Fritz O’Connor, former VP of Marketing at Ironman 4×4 America, exemplifies this approach. With over two decades of experience spanning manufacturing, sales, and marketing leadership, Fritz has developed a methodology for building high-performing organizations that deliver results consistently, even in challenging circumstances.

A marketing leader built for manufacturing

Fritz’s career journey reads like a masterclass in understanding customers across different industries. Starting in the printing and paper industry, he cut his teeth in structured sales training programs that taught him the fundamentals of professional sales and business operations.

“I’ve spent my entire career in sales and marketing roles. Almost exclusively in the manufacturing sector for companies that make stuff,” Fritz explains. This foundation in manufacturing would prove invaluable throughout his career, giving him deep insight into the complexity of bringing physical products to market.

His two-decade tenure at GE further refined his skills across diverse business environments. “We always used to say we can work in any industry, anywhere in the world, and still get paid by the same company,” he recalls. This experience working across plastics, appliances, and GE Corporate gave him a unique perspective on how great companies operate at scale.

But it was during his time at GE Corporate that Fritz discovered what would become his career-defining framework: differential value proposition (DVP). Working in a marketing consulting role with virtually every business in GE’s global portfolio, he helped launch this customer-centric approach to messaging and positioning throughout the organization.

This systematic approach to understanding and serving customers became foundational to Fritz’s ongoing success.

Implementing systems and frameworks that take teams from features to solutions

Originally coined by the founder of Valkre Solutions, Jerry Alderman, the DVP framework transforms how companies think about customer messaging and competitive positioning. Fritz became a master at implementing this methodology across diverse organizations.

“What are you offering? Be it a product or service that is better than the customer’s next best alternative,” Fritz explains. This might seem simple, but the implications are profound. Rather than competing on features or price, DVP focuses on solving customer problems in ways that competitors simply cannot match.

The challenge, as Fritz learned during his GE implementation, is that DVP represents a fundamental shift in thinking. "Every business, product, or service has a value proposition, but not every value proposition is differential. So many companies have the same value proposition. The white space is that differential part."

"It's about switching thinking from a feature to a benefit. For example, a blue appliance is not a differential value proposition. It's a feature."

Fritz teaches teams to make this shift by leading with problems and solutions.

"It's how it makes the consumer or customer's life better, how it solves that problem. You have to identify what the problem is. You have to articulate how you can fix that problem in a different way, better than anybody else."

This shift from features to solutions requires teams to understand their customers' actual problems, not just their stated needs.

For leaders, this translates directly into more effective product messaging, clearer value propositions, and ultimately, higher conversion rates.

Overcoming the "this is how we've always done it" challenge

One of Fritz's biggest career wins (and ongoing challenges) centers around implementing the Differential Value Proposition (DVP) methodology across organizations. The implementation at GE became both a success story and a learning experience in change management.

"As you can imagine, anytime you try and launch a new process in a company the size of GE, you can be met with resistance. Especially when you're coming out of corporate."

This resistance taught Fritz a crucial lesson about implementing change: "I don't view that as a challenge or a stumbling block, but as a fantastic and wonderful opportunity because when you flip those people, they become your biggest proponents."

His approach centers on listening first, then demonstrating value in the stakeholder's own language. "It's a listening journey. You've gotta understand what the challenges are that of the people with whom you're working, whether it's an external customer or an internal customer."

"Proactively listen and walk in the shoes of the people I'm working with. When I'm trying to introduce something as significant as DVP or other business tools."

This listening approach helps identify the real challenges and resistance points, making it possible to address them effectively.

The foundation: accountability, responsibility, and challenge

But having the right frameworks isn't enough. Fritz learned that execution depends on creating the right team culture. He is quick to credit his teams as the backbone of his successful projects, and one of the ways he supports them is with clear organizational principles.

"I have a few underlying business principles that I've gained along the way that are the foundational threads for me," Fritz explains. "One is, any team I work with or works for me, my job is to make them as successful as possible."

This people-first approach manifests through three guiding principles:

• Accountability: Holding yourself and your team responsible for deliverables and outcomes
• Responsibility: Taking ownership of significant business challenges
• Challenge: Embracing difficult problems that create meaningful business impact

"The way I do that is through three guiding principles, which are accountability, responsibility, and challenge," Fritz notes. "I want to be entrusted with significant responsibility that is helping to solve a significant business challenge."

These principles translate into a simple but powerful operational mantra: deliver on time, complete with excellence.

"I know those all sound like buzzwords, but they're not meant to be. And we don't treat them as such. We treat them as very simple guiding principles to keep us focused."

Putting it all together at Ironman 4x4

When Fritz joined Ironman 4x4 America, he found the perfect opportunity to apply all of these frameworks.

Ironman 4x4 is a global company that sells off-road parts and accessories for 4x4 vehicles (lift kits, suspension parts, bumpers, etc.). They have been around since the 1950s, but were new to the United States, so Fritz had the opportunity to find new ways to market their complex "fitment" products, or parts that must work with specific vehicle makes and models. This complexity creates both technical and marketing challenges that Fritz's team had to solve systematically.

His sales background gave him an invaluable perspective on marketing effectiveness. "If you spend any time in sales, that means you're around customers, whether those are B2B or B2C customers. And you learn what's important to them."

This customer proximity taught him the critical principle of "show me, don't tell me." Rather than relying on feature lists or industry awards, effective marketing demonstrates value through customer experiences and outcomes.

"We always, in both sales and marketing, it's easy to get into the trap of just talking, talking, talking, describing stuff, talking about features and benefits. Talking about the industry's best. Nobody cares about your industry. They care about how your product or service is going to impact them."

The key to marketing complex products, Fritz knew, is understanding how customers think about their problems. Rather than leading with technical specifications, the focus should be on the customer's end goal and the emotional drivers behind their purchase decisions.

Fritz emphasizes the importance of demonstrating value rather than just describing it: "Really, visual storytelling, video storytelling, placing the customer in the scene so they understand your value. That ability comes from firsthand experience of seeing that happen in the sales arena."

A data-driven website replatforming

His POV shaped everything he was involved in at Ironman 4x4 America, from new product introduction processes to website optimization. Fritz implemented structured new product integration toll gates with clear deliverables and cross-functional accountability, ensuring every product launch was executed with precision across creative, digital, and channel marketing.

His customer-centered thinking and frameworks proved essential when his team tackled a complex website migration from an outdated platform to Shopify. The project was based on their understanding that a website change was necessary to better serve their audience and increase ecommerce sales.

Working with The Good on a DXO Program, the Ironman 4x4 team executed the redesign and replatforming with data-driven methodology. Rather than relying on opinions about what the site should look like, they embraced rapid prototyping and continuous testing.

"Any decision made without data is just an opinion, right?" Fritz notes, referencing CEO Luke Schnacke's philosophy.

"We try to be very data-driven, which is why it was so important for us to work with The Good, to get that data and share it with the team managing the website replatforming so that they were making data-driven decisions on design and functionality."

They didn’t wait for a “perfect website” to figure out what customers wanted. They tested and got feedback throughout the entire process to make sure they were developing the right ideas.

"I realized we were never going to do it perfectly," Fritz recalls. The team was getting bogged down in opinions about checkout processes, product customizers, and overall site design. "We could end up using half our development budget on building something that doesn't perform."

"Ultimately, we agreed to launch and then test the heck out of it. We didn't want to overburden the development pipeline with projects that don't have a financial impact."

This represents a fundamental shift in thinking. They went from trying to build the perfect site to building a testable foundation for continuous improvement.

The beauty of working with The Good in this situation, Fritz explains, was "the rapid prototyping, the test and learn. We could very quickly get feedback and iterate and then test and learn again."

Multiplying results through partnership

Leveraging an external partnership accelerated progress beyond what internal resources could achieve alone and held the team accountable to the frameworks and goals of staying user-centered and data-driven.

"If you're not an expert, I would recommend doing a website project with a company like The Good. It wasn't a cost, it was an investment," Fritz emphasizes. "And I think that Ironman 4x4 is the beneficiary of the investment that they made with The Good as they migrated over to Shopify and learned about what customers would like."

The partnership enabled intentional, studied testing with proper dependencies and measurable results tracking.

"That whole test and learn methodology is done in a very structured, deliberate way. Making changes in a waterfall, with the proper dependencies articulated, and then tracking the measurable benefits of changes, and then tweaking accordingly from there."

This approach breeds confidence because it's entirely data-driven, removing guesswork from critical business decisions.

Lessons for marketing and sales leaders

For marketing and sales leaders looking to build similar operational excellence, Fritz's approach provides a roadmap: start with principles, understand your customers deeply, make decisions based on data, and never underestimate the power of strategic partnerships to unlock potential.

Start with principles, not tactics

Before implementing any marketing or optimization program, establish clear guiding principles. Fritz's framework of accountability, responsibility, and challenge provided a foundation that influenced every decision and created lasting organizational change.

Understand your customer's next best alternative

Move beyond feature-benefit messaging to understand what your customers would do if your solution didn't exist. This "next best alternative" thinking is the foundation of truly differential value propositions.

Convert resistance through understanding

When facing organizational resistance to change, focus on understanding stakeholder concerns rather than pushing solutions. Meet people where they are and demonstrate value in their language.

Embrace data-driven decision making

Resist the temptation to rely on opinions or best practices. Instead, create structured testing methodologies that let customer behavior guide optimization decisions.

Invest in external partnerships strategically

Recognize when external expertise can accelerate progress. The right partnerships provide capabilities and perspectives that internal teams may not possess, ultimately delivering better results faster.

Starting an optimization journey

Fritz's approach to building and scaling teams, including Ironman 4x4's US marketing operations, demonstrates how principled leadership, customer-centric thinking, and strategic partnerships can create sustainable competitive advantages.

