The company had assembled a list of proof points they could showcase on their homepage: years in business, number of integrations, customer counts, implementation guarantees, security certifications, industry awards, analyst recognition, and more. But they only had space to highlight four of these benefits prominently below their hero section. They faced the classic messaging dilemma: which trust signals would actually move the needle with prospects evaluating B2B software?

This is where MaxDiff analysis becomes valuable. Instead of relying on stakeholder opinions or generic best practices, we could let their target buyers vote with data on what mattered most.

What makes MaxDiff analysis different from other survey methods

MaxDiff analysis (short for Maximum Difference Scaling) is a research methodology that forces trade-offs. Rather than asking people to rate items individually on a scale, MaxDiff presents sets of options and asks participants to identify the most and least important items in each set. This forced-choice format reveals true preferences because people can’t rate everything as “very important.”

Here’s why this matters: traditional rating scales often produce compressed results where everything scores high. When you ask customers, “How important is X on a scale of 1-10?” most people will hover around 7 or 8 for anything remotely relevant. You end up with a spreadsheet full of similar numbers and no clear direction.

MaxDiff cuts through that noise. By repeatedly asking “which of these five options matters most to you, and which matters least?” across different combinations, you build a statistical picture of relative importance. The math behind MaxDiff generates a best-worst score for each item, showing not just which options are preferred, but by how much.

For digital experience optimization, this methodology is particularly useful when you need to prioritize limited real estate on a website, determine which features to build first, or figure out which messaging will actually differentiate your brand.

How we structured the MaxDiff study for maximum insight

In the project for our client, we started by defining the target audience precisely. The company was a B2B SaaS platform serving mid-market operations teams, so we recruited 60 participants who matched their customer profile: director-level or above at companies with 50-500 employees, working in operations or supply chain roles, currently using at least two SaaS tools in their workflow, and actively evaluating solutions within the past six months.

From the initial audit and stakeholder interviews, we identified 11 potential trust signals the company could emphasize on its homepage. These included things like:

• Concrete numbers (customer counts, uptime percentages, integrations available)
• Credentials (security certifications, enterprise clients)
• Promises (implementation timelines, support response times, money-back guarantees)
• And more

Each represented something the company could truthfully claim, but we needed to know which ones would build the most trust with prospects evaluating the platform.

The survey design was straightforward. Each participant saw these 11 benefits randomized into multiple sets of five items. For each set, they selected the most important factor and the least important factor when considering whether to adopt this type of software. Participants completed several rounds of these comparisons, seeing different combinations each time.

This approach gave us enough data points to calculate a robust best-worst score for each benefit: the number of times it was selected as “most important” minus the number of times it was selected as “least important.” Positive scores indicate a strong preference, negative scores indicate a low importance, and the magnitude of the scores shows the strength of feeling.

The results revealed a clear hierarchy of trust signals

When we analyzed the MaxDiff results, the pattern was striking. The top-scoring benefits shared a common theme: they provided concrete evidence of proven reliability and satisfied users. The bottom-scoring benefits? They emphasized company scale and marketing visibility.

The four highest-scoring trust signals were clear winners. G2 or Capterra ratings scored 38 points (the highest possible), indicating this was nearly universal in its importance. The number of active customers scored 30 points. An implementation guarantee (“live in 30 days or your money back”) scored 25 points. And SOC 2 Type II certification scored 16 points.

These weren’t arbitrary marketing metrics. They were the specific signals that would make someone think, “this platform delivers real value and other companies trust them.”

The middle tier included operational details that registered as minor positives but weren’t decisive: the number of successful implementations (7 points), availability of 24/7 support (6 points). These signals suggested competence but didn’t particularly move the needle on trust.

Then came the surprises. Years in business scored -5 points, indicating it was slightly more often selected as “least important” than “most important.” The number of integrations available scored -11 points. AI-powered features claimed scored -15 points. Employee headcount scored -36 points. And recognition as a Gartner Cool Vendor scored -55 points, the lowest possible score.

Think about what prospects were telling us: “I don’t care that you have 200 employees or that Gartner mentioned you. Show me that real companies like mine trust you and that you’ll actually deliver on your promises.”

Why customers rejected company-focused metrics

The findings revealed an insight into trust-building that extends beyond this single company. B2B buyers weigh social proof and reliability guarantees far more heavily than they weigh indicators of company scale or industry recognition.

When a business talks about its employee headcount or analyst mentions, prospects interpret this as the company talking about itself. These metrics answer the question “How big is your business?” but not “Will this solve my problem?” From the buyer’s perspective, a larger team or Gartner mention doesn’t necessarily correlate with better software or smoother implementation.

By contrast, user reviews and customer counts answer the implicit question every prospect has: “Did this work for companies like mine?” A guarantee directly addresses risk: “What happens if implementation fails?” Security certifications address legitimacy: “Is this platform secure enough for our data?”

The AI-powered features claim scored poorly, likely because it felt trendy rather than practical. Prospects for this specific business weren’t primarily concerned about cutting-edge technology; they wanted a platform that would reliably solve their workflow problems. Leading with an AI angle, while possibly true, didn’t address the core decision-making criteria.

Years in business scored negatively for similar reasons. While longevity can signal stability, in this context, it didn’t address the prospect’s immediate concerns about implementation speed and user adoption. A company could be around for years while providing clunky software with poor support.

From insight to implementation: turning research into revenue

The MaxDiff analysis gave the company a clear action plan. We recommended implementing a four-part trust signal section directly below their homepage hero, featuring the top four scoring benefits in order of importance.

This meant reworking their existing homepage structure. Previously, they had emphasized their implementation guarantee in the hero area while burying customer counts and ratings further down the page. The research showed this approach had it backward. Prospects needed to see evidence of customer satisfaction first, then the implementation guarantee as additional reassurance.

We also recommended removing or de-emphasizing several elements they had been proud of. The employee headcount mention, the Gartner recognition, and several other low-scoring items were either removed entirely or moved to less prominent positions on the site. The goal was to prevent low-value signals from crowding out high-value ones.

The broader lesson here extends beyond this single homepage optimization. The MaxDiff results provided a messaging hierarchy that the company could apply across its entire go-to-market strategy. Email campaigns, landing pages, sales conversations, demo decks, and even their LinkedIn company page could now emphasize the trust signals that actually mattered to prospects.

When MaxDiff analysis makes sense for your business

MaxDiff is particularly valuable when you’re facing a prioritization problem with limited data. It works best in these scenarios:

• You have more options than you can implement. Whether that’s features to build, benefits to highlight, or messages to test, MaxDiff helps you choose wisely when you can’t do everything at once.
• Stakeholder opinions are conflicting. When internal debates about priorities can’t be resolved through argument, customer data settles the question. MaxDiff provides quantitative evidence for decision-making.
• You need to differentiate in a crowded market. If competitors are all saying similar things, MaxDiff reveals which specific claims will break through. Often, the winning messages are ones companies overlook because they seem “obvious” or “not unique enough.”
• You’re optimizing for a specific audience segment. Generic research about “customers in general” often produces generic insights. MaxDiff works best when you recruit participants who precisely match your target customer profile.

The methodology has limitations worth noting. It requires careful setup, and you need to know which options to test before you start.

If you don’t include the right benefits in your initial list, you won’t discover them through MaxDiff.

It also works best with a reasonably sized set of options (typically 5-15 items).

And the results tell you about relative importance, not absolute importance; everything could theoretically matter, but MaxDiff reveals the hierarchy.

How to use MaxDiff findings in your optimization strategy

Once you have MaxDiff results, the application extends beyond simply reordering homepage elements. The insights should inform your entire digital experience.

Your messaging architecture should reflect the importance hierarchy. High-scoring benefits deserve prominent placement, repetition across pages, and detailed explanation. Low-scoring benefits can either be removed or repositioned as supporting rather than leading messages.

Your testing roadmap should prioritize changes based on MaxDiff findings. If customer reviews scored highest in your study, test different ways of showcasing reviews before you test other elements. Let the data guide your experimentation priorities.

Your content strategy should emphasize what customers care about. If service guarantees scored highly, create content that explains the guarantee in detail, shares stories of when it was honored, and addresses common concerns. Build your editorial calendar around the topics MaxDiff revealed as important.

Your sales enablement should align with customer priorities. If the research showed that prospects value licensing credentials, make sure your sales team knows to emphasize this early in conversations. Create collateral that highlights the trust signals that matter most.

The most effective companies use MaxDiff as one tool in a broader research program. They combine it with qualitative research to understand why certain benefits matter, behavioral analytics to see how users interact with different messages, and continuous testing to validate that the predicted preferences translate into actual conversion improvements.

Turning guesswork into growth

The SaaS company we worked with started with a dozen possible messages and no clear sense of which would build trust most effectively with B2B buyers. After the MaxDiff analysis, they had a data-backed hierarchy that let them confidently restructure their homepage and broader messaging strategy.

