Just recently, our CEO talked about the beginning of our journey in offering Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) solutions. Now, after years of tailored work, from mapping the importance of website optimization to strategizing the means and ways to improve site performance, conducting A/B tests, and using the results to boost marketing efforts, we can say that we exceeded our own expectations, and became quite versed in this field.

CRO has become the mainstream effort to find the most optimized website version. It is ‘the’ tool to differentiate a brand’s website by understanding visitor behavior, making observations, building a testing pipeline, executing the tests from observed statistical results, and engaging through new-age channels.

At Sogody, we have been doing CRO as part of our Experimentation Service. With tools like Google Optimize and Optimizely, throughout our work, we increased the percentage of users who performed a desired action on different brands’ websites, be they Shopify build or a Headless architecture.

In one of our most recent success stories, our client, Every foods, wanted to find a way for customers to add toppings as “add-ons” to the cart at a later stage, before reaching the checkout. The plan was to try out a cart recommendation variation and another one where we showed the add-ons in a pop-up form before the user goes to checkout.

The AOV increase for Every

The main objective of most e-commerces is conversions, hence 90% of our A/B testing is built with one objective in mind: enhancing the website in various ways to earn more conversions or increase the average order value (AOV). A successful A/B test we ran recently for Every, conducted how the cross-sells are displayed to the end users.

By analyzing vast amounts of data in various channels, such as reading heatmaps and Google Analytics, we fathomed that people had an affinity to pick cross-sell products. Now the goal was to suggest new Every toppings to its customers as cross-sell products. However, we did not want to bombard the user with a ton of product information, instead, we intended to increase the AOV by using recommendations.

To decide on the best way that we could display these cross-sells, we tested the two following variants:

• In the A variant, the cross-sells were shown as recommendations in the cart, meaning they were in a less focused spot on the website.

• In the B variant, we showed cross-sells in the middle of the screen after the user intended to checkout (taking the main focus).

Both variations were set up on the Shop page and the traffic was split 50/50. The experiment was running for a few weeks, and after the experimentation ended, we found out that Every’s customer base, preferred to have their cross-sells as recommendations in the cart. This made the A variant the winning one.

After the winning variant was implemented on the live site, we observed a 7-10% increase in average order value for the customers who add a cross-sell product to their cart.

The user-centric approach to CRO

A brand aiming for conversions must understand its users. That’s why we consider user experience strategy as part of our entire CRO process. We start by looking at the business objectives, goals, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) a brand is aiming to achieve so that we understand how they want their website to perform and how to measure success; then we move on to talking about how users actually interact with their site: what are their pain points, what type of interactions do they prefer, what are the main frictions when using the website? Once the dots are connected, we will create an optimal solution so it can be launched and observed for statistical data.

Focusing on the final action—the conversion—is obviously important, but in reality, a lot happens before that point.

We dig deeper to understand the why beyond the data a brand has. We are not the ones to use ‘best practices’ when optimizing, however, from all the work that we have done for our clients, we have been improving and making the changes that will be recognized as 'best practices' in a few years.