"There's no obstacle too big that can't be overcome with data and optimization, right?" Fritz states emphatically. "The whole point of being data-driven and optimizing is to get time back and to become more efficient."

His advice for other leaders facing similar challenges?

"Get to yes. Figure out how to do it. Don't say, this is why I can't do it. Say this is how I'm going to do it. Here are things I need to do in order to do it. Then hold yourself accountable. Make it happen. Do it."

The secret, according to Fritz, lies in celebrating small wins that compound over time: "Little steps, I always like to say, celebrate the little wins. Go after the little wins because they compound on one another and then all of a sudden you're gonna look back and go, holy mackerel, I can't believe I am where I am."

The secret is consistency: "And it starts with data as your foundation and optimization as the accelerator."

For ecommerce leaders looking to build similar operational excellence, Fritz's framework provides a proven template: establish clear principles, understand customer problems deeply, make data-driven decisions, and never underestimate the power of strategic partnerships to accelerate growth.

Ready to optimize your ecommerce experience with data-driven methodology? Learn more about The Good's Digital Experience Optimization Program and discover how strategic partnerships can unlock your growth potential.

The Good helps ecommerce brands like Ironman 4x4 optimize their digital experiences through research-backed testing and strategic partnerships. Our team combines deep technical expertise with proven methodologies to deliver measurable results for growing brands.

The post Fritz O’Connor Stays User-Centered and Leads with Data During Uncertain Times appeared first on The Good.

So, as a leader, it’s important to adapt. Kalah Arsenault knows this well.

Over the course of her career, she’s been tasked with everything from turning data into actionable insights and advocating for data-driven analysis to building experimentation programs.

Currently, she leads the marketing optimization team at Autodesk, the global leader in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software.

We had the chance to sit down with her and get the inside scoop on:

• Standing up an A/B testing program
• A simple prioritization model making an impact
• Measuring and circulating optimization learnings

Marketing optimization for a leading software company

As the marketing optimization team lead, Kalah digs into all the nooks and crannies of the company’s marketing efforts to make it more effective and efficient.

The marketing optimization team at Autodesk sits on the operations team at the intersection between marketing operations and technology. Partnering with marketing teams to improve campaign effectiveness, Kalah and the marketing optimization team bridge the gap between data, marketing know-how, and testing expertise.

When shakeups a few years ago halted all A/B testing on the Autodesk website, Kalah was eager to partner with the website team to re-enable experimentation. A self-proclaimed marketing, analytics & optimization enthusiast, Kalah brings a consistent data-backed ethos to her work. And her background tee’d her up for success. Kalah jump-started her professional life in advertising and ecommerce. The experience working in stakeholder-facing roles gave her a unique ability to turn data into stories and prove the value of iterating your way to success.

Standing up an A/B testing program

The challenge was clear. Without an experimentation program in place, the team was left without the data needed to fuel good decision-making.

“The data will tell you what is the right choice and it takes decision-making out of the process,” she said when asked how data plays a role in her decision-making. It can even go so far as to be said that they don’t just affect the process, they are the process. “Experimentation and data can be the decision-making process.”

So, it was crucial to get the A/B testing program back on its feet in order to bring that clarity to the work she was doing day-to-day.

To start, Kalah and her team put their experience into practice, creating an A/B testing roadmap. This was a crucial step, requiring them to define goals, align with stakeholders, and assess priorities and risks of optimization. Because of a new organizational structure, on top of the complexity of rebuilding the A/B testing program, there was an added obstacle to working across different marketing teams.

The optimization and web teams worked together to establish clear parameters, agreements, and definitions of what could or could not be tested. There is now a huge, pre-approved sandbox to play in, allowing optimizers the chance to find iterations that improve UX and marketing KPIs.

Whether you’re a researcher, an analyst, a marketer, or an optimization specialist, a well-made roadmap connects you with the clear steps needed to begin experimenting.

For Kalah, this meant:

• Identifying objectives for the testing program
• Establishing marketing and website challenges
• Isolating testing opportunities
• Formulating testing hypotheses
• Prioritizing testing opportunities

With frameworks in place, they were ready to get back to work.

While other optimization leaders can follow a similar strategy of aligning with stakeholders and building a roadmap, standing up an A/B testing program is no small feat. So, if you don’t have the resources or a dedicated team like Autodesk, she has some advice.

“What I primarily suggest is hiring someone who specializes in the practice. I think the expertise to identify optimization opportunities, design the tests, see it through implementation, measure the results, and provide recommendations and next steps is incredibly impactful.”

And while there are some savvy marketers that can do this, she emphasizes that “it's a separate skill set and expertise.” So whether you hire for that as a full-time role or you look to agencies to bring that expertise, Kalah strongly recommends companies consider experts to lead the charge.

For example, “at a high level, a test may show one version outperforming another,” she says. “But digging deeper often reveals different results by segment, whether by job profile, country, or industry. We aim to look beyond primary KPIs to fully understand what’s driving the outcome.” That level of nuance is hard to find in a busy marketer, so it’s best to have dedicated optimizers around who can take the time to know and understand audiences.

A prioritization model to drive velocity

With the A/B testing program back up and running, Kalah and her team had their plates full finding efficiencies and improvements across Autodesk’s marketing efforts.

Not only were there opportunities identified in their research, but teams across the organization were submitting requests and ideas for their consideration.

The list was long. The optimization team wasn’t sure what the “most important first thing” to work on was, and marketing stakeholders didn’t understand why their projects weren’t top of the list for testing. There was an opportunity to clarify and get more done quickly.

The solution? A prioritization model aimed at:

• Increase testing volume
• Aligning teams
• Saving time

While lots of testing folks would hear “prioritization model” and go straight to the mathematical elements, Kalah needed a model that was simple, easy to calculate, and transparent for all parties.

Kalah and her team built out an auto-calculated prioritization model as part of their optimization requests intake process. It involves three elements:

• Business impact: Measured based on whether the request aligns with the marketing plan, which is agreed upon by everyone from CMO to entry-level marketing team member.
• Level of effort: Internal criteria that identify a higher or lower level of effort.
• Urgency: Assess the request with questions like: Does it need to be executed immediately? Does it impact a larger project immediately? Does this effort have backing from a senior leader in marketing?

The intake process asks questions related to the criteria mentioned, and then logic set up in Asana auto-calculates the prioritization of the experiment or optimization. “This is what saves us time and energy,” she says. It eliminates looping conversations and time to manually prioritize things amongst the team.

Kalah emphasizes the power of this setup. “We don't do mathematical calculations to assess the level of business impact or length of time to reach statistical significance. That's too resource-intensive, and we'd be spending all our time assessing and prioritizing. With our automated prioritization model, we can spend our time on launching and analyzing tests and making business impact.”

And it worked.

“We were able to double the amount of tests our team took on within one year. So from this compared to last year we doubled the volume of testing with a new operating and prioritization model.”

Measuring marketing optimization success

The volume of tests is just one of the key metrics Kalah identified for measuring her team’s success.

It can be tough to find just one KPI to prove the value of optimization, given the nature of working across teams, products, and audiences. So, instead of focusing on 1:1 measurement, they look at a variety of metrics, including:

• Volume of tests
• Volume of analyses
• Customer satisfaction score
• How many marketers are seeing/learning from the findings

In the end, her team’s goal is to look at how marketing campaigns are performing and then give advice on how to make them better. So, while each test or optimization has its own KPI related to growth, as a team they are measured more holistically.

With prioritization and test volume locked down, she is ready to move the needle on insights shared.

“I'd really love to put more energy towards amplifying the impact of each test and getting the findings out to as many marketing teams as possible. We've already seen this working through a newsletter that's sharing our testing results and analysis work. We've also been hosting quarterly brown bag style meetings with the most universally applicable test results that marketers could implement themselves.”

This year, Kalah is also hoping to find new ways to turn insights into action. “I am also hoping to dive into data visualizations and figuring out how to make our findings more snackable and basically getting to a place where people want to read them and it's easy and enjoyable.”

These goals directly align with her team’s measurements for success. Other optimization leaders can take a page from Kalah’s playbook here by letting individual tests focus on the marketing metrics and determine departmental success based on insights, experiments, or other relevant measurements.

How can you replicate some of Kalah’s success?

Kalah’s advice to those new to optimization is simple yet impactful: start small, and stay curious. “Get to know your data, experiment with tools, and don’t be afraid to make tweaks,” she says. “You might be surprised at the impact even small changes can have.”

Her overarching message is one of optimism and opportunity. “Optimization is about evolving and improving—for your customers, your organization, and yourself,” she concludes.

Yet, good optimization leaders know that you can’t do it all alone. Internally, Kalah’s team employs a mix of full-time employees, contractors, and agency partners to meet the demands of scaling optimization efforts. “Contractors and agencies can help manage peaks in the workload,” she notes.

“I come from an agency background. I've always been a fan of working with full-time employees, but I realized as we're trying to scale and grow the amount of impact we're making as a team, it's really important to have contractors or agency partners to support higher demand and the peaks and valleys of work.”

By embracing a data-driven mindset, prioritizing strategically, and fostering cross-team collaboration, Kalah exemplifies what it means to lead impactful optimization efforts. If you need an expert partner to help manage a robust roadmap, get to know our Digital Experience Optimization Program.

The post How Kalah Arsenault’s Team Stood Up An A/B Testing Program & Doubled Volume With A New Prioritization Model appeared first on The Good.

Emma Leyden knows. As a senior product manager who specializes in human-centered design, she’s spent years using unique research techniques to create explosive product growth.