This is the power of asking prospects the right questions in the right way. Not “do you like this?” which produces inflated scores for everything. Not “rank these 11 items,” which overwhelms participants and produces unreliable data. But rather, through repeated forced choices, revealing the true importance of each element.

If you’re struggling with similar prioritization challenges (too many options, limited space, stakeholder disagreement about what matters), MaxDiff analysis might be the tool that breaks through the noise. It transforms subjective opinion into statistical evidence, letting your prospects vote on what will actually convince them to choose your platform.

Ready to discover which messages actually resonate with your customers? The Good’s Digital Experience Optimization Program includes research methodologies like MaxDiff analysis to help you prioritize changes based on real customer preferences, not guesswork.

The post MaxDiff Analysis: A Case Study On How to Identify Which Benefits Actually Build Customer Trust appeared first on The Good.

While it’s essential to focus on features, user experience, and growth metrics, something many SaaS founders often underestimate is the significance of cognitive biases in pricing architecture. Understanding a few key principles of human psychology can help you guide users toward higher-priced plans.

When done correctly, psychological pricing strategies create genuine win-win scenarios where customers feel confident in their decisions while businesses optimize for sustainable growth.

The basics of SaaS pricing

The software industry’s shift from one-time purchases to subscriptions fundamentally changed consumer behavior. Unlike the old model, where companies had little incentive to maintain previously sold software, the subscription model encourages continuous updates and feature additions, benefiting the consumer.

Customers now feel a sense of ownership over the experience, and there is an inherent ongoing value perception that companies must meet. Ideally, companies take the monthly subscription fee and put it back into the product, upgrading or adding features to their software.

For companies, switching to the subscription model significantly boosted valuations. It also opened up opportunities for tiered pricing that wasn’t relevant for the one-time purchase model. It allows businesses to cater to different customer segments and extract value based on usage or features.

Successfully structuring SaaS pricing involves more than just crunching numbers; it requires an understanding of consumer psychology. By aligning pricing strategies with how users perceive value, make decisions, and react to choices, SaaS companies can craft pricing that not only attracts but also retains customers.

An overview of SaaS pricing models

The SaaS industry employs various pricing models beyond simple monthly or annual subscriptions, often adapting to the value delivered and the specific use case.

Subscription-based (annual recurring revenue)

This is the most common model, where customers pay a recurring fee (e.g., monthly or annually) for access to the software. Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is a key metric for SaaS companies, representing the total revenue expected from all active subscriptions over a year.

As mentioned above, the subscription model benefits consumers by providing ongoing updates and improvements, rather than a one-time purchase that quickly becomes outdated.

Companies that offer subscription-based pricing: Netflix, Hulu, Spotify (premium), Apple Music

Seat-based

This model charges based on the number of users or “seats” that have access to the software. Pricing scales linearly with team size, making it predictable for both the company and customer. This model works particularly well for collaboration tools and enterprise software, where value increases with the number of users.

Seat-based pricing aligns cost with usage in a way that feels fair to customers—small teams pay less, larger organizations pay more. It also creates natural expansion revenue as companies grow their teams.

Companies that use seat-based pricing: Slack (per active user per month), Zoom (per license), Asana (per team member), Monday.com (per user), Microsoft 365 (per user license)

Freemium or feature-based

A freemium pricing model offers a basic version of the product for free, with limited features or usage, while charging for advanced features or increased functionality.

Companies that use a freemium pricing model: Canva (access to limited features by giving an email address), Spotify (free model with ads and limited functionality), Figma (three free designs before payment is required).

Skill-based

A pricing model that is driven by AI tools, skill-based pricing up-charges for advanced knowledge versions of the product rather than just features. Companies offer different tiers that represent varying levels of the tool’s competency, from basic automation to expert-level performance. Pricing reflects the sophistication and accuracy of the work delivered.

Companies implementing skill-based pricing: ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) vs. ChatGPT Pro ($200/month for higher capability)

Usage-Based / Tokenization

Another option emerging with AI tools, this model charges based on the value delivered, such as the number of hits, credits consumed, or output produced (e.g., minutes of video). This often supplements a base subscription.

Companies on a token-based model: Opus, a video clipping software, where you buy “tokens” to produce content.

Hybrid Models

Many companies combine these approaches into a hybrid model. For instance, a base monthly subscription might include a certain number of “tokens,” with additional tokens available for purchase.

How consumer psychology plays into SaaS pricing

Within these different pricing models, there are usually tiers of service offered.

Consumer psychology plays a crucial role in both how pricing models are perceived and how the tiers of your plan are chosen.

In Jon MacDonald’s book, Behind The Click, which explores the psychology behind user behavior, he says, “what feels true is often more real than what is actually true,” highlighting the power of emotional appeals over pure logic in decision-making.

People make quick decisions based on mental shortcuts. Pricing tiers should align with these shortcuts rather than creating friction. “The less effort it takes to process information, the easier we can make decisions and move on to the next task,” says Jon.

To better understand the connection between consumer psychology and SaaS pricing, consider these principles.

Key Psychological Principles in SaaS Pricing

• Anchoring Bias
  • Meaning: People overly rely on the first piece of information they encounter (the “anchor”) when making subsequent decisions.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: The initial price presented, or the first tier a user sees, can heavily influence their perception of value for all other tiers. Companies should carefully consider which tier to highlight first. Avoid leading with discounts if the goal is to establish premium value.
• Priming Effect
  • Meaning: Subtle cues (words, images) can influence subsequent thoughts and actions.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: The language, imagery, and overall design of a pricing page can introduce or “prime” customers to associate certain emotions or benefits with different tiers. For example, using visuals of a simplified workflow for a basic tier and a thriving, collaborative team for an enterprise tier.
• “Bye-Now” Effect
  • Meaning: Merely reading the word “bye” can subconsciously nudge people to think of “buy.”
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: Although subtle, this suggests that carefully chosen words in calls to action or surrounding copy on pricing pages can have a minor,subliminal influence on conversion.
• Ikea Effect
  • Meaning: People feel more attached to items they’ve created or had a hand in assembling.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: If a SaaS product offers customization, highlighting how users can tailor features or workflows can increase their sense of ownership and commitment, making them more likely to subscribe and retain.
• Decision Fatigue
  • Meaning: The more decisions made, the more mentally drained one becomes, leading to poorer decisions.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: Limit the number of choices presented on a pricing page. Use clear distinctions between tiers, recommend a “most popular” option, and provide comparison charts that simplify complex information.
• Less-Is-Better Effect
  • Meaning: People might prefer a lower-quality item when presented alone, but their preference can flip when compared to better options.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: When presenting tiered options, strategically place a slightly less impressive (but still functional) tier next to a desired middle-tier option. This makes the middle tier appear more valuable and appealing.
• Decoy Effect
  • Meaning: Introducing a clearly inferior “decoy” option makes a target option seem more attractive.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: A common strategy is to offer three tiers: a basic, a slightly more expensive but much more valuable middle tier (the target), and a very expensive, feature-rich tier (the decoy). This nudges users towards the middle.
• Bundling Bias
  • Meaning: People tend to overvalue bundled packages, even if they don’t use all the components.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: Offer feature bundles or user bundles within tiers. This makes customers feel like they are getting more value, even if they don’t utilize every single element.
• Loss Aversion
  • Meaning: The pain of a loss is more intense than the joy of an equivalent gain.
  • Impact on SaaS Pricing: Emphasize what customers gain by choosing a higher tier, or what they avoid losing (e.g., time, efficiency) by upgrading. Guarantees and clear refund policies reduce the perceived risk of a “bad” purchase.

SaaS pricing strategies that convert

Here are a few ways you can start turning your new psychological knowledge into revenue via your pricing strategies.

Offer pricing tiers

The way you present your pricing tiers significantly influences user perception and choice. This is where choice architecture comes into play.

People tend to avoid extremes and gravitate towards the middle option. Offering three tiers —a low-priced, feature-limited option, a mid-priced, balanced option, and a high-priced, feature-rich option —often leads users to choose the middle tier. This is because it feels like a safe and reasonable compromise.

Prioritize the customer needs

Ultimately, the most effective SaaS pricing strategy is one that is tailored to the specific needs and preferences of your target audience.

Talk to your users, understand their pain points, and learn how they perceive the value of your product. Then, experiment with different pricing tiers and messaging to see what resonates best with your target audience.

The goal is to make the right decision for them as much of a no-brainer as possible. This means understanding what problems customers are trying to solve and how each tier addresses those problems.

Segment customers

Successful pricing tiers align with customer identity and use case psychology, not just feature differences. Adobe does this well by segmenting products and pricing based on three audiences: personal/at-home, student, and professional. These are the buckets of software you can choose from, and grouping them and the prices based on how you self-identify will support users in autonomously picking the right option.

Conduct a verb-scoring exercise

If you need competitive inspiration for how other SaaS companies are feature-gating their products, try a verb-scoring exercise. Though it is pricing strategy adjacent, understanding customer expectations based on competitors can help you decide what sort of pricing model or feature-gating strategy you’d like to adopt. When done correctly, verb-scoring can help you find ways to monetize, mitigate “free trial abuse,” and acquire new users.

