Personalized Promotions Raise Conversions

There are a lot of ways to personalize the user experience, for example by location, item views, user profile, time of day, and more. This brand, a top chain of health food stores with a large ecommerce business, regularly tests personalized campaigns as part of their effort to continually improve user experience and conversions. In this experiment, they sought to better target promotions for customers based on their interaction with a brand subscription box.

The Test

This retailer offers a subscription box service that customers can personalize to their tastes that includes a range of items that match users’ self-generated profiles. The top banner of the website is dedicated to promoting this newly launched subscription box, and offers promotions and incentives for subscription.

The brand suspected that personalizing the specifics of the promotion to each individual visitor might better highlight the value of the service and increase conversions. To do this, they ran an A/B structured test for users on desktop, mobile, and tablet devices, with three personalization options:

1. Visitors who had not engaged with the subscription box at all were presented with a generic discount on their first subscription box order.
2. Visitors who had clicked and viewed the subscription box details, but had not purchased yet, were presented with the same discount plus recommended items and a more prominent call to action.
3. Visitors who purchased the subscription box were presented with a reminder to preview their purchases or add recurring items to their orders.

The goal of this test was to determine whether it encouraged more productive engagement with the promotional messaging, increased conversions, or lifted revenue.

Results and Next Steps

Views of this subscription service increased by 15% over the course of the month long test, and add to bags saw a 16% increase. Purchases increased by 17%. The brand saw no negative revenue impact site-wide in any variation. Based on these results, the brand released the personalized messaging to 100% of its site visitors.

Follow-up testing is currently being done to optimize the promotion, including increasing the prominence of the promotional content and displaying in multiple locations beyond the home page. As well as testing other images and call-to-action messaging.