Recently, Emma was with Polygence, a high-growth seed-stage startup that connects students with mentors. Before that, she was with IDEO, an award-winning global design firm, where she honed her ability to uncover user insights through user research to make product decisions. And before that, she worked at Title Nine, an ecommerce women’s clothing company.

Emma is committed to designing user-centric and data-driven products that drive engagement. She believes that if you create great experiences for customers, business value will follow.

“I’ve really always been focused on understanding the deep needs,” she tells us. “Once I figure out a user’s need, I can use those insights to inform product decisions and fuel growth.”

Emma brings a robust basket of tools to the table: UX research, design, agile methodologies, and honed skill of marrying user needs and business objectives. We had the pleasure of working with Emma when she was with IDEO, and we caught up with her recently to get her best tips on how today’s product leaders can make a measurable impact on their organizations.

Today, we’re sharing insights from that chat, including:

• What human-centered product management is
• Why Emma can’t live without experimentation
• Her favorite tools for product research
• How to pick an agency partner

A Human-Centered Approach to Product Management

There is something uniquely refreshing about talking to a digital leader who remembers there is a real person on the other side of the screen. For Emma Leyden, a human-centered approach to product management keeps her focused on what really matters: the end user.

“As a product manager, you should feel as if the customer is in the room with you as you’re making product decisions,” Emma says. “You should be able to speak with the voice of the customer because you’ve talked to so many people, but also because you’ve synthesized enough and you understand your audience.”

What Is Human-Centered Product Management?

Human-centered product management is exactly what it sounds like. A style of work that has a person anchoring everything you do. It can show up in the way you talk to customers, experiment, or lead your team.

Talking To Your Customers

In some cases, human-centered product management means literally bringing customers into the office. For example, in one role, Emma’s team saw sports bra sales fall 5% year over year. To uncover why, she brought in five women who consistently shop for sports bras to learn what’s important to them when buying a bra.

After her conversations with real customers, she learned about the vulnerability and body issue challenges of purchasing a bra online. She also learned that the site’s photography wasn’t meeting their needs, and color choices within the same style were important.

“It wasn’t an extensive study. It was just five women, but talking to them helped us change the way we merchandised our products.” Once you learn your customer, you can take a human-centered approach to those decisions.

Data & Experimentation

Though crucial to the success of human-centered product management, physically talking to the customer isn’t the only way to inform your work. Emma incorporates a diverse mix of strategies to ensure she is making the right decisions.

“Everything should be data-driven when you're making a product decision,” Emma says. Every single stakeholder - including developers, designers, and leaders - will ask you for data to justify your decision. So you always have to have data to back it up and also to track if your enhancements improved something.”

Where does the data come from? Experimentation. “Experimentation is a tool to gut-check your decisions,” Emma tells us. It’s an important way to identify possible improvements as well as validate what you think you know. “It might not give you 100% or even 80% confidence, but it can tell you if you’re headed in the right direction or not.”

It embodies the “human-centered” spirit by keeping your personal bias out of the picture.

“I can't live without A/B testing. There have been so many times in my career I found myself too close to the product. I thought I had a handle on things, but an A/B test showed that I wasn’t right. It’s actually fun to be surprised like that.”

Data and experimentation can tell stories about customers if you know how to listen. The right metrics, when considered together, can paint a picture of delight, frustration, and everything in between, keeping leaders focused on the customer experience.

Leading Your Team

Human-centered product management means building products and making decisions based on and for the user. But it also means collaborating with your team and connecting with them where they are.

“Having strong leadership skills is important, but also I think strong collaboration skills are key as well.” Collaborating with different experts, in many cases, means learning to speak their language. “For example, if you have the skill to say to a designer, ‘Here’s where the engineer is coming from’ or ‘Here’s how they’re going to interpret your design,’ you can make a more efficient communication channel, which makes the team work faster and ship better products.”

A good product manager can bridge the gaps and translate messages across teams because of that human-centered approach. It also keeps you open-minded and ready for the unexpected. It's important as a product leader to bring in people who might not always be part of the ideation phase but can offer a lot of valuable input. That’s because creativity doesn't just come from the top.

“I have a deep belief that everyone is creative. I think that engineers are some of the most creative people in any organization. When I say that, CEOs look at me shocked, but engineers are closest to the work and want to ship products that will actually be used, so they have a good idea of what should be built.”

Using Creative Research Methods to Gain Confidence In Product Decisions

The good news for product leaders everywhere is that you don’t need millions of dollars and thousands of customer conversations to take a human-centered approach. Sometimes, you just need a cardboard box.

If you’re going to embrace creativity from unexpected places across your organization, why not get a little “out-of-the-box” in your own techniques and tactics? Emma shared some of her favorite tools for creative product research. Hopefully, these drive home the point that anyone can take a human-centered approach to product management regardless of budget, time, or audience size.

Low-Fidelity Prototyping

User testing with prototypes is one of Emma’s main tools for getting a gut check before taking design and messaging to production.

“The point of a prototype is to communicate the absolute bare minimum of a feature enhancement and see how users react,” she says. “You can throw a prototype together, put it in front of someone, and learn a lot quickly.”

Emma uses two types of prototyping:

• Prototyping for designers: Designers are visual people, so to help them understand what you want from a product, you have to give them something visual. It doesn’t have to be pretty, but a quick mockup or sketch is a powerful way to bridge the communication gap.
• Prototyping for users: These don’t need to be fully developed, but they have to be something users can use. “This does not need to be fancy,” she tells us “I’ve literally made prototypes with cardboard and put them in front of users.” The point is to communicate the absolute bare minimum of a feature.

“One of the beauties of prototyping is that when you take the design elements out of it, you're stripping down the feedback,” Emma says. It prevents users from being influenced by unimportant details or things that can be tested and changed later. It lets you focus on the functionality and usability of a product.

Out-of-the-box User Research

Emma also likes to use creative, outside-the-box UX research techniques to uncover insights to inform design and product decisions. Here are a few of the fun examples she shared that may come in handy for your own efforts.

The Scavenger Hunt Approach for Discoverability Insights

The scavenger hunt approach is useful when you’re trying to validate whether users can find information. In this test, Emma asks a user (or a group of users) to find a piece of information in a website, webpage, or document.

How they search and how long it takes them to find the information helps you understand their mental models and whether the site, page, or document matches their thinking.

"In one case, we knew a specific piece of information was key from a previous test, but we had to validate if users could easily find it," Emma explains. "People were scanning through the document like crazy, and we quickly learned that what we thought was obvious on page six was actually buried too deep."

Hot Dot Voting for Honest Feedback

Hot dot voting is an exercise where Emma gives users access to the digital workspace of some product. Then she asks them to add green dots to portions of the workspace that resonate with them and red dots to portions they find confusing or frustrating.

"The beauty of this method is that it gives people time to think,” Emma tells us. “They’re not being put on the spot to say something they like or dislike at the moment, which can lead to biased answers. Instead, they reflect quietly and provide more thoughtful responses."

Ultimately, this technique produces valuable conversations about the product. The facilitator gets a chance to see the themes people follow when exploring or using the product.

Turning Creative Research & Design Into Business Success

Emma’s human-centered approach has served her well in her career. She has a long history of creating impactful change at every organization she’s been a part of. Sticking to her unique approach has delivered huge results and some key learnings along the way.

Turning User Insights Into A 733% Sales Increase

In one instance, Emma delved into a product that was underperforming at Polygence. It was intended to serve as an add-on to the core product, but customers weren’t buying. After talking with users (students and program mentors), operational staff, and salespeople, she discovered that the product was built to serve two very distinct user needs. Customers found this dichotomy confusing.

The solution was to split the product into two separate products, each serving a different purpose. The new products were given clean messaging and offered to different customer segments alongside the core product.

The results of Emma’s research approach created a 733% sales increase. “This is an example of where good research and strategic thinking can help you make simple choices that make a big impact on business metrics,” she tells us.

Using Experimentation To Increase Clicks By 250%

In another case, Emma learned that what users say they want isn’t always what they really want. At IDEOU, customers requested more price transparency, so Emma’s team displayed course prices throughout the website. Unfortunately, this had a negative impact on sales.

After running A/B tests, she learned that user feedback didn’t match their behavior. When she removed prices, they saw a 250% increase in clicks to the enroll button.

“This was a clear example (that actually happens often) where a user says they want something, but their behavior is actually different,” Emma says. “Experimentation is important because it helps you understand how much to follow what users say.”

Finding an External Partner for Product Success

While Emma has had plenty of success on her own, she’s no stranger to calling in external partners who can make her optimization team stronger.

Hiring an agency is a lot like finding a romantic partner. You can’t grab just anyone. You have to find the one that’s right for you. Emma tries to look deeper into potential relationships with external partners, beyond the initial pitch.

“When you get a slide deck from an agency, they’ll try to show you how they’re going to move the needle and get good results,” she tells us. “But I think you should go beyond that. You should try to understand if they truly understand your business and if they align with your values.”

Furthermore, Emma likes asking hard questions. She wants to know, for instance, what happens if a test has a strong negative result. How the agency responds will tell you a lot. Do they answer honestly or do they sugarcoat their response?

How does she build good agency relationships? With a practiced vetting process.

Emma believes relationships with agencies should be collaborative. Neither side should dictate the relationship, what needs to be done to move the needle or the pace. You and the agency should be on the same team with the same priorities, but each brings different perspectives to the table.

“Once you start a working relationship, everything beyond the kickoff call should feel mutual. It should not feel like they are talking at you for the whole time, and then you get to ask a question at the end.”

Why was Emma attracted to The Good? We value the same kind of partnership that Emma requires in an agency. We both recognize that great product development comes from a collaborative effort between the internal stakeholders who know the customers well and external partners who know optimization.