Frame pricing

Don’t just give a total annual or monthly cost. Emphasize the savings for upgraded plans, slice the costs differently by showing how much it costs per day or per use, or compare plan outputs. By framing the pricing differently, you can help customers see why these plans matter.

Simplify choices

More isn’t always better, and that is especially true for pricing strategy. Reduce the number of decisions customers need to make. Curated collections, clear comparison charts, and simplified product descriptions within tiers can combat decision fatigue.

Leverage social proof

Show that others are successfully using your product and how they are benefiting from it. This includes customer testimonials, reviews, “bestseller” indicators, and even real-time purchase notifications.

Don’t ignore the details

Even subtle changes to your pricing can have a significant impact on user perception. Ending prices in .99 instead of .00 can make them seem significantly cheaper, even though the difference is minimal.

In some cases, removing the currency symbol (e.g., just “30” instead of “$30”) can make the price seem less salient and more appealing.

Finally, visually highlighting the plan that offers the best value can draw attention to it and increase its adoption rate. A badge or a different color can do wonders here.

Review your pricing strategy for more conversions

Successful SaaS pricing is a blend of art and science. By strategically applying the psychological principles and strategies outlined, SaaS companies can design pricing tiers that not only make economic sense but also resonate deeply with the human element of decision-making. Doing so logically leads to higher conversions and sustained customer loyalty.

Start by auditing your current pricing through a psychological lens. Are you creating clear choices without overwhelming options? Does your tier structure align with customer identity and use cases? Are you leveraging social proof and strategic framing?

When you have some ideas for improvement, test them with your users to see what should be implemented. And if you’re looking for other monetization strategies, get in touch.

The post The Psychology Behind Successful SaaS Pricing appeared first on The Good.

I have no doubt that your SaaS product has countless things that make it great. But do users intuitively understand those benefits and unique selling points across your digital experience? Are you making sure they know exactly what sets you apart no matter where they are in their journey? 

If your answer is anything less than an enthusiastic “yes,” this article is for you. We’re sharing how you can identify and address the gaps in your benefits and unique selling points.

What is the benefits & unique selling points heuristic?

Benefits and unique selling points differentiate products/services by highlighting unique value promises. They show users why they should choose to purchase from you instead of elsewhere. 

Without clear benefits and unique selling points, you leave the user uncertain whether it is right for them. 

Digital experiences that adhere to this heuristic may apply a tactic like breaking down a differentiating feature in a demo video or building an interactive comparison chart that helps users clearly see the advantage of their service/product.

Benefits and unique selling points is one of the six Heuristics of Digital Experience Optimization developed by our team at The Good. The full list includes:

1. Priming & Expectation Setting
2. Trust & Authority
3. Ease
4. Benefits & Unique Selling Points
5. Directional Guidance
6. Incentives

These heuristics theme common optimization issues and opportunities. Optimizing your digital experience through the lens of heuristics keeps the user at the center of analyses. When done correctly, it will ensure your strategy creates journeys that feel familiar, do what they say, and function intuitively.

Knowing this heuristic is the first step. Now, let’s look at how to spot areas where you may be falling short.

Use research to understand where benefits & USPs are unclear 

It’s important to understand where and when users are missing the value promise of your product. 

A great way to deepen your understanding of the current experience is with user research. 

Research methods like session recordings, heatmap analysis, and user testing may indicate you are in violation of the benefits and unique selling points heuristic. Watch for these common signs that your benefits and USPs may not be coming across clearly:

Low Directness

• Research methodology: Session recordings
• How it manifests: Users can be seen scrolling through the site looking for specific content and struggling to find items of interest, possibly hesitating on the site, suggesting uncertainty.
• What it means: If you’re noticing patterns of users hesitating to click when looking at the menu or visiting several pages before finally lingering on a page, they may need support in wayfinding. 
• What to do about it: Take low directness as a sign that users need a little directional guidance and use it as a jumping-off point to further evaluate your navigation, labels, and page nesting. If you have a flagship use case that regular customers swear by, try to get users to see it (and its value) earlier, and don’t make them dig for it. 

Attentive/Intentional Reading

• Research methodology: Session recordings
• How it manifests: When a user slowly scrolls over content on a desktop, their mouse hovers over text, and when they are intensely reading, you might even see them go line-by-line.
• What it means: When users demonstrate a detailed reading of the fine print, it may indicate that they are looking for something they simply can’t find or trying to determine if the product fits their use case.  
• What to do about it: Keep an eye out for sessions that include intense reading and try to determine what content the user was looking for (and not finding) so you can serve that up more prominently in the user experience. For consumable products, that might mean clearer nutritional benefits. For a digital product, it might mean showcasing compatibility or use cases. 

Positive Sentiment or Negative Sentiment

• Research methodology: User testing
• How it manifests: User expresses positive or negative emotions towards the site/brand or an element of the site/brand.
• What it means: If, in early testing, users aren’t connecting to your product, you might hear subtle hints like “I would want to go back and make sure to evaluate the alternatives.” When users don’t clearly understand your unique value proposition, they’ll fail to connect and indicate they’re not sold. 
• What to do about it: Use those blasé moments to fine-tune your messaging until it starts to click. Make sure you’re articulating who your product is best for in the language of your users. 

5 Examples of SaaS companies that leverage the benefits and unique selling points heuristic 

Once you’ve identified the areas in your site or app that are in violation of the benefits and unique selling points heuristic, you can address them. 

The goal is to help users make their decisions faster and with ease. As a starting point for inspiration, here are five SaaS companies that showcase the effective use of benefits and USPs, each helping users make confident decisions more easily.

Give a holistic breakdown by value theme like DocuSign

DocuSign breaks down the security benefits holistically, reassuring security-conscious users about important benefits and unique selling points.

List features in a comparison chart like Indicative

Indicative adds CTA buttons to their comparison chart so that as they highlight core capabilities, users have quick-access entry points to get the offer.

Leverage guided tours like Outreach

Sales platform Outreach has use case-specific interactive demos on the website so prospects can see why the tool could be a good fit for them. 

Lead with core benefits like PandaDoc’s feature announcement pop-up

PandaDoc‘s pop-up for a feature rollout announcement leads with the benefit to the user, which makes users more likely to engage with the overlay. 

Animate your pricing page like QuickBooks

QuickBooks’ pricing chart has a visual cue for each feature that pops out with details, benefits, and a pitch video. This increases user confidence.

How to identify your benefits and unique selling points

It can be tough to find the right benefits and unique selling points to highlight across the digital experience, even if you can see where customers are getting stuck.  

Here are some tips to get you started: 

• Write a list: jot down all of the things that make your business, products, or services unique from your competitors – get specific, like your pricing model, customer service accessibility, and features.
• Research the competition: you won’t know what makes you different if you don’t know what you’re up against. Dig into their benefits and unique selling points so you can be sure to stand out.
• Identify your customers’ needs: research your customers using data and surveys to discover their most pressing needs and determine how your tooling is meeting those needs so you can more prominently feature it across the experience.
• Combine needs and differentiators: cross-reference the list of things that make your successful business different and your list of customer needs to pinpoint any that overlap. 
• Consider how you will implement: these points should be woven throughout the digital experience so that users are presented with benefits and unique selling points relevant to where they are in the customer journey.
• Test and validate: With your improvement ideas in hand, it’s time to test the optimizations. There’s no point going all-in on implementation if the language or functions don’t resonate. Consider a second round of user testing, some rapid testing, or A/B testing where it makes sense. 

For more inspiration, check out our article on 14 unique selling proposition examples. 

Heuristics build the foundation of an excellent digital experience

Most SaaS teams have a million things on their plate, juggling KPIs, internal politics, and all the day-to-day tasks to keep the product moving forward. However, nothing is as important as the foundational user experience and how your audience perceives your product.

This is where heuristics come in. You can uncover pain points that can be solved with tactics to address them. It may sound simple, but it can be a lot to accomplish without an external, user-centered POV. If you’d like support in your efforts, contact us.

The post Is Your Value Promise Falling Short? Here’s How to Identify and Upgrade Tired USPs appeared first on The Good.

There is nothing more frustrating than feeling like a company is giving you the bait and switch. In user experience design, we call this poor priming and expectation-setting, and it is a violation of one of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization.

Heuristics, by definition, are mental shortcuts used to solve problems quickly and effectively. They allow people to speed up analysis and make informed, efficient decisions. Knowing our brains are wired to take shortcuts and make quick decisions, you can imagine how heuristics play a crucial role in how customers navigate and perceive digital experiences.

Digital experiences that violate user heuristics are bad for users and bad for business. So, let’s take a look at how to address the priming and expectation-setting heuristic in a way that improves the user experience.

What is the priming and expectation-setting heuristic?

Priming and expectation setting is a heuristic that sets users up for success by clarifying how the interface will perform, indicating what actions users should take, and managing user expectations.

