark Report, more than one in three website visits cause frustration, affecting engagement and conversion. 

Thus, spotting and solving any frustration quickly is vital, especially on your product, category, and checkout pages. Here’s how Kelly’s team used Contentsquare to spot frustrations and devise a solution to avoid revenue loss.

Challenge: 

Using Contentsquare’s Zone Based Heat Mapping, team noticed that customers were clicking up to five times more frequently on a credit card form field at checkout.

The troubling signs didn’t stop there. The team found that customers clicked on the Confirm and Pay button twice as often—indicating frustration and a high risk of losing customers before conversion. 

Action: 

When Kelly and her team find a potential issue, they use the WWWWWA acronym to break it down and analyze it constructively:

• Who experiences it? 
• What is the purpose? 
• Where is it visible? 
• Why is it there? 
• Are there any dependencies? 

With this method, they can interpret an issue in the proper context, understand the customer’s perspective, and account for any dependencies before making a recommendation. 

How my deal’s UX team analyzed an issue using the WWWWWWA problem-solving method

Results: 

Kelly’s team shared insight on customer behavior and device information to help their analysts and developers quickly determine how to fix the error. Conversion rates went up by 2% while reducing fix times. 

#3. Transcend guesswork and gut feeling with data 

Picture this: you’ve had a great sales week. 

But what made it successful? Was it the quality of your sales offer? Or did a web banner or a button perform exceptionally well? Countless factors can influence your conversions and sales, making identifying the exact reason challenging. 

But, with the right insights, you can make your website work harder and improve sales. Or, in Kelly’s case, triple a homepage carousel’s return on investment (ROI). 

Let’s find out how the team got there. 

Challenge: 

Before Contentsquare, Kelly and her team couldn’t tell which parts of their website were driving sales, preventing them from making informed recommendations to the marketing and merchandising teams to improve engagement. 

The team spotted an opportunity for improvement with Contentsquare. Even though their home page was their fourth most visited page on mobile devices, most people spent only 27 seconds on it and barely scrolled. 

MyDeal’s initial homepage engagement metrics on mobile

Action: 

Using Zoning Analysis, they compared homepage engagement over the peak Christmas and Boxing Day sales season with the post-Christmas and Back to School season, looking at metrics like tap rate, exposure rate, attractiveness, and revenue generated.

The four metrics MyDeal used to compare homepage engagement on mobile devices.

Kelly’s team found their Categories carousel and Product Recommenders at the end of the home page had significantly higher engagement and attractiveness than the carousel at the start of the page. They hypothesized that labeled carousels show more products and break up the content on mobile, encouraging deeper browsing. 

Difference in carousel engagement rates from the beginning of the homepage (1.68%) to the end of the homepage (4.38%)

Results: 

This simple change helped them see a massive improvement in their Trending Categories homepage carousel, generating 336% more revenue and doubling click rates on a page view and session level. 

Engagement metrics and ROI before and after the change in carousel

3 key takeaways to optimize your customer journey: 

Be proactive, not reactive: Online user experiences matter and affect customer conversion and retention. Keep an eye on critical conversion points like checkout pages for any signs of user frustration to avoid losing revenue opportunities.

Make decisions on actual data: Many factors influence conversions and sales. With the correct data to pinpoint what made a campaign successful, you can replicate its success or find opportunities to improve. 

Don’t be afraid to ask why:  Spotted a potential issue? Be sure to analyze the context, understand the views of different teams, and any limitations before you make a recommendation. Structured inquiry methods like WWWWWWA help organize your thoughts.

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The company’s collaborative approach has paid off. Thanks in part to its close relationship with other departments, as well as a rigorous testing culture and regular customer contact, Ecosa’s UX team has run a host of tests and experiments that have improved conversion rates.

Speaking at CX Circle Melbourne, Ecosa’s Lead Product/UX Designer Michelle Eynon, shared how Contentsquare’s insights have helped test and validate her team’s UX experiments while drawing on customer insights to create a seamless digital customer experience. 

Here are four strategies Ecosta has used that you can follow to emulate their success.

#1. Test, test—and test again

Social proof and intuitive navigation are two things customers look out for when buying a product from your company. 

But what’s the most effective way to bring them together in your UX designs? 

You might have assumptions about that, but they will need to be validated. And that’s  where testing proves invaluable. 

Hypothesis 

According to Ecosa’s customer research, customer reviews and star ratings help customers decide on purchases. 

The team hypothesized that making product reviews more visible would positively affect customer engagement.