One Final Piece of Advice? Approach Product Growth With Nuance For The Best Results

There are some folks with a "test everything" mindset, where nothing is launched without testing, but there are other leaders who advocate for almost the opposite. "Founder mode" is about instinct and speed. So, to wrap up our conversation, we asked Emma a question that frequently occurs in the industry: Is there one “right” approach to product growth?

“Your approach depends on the size and status of your company,” Emma says. “If you’re a small seed stage startup, you’re launching and learning and doing your experimentation post-launch. But a more established company has an expectation of a certain experience, so they have to be more thoughtful about what and how often they launch.”

While product intuition is important, it’s important to keep in mind we all have our biases. Sometimes, it’s hard to see our products from different perspectives, which is why testing is important. If you feel the need to launch quickly, you should at least perform what she calls a “gut check.”

“Your ‘gut check’ can be done in low-effort ways. It won’t give you the most confident answer, but something as simple as showing a design to like friends and family before you launch can teach you a lot.”

As a good rule of thumb, Emma encourages having some kind of user research scheduled every week, even if it’s as simple as letting someone see or use the prototype of a product and voicing their thoughts aloud. You can learn a lot about the usability of a product with this kind of approach.

Getting Results As A Product Leader

Emma’s incredible results are a testament to her human-centered approach to product design. We hope more product managers take such a deep interest in their customers to design incredible products and experiences.

Good product leaders like Emma know that staying user-centered and making informed, data-backed decisions is the key to success. Hiring an agency like The Good can help you do just that. Our team can amplify your impact with the tools, technique, and expertise that you just can’t find in a single hire.

Learn more about our Digital Experience Optimization Program. We bring all the pieces you need to complete an optimization puzzle and build a better digital journey.

The post How Emma Leyden’s Approach to Human-Centered Product Management Delivers Results appeared first on The Good.

At trueCABLE, optimization is a practice, not a program. It’s part of their culture and identity to improve the experience (digital and otherwise) for their shoppers. Optimization is not a one-and-done, check-it-off-the-list task. They aren’t trying to be the cheapest brand. Instead, they focus on serving their customers through great support and a frictionless website experience.

They keep the customer at the center of everything they do. If you’re also aiming for long-term, sustainable success, it’s important to bake a customer-centric mindset into your organization’s DNA.

So, we chatted with Jessica Floyd, VP of Marketing & Business Development, and Mikayla Moulton, Marketing Manager, from the trueCABLE team, to explore their work and what other ecommerce companies can learn about true customer-centrism and user-centered design.

trueCABLE’s Story

trueCABLE started in 2015. Their goal was to disrupt an outdated industry by delivering the fastest, most reliable low-voltage supplies and backing it up with unbelievable customer support. They serve DIYers and professional installers alike.

They certainly don’t skimp on quality. All of their products are designed by experts to exceed industry standards and undergo rigorous testing to ensure they outperform other, more expensive brands.

Unlike other companies that design products to break down and be replaced, trueCABLE uses a customer-centric approach and builds products that will last you years in the field.

They’re so confident in the quality of their products that they offer a Forever Warranty that covers any defects in material and manufacturer’s workmanship for all products, forever.

A Customer-Centered Mindset

trueCABLE has seen tremendous growth over its almost 10 years in business. And that success stems from its team’s philosophy of customer-centered thinking. This approach has been part of the company since the very beginning, long before they even had a website, let alone took deliberate steps to improve their website.

This is why we say optimization is a practice at trueCABLE. They’ve been doing the most critical part of optimization – building for the user – since day one.

Jessica Floyd, VP of Marketing & Business Development, was one of the first employees at trueCABLE, starting in the early days when they only sold on Amazon. She has a background in marketing but works with all of the other departments, making sure the marketing efforts align with customer success, sales, etc.

“Focusing on the customer has been a business strategy since the beginning,” Jessica tells us, “because the things we sell are pretty commoditized.”

Jessica knows the value of serving the customer. She never aimed to compete on price. She uses customer service as one of trueCABLE’s differentiators.

Mikayla Moulton, Marketing Manager, joined the company after Jessica but has experience that is deeply rooted in user-centered thinking as well. She started out in customer success, where she worked on the front lines, making sure customers found the products valuable. She brings a unique, customer-centric attitude to the marketing team.

“Without our customers, there is no trueCABLE,” says Mikayla. “Thanks to my time in customer success, I’ve been able to understand the issues customers face, whether that’s on our website or with the products. I saw how loyal they became when we solved their problems.”

This mindset is the foundation of their work. It all starts with listening to the shoppers. The feedback informs changes on their site and to their products, with the goal of saving future customers from similar challenges.

And it doesn’t stop with the marketing team. trueCABLE has buy-in from its leadership because, at the end of the day, that is where the root of customer-centrism lives. The whole team sees the value of user research and testing. With the addition of The Good’s research, data collection methods, and counsel, they continue evolving their approach to make more informed decisions that serve their shoppers.

A Culture of Experimentation

Another pillar of Jessica and Mikayla’s success has been their willingness to challenge assumptions and take risks. This is made easier by having leadership that’s aligned with the experimentation ethos and filters that philosophy throughout the organization.

This matches our findings, as well. When we studied hundreds of successful optimization teams, we learned that they all had strong leadership buy-in. This is why buy-in is a big part of our 5-Factors Scorecard.

Risk-taking has always been a part of trueCABLE. The CEO, John, has always been willing to take calculated risks.

“You know the saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?’ That doesn’t apply at trueCABLE. Things move so quickly with ecommerce and digital marketing that you have to keep moving. That’s how we keep ahead, by experimenting and trying new things.”

– Jessica Floyd, VP of Marketing & Business Development

But that risk-taking has to fall within the scope of their customer-centered mindset. All tests and experiments must pass through the lens of “Is this good for the customer?”

The challenge is that this can often lead to hasty implementations based on just one piece of feedback. While trueCABLE had a practice of talking to users and making user-centered decisions, they wanted to make sure their hunches were correct by testing them. This led them to The Good.

trueCABLE and The Good

“When we found The Good, we were excited to finally have the data to back up changes we were making on the website.”

Mikayla Moulton, Marketing Manager

“Now, with our marketing, we’re either testing beforehand or pulling data before we launch to make sure that our efforts are actually getting results. That is something we have focused on since working with The Good,” says Mikayla.

For instance, they learned that building a site for two distinct audience groups – B2C and B2B customers – can make the relationship between conversion rate and revenue a bit hazy. A large B2B order can affect test results that must be accounted for.

“Understanding this helped me a lot,” says Mikayla. “That’s something I can keep in mind when I’m looking at other test results in marketing and other departments.”

In another case, Jessica and Mikayla discovered that their customers prefer long-form technical details in product descriptions, even if large sections of text make their pages look less aesthetic.

“We learned that users like to have all of that information,” Jessica says. “Information like that is helpful because we can use it in other parts of our marketing messaging and strategy.”

This finding went against a common ecommerce convention that less is better on product pages. Variants with less text in the hero area lost significantly to the version with more text (pictured below).

Listening to trueCABLE’s unique users instead of going with “the norm” or gut instinct paid off big time.

In an earlier version of their site, the collection pages contained the same products but in as many as 10 different colors. It was messy and cumbersome to sort through.

After working with The Good, they truncated the color selection to display a small group of colors with a “+” sign to indicate there were more options. This made their collection pages cleaner and easier to use. “This change performed really well. It’s been a big win for us,” Jessica says.

Going forward, Jessica and Mikayla are smart not to silo their learnings. The organization’s 28 team members benefit from the learnings of the Marketing team – especially sales and customer success – which compounds the value of their tests. This is one of the reasons why understanding the customer is so important: Everyone in the organization can use it to optimize their domain.

“It helps [the other teams] understand the customer journey,” says Jessica. “I’ll let them know what customers are looking for on the website. It helps everyone do their jobs better.” They use this knowledge and other insights from website improvements to inform ad copy, customer service language, and more.

Focus on Your Unique Users

Jessica, Mikayla, and the team at trueCABLE have done the work to build a quality digital experience for their customers. Now, they serve as a great example for other ecommerce brands of the importance of staying user-centered and valuing optimization for improvements in the business and the user experience.

Many companies feel they are lacking the competencies needed to build an effective optimization program. But trueCABLE’s story goes to show that being a lean team doesn’t have to prevent you from making a big impact. You don’t even need to have all the core competencies in-house. You just need a customer-centered mindset and a great partner to help you actualize the vision.

Hiring a team like The Good can help product marketing and ecommerce leaders create a practice that delivers better digital experiences for your users and your bottom line.

Ready to get started? Let us help you harness user insights and unlock improvements beyond your conversion rate. We’ll create a custom program that unlocks the full potential of your website, app, or digital product. Learn more about the Digital Experience Optimization Program.

The post How trueCABLE’s Customer-Centered Mindset Laid The Foundation For An Experimentation Practice appeared first on The Good.

Brands that adopt those principles do well. Brands that resist them tend to struggle.

Andy Lightman, ecommerce and marketing expert, knows this well.

His leadership and mindset created an effective growth engine that contributed to more than doubling Fully’s ecommerce business. So, we asked Andy to share his pointers on strategizing for success and keeping a team focused on measurable business outcomes.

A Standout Ecommerce Leader With A Challenge

Meet Andy Lightman. Experienced ecommerce and marketing leader with a stacked resume from Fully, TripAdvisor, and more, Andy handles the entire gamut. He finds quality traffic, converts those visitors into buyers, and grows customer lifetime value.

When you work with Andy, no levers are ignored. He looks at short-term revenue boosters, like promotions, and long-term optimizations, like improvements to the customer journey.