Digital experiences that adhere to this heuristic may apply a tactic like explicitly mentioning free shipping early in the journey to reduce cart abandonment rates or sharing estimated delivery dates to manage customer expectations.

Priming and expectation setting is one of the six Heuristics of Digital Experience Optimization developed by our team at The Good. The full list includes:

1. Priming & Expectation Setting
2. Trust & Authority
3. Ease
4. Benefits & Unique Selling Points
5. Directional Guidance
6. Incentives

These heuristics theme common optimization issues and opportunities. Analyzing your digital experience with heuristics in mind keeps the user at the center of analyses and guides your strategy toward building journeys that feel familiar, do what they say, and function intuitively.

Identify violations of this heuristic with user research patterns

Before you can start to address any heuristic to improve the digital experience, you have to understand if, where, and when users are getting stuck.

To understand if your digital experience is violating the priming and expectation-setting heuristic, a great place to start is user research. Set goals, pick the right method for your needs, and start talking to your users (or observing their behavior).

As you analyze the research, look for patterns including:

• Rage clicks: User clicks on an element multiple times without getting the desired or expected result. Usually, this signifies unclear system status, meaning your user doesn’t provide enough cues, semantics, or timely feedback to keep users informed.
• Low directness: Users can be seen scrolling through the site looking for specific content, struggling to find items of interest, and possibly hesitating on the site, suggesting uncertainty. This can be a sign of unmet expectations, meaning your system’s interactions, navigation, or language don’t match users’ mental models of real-world or site conventions.
• Price sensitivity: Users express concern about product or shipping prices, potentially leading them to abandon. This often indicates poor priming because of unclear or missing elements in the interface that typically guide user behavior and inform them of what to expect.

The good news is once you identify the patterns, you can address them with tactics to improve priming and expectation setting. Doing so is an ethical way to improve customer sentiment and increase conversions.

Real-life examples of using priming and expectation-setting to improve the user experience

Most companies have a chance to improve priming and expectation setting across their digital journey. Here are a few real-world examples that can inspire your efforts to adhere more closely to the heuristic. You might see some pretty compelling rewards for your improvements.

Offline download delivery priming

We worked with the largest digital repair manual database, eManualOnline, to find opportunities to improve their on-site experience. Following similar recommendations as outlined above to identify violations of optimization heuristics, we conducted user testing. It revealed that users were confused about how eManualOnline delivers their manuals, as some are digital downloads and others are physical editions.

Because of the mixed delivery method messages throughout the site, customers felt a lack of trust when confronted with the website.

We decided to test out highlighting delivery methods to clarify any confusion and increase transactions. We A/B tested 2 variants: a control and a variant that made delivery methods clearer at various touchpoints.

The variant with clear delivery method language showed a 14% lift over the control. Clarifying access methods for offline downloads resulted in stronger purchase intent. This is a clear example of priming and expectation setting at work.

Permission priming in user onboarding

When onboarding a user to a new digital experience (app or desktop service), priming and expectation setting can strongly impact churn metrics.

Here’s a good example from Scan & Translate. It reminds users that in order to use the scan features and gain value from the app, they need to grant camera permissions to the system.

Preparing, or priming, a user before you ask permission to access their OS makes it more likely that they’ll comply with your request. This is vitally important because your product might not be able to provide value to the user without access.

Expectation-setting without compromising brand language

Residential furnishings brand, Knoll, has a range of uniquely crafted and handmade products. The care and detail that goes into each piece means longer lead times on shipping and delivery.

When we took on a project to improve their digital experience, we tested out adjusting their copy to better reflect the craftsmanship of their work.

Changing the wording from “Lead time: 8 weeks” messaging to “Made for you. Ships in 8 weeks” led to our biggest test win of the year in terms of revenue.

It created synergy between the brand’s needs (priming purchasers that shipment won’t happen for a while) and the customer’s needs (understanding why shipment won’t happen for a while). It also had the benefit of turning a challenge (long lead times) into a compelling conversion booster (custom-made).

Priming in form design

Priming is one of the first principles of form design. It keeps users on the path to form completion by clearly setting expectations and ensuring they don’t drop off due to surprises.

Priming in form design takes many forms but often is provided through progress bars. Adding this element tells the user what they can expect from the process during or before completion of the form, setting the expectation so that users come prepared to fully fill out the form.

See this example from Etsy. The company features a progress bar with clear labels to prime users about what to expect during the mobile checkout process.

To set expectations with a form, you can also be clear about the end result or value users receive upon completing the form. This can generate excitement for the product, motivating form completion.

The “Try Demo” button from ServiceNow, shown below, primes users to know what they can expect after they fill out the form. Users will get to demo the product and can also expect everything in the bulleted list to the left.

Using heuristics to theme your roadmap of opportunities

To transform the priming and expectation-setting heuristic into an actionable improvement opportunity for your digital property, consider building a strategic roadmap.

Leverage user research to identify common patterns indicating violation of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization. Prioritize those opportunities based on their potential for impacting KPIs. Then, develop a plan to test improvements with a theme-based roadmap.

Taking the time to really understand where users are getting stuck in your digital experience will set you up to make more efficient and impactful decisions.

Our team can support you on your journey through a custom Digital Experience Optimization Program. You’ll have access to an entire team of researchers, strategists, designers, and developers that will help remove violations of the priming and expectation-setting heuristic (and more).

The post How To Leverage The Priming & Expectation Setting Heuristic To Drive Conversions appeared first on The Good.

What you consider “easy to use” could be completely unintuitive for your audience. That’s why user research and identifying common behavior patterns is so important. Ease of use is about more than just clean layouts and fast load times; it’s about understanding human behavior and anticipating needs before users even realize them.

You can do exactly that by leveraging the ease heuristic. Ease is one of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization, a tool developed at The Good to theme common optimization issues and opportunities with the user at the center of analyses.

In this article, we’re sharing everything you need to know about the ease heuristic and how to leverage it to create a better website or app. Keep reading to learn:

• How the ease heuristic manifests
• How to identify when your website violates the ease heuristic
• Five ways to improve ease (with examples)

What is ease in UX?

The ease heuristic focuses on making a website, app, or digital product “easy to use.” It ensures users won’t abandon a digital property due to its complexity and offers better accessibility to diverse audiences. It includes aspects like information architecture, navigability, and seamless functionality.

Let’s check out these three pillars of ease in more detail.

What is information architecture?

Information architecture (IA) is the practice of structuring content on digital products (websites, apps) to make it easy for users to find and understand the information they need. It focuses on things like:

• Content grouping that is intuitive
• Navigation design to help users find what they need
• Labeling systems that are clear and consistent
• Search systems that find things efficiently

Effective information architecture enhances the overall user experience by reducing cognitive load, preventing user frustration, and ensuring that users can complete their tasks with ease.

What is navigability?

Navigability refers to the ease with which users can move through a website or application to find what they need (information, features, etc.). Key aspects include:

• Intuitive structure that follows a logical pattern
• Clear labels indicating current location and options for next steps
• Consistent design of uniform patterns to avoid re-learning
• Responsive elements with immediate feedback
• Accessible paths that accommodate all users

Good navigability of elements such as menus, links, buttons, and search bars increases satisfaction by minimizing the effort required to find information and complete tasks.

What is seamless functionality?

Seamless functionality refers to the uninterrupted operation of a digital product, where all features work together for a smooth user experience. Key characteristics include:

• Smooth interactions (clicking, scrolling, swiping) with minimal load time/delays
• Consistent website performance
• Error handling with feedback and recovery options
• Integrated features that update as needed
• User-friendly interfaces that don’t require extensive instructions or support.
• Optimized load times

Achieving seamless functionality ensures that users can accomplish their goals efficiently and without distraction.

How does violating the ease heuristic impact the user?

As mentioned, heuristics are tools used to identify optimization issues or opportunities. Information architecture, navigability, and seamless functionality work together to improve the “ease” of use on a website or app. But how does it impact a user when the ease heuristic is violated?

High Interaction Cost

Violating the ease heuristic can often come at a high interaction cost. For example, a task or interaction requires significant time/effort, creating frustration and resulting in abandonment.

Heavy Cognitive Load

Another way lack of ease impacts a user is by putting undue mental effort into accomplishing a task. This may cause analysis paralysis or frustration, leading to abandonment.

Content Fatigue

Excessive textual/visual content on the page can overwhelm users, hindering their ability to find relevant content for successful task completion.

Unclear System Status

If the interface doesn’t provide enough cues, semantics, or timely feedback to keep users informed, the system status is unclear. This results in stress, uncertainty, and likely abandonment.

Identifying opportunities with user research

If you want to understand where and when your website violates the ease heuristic, the best way is with user research.

While patterns related to violation of the ease heuristic can appear in plenty of user research methods, such as heatmaps, user testing, etc., here are a few examples of how they might specifically show up in session recordings or observational analysis.