Ecosa’s new product tile

Test

Ecosa’s UX team created a new tile for product pages that summarizes product reviews and highlighted star ratings so customers could see them at a glance. 

To see if visitors would interact with this new tile, the team A/B tested two versions of it on Contentsquare, tracking attractiveness and exposure rates.

Results

After applying Contentsquare’s Zone Based Heat Maps to the A/B test results, it was obvious which tile was the winner. 

Customers interacted more with the new tile when it showcased product reviews and star ratings and were more likely to scroll down to read the information on it. This meant its attractiveness rose from 1.99% to 5.02%.

What’s more, with product reviews and star ratings featured on the tile,  conversion rates via rose by 7% 

#2. Stay close to your customers

Understanding your customers’ needs presents you with opportunities to help them make informed decisions. 

Here’s how Ecosa combined customer journey data from Contentsquare with research to improve conversion rates. 

Challenge and hypothesis 

Ecosa’s customer research showed that their customers would research and compare several brands before purchasing. 

Michelle’s team hypothesized that providing customers with a comparative tool on their product pages would help drive conversions.  

Action 

To help customers with their research, Ecosa created a competitive analysis section on the Ecosa Pillow product page, making sure to include key selling points of their pillow products that aren’t supplied by their competitors’ pillow products.

Following positive results on new customer conversion rates as a result of this change, the team continued to optimize. 

After seeing high click-through rates on the competitor subhead, Ecosa’s UX team tested a second pillow page variant, further elaborating on how its pillows stand out from the competition, and calling out its trial period return policy.

Results 

Using Contentsquare, the UX team found that having a competitor comparison on the pillow product page improved new customer conversions by an amazing 28%. 

Both tests resulted in an 18% increase in conversion rate.

#3. Speak to customer-facing teams 

Conducting customer interviews and consulting behavioral data aren’t the only ways to uncover customer pain points. 

You should also prioritize speaking to your customer-facing teams, such as customer service, product and procurement. 

Here’s how an insight from customer service helped Michelle’s team improve conversions by 8%—making their customer service team happier in the process. 

Challenge and hypothesis 

Ecosa’s customer service team brought it to Michelle’s team’s attention that 3.9% of pre-purchase calls to customer service were querying available sizes of the  Ecosa mattress.. 

Upon inspection, the UX team realized that this sizing information needed to be clarified on the website.

Action 

Ecosa’s UX team put together a quick, and highly effective, initial solution – inserting mattress specifications (including sizes) on the website for customers to read. 

This quick fix halved the number of pre-purchase calls concerning mattress sizing from 3.9% to 2.1%.

Later, the team created a new information drop-down area (including mattress measurements) as part of a new product page design. 

This made that essential information easier to find, further reducing pre-purchase calls concerning mattress sizing to 1.32% .

Results 

With product information now easy for customers to locate, pre-purchase calls to customer service dropped by 300%—and conversions rose by 8%. 

#4. Use behavioral data to learn how customers interact with your site

Understanding how your visitors behave on your website is the first step towards deciphering what frustrates them and how they interact with a site to get what they want. And it’s this understanding that informs how Ecosa’s UX team designs the company’s digital experience for its customers. 

Challenge and hypothesis 

Customers have low attention spans. They tend to scan, rather than read, your online content. And according to our recent Digital Experience Benchmark report, they only scroll an average of 50% down pages.

It’s essential to make it easy for customers to find the most critical information about the product they’re looking at, ideally without having to scroll. 

You might, for example, cater to this behavior by adding a product summary or other eye-catching information at the top of a product  page. 

That’s exactly what Michelle’s team decided to do, and test.  

Action 

Ecosa’s UX team worked with its product and procurement teams to create a ‘Best For’ section at the top of each product page, highlighting the key selling points of each product. 

The team ran an A/B test with Contentsquare to validate their new version, comparing conversions, exposure and attractiveness metrics. 

Results 

When product pages included the product summary up top, they performed significantly better. 

Actually, that’s an understatement: They saw 16% conversion rate boost and 173% increase in engagement.

3 key takeaways for creating a better digital experience 

Keep things simple: Not all changes need to be huge. Simple solutions can reap huge rewards without having to take up a lot of time and/or resources. 

Stay close to your customers:  Regular customer research helps you understand what they’re looking for and will help you develop content that helps them along the purchase journey. 

Go beyond data:  Customer-facing teams can provide valuable insights on enhancing user experience that may not be evident through data analysis.

Want to see how Contentsquare can help you understand how to optimize your digital experience? Watch the 6 minute demo below. Then drop us a line.

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