Andy takes a holistic approach to ecommerce management, but when he was hired as the first and only ecommerce team member at Fully, Andy had to start at square one.

Three years later, tasked with migrating off an out-of-date ecommerce platform, his job was to build a new website and stand up a team to support it. And how he approached the project is a great metaphor for what makes Andy such a standout ecommerce leader.

The new site would live on Magento 2, an ecommerce platform, similar to Shopify, but open-source and highly customizable. As he began work on the new website, Andy realized they were relying on a lot of “wisdom” that couldn’t be supported by data. There was no shortage of opinions on what checkout should look like, how the product customizer should function, and how the website should look and feel.

This led to Andy’s movement of clarity. “I realized we were never going to do it perfectly,” he says. “We could end up using half our development budget on building something that doesn’t perform. Ultimately, we agreed to just launch and then test the heck out of it. We didn’t want to overburden the development pipeline with projects that don’t have a financial impact.”

So, they launched their minimum viable website without fussing over making everything perfect. Andy decided to A/B test their way into greatness and let “goodness” be enough at launch. Over time, he knew tiny improvements would stack up.

How To Stay Focused On Measurable Business Outcomes

Andy’s laser focus on projects that have a financial impact goes beyond the website launch at Fully.

In theory, it seems obvious that an ecommerce leader should be focused on measurable business outcomes. But in practice, it’s easy to get distracted by endless priorities and stakeholder opinions.

To avoid falling victim to those priorities and opinions, Andy did a few things to keep the focus on what matters and build a team that does the same.

Leverage The Right Data

When Andy joins a company, his first priority is getting clean data. For example, as Fully’s solo ecommerce team member, his first task was to set a strong foundation about the current website and customer behaviors.

“There’s an underpinning of data that we use to help us understand the business, moment to moment,” he says. “We’re able to see operationalized decision-making in a short period of time.”

This lets whatever brand he’s working with identify what’s working so they can dial it up quickly, and what doesn’t work so they can back off before investing too much time or money. He monitors everything through a series of custom reports and dashboards.

He doesn’t rely on hunches or his gut instinct. He uses best practices as a starting place and then runs experiments to achieve incremental changes. He understands the importance of basing decisions on data.

Build A Team Focused On Moving The Needle

Ask any leader about their biggest challenges and they will usually mention something along the lines of finding the best people. Building a strong team can produce meteoric success. But a weak team can stall growth for months or years, especially if those team members aren’t aligned with the organization’s philosophy.

So, how did Andy end up with a team that not only supported his ideas but also helped drive the overall growth of the business?

He focused on hiring for the main levers to driving revenue: increasing traffic, increasing conversions, and increasing AOV.

The first person Andy hired was a performance marketing specialist. This person was in charge of search and social advertising campaigns, as well as competitive intelligence. He wanted someone in charge of bringing in traffic so they had a bigger pool of customers to build relationships with.

The next hire was a product manager. But in this case, the product was the website. This person was in charge of managing and implementing new website features.

Next, he hired content and merchandising specialists who would build products, update pages, set up promotions, and manage the appearance of the website. And all the while he worked closely with marketing and business leaders to build out competencies in SEO, email marketing, affiliate and partnerships to keep the traffic flow strong.

Each hire was strategic and circled back to the idea that Traffic x Conversions x AOV = Revenue.

Permeate A Culture of Prioritizing Based On Business Outcomes

The next actionable tactic Andy used was to make sure there was a culture of prioritization based on business outcomes. Rather than getting distracted by all the small wants and needs of the stakeholders, establish clear goals that you can collectively work towards.

There is proof in numbers. Brands can achieve growth by focusing their time and resources on the things that are verified to make an impact on the business.

In practice, this looked like Andy keeping his group of specialists connected to other teams, as many of the biggest problems require action from multiple departments.

“The thing that’s been incredibly successful, both at Fully and also in my experiences working for TripAdvisor, is the need to be connected across teams,” Andy said. “Rarely a day goes by where I don’t speak with other teams. I work closely with marketing, merchandising, customer service, IT, accounting and finance, and our B2B sales team.”

Find The Balance Between Focusing on Frontend Improvements & Systemic Infrastructure

In order to prioritize business outcomes, Andy understood that he needed a balance of focus between the front-end improvements that drive revenue and systemic infrastructure that supports general business health.

At Fully, SKUs were complex, often consisting of multiple sub-products that got assembled into a final product. It required careful coordination on the data systems level with marketing, accounting, and fulfillment. At the scale Fully operated, a few mistakes can spiral out of control.

Andy’s philosophy is to tackle projects that create the biggest impact, but this prioritization system has caused moments of tension and frustration when his team couldn’t address someone’s issue right away.

In these cases, the only way to be effective is with transparency and honest communication about that prioritization process. He had to be willing to make prioritization decisions and then defend those decisions to anyone in the organization.

“I think that when you’re transparent with other people, they tend to be understanding back,” he told us.

“You don’t have a million hours a week to do all the things [you want to do],” Andy said. So you have to be honest within the team and with the rest of the organization and the stakeholders about how long things are gonna take. Sometimes you have to acknowledge that you hear their concerns about a particular problem, and then explain that you have more significant issues with bigger financial impacts.”

This model requires extremely clear communication. Andy likes to designate single points of contact for projects. For instance, if one of his product managers is working on an A/B test, all information regarding that test flows through that product manager. This keeps things simple and clear.

Leverage External Partnerships & Agencies As Needed

Another strategy Andy uses to prioritize work that moves the needle for the business is to leverage external partnerships and agencies. He smartly recognizes that outsourcing certain functions gives him access to skills and expertise he couldn’t afford to hire for directly, and knows that spending on an external partner could save money in the long run.

For example, Andy knew he wanted to allocate development spend only on revenue-driving projects. In order to figure out what those projects were, he developed an A/B testing program with support from The Good.

One of the biggest changes Andy and his team made through experimentation was to the checkout system. They studied data from reputable sources like Bayard, examined checkout systems from major brands like Shopify, and then used their learning as hypotheses to run their own tests.

The result was a drastically overhauled checkout process. “We tweaked and fine-tuned everything in checkout. We looked at the impact of consolidating fields, a ‘next’ button versus scrolling, breadcrumbs vs. no breadcrumbs, and countless other factors.”

Andy and his team could play with all the different ideas they had for the ecommerce site, but only execute and develop those that were proven to drive results.

Beyond the checkout process, product pages and checkout flows were the first areas of improvement. Then focus shifted to navigation and categorization. Finally to smaller projects and refinements.

Each piece of qualitative and quantitative research helps create a bank of knowledge. Over time, we learned what the customers like and what they don’t, which makes future experiments more effective.

The external partnership with agencies like The Good meant he could use his development spend wisely and learn more about his customers in the process.

A Strong Team & Iterative Optimization Leads to Great Results

Under Andy’s leadership, Fully had enormous success. He built a strong team, focused on key measurable business outcomes, and iterated his way to ecommerce growth.

Fully’s product customizer is an excellent example of this success in action.

Andy understands the importance of personalization, especially for stores with lots of SKUs, high dollar values, and products that inhabit the physical spaces we see every day.

Many of Fully’s products are configurable. Customers can choose components, materials, colors, sizes, and other attributes. For instance, you could have wire management holes added to a desk.

Presenting endless options to customers in a frictionless way is obviously a challenge. It’s also complex in the back end. Inventory and fulfillment are a careful balance.

“When you have such a complex thing that you need to handle as a business, the inclination is to make it as easy as possible for the business to handle,” Andy says. “But really, none of this works unless the customer finds it fun, engaging, or frictionless.”

In the end, Andy focused on the customer and their experience. He figured if sales were coming in, the business would figure out how to fulfill those transactions.

So, Andy and his team with support from The Good learned to leverage an iterative testing program. The focus was to generate stacked learnings from tests that delivered a better, more personalized experience for users.

This iterative process and focus on the customer yielded impressive results. Fully was able to boost revenue by more than $1 million each quarter.

The end result is a customizer that isn’t just effective, it’s fun for customers.

“If you have a highly customized product, it’s supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to let people get hands-on with the shopping experience,” he said.

The Secret Sauce: Consistent, Steady Optimization

If you ask Andy, the secret to ecommerce growth doesn’t require you to hit home runs. In fact, in Andy’s experience, explosive improvements are rare.

“This stuff takes time and you have to just be diligent about it,” Andy said. “It’s hard to get those overnight wins. Those are awesome, but most of this is just consistency.”

Andy found that improving a site and the customer experience happens with consistent effort, finding small ways to improve, bit by bit. Instead of trying to make giant leaps every day, he focused on small wins that compound over time.

“Show up every day thinking, ‘What are the things that we can improve today? What projects can we keep moving forward to get them eventually in place to make an impact?’ And I think if you’re continually working on the right activities, some are going to make an impact. Steady, consistent effort is going to yield better results in the long run.”

We echo this philosophy at The Good. After all, you’re never “done” optimizing. There’s always room for improvement. The goal is to get a little better every day, sometimes only a quarter of a percent at a time.

Moving the Needle for a Winning Ecommerce Brand

Good ecommerce leaders like Andy know that converting on-site customers is essential. There’s no sense driving traffic to your site (which can be expensive!) if it doesn’t turn those visitors into customers. You could waste a lot of money acquiring bad traffic.

Andy is a great example for other ecommerce leaders. He has a clear philosophy of mining data, developing experiments, and focusing on the customer. He built a strong internal team, gave them autonomy and room to collaborate, worked closely with agency partners like The Good, and took steady steps that moved the needle.

Hiring an agency like The Good could be the key piece you’re missing in your optimization team. You gain a whole team of experts, such as strategists, UX researchers, designers, and more, which puts all the expertise you need at your disposal without hiring expensive full-time specialists.