• Halted scrolling: The user pauses on the site to possibly engage with content/reorient themselves, which could imply that the user perceives a false bottom. This indicates a heavy cognitive load.
• Hunting and Pecking: The user bounces around the site from page to page, sometimes back-navigating, looking for specific content without finding products of interest. This may indicate unclear system status.
• Scanning: Users scroll over content (text or images) at a higher scroll rate on mobile, while on desktop, they might hover over some words or phrases or completely skip over content altogether. This could indicate a high interaction cost.

Look for this behavior to identify violations of the ease heuristic. Then, you can prioritize opportunities to improve it for a better digital experience.

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Five ways to make it easy for users (with examples)

Once you know your website violates the ease heuristic and you have identified areas of opportunity, you can hypothesize and test improvements. Here are some ideas for increasing ease on your website.

1. Group products by attributes

When products are not intuitively grouped, users can experience decision paralysis or confusion. Grouping products by shared attributes can reduce frustration and support user wayfinding.

It is especially beneficial when a brand has a large selection of products, like mattress brand Casper.

2. Collapse or expand relevant dropdowns

Content hidden in accordions can cause users to miss critical information in a purchase decision, leading to frustration and abandonment.

Prioritizing relevant drop-downs by expanding them on PDP or category pages can help users better differentiate products and increase the likelihood of purchasing.

Note that it is sometimes necessary to bring in a copy expert to rewrite product copy entirely, focusing on decreasing cognitive load and increasing the user’s value.

3. Refine product grid layout

Users can become overwhelmed with product listings on category pages, especially if there are many SKUs or a large amount of content.

Refining category page layouts to be more scannable may improve shopper experience, easing product discovery and encouraging visits to PDPs.

Specifically, we’ve found success testing on mobile with a 2-up layout so users see more products when they land on a category page. We iterate on category page layouts based on test outcomes and look for opportunities to test things like CTA colors, language, and selector options within product grids.

4. Improve add-to-cart feedback

A lack of notification that a product has been successfully added to the cart can cause users to be unsure of the status, leading to frustration and cart abandonment.

Improving add-to-cart feedback guides users to checkout, increases purchase intention, and reduces uncertainty.

5. Increase the visibility of tooltips

Many tooltips can be hard to see or hidden on a page, which can lead to a lack of understanding and confidence.

Emphasizing tooltips can ease directional guidance and help users understand how a product functions or explain an element on the page in an unobtrusive way, which can lead to better understanding and increase confidence.

Common tooltip use cases include interactive walkthroughs, secondary onboarding, instructions, upsells, feature adoption, and new product updates.

Improving ease (and beyond) in digital experience optimization

Ease is only one of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization. These heuristics can guide your strategy and help you build digital journeys that feel familiar, do what they say, and function intuitively.

The six heuristics are:

1. Priming & Expectation Setting
2. Trust & Authority
3. Ease
4. Benefits & Unique Selling Points
5. Directional Guidance
6. Incentives

To learn more, or if you’d like our team to review your website for opportunities to improve based on these themes, get in touch.

The post What Is The Ease Heuristic? (And How To Leverage It To Improve UX) appeared first on The Good.

According to the US Click-and-Collect Forecast 2022, US consumers spent $96 billion on BOPIS orders in 2022, which accounts for 9% of all ecommerce sales.

Nearly two-thirds of US retail chains offer these “click and collect” services, and for good reason, as 72% of US consumers say they are more likely to buy online from a store that offers BOPIS services.

There’s no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic played a role here. Many customers used buy-online-pickup-in-store and curbside pickup options simply to avoid crowds.

Businesses offering larger or more complicated products also often offer BOPIS to make sure customers get exactly what they want (and need). For example, a motorcycle or bike shop might allow you to customize and purchase online but encourage you to pick up in-store to get your seat custom-fit before riding off into the sunset.

And BOPIS shows no sign of slowing down. According to the Global Buy Online Pick Up In Store Marketplace Forecast, the global BOPIS industry was worth $243.89 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow to $703.2 billion in 2027.

BOPIS is a key part of an omnichannel retail strategy and a personalized customer experience. It blends the in-store and online experiences so customers can choose how and when they get their products. So, in order to be competitive, it’s important that you understand and offer BOPIS services.

What is BOPIS (or BOPUS)?

BOPIS meaning: Buy Online, Pickup In-Store is a shopping method where customers buy products through an online platform and then pick them up at a physical location instead of waiting for delivery.

BOPIS is sometimes abbreviated as BOPUS. It also goes by other names, like curbside pickup, click and reserve, online order pickup, click and collect, or “Buy Online, Collect In-Store” (BOCIS). It’s all the same process.

When you shop like this, you get all of the convenience of browsing for products at home without having to wait days–or weeks–for delivery. In some cases, the store will bring it out to your car for you.

Retailers like Walmart, Target, and Best Buy have embraced BOPIS to bridge the gap between online convenience and the immediacy of in-store shopping. Stores love this arrangement because it means they claw back an online sale that might otherwise go to online-first retailers like Amazon and can leverage their existing physical store network.

How BOPIS Works

The BOPUS business model is pretty simple: The customer orders online but collects the item at a physical location. Let’s walk through the shopping and order fulfillment process.

Step 1. Customers Buy Online Through Your Website or App

A customer browses your website or app until they find the products they need. They add those products to their shopping cart like they would for any online purchase.

At some point during the digital experience, the customer is given the option to have the item delivered or pick it up at a local physical location. In some cases, the customer must also select a time to pick up the item.

In order for this to work, stores must enable real-time inventory updates between the local POS system and the website or app. Otherwise, a customer may purchase a product that’s out of stock at their desired location.

Step 2: The Retailer Fulfills the Order

Next, the website or app sends the order to the chosen physical store. Employees are notified of the order and instructed to pick it off the shelf and prepare it for pickup.

A notification is then sent to the customer that the item is ready to pick up. In email form, they look something like this:

If, for some reason, the item isn’t available, the employees must trigger a message that notifies the customer and lets them know what happens next. In some cases, an out-of-stock item can be sourced from a nearby location, as long as the customer is informed along the way.

Step 3: The Customer Retrieves the Order

Finally, the customer picks up the order at your store. Depending on your click-and-collect strategy, they may pick it up at a third-party location, such as the post office, a UPS/FedEx location, or a local locker specifically for ecommerce pickups.

If the store has the resources, they may offer curbside pickup, where the customer drives right up to the store, and an employee promptly delivers the item right to the car.

Why BOPIS is Effective for Ecommerce Businesses

Now that you understand how BOPIS works, you might be wondering why you should bother. Let’s explore the perks of buy-online-pickup-in-store services and why they’re a great opportunity for retailers.

Boosting Customer Satisfaction

BOPUS offers customers the convenience of online shopping with the instant gratification of picking up their purchases in-store. This creates a better shopping experience for many customers who simply don’t want to wait.

Is it right for every customer? Of course not, which is why BOPUS can always be an option, but never mandatory.

Reducing Shipping Costs

The customer always pays for shipping, whether the shipping fee is added at checkout or built into the cost of the products.

If the shipping fee is an add-on, the customer can avoid it by retrieving the items themselves. For example, with furniture retailers, shipping costs can quickly get into triple digits because of item size. So, picking up the item can save hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars.

If the shipping fee is built into the price, the store keeps the extra portion even though they aren’t shipping the item. This simply increases the margin.

This is a big win for customers, as well. It’s the top reason people like BOPIS.

Driving In-Store Traffic

BOPUS brings customers into your brick-and-mortar store to pick up their orders. This creates an opportunity for additional sales. More foot traffic means additional purchases, as stores can capitalize on impulse buys and cross-selling opportunities.

Enhancing Customer Relationships

When customers pick up their orders in-store, businesses have a chance to interact with them face-to-face, strengthening the bond between the brand and the customer.

These personalized interactions foster trust and loyalty, which ultimately leads to long-term customer relationships and deeper customer satisfaction.

Encouraging Returns and Exchanges

BOPUS simplifies the returns and exchanges process by allowing customers to handle them in person, even if they made the purchase online. This provides a convenient solution for resolving issues, reduces return shipping costs for the business, and minimizes the time and resources spent on processing returns.

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How to Display BOPIS on Your Site (with Examples)

Displaying the BOPIS option on your site is relatively straightforward. Your job is to introduce it during the browsing experience so customers can’t miss it.

Let’s walk through the BOPIS process using Target as an example.

1. Build a BOPIS Landing Page

Shoppers may need a little help understanding your BOPIS model, especially if they’ve never used this kind of system before. It’s smart to build a simple landing page that explains how it works for your store.

Target does a great job here. Their page includes everything you need, including links to download the app, instructions for how to use it, returns information, and even a Starbucks upsell.

2. Have the Customer Select a Location

At some point during the process, the customer will need to select their preferred location. When you click the location link at the top-left of any Target page, an overlay appears that offers store options. Selecting a store saves it for your future orders.

3. Provide the BOPIS Option on Product Pages

Give customers the option to select BOPIS on each product page. This helps them plan the rest of their shopping experience.

Target smartly uses a visual selector on the product page. It’s impossible to miss. Additional information is provided beneath the selector, including the current location, pickup time, and order availability.

Clicking the “Check other stores” link gives the user the option to change stores. This is helpful if the product is out-of-stock at their usual store or if they prefer to pick it up at a different location (perhaps they’ll be in the area).

4. Give BOPIS and Delivery Options in the Shopping Cart

It’s smart to present the BOPIS-or-delivery choice on the shopping cart page as well. This is helpful for customers who chose incorrectly on the product page (some people shop quickly!) or may want different options for each product. Include a “change store” link as well.

Optimizing the BOPUS/BOPIS Experience

Now that we’ve outlined the core moments in a BOPIS web journey, let’s talk about optimizing the experience. Your job is to present this choice in a simple, pain-free way without distracting from the checkout process.

1. Pre-fill Important Details During The BOPIS Experience

Modern shoppers want more than a frictionless online shopping experience. They want a dynamic experience that’s tailored to their needs and preferences.

The most straightforward way to personalize the BOPIS experience is to give the customer the ability to select their preferred store. Better yet, meet customer expectations and reduce distractions by using geolocation to identify and select the closest store for them.

Next, promote local offerings based on user-selected stores. For instance, if a customer selects your Cincinnati, Ohio location, show them promotions specific to that location.

2. Set Proper Expectations on Your BOPIS Landing Page

Remember that landing page we spoke about earlier? Here are some tips to make it effective:

• Make it easily findable in your main navigation.
• Clearly explain how BOPIS works. Provide step-by-step instructions for the entire process, including the in-person part.
• Mention any special promotions or deals they get for using BOPIS.
• Include a dynamic section that displays any local promotions for the currently chosen store or an opportunity to replace anything that is unavailable.

3. Optimize Local Landing Pages

If you have landing pages for each store, it’s important to optimize them as well. They should include information about your BOPIS program and/or a link to the main BOPIS landing page. Use proper schema markup so it displays properly as a Google Business page.

For the sake of customer convenience, include any information the customer needs about the location, like directions, store hours, and additional departments or services that may be available.

Check out this great landing page from DressUp.

4. Mitigate Errors on Product and Category Pages

Your product and category pages that offer BOPIS services should clearly identify which location offers them. There can be no confusion here. If a customer shows up at the wrong store, they will not be happy, even if the mistake is their own fault.

Furthermore, clicking the store’s label should give the customer the option to change locations. This process should be simple and intuitive without breaking the checkout flow.

5. Make Sure Your Website and/or App is Bug-Free and Speedy

Make sure all of your BOPIS components are mobile-friendly and functional on all browsers and devices, including your landing page, store selector, and other widgets. Broken tech is one of the surest ways to lose a sale.

Furthermore, take care to integrate your website/app with your inventory tracking system. Whatever software guides your BOPIS system needs to know inventory levels at each location.

6. Establish a Pick-Up Location

Designating a pick-up location seems like a minor part of the process, but it’s actually a key step. Remember that your customers are using BOPIS because it’s convenient. If they spend 10 minutes looking for the pickup location, you might wipe out all of their time savings.

Put your pickup station near your main entrance at the customer service desk or a specialty desk for online customers. Label it clearly with obvious signage. And make sure your team is ready to verify the order and hand over the products quickly.

7. Keep Your Customer Updated

Customer engagement is key here. Since BOPIS requires your customers to appear in person, it’s critical that you keep them updated regarding the process of your order.

On one hand, you want them to arrive as soon as the order is ready to reduce their wait, but if you notify them too soon, there’s a chance they show up before you’ve picked out their order.

Keep your customer well informed about the process. Notify them when you receive the order, when you start picking it, and when it’s ready. Include clear instructions to help them collect it, especially regarding what they have to do (visit a desk, reply to a text, etc.).

Target notifies customers with push notifications. Customers can respond in-app to the BOPIS team with questions or instructions.

8. Build BOPIS Into Your Marketing

Your BOPIS system is a marketing asset, so make sure to include it in your promotions. Send regular reminders to your audience about their ability to pick up in person.

If you promote to local customers with social media ads or display ads, indicate somewhere that your products are eligible for local pickup.

BOPIS should also make an appearance in your cart abandonment emails in case they object to your delivery times.

Common Questions About Buy Online, Pick Up In Store

Still have questions about BOPIS and how it works? Here are some common questions people ask about buy-online-pickup-in-store.

What is the difference between BOPIS and curbside pickup?

BOPIS involves customers ordering online and picking up their purchases inside the store. Curbside pickup, on the other hand, allows customers to remain in their vehicles while store staff bring their orders directly to their car, so the transaction is completely contactless.

Is BOPIS the same as click and collect?

Yes, BOPIS (Buy-Online-Pickup-In-Store) and click and collect refer to the same service. Both terms describe the process of customers purchasing items online and then picking them up at a physical store location.

What is ROPIS?

ROPIS stands for Reserve Online, Pick Up In-Store. It’s a service similar to BOPIS, where customers reserve items online and then pick them up and pay at a designated store location. This approach allows customers to secure specific items before visiting the store, but they still have to pay in person.

How long does it take for BOPIS orders to be ready for pickup?

Typically, BOPIS orders are ready for pickup within a few hours to one business day, depending on store policies and order volume. Stores send a notification when orders are ready for collection.

Does BOPIS allow for returns or exchanges?

Generally, most stores allow returns and exchanges for items purchased through BOPIS. Some stores require customers to bring it back to the original location, whereas others allow returns at any location.

Is there a fee for using the BOPIS service?

In most cases, BOPIS is offered as a complimentary service, though some stores have minimum order requirements or fees for expedited pickups.

What are the disadvantages of BOPIS?

Potential disadvantages include limited product availability, longer wait times during peak periods, possible confusion with order pickups, and the need for customers to travel to the store, which may not be feasible for everyone.

BOPIS and Your Digital Experience

Buy-online-pickup-in-store is just one small component of your business model and entire digital experience. It works alongside the other features of your online presence to create a streamlined, robust, and personalized shopping experience for your customers.

If you’re looking for strategies to improve, our Digital Experience Optimization Program is a custom plan for ecommerce and product marketing teams that unlocks the full potential of your website, app, or digital product. Learn more.

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The post BOPIS: How Buy Online, Pick Up In Store Works and How to Improve the Experience appeared first on The Good.

As a brand, it’s important to understand customer sentiment: how your customers feel about you. Once you uncover their thoughts, you can make ethical optimizations to your business and website experience that create more positive sentiment.

In this guide, we explain customer sentiment and how to analyze it. We also explain how ethics are intertwined with sentiment and how our proprietary model helps you identify ethical activities that have the best chance of moving the needle.

What is Customer Sentiment?

Customer sentiment refers to the emotions customers feel toward your brand, products, or services. It helps you understand whether your customers’ feelings are positive, negative, or neutral, as well as why they feel that way.

Generally speaking, if your customers have positive sentiment, they are more likely to buy and become repeat loyal customers. Customers who think of your brand negatively are less likely to buy.

What affects sentiment? Your products are the biggest factor. If people love your products, they’ll probably think well of your brand. But your service quality, personal interactions, charity work, company values, website experience, and other factors can influence sentiment.

Sadly, there is a discrepancy between companies’ opinions on customer sentiment and how customers actually feel. A NICE CXone report discovered that 50% of businesses believe their customers have a positive sentiment toward their brand, but only 15% of customers agree.

What’s interesting about sentiment is that it’s infectious. It can spread from one customer to others. For instance, suppose a customer has a delightful experience with your brand. They will undoubtedly share their experience with others, which will improve those people’s sentiment.

If you gather enough feedback from customers about their feelings, you can take steps to address any issues and build a better brand experience. But to get this feedback, you have to ask the right questions.

Direct vs. indirect feedback

Customer sentiment relies on direct and indirect feedback. Both are valuable. Their differences lay in how you get them.

Direct feedback refers to statements your customers make to you directly. This includes emails, phone calls, customer support tickets, live chat, or in-person conversations. Generally, these only happen when customers aren’t happy, though direct praise isn’t uncommon.

Indirect feedback refers to statements your customers make publicly, but aren’t intended for you. This includes conversations with friends and social media conversations. With the right tools, you can find and listen to these statements.

Some communications straddle the line between direct and indirect. A Twitter complaint, for example, is directed at the brand, but the tweeter relies on the pressure of a public conversation to make their point or get a response.

Measuring customer sentiment

We have lots of ecommerce metrics to measure how people feel, such as customer satisfaction (CSAT), customer effort score (CES), ease of doing business (EODB), or Net Promoter Score (NPS®).

While those metrics are valuable, they don’t attempt to understand why customers feel the way they do. To learn why, we have to approach it qualitatively.