“The return on investment that we’ve had with The Good has been incredible,” Andy said. “We pay this flat rate and then we see these tests that yield incredible results. It’s a very good deal for us.”

Want results like Andy’s? Learn more about our Digital Experience Optimization Program.

The post How Andy Lightman’s Ecommerce Philosophy Created Millions in Revenue appeared first on The Good.

Dynojet sells parts for power sports vehicles, including dynamometers for measuring automobile horsepower and power sports applications. Essentially, products that drive more performance out of power sports products.

In a satisfying reflection of the products they sell, Jackson and the Dynojet team were keen to drive more performance from the brand’s website. They were struggling to shake off internal assumptions—a curse of being “too involved”—which is where Jackson’s motto originates from.

“I try to be very cognizant of leading with data over rhetoric,” says Jackson. “I like blue, you like red. Doesn’t really matter. What does the consumer like?”.

Jackson is a self-proclaimed “bridger”. He’s an advocate for bridging the gap between creativity and data. With a rich background in big media that focused on high-level intangibles, he suddenly found himself in a position where he could drive quantifiable results.

“In the ecommerce world, we now have digital tools that allow us to measure each step of the customer’s journey and understand what works and what doesn’t,” he says. But even with a million software tools available, it’s still a tall order to understand the data and what consumers are actually saying based on their behavior.

It was this struggle that pushed Dynojet to find an optimization partner.

From the outside, it looked like the team had it all together. They’d already installed heat mapping software, and the dev team was monitoring customer behavior. But there was one small problem: They didn’t know what to do with that information. The Dynojet team didn’t have the bandwidth, internal knowledge, or business acumen to properly articulate or even measure consumer behavior, let alone understand what to do with the results.

“This is where The Good helped us understand and articulate what initiatives or what action needed to be driven out of the insights,” says Jackson. “We were struggling to understand the customer journey and how we could refine that journey to reduce roadblocks to conversion.”

Leaving assumptions behind: Focusing on the data with the support of experts

It’s easy to make assumptions when you’ve worked with a brand for so long. You know who your customers are and you know the products inside out, so why wouldn’t you know how to drive conversions? This is the trap that Jackson almost fell into.

But he knew that to put data first, he had to leave all assumptions behind. “So many times we would bring thoughts or ideas as the brand to the table,” he says. “And we might A/B test that theory and find that the opposite is actually true.”

It’s hard to push aside assumptions, especially when you’re constantly told to benchmark your brand against key competitors and follow industry best practices. But that’s exactly what working with The Good helped with.

“Over the last year of working with The Good, the key output has been data-driven insights. It really drives a lot of our discussions and our decisions as an organization and an executive team. We’ve learned to use data as the focal point of decision-making rather than my opinion, your opinion, or anecdotal evidence,” says Jackson.

Some of the smallest changes led to the biggest wins—a consequence of leaving assumptions behind and accepting that the data knows best.

Unlocking a wealth of experience and an outside perspective

When asked why he chose to work with an optimization firm instead of hiring in-house, Jackson’s answer was simple:

“I don’t think a brand can hire an individual that has the wealth of knowledge that an agency has.”

Jackson Esselman, Vice President of Marketing and Ecommerce, Dynojet Research

It’s the same reason Dynojet used a paid search agency instead of hiring in-house. The Digital Experience Optimization Program allowed Jackson to work with experts who could implement insights from the large number of brands they’d partnered with. At The Good, we’ve collectively worked with hundreds of ecommerce brands and can bring that rich perspective to every company we work with.

We carried out a number of different tests and variations on the Dynojet website that wouldn’t just give us data, but also the context to go with it. In one winning test, we increased conversion rates by 37.30% by placing an Add to Cart button at the top of the page. We wanted to test whether moving the checkout button would encourage shoppers to purchase based on data from Clickmaps that showed visitors were hesitant to proceed to checkout.

This change also led to an increase in visits to checkout and, ultimately, more revenue.

In another test, we made the vehicle search feature more visible on product pages which led to a 31.25% lift in conversion rate over the control variation.

These small but impactful changes add up when they’re implemented across the site, leading to a cumulative increase in conversions, sales, and revenue.

To put that into context, here are some of the high-level results our partnership has generated so far:

• 22 completed tests with a 50% win rate
• $5MM+ in Annualized Revenue Gain

“Our investment with The Good has returned 42 times in the annualized revenue based on the experiments we’ve done together,” says Jackson. “If you sat in front of a board and said I can 42x the ROI, you’d get a green light every time. Working with The Good was absolutely worth it.”

Fostering a respectful, business-savvy relationship through transparency and experimentation

The numbers speak for themselves, but we’ve been fortunate enough to have a positive impact on other areas of Dynojet’s business, too. We bring the unique and varied experience of a strategic partner, offering a full team in place of one new hire.

We’re strategists, designers, UX researchers, optimization pros, and so much more—we’re growth partners. Having access to knowledge across clients and years of industry experience was incredibly valuable for the small Dynojet team, but it was our ability to work together—to combine Jackson’s extensive knowledge of the industry with our CRO expertise—that made the partnership so successful.

“It really is about the people that you work with,” says Jackson. “People want to work with friendly, open, high-energy people, and The Good has absolutely been a great example of that. The team was extremely knowledgeable, extremely transparent, and very open to experimentation. And I think those are the key pieces to choosing a CRO partner.”

Success comes from a level of trust from both sides and the ability to navigate the challenges, the wins, and the losses together.

“It’s very easy for a brand to try and dictate the conversation. But we navigated those challenges very seamlessly with The Good, with open minds, and really came to some conclusive results that generated substantial revenue. It was a very respectful and business-savvy relationship.”

Jackson Esselman, Vice President of Marketing and Ecommerce, Dynojet Research

Shedding assumptions and leaning into an expert partnership has given legs to Jackson’s motto, “data over rhetoric”. The Dynojet team had the data, they just didn’t know what to do with it. Now, they can be absolutely certain that the decisions they’re making are based on substantial facts, not rhetoric.

The post How Removing Assumptions and Bringing in an Outside Perspective Led to Over $5 Million in Annualized Revenue Gains appeared first on The Good.

And while we know that digital publishers likely have their hands full with optimizing everything—from landing pages to headlines all the way through to cancellation journeys—paywalls are still one of the most important touch points in a customer lifecycle and a key way that online publications monetize their content.

But in the age of unlimited free content, convincing users to pay for access can be challenging. In this article:

• We define paywall delivery methods
• We show you some best-in-class examples
• We then outline our formula to optimize your paywall design
• We also show you how we created big gains in The Economist’s paywall strategy

What is a Paywall?

A paywall is a system used by online publishers to monetize their digital content and generate revenue. They restrict access to content, such as articles or videos, unless the user pays a fee or subscribes to a service.

In other words, an online paywall is a barrier that prevents users from accessing content until they have paid for it or completed some other action, such as registering an account or signing up for a free trial.

How Paywall Strategy Fits Into a Great SaaS Product Experience

There are plenty of elements within our control when it comes to optimizing a SaaS product experience. As mentioned above, paywalls are just one component of your strategy.

Below you can see how paywalls fit in the ‘Registration’ phase of the user experience and get a better understanding of all the elements we could optimize to improve acquisition, conversion, and retention metrics in digital media.

Registration Walls vs Hard Paywalls (With Examples)

Now, let’s get into the specifics. Paywalls can be implemented in a variety of ways, but there are two main types of paywalls:

Hard Paywalls ask users to subscribe to access content and prevent the user from reading any further until they have subscribed. They may include incentives like free trials, discounts, or special promotions.

Registration Walls prevent the user from reading any further until they have registered. They ask users to give a few simple details like an email address in order to continue reading. Offers vary, but registration walls typically offer a few free articles per month or week to users who register.

Note: Registration walls are sometimes referred to as “soft paywalls” because the nature of the barrier isn’t quite as firm. We recognize that “paywall” is a bit of a misnomer, but it’s easier to say, so it stuck. While we like saving a few syllables here and there, for the sake of clarity, we’ll keep referring to these as Registration Walls throughout this article.

Registration Wall Examples

Registration walls keep it simple. They simply ask the user to exchange minimal information (sometimes only an email address) for article access. They occasionally grant other privileges like commenting and bookmarking, but their main offer tends to be the article itself, not the deeper features like bookmarking.

Let’s look at a few examples of Registration Walls.

Medium keeps its registration wall as simple as it gets: one line of text and two single sign-on (SSO) options. They don’t spend a lot of time convincing users here because they aren’t asking for a lot of effort from users to register.

The New Yorker doesn’t bother with SSO. The simple but directional headline clearly relays the benefit to the reader and asks for minimal effort to continue—a single email field.

Hard Paywall Examples

Hard paywalls are true paywalls. The ones that actually generate revenue. Users can’t close out of or circumvent them by submitting only their email address. A hard paywall asks users to subscribe. It typically offers details like pricing, benefits, incentives, and a call to action.

Hard paywalls are typically seen on article pages where user intent is highest to continue. In some cases, a dynamic paywall is used to gate some types of content but not others.

What’s important about a hard paywall is that it blocks the remainder of the page. A traditional popup that can be dismissed won’t do. A hard paywall, by nature, must obscure the bulk of an article. Let’s look at a few ways that can be done:

An inline paywall is embedded in the page and moves as the user scrolls. In this example from The Economist, they used an inline paywall to obscure the remainder of the article after the first paragraph.

A sticky banner at the bottom of the screen is another common paywall format. Here the New York Times includes key subscription details in their sticky banner.