More than 90% of communication is nonverbal, but that presents a challenge when you’re dealing with written communication, which lacks visual and acoustic aid. The words people use are only a fraction of their feelings.

This is referred to as the Iceberg Principle. Like an iceberg’s mass, which sits mostly under the water, your audience’s sentiment is similarly obscured. It’s your job to decipher the true meaning.

Customer sentiment is based on words, so we have to either a) have to have conversations with our customers, or b) peer into their conversations with their friends, family, and followers. A star rating will tell you whether a customer had a good or bad experience, but it doesn’t give you any information in regards to fixing the bad and leaning into the good.

Sentiment analysis, therefore, will put you on the path toward improving the experiences of all of your future customers. According to the Customer Service Trends for 2022 report, 64% of consumers stop doing business with a brand after only two or three bad experiences, so it’s important to make sentiment-improving changes quickly.

Sentiment analysis is the process of trying to understand your customers’ and potential customers’ feelings about your brand, products, and overall experience. Furthermore, it helps you look beyond their words at the tone of their comments. You can do this manually or with a customer sentiment analysis tool.

Let’s use a basic example. Suppose a customer leaves a product review that simply says, “It’s fine.” At face value, that’s a good review. “Fine” certainly isn’t negative, but even through the text we can see that the customer isn’t really happy with their purchase. Maybe the product isn’t what they wanted, but not worth initiating a return.

They said “Fine,” but in actuality, they had a negative experience. Even the most basic customer feedback can help you discover potential optimizations.

The Intersection of Ethical Website Design and Customer Sentiment

Now that you understand customer sentiment, you’re probably wondering how to improve it.

There is a general correlation between higher sentiment and more conversions. It’s not a linear relationship, however. While customers who like your brand are more likely to buy, increasing sentiment doesn’t always improve conversions and boost sales.

There are definitely some things you can do to improve customer sentiment and will make people more likely to purchase. Social proof, for example, makes customers feel better about their purchase and improves conversions.

However, some sentiment-improving activities won’t impact your conversion rate. Having a blog or offering a freemium model of pricing makes people feel good, but doesn’t necessarily move users down the conversion funnel.

As you would expect, activities that produce negative sentiment, such as poor imagery, hidden prices, and slow-loading pages, can hurt your conversion rate.

However, we have to consider the ethical ramifications of any initiative, even if they lead to more sales. Some sentiment-reducers can actually boost sales, like popups, false claims, and blatantly copying your competitors. These initiatives work in the short term, but they often have long-term, irrecoverable effects on your brand.

If you’re confused, don’t worry. Here’s a model we put together that shows common site elements and how users interpret them based on our research and testing.

The top left quadrant represents activities that will improve customer sentiment, but won’t boost your conversion rate. These are not a priority.

The bottom left quadrant represents activities that will reduce customer sentiment and reduce your conversion rate. They frustrate users and detract them from making a purchase. Avoid them at all costs. If you have any of these issues, don’t bother testing. Just fix them.

The bottom right quadrant represents activities that might improve your conversion rate, but are still unethical. They work, but that could affect your brand image over time. They also might have non-customer-related consequences. False claims, for example, could cause legal trouble.

We know that no one intends to create dark patterns or act unethically toward their site visitors, but it does happen. For instance, there is a fine line between “urgent language” and misleading users. These are elements to stay away from and potentially test to determine if it improves sentiment and purchases.

The top right quadrant is the intersection of ethics and good design: activities that improve sentiment and conversions. These represent opportunities that deserve your attention.

What we do at The Good focuses on this top right quadrant. We approach optimization with an understanding of what drives positive sentiment. This helps us develop better outcomes for our clients. A client may have a lot of ideas but we may not test all of them for data-backed reasons or because we know it won’t move the needle towards purchase.

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How to Conduct Customer Research to Improve Customer Experience

How to Find Ethical Initiatives That Increase Customer Sentiment and Conversions

In order to find initiatives for testing, we first focus on that top right quadrant. This is the sweet spot where optimizations have a reasonable chance of improving conversions and increasing customer sentiment.

• Post-purchase incentives
• Shipping incentives
• Imagery with product in-situ
• Brand value alignment
• Social proof
• Search improvements
• Quality tiles
• Priming
• Buy-now-pay-later
• Urgent language

Does this mean that those initiatives will definitely improve sales and sentiment? No. Nothing is guaranteed because all brands, products, and audiences are different. But these are great topics to inspire your experiments.

Furthermore, there are probably some ethical activities that improve sentiment and conversions that are unique to your business. Maybe your customers want a product builder on your site. Maybe they want you to get involved with a related charity. Or maybe they want special, nonstandard product filtering.

If you aren’t sure what your customers want, you’ll have to go out and get that information. Here are some actionable ways to determine customer sentiment and learn how to improve it.

As you hunt for your own optimization, plot them in our sentiment-ethics model, then focus on the ones that fall into the top right quadrant.

1. Collect reviews and survey responses

If you aren’t already, someone on your team should be reading every customer review that comes in. This includes reviews on individual products and general brand reviews on Google, Yelp, Facebook, and Trustpilot. If you don’t have reviews coming in naturally, start requesting them as part of your post-purchase experience.

Don’t focus on the bad reviews from unhappy customers. Positive customer experiences can validate what you know works in your website experience and marketing campaigns.  

Additionally, use online surveys to collect your customers’ opinions. These are typically longer than a simple product review request, so your response rate will be lower, but they give you the opportunity to ask probing questions. Plus, surveys aren’t public, so only you see the answer. You can encourage your customers to be brutally honest.

Who should take your customer satisfaction survey? It depends on what you want to know. If you want to know what you’re doing right, talk to your most active customers. If you want to know what you’ve done wrong, ask customers who only purchased once.

Most importantly, make your customer surveys easy for customers to complete. Send a link to a simple form. Include multiple choice questions they can complete quickly, but also add comment boxes so they can provide unique feedback in their own words.

2. Conduct customer interviews

User interviews are one-on-one conversations with existing users or potential users in your target audience. The purpose is to get direct feedback on how they feel and what you can do better in your brand experience, including your ecommerce site.

Admittedly, user interviews are expensive and time-consuming. Someone on your team has to conduct each one. And sometimes you don’t come away with any valuable feedback. If you need feedback at scale, opt for social listening or satisfaction surveys.

But customer interviews have the potential to provide a surprising amount of information, especially if the interviewer has experience pulling information out of your customers. A skilled interviewer can probe deeply to extract powerful insights.

Analyzing your feedback from interviews is challenging because the information is qualitative and unstructured. You (or someone on your team) will need to go through them one by one and divide customer comments into categories that help optimize the website. In some cases, you might look for answers to specific questions, such as “Why don’t our users take the quiz?”

3. Monitor customer service calls and live chat

When customers contact you directly, it’s important to measure their sentiment. Since 96% of customers don’t complain when there’s a problem, you have to take the ones that do complain seriously.

Suppose a customer calls to complain about missing shipment tracking information. Perhaps they didn’t receive the shipping confirmation email. Or maybe there’s something wrong with the tracking field in the email itself.

In this case, the customer support representative should summarize the encounter in a shared document or CRM. Then, review these notes regularly to look for repeat complaints. If you see sentiment patterns, have someone fix the issues so future customers don’t suffer the same problems.

4. Conduct customer sentiment analysis with AI

Sentiment analysis (sometimes called opinion mining) is a process that uses conversational artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning to determine the sentiment behind text. It attempts to extract those intangible bits of communication and identify customer issues.

These kinds of tools can analyze any type of text: social media posts, review sites, news articles, blogs, support tickets, live chat transcripts, and more.

After reviewing the comments, the AI will unpack the text to understand its structure and classify the words as positive, neutral, or negative, thereby turning qualitative information into quantitative data that can be analyzed at scale.  

How does it work? The algorithms turn words into vectors, then use the distance between those points to understand their relationship. For instance, a sentiment analysis AI would group “Honda” and “Ford” together because they are related. (This TEDx talk explains everything.)

Sentiment analysis can detect emotions, like anger, happiness, frustration, or disappointment at different stages of the customer journey. It can even deduce what customers think of your product. Suppose customers complain that a product “breaks right away” or “isn’t very durable” or “fell apart in my hands.” In this case, the AI would classify all of those comments as “low quality” to give you a comprehensive picture.

Fortunately, you don’t need to build this yourself. There are plenty of pre-built sentiment analysis SaaS tools your data team can use, such as Talkwalker, Reputation, Repustate, Brand24, or SentiSum.

5. Interact with your audience on social media

A proper social media presence is more than just blasting out content into the void. Smart brands engage with their audience to create genuine relationships and extract valuable social media feedback.

In a 2020 Bain & Company study, 54% of companies reported using technologies for analyzing customer sentiment from social media platforms. This is expected to exceed 80% in 2023.

The benefit to these interactions is that you can hear from all customers, not just recent ones. You can even learn what non-customers think of your brand and website experience.

When a social media user mentions your brand, document their comments. Try to determine why they made those comments and how you can fix the problem for that customer and future customers.