An overlay, as seen in the Washington Post, obscures article content with a lightbox or popup.  Note that this one can’t be closed in any way but by subscribing.

Solving the Challenge of Negative Sentiment

While paywalls are often a publisher’s primary mechanism for acquiring subscribers, they can also be a source of frustration for users who are accustomed to free online content. This dance between maximizing conversion volume and minimizing damage to reader sentiment can feel tedious. But the SOLID framework is designed to help you turn cold readers into subscribers.

The best paywalls have five key elements, for which we use the mnemonic SOLID:

S — Salient

Paywalls typically get the most visibility and engagement where user intent is highest: on articles and news content pages (as opposed to the home page or category pages). The article is the valuable content the user came to the site for, so this is the first piece of the conversion puzzle; the content has to be so valuable, so important, and so relevant that users are willing to push through barriers to get it.

All this is to say, a well-optimized paywall can’t compensate for a low-value article. The article needs to be worth reading. Users need a compelling reason to push past the barrier you’re presenting, so testing headlines and having a great product is the first step to optimizing the paywall experience. In one word, make sure your content is salient.

O — Offer

Offers are typically given in the form of discounts (as with the 4 weeks for $1 example from the New York Times above), but they can be anything from a free tote bag to entries into a raffle.

Offers add urgency, appeal, and a reason to convert beyond the immediate value. They can get users who might normally abandon at the first sight of a paywall to consider subscribing.

L —  Low Friction

Most web designers know that the more fields, steps, and instructions you add to a form, the more you can expect users to abandon. But are you sure you know what “easy” really means to your users?

Minimizing form fields is sure to make your form easier to use, but it doesn’t address how effortful a user perceives the signup process to be.

Perceived effort is the user’s impression of how complicated the process will be, and a high perceived effort level can cause users to abandon when they feel they don’t want to invest the time or effort required. As a result, we not only need to concern ourselves with the signup process being easy, but we also want the experience to appear easy.

To minimize perceived effort and create a low friction experience, you may want to abate concerns by communicating that the whole process will be 1) simple and 2) quick:

• Use phrases like “sign up in minutes” to reassure users that you respect their time and will get them back to the article quickly
• Show a minimal number of steps and fields from the initial screen, so users can get quick, visual confirmation that the signup process will go quickly
• If you offer a free trial, you may want to let users know that you’ll remind them before their trial ends so they know they won’t forget to cancel (if that’s their intent)
• Use phrases like “cancel any time” and so users know they can back out if they aren’t happy

I —  Immediate Value

While we’re giving you the kindling to level-up your paywall game, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention one foundational element to a paywall: make sure you convey the immediate value users will receive by subscribing.

It’s great to have enticing offers, a low-friction form, and the best articles, but users are here for one reason: they want to learn something. Be sure to give them not just an offer, but the assurance that if they subscribe, they will gain access to the article.

Great paywalls will always contain some reference (either in the main header or in the subheading) to:

1. What users will receive immediately after subscribing and
2. How to get it

Consider these examples:

• Subscribe to continue reading (Washington Post)
• Read the rest of this story with a free account (Medium)
• Sign up to keep reading (The Economist)

If you’re unfamiliar, the Jobs to be Done framework is a great foundation for understanding how to talk to your visitors about what matters to them, rather than what matters to your company.

D — Distinctive Point of View

Especially if you’re dealing with trending headlines, you may worry that you’re losing potential subscribers due to the prevalence of competing articles on the subject. After all, a determined user could probably search for and find another article on the same subject that isn’t locked behind a paywall. It only takes a few seconds.

For those users, they may need some additional incentive to get the content from you. Assure visitors that you’re going to cover the topic, unlike any other publication. That way, they aren’t just paying for the toplines; they’re getting additional context and a distinctive point of view that makes headlines more meaningful.

Here are some examples of language that hint at the publication’s unique perspective:

• “Fiercely independent journalism.” - The Atlantic
• “Award-winning, British perspective.” - The Telegraph
• “Incisive analysis on issues that matter.” - The Economist

Paywall content hierarchy example

Here’s an example of a paywall offer that includes key elements. This is The Economist’s paywall before working with The Good.  (We’ll show you our improvements in just a minute.)

How to Optimize an Online Media Paywall Experience

Now that you understand how a paywall works and how they are structured, you are probably wondering how to optimize your paywall strategy.

We can apply a strategic, optimization-focused approach to paywalls just like any other element of your site. Define goals, craft hypotheses, and run experiments. Let’s walk through the process, using our work with The Economist as a case study in the process.

Step 1: Define goals & constraints

Before starting any website optimization initiative, it's important to set your goals and acknowledge your constraints. This will help you determine whether your changes push the needle in the right direction.

In the case of our work with The Economist, their goal was to improve their in-line paywall conversion rate by 3%.

The Economist also had two constraints that limited our testing. First, we couldn’t change the mechanism. We couldn’t switch to an overlay or sticky banner because they already had other elements in those places. We also couldn’t adjust the timing of the offer.

Second, we had to keep advertising revenues intact. Since The Economist earns revenue through ads, which require page views and dwell time, we couldn’t make any changes that increased the bounce rate or prevented users from exploring more pages (and seeing ads).

Step 2: Conduct the research & create a problem statement

Before designing tests, the next step is the research phase. At The Good, we make use of a number of data collection and analysis tools. We recommend having at least a few of these generative research methods in your tool kit:

• Data Analysis
• Heatmap Analysis
• Heuristic Analysis
• Moderated Usability Testing
• Over-the-shoulder observation
• Customer Service Interviews
• Competitive Analysis

Step 3: Define a problem statement

After exploring your data, the next step is to define the problem using a problem statement. A problem statement summarizes the problem we’re trying to solve. It usually takes one of these two forms:

• Users [are doing x], indicating [problem].
• The paywall [does what], causing [problem].

In the case of The Economist, we saw a clear pattern of user behavior that we turned into three problem statements. They are similar but slightly different.

• Users are not scrolling far enough on the page to see the value proposition, offer, or additional benefits, indicating the paywall is too tall.
• Users fail to scroll much past  “You’ve reached your article limit,” indicating they may not know how to proceed.
• The paywall text may fade too early, causing confusion and abandonment before users can see calls to action.

Step 4: Craft a hypothesis

The problem statement only describes what’s happening now. To guide experimentation, we need a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a testable, tentative explanation or prediction about a phenomenon, based on what we already know. We came up with two:

• Shortened vertical height and directive messaging on the paywall will increase conversions to subscriptions.
• Updates to the paywall including a shorter text fade, solution-oriented header, and layout changes will increase starts and decrease bounce rate.

Step 5: Design your experiment(s)

Once you have your hypothesis, the final step is to design experiments that meet the criteria in your hypothesis. One of the benefits of running tests on a major publication is that there is plenty of traffic to test multiple variations of the paywall. In the case of The Economist, we tested five variants.

Here is the desktop variant that performed the best:

And here’s the same variant on mobile:

Why was this variant more effective than the original paywall?

• It’s significantly shorter, so users are more likely to see it as they scroll.
• It’s more action-oriented. Instead of “You’ve reached your article limit,” it tells the user exactly what to do to bypass the limitation.
• It has the additional benefit of “unlimited access.”
• The secondary call to action increased registrations. More registrations lead to more subscription conversions down the road.

The Results of Optimizing the Paywall Experience

The results of our work with The Economist were significant. We achieved a 5% increase in subscription starts and a decrease in bounce rate with a neutral impact on advertising revenue.

Basically, we gave The Economist everything they wanted and more.

“Through (working with The Good), we were able to increase conversions to paid subscriptions by 5% without compromising our ad revenue, which was a significant return on investment and a huge win for our organization.”

David Humber, Marketing Director of The Economist

You can read more about the project in our case study of The Economist.

We saw similar results when we worked on The Telegraph’s paywall model, including a 30% reduction in same-day subscription cancellations, improved subscriber quality and acquisition rates, and increased paywall conversions. Read our case study of The Telegraph.

You can see similar results on your paywall strategy with the help of our Digital Experience Optimization Program. This end-to-end review of your buyer journey helps you uncover the best opportunities to improve your sales performance and grow your revenue.

Our program starts with an audit that goes beyond surface-level metrics to provide the most thorough review of your website possible and prepare a conversion rate improvement plan that is tailored to your business and paywall strategy.

We bring decades of collective optimization experience working with globally-recognized brands. Let our team put together a detailed report that outlines your strengths and opportunities to boost conversions and 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 Optimizing Paywall Strategy for Digital Media (and How We Boosted The Economist’s Subscriptions by 5%) appeared first on The Good.

At 10:45 am, the team returns to work, their creative juices replenished and in full flow.

Innovation runs through Studio M’s veins. The 80s brainchild of Curt and Sue Todd has evolved from its humble beginnings to become one of the most prolific family-run home and garden DTC and wholesale businesses. Today, it’s famed for inventing MailWraps®, the first decorative magnetic mailbox cover, and its most recent patented product, Art Poles. But it’s the constant commitment to a culture of innovation and experimentation that has given the brand its competitive edge.

Maura Godat joined the company 10 years ago as an intern—a favor from her brother-in-law during her college days. Over the past decade, she has risen to become the Creative Team Director, overseeing resource management and timeline planning for the expanding product and marketing teams.

There has been a lot of change at the company since Maura started—something that she handles strategically and thoughtfully with her team. “If we’re talking about a general sense of change in an organization, it’s really just about making sure people feel like they’re part of the change,” she says.

Involving the entire team in decisions, reassuring people that their opinions are valued, and encouraging them to feel part of the change has been a huge driver behind the success of Studio M’s experimentation program. “Everything is more successful when everyone in the organization, whatever the project they’re working on, feels like a part of the solution,” says Maura.