If your brand gets a lot of social media activity, consider using a social listening platform to monitor conversations at scale, such as Sprout Social, Falcon.io, or Hootsuite. These tools let you track brand mentions, hashtags, and any keywords you like.

The Best Results Come From Tailored Insights

Best practices only take you so far. At a certain point, you have to run methodical experiments to determine what moves the needle for your brand and ecommerce site.

At The Good, our experts can help you develop accurate insights tailored to your specific site and user goals. We’ll find ways to increase conversions and customer sentiment without violating ethics, mistreating your users and customers, or causing long term damage to your brand.

Our years of experience let you focus on the initiatives that will have the greatest impact. You may have a lot of ideas, so we work collaboratively with you to test ideas that move the needle towards purchase while surfacing improvement opportunities that your team can implement. 

Learn more about our Conversion Growth Program. Let’s accelerate your business growth with our done-with-you optimization program that has proven results and no long-term commitments.

FAQs About Customer Sentiment and Ethical Design

What is customer sentiment?

Customer sentiment refers to the overall attitude, opinion, and emotions of customers towards a product, brand, or service. It can be positive, negative, or neutral and can have a significant impact on a company’s success or failure.

What is a sentiment example?

An example of negative customer sentiment in ecommerce is when customers leave negative reviews about a product they purchased online, citing issues such as poor quality, incorrect sizing, or slow shipping times. This negative sentiment can discourage potential customers from making a purchase, leading to a decrease in sales and revenue for the ecommerce business.

How do you measure customer sentiment?

Customer sentiment can be measured through various methods such as surveys, feedback forms, social media monitoring, online reviews, and sentiment analysis tools. These methods allow businesses to gather data and valuable insights about customer opinions, emotions, and attitudes towards their products or services.

What is ethical website design?

Ethical website design involves creating websites that prioritize the privacy, security, and well-being of users. It includes transparent data collection practices, accessibility for all users, and user-centered design that prioritizes usability and functionality. Ethical website design also avoids the use of manipulative tactics to exploit or deceive users.

What is customer sentiment analytics?

Customer sentiment analytics in ecommerce involves analyzing customer feedback, reviews, and social media mentions to understand customers’ emotions, attitudes, and opinions about a company’s products or services. This helps ecommerce businesses identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to enhance the customer experience and ultimately drive sales.

Hundreds of millions in revenue generated with our strategic optimization programs.

But don’t take our word for it. Hear about the amazing results from 15+ years in business, straight from the source.

SEE HOW

The post Drive Business Growth at the Intersection of Positive Customer Sentiment & Ethical Website Design appeared first on The Good.

So why do we assume that in creative work, we will immediately have the best idea or deliver unbelievable results? 

Ask a room full of business people how many see themselves as creative and you are likely to receive some blank stares or commentary about how bad they are at drawing. 

As an ecommerce UX designer, this perspective is damaging. But still, I sometimes find myself getting caught up in the idea that you either have creativity or you don’t. 

The reality is, it’s a muscle you have to exercise and strengthen just like any other. 

I recently read Creative Confidence by IDEO founders Tom and David Kelley which outlined how to help companies and individuals boost creativity in their work. The book is broken down into eight chapters, including a section with exercises designed to get people out of their comfort zones and into a space of innovation. 

Below are my five biggest takeaways from the book for aspiring ecommerce UX designers, and insights on how we live out these ideas and boost creativity in our own work at The Good. 

1. Apply a Growth Mindset to Your Work

How many times have you been given a problem and thought or said “I can’t” or “this won’t work”? 

This is a fixed mindset or the belief that intelligence or creativity are immutable characteristics that cannot be changed. 

This mindset limits us and makes us so afraid of failure or embarrassment that we avoid risks and end up sabotaging long-term opportunities simply because we are afraid to admit what we don’t know. 

Conversely, a growth mindset is when you believe creativity and knowledge are like a muscle that must be trained over time with persistence. It gives us the chance to improve in small, incremental ways that add up big over time. 

We encourage a growth mindset amongst our clients and our team by living out our core value of “Make Improvements Not Excuses.” We are a team of lifelong learners who understand the value of growth through practice, not perfection. 

A fixed mindset tells us that receiving critical feedback means you are not measuring up or have personally failed. However, a growth mindset allows us to take feedback as an opportunity to improve our work and grow in our discipline.

2. Early Failure is a Key to Long-Term Success

David and Tom Kelley write about failure a lot in Creative Confidence as something to embrace rather than avoid. 

Early failure in a project helps us find weaknesses and correct them in the innovation cycle. Owning a setback allows us to actually learn what to do differently in the future. 

Psychologist Albert Bandura discusses this in his work around curing phobias: giving people small successes to focus on can help them overcome limiting beliefs and build creative confidence. 

An easy way to learn “quick, easy, and cheap” is through prototyping. Prototypes can be as rudimentary as a drawing on a napkin and as high fidelity as an interactive digital mockup. 

They give us the latitude to quickly test ideas to understand the best pathway forward.

Here’s an example of a low fidelity mockup of a zoo app that I created in a course. Taking this first step gave me and my peers a starting point to work off of. 

As we continued working on the prototype, we found weak points and areas for improvement that led us to the more polished version. Below you can see the high fidelity mockup of the same zoo app once we iterated on it as a team. 

While the first version was far from perfect, it gave us ideas on how to improve and helped guide us to our final product. 

When you approach challenges this way, failure is no longer a scary word but a part of the innovation process. 

At The Good, we take it one step further when designing multivariate tests for our clients. A failed test does not garner blame or frustration but is labeled a “learner” or an opportunity to iterate and improve an experience for the future. 

3. Be an Empathetic Detective

At the heart of all the work we do as creative professionals is the end-user. 

Cultivating curiosity and empathy for your users is the best way to create better experiences for them and in turn, helps us boost creativity.

 It is all too easy to fall back on what we already know, especially with time constraints and budgets to consider. So how do we conduct research in a way that helps us develop valuable insights?

Below are a few strategies:

• Apply a beginner’s mind to everyday tasks, what do you notice that you normally would not?
• Instead of simply looking at what competitors are doing, cultivate empathy for your users and what their perspectives and needs are.
• Look for ways to update and refresh your worldview. Field observations help you notice details that you wouldn’t otherwise pick up in structured interviews.
• Ask why, then keep asking why. Are you gaining new insights from user interviews or just hearing what you expect?
• Use customer journey mapping to get in the mindset of your users. Look for insights, patterns, and anything that can be improved. This is such a critical strategy behind how to boost creativity and build a better experience for customers, that our team created an informative video on the subject. 

4. Collaboration is Key

The fact is, creativity does not happen in a vacuum. It requires input from all the disciplines contributing to a project or goal. 

Multidisciplinary teams keep our perspective fresh and create a system where sharing ideas is encouraged. 

Teams that have creative confidence are ones that have a back and forth culture where team members ask “what can I do to improve this concept” rather than “that won’t work” or “that is a bad idea.” They share ownership of a project because that gives everyone a stake in successes and failures. 

A great way to foster this creative collaboration is to designate a time for open discussion and ideation. We have weekly and monthly meetings dedicated to internal reviews of our work and brainstorms. Anyone on the team can attend and anyone can bring a topic to cover. These meetings create a culture of internal feedback and collaboration. 

David and Tom Kelley recommend thinking of each team member as a superhero. What are their strengths? What is their kryptonite (weaknesses)? How can you best draw on strengths and diminish weaknesses during a project lifecycle? 

Great teams are diverse. They are not afraid of uncomfortable conversations and are prepared to bring their whole selves to work which allows us to understand their unique perspective.

5. Just Do It

Not just Nike’s famed catchphrase, the principle of “just do it” applies to building creative confidence and boosting creativity as well. 

“If you want to make something great, you have to start making.” 

In the workplace, this can be challenging especially when faced with a problem that has no clear solution. Instead of being a passive observer, tackle a doable piece of the problem. 

Get started, even if your start feels inconsequential. Prototyping comes into play here as a low-stakes way to get ideas flowing and engage the team/clients in the story you are trying to convey. 

Test your prototypes with users, get feedback, and iterate. 

If you are a procrastinator, try reframing. Replace ‘procrastinate’ with the word ‘resistance’ and you may realize that the gap between thinking and action is something you can bridge.

Leverage Your Inner “Ecommerce UX Designer” To Boost Creativity

Creativity is something that must be worked and stretched to become a practice that feels comfortable, like any muscle. 

Design thinking should not be siloed between our work and personal lives. In fact, design thinking pervades every aspect of our lives. 

In our work at The Good we use a human-centered approach to solve challenges. Working as a team helps us keep ideas flowing and provides fresh perspectives. 

We set goals and find ways to go beyond what we even thought was possible. 

We see problems and take action to solve them. 

Don’t let fear of failure and the thought that you are “not creative” limit you from what you can achieve. We can all benefit from design thinking and applying the key principles of creative confidence to our lives.

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