The brand is always coming up with new product ideas and iterating on and improving products that are already out there. “We add a little twist to make them better,” says Maura. Studio M has always had an experimental streak, and the brand is not afraid to explore and play. As the company has embraced a continuous improvement mindset, Maura has helped her team implement lean principles. “We’re always pushing continuous iteration and improvement across all teams, whether it’s production, warehouse, admin, or creative. Everybody’s challenged,” she explains.

It’s this willingness to think outside the box and innovate while still trusting the data that has made The Good’s partnership with Studio M so successful.

The web’s best resources for converting more visitors into buyers.

A decade of conversion insights in one collection.

START READING NOW

Building testing and innovation into the heart of the decision-making process

Studio M wanted to put itself in a position where it had little to no competition, and focusing on a unique product mix was a big part of that journey. “Things you just don’t see from other vendors–those were the things that stuck around,” says Maura when describing how the brand chose to explore different product lines.

But, as is the case with many small, family-owned businesses, it’s hard to test everything. This was a struggle for Maura, who’s a keen advocate for A/B testing anything and everything. “It’s super helpful when you’re trying to make an informed decision, but for us, it’s not always feasible because it’s a lot of extra effort to implement two versions of something or to even track it at all,” she admits.

It wasn’t just products that were the subject of Studio M’s testing and innovation, though. As part of its growth plan, Maura and her team implemented many different marketing tactics, including the most effective strategy—PPC campaigns. Pay Per Click ads were huge for the business, but when the traffic started pouring in, Maura quickly realized she had to turn her attention to conversion.

“At that point, we realized it was time to focus on the customer journey once they get to the site,” says Maura. “We wanted to know what shoppers were seeing and what was making them go away.”

Partnering with an expert optimization team was all part of the learning process, and Maura was keen to work alongside someone who could take the reins.

“Partnering with The Good was huge because, as a small company with small teams, we just don’t have the resources to always do the due diligence and dig through the data to decide what the outcome of each test was.”

Maura Godat, Creative Team Director, Studio M

The biggest value-add for Maura was she could leave experimentation in our capable hands and give back her own time and energy to her team.

Moving beyond assumptions with a data-driven partner

When you’ve been working at a business for 10 years like Maura has, it’s easy to assume you know what customers want and what’s important to them. Maura didn’t want to fall into this trap, so it was important for her to partner with an expert that could go beyond assumptions and use tangible, data-led evidence.

Our partnership with Studio M was an excellent match. We’re both insight-led companies that aren’t afraid to dig around to find what works. “Reading about The Good’s processes, case studies, and site teardowns—it was just very evident that your approach is data-driven,” Maura said about choosing to work with us.

It was important for Maura to get tangible outcomes—something that she and her teams had struggled with due to a lack of resources and time. And, with a background of relentless testing and experimentation, it was very clear that Studio M didn’t just want a surface-level site refresh. They wanted evidence of the impact of every new iteration–and there was a lot to test. A jam-packed product catalog, multiple product variations, and over a decade’s worth of content all lent themselves perfectly to multiple tests.

But to begin with, we focused on improving three core areas:

1. The product page experience
2. Category pages
3. Navigation

One of the biggest challenges we faced was the sheer breadth and depth of Studio M’s product catalog. As a result, we did a lot of testing with the goal of exposing shoppers to a wider range of products. For starters, we adjusted the content shown in the top-level navigation bar and provided links back to related categories on product-level pages. We also had a winning mega menu design, pictured below.

We also wanted to shine a spotlight on one of Studio M’s unique differentiators—its library of talented artists. To do this, we featured artists across the site and linked back to their collections, creating deeper shopper connections and exposing customers to new products in the process.

Winning back time and scaling innovation: how our integrated partnership created a seamless research and testing hub for a busy team

The Good’s custom Digital Experience Optimization Program suited Maura and Studio M’s needs perfectly. We agreed on a done-for-you process, meaning Maura could take back her time for other parts of the business while we conducted the experimentation and research behind the scenes.

We were keen to work closely with Studio M to identify where they could benefit from optimization, particularly across such a huge product catalog. But we also wanted to make sure that every product had its moment in the limelight and that the brand’s unique differentiators were brought to the forefront.

The integration with Studio M was seamless—made possible, no doubt, by the businesses’ commitment to testing and experimentation.

Trust played a big part in our successful partnership, and it was a huge help having the entire team on board—something that Maura has been fostering over her time at Studio M.

The best part was our ability to help Maura and the team shake up decades-old assumptions and continue to push for innovation.

“Sometimes, our team thought something would be super impactful for shoppers, but it wasn’t. So it just goes to show that it’s always worth testing. It’s always worth experimenting.”

Maura Godat, Creative Team Director, Studio M

So, while we took care of the data, testing, and tangible outcomes, Maura and her team leveraged their experience in the home and garden industry and their well-honed intuition. “I think if you make every decision based on data it’s going to slow you down big time,” says Maura. “So you have to go with your experience and your gut sometimes, but it’s nice to have that balance of a team that’s looking at the data and digging in to show a clear winner.”

We were, in all intent and purpose, an extension of Maura’s existing team. We were given free rein to run with the information we had—and while it was a collaborative effort, we were there to make Maura’s job easier, not harder. “When you feel like you have a partner who’s just got it, it saves so much of your time and energy,” says Maura. “It really feels like a help instead of a handhold. It’s just super refreshing.”

The innovation bell chimes again: pairing years of industry experience with creative new ways of thinking

It’s 10:30 am and the bell chimes. It’s that time of the day again—time to test, innovate, and experiment, and we’re right here beside the Studio M team.

“You have a super dynamic, dedicated team that really feels like an extension of our team that helps drive growth by making our site the best it can be for users,” says Maura. “Putting yourselves in the shoes of the user and doing a deep dive into what that experience is was incredibly valuable for us. We can’t wait to get back into it—it was just a really fun time.”

As a small brand that often didn’t have the traffic to reach a conclusive test result, Studio M leaned into the partnership with The Good to provide recommendations.

“Sometimes traffic wasn’t as high as we anticipated it being, or a clear winner wasn’t presenting itself. The Good was able to look at different data points in different ways and see that, while it might not be meeting a specific goal, it still accomplishes something else.”

Maura Godat, Creative Team Director, Studio M

We were able to take the years of experience and industry knowledge that Studio M has and pair that with thoughtful and creative ways to look at the test results and data.

“Build and they will come”: Implementing a test and learn culture in your own organization

Encouraging a test-and-learn culture has allowed Studio M to continue to innovate after decades in business. Business and consumer preferences are in a constant state of motion, and the only way to stay on top and gain a competitive edge is to learn and learn some more.

If you want to become an innovative powerhouse like Studio M, follow in their footsteps—build your innovative product and drive traffic to your site. Once you have the traffic coming in, turn your attention to conversions to create an enjoyable customer experience.

We are here to help.

The post <strong>Encouraging A “Test And Learn” Culture To Keep Innovation Fresh After 30 Years In Business</strong> appeared first on The Good.

Chad’s focused goals and flexible mindset made for an easy partnership as we developed a strategy and tackled each goal head-on.

Find out how Chad Ina’s fearless approach with The Good helped eManualOnline achieve impressive results like:

• A 50% win rate
• £530K annualized revenue gains
• 9:1 ROI

An industry leader

Trusted for over 15 years by over a million sellers, eManualOnline offers over 2.5 million digital repair manuals for download, making it the largest repair manual database online.

Their site boasts an impressive catalog across all industries, including automotive, household electronics, construction equipment, and more.

And not only professionals can purchase their manuals. eManualOnline is for everyone curios about repair, whether you’re a professional mechanic, a repair shop, or someone who loves a good DIY project.

eManualOnline has a long-standing commitment to providing quality manuals with quality service at a reasonable price, something they’ve maintained through all of their years of service.

From simple tweaks to bold reworks of complex elements

Goals provide the foundation of any meaningful experimentation. When goals are set, they become the guiding force driving us toward success. Unclear goals and lack of direction lead to failed projects and wasted time.

Fortunately for us, eManualOnline shared many goals that helped shape our testing approach. These included:

• Finding high-priority improvement areas with analytics data
• Increasing conversion rates, a common goal among our clients
• Increasing directional guidance: Finding ways to guide users to the most relevant products pages in as little time as possible
• Simplifying the purchase process
• Minimizing the clicks to checkout
• Improving side and top navigation for user intent

Conducting a site-wide audit illuminated 3 key challenges

After establishing specific goals, we conducted an audit of eManualOnline to identify any areas of friction and improvements.

Using both qualitative and quantitative data provided insights into not only how customers interact on the site but why these interactions occur.

Our team gathered insights from this research, which illuminated 3 key challenges.

We reviewed heat maps and session recordings of customers scrolling up and down category pages, revealing a potential need for better filtering options and content hierarchy.

User testing revealed that users weren’t sure how eManualOnline delivers their product. Mixed messages throughout the site made customers wary and untrusting of the website.

For example, various locations mentioned mixed delivery methods: DVDs, downloads, links, and emails. Users were likely to lose confidence if delivery methods were unclear.

Additional session recordings showed that users landing from ads were likely to bounce, but those that engaged had a higher than typical likelihood to use breadcrumbs.

This indicated that the products they were seeing might not match their needs. So, while users were bouncing, they would likely be willing to dig deeper into the site, given the right pathway.

Once we identified these challenges, we explored competitive and comparative examples to draw inspiration for our A/B testing strategy and find ways to maximize paid traffic from ads.

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

For example, we noticed that Target uses promoted filters on their collections pages to encourage users to filter for the most relevant results for their needs.

We hypothesized that emphasizing the number of results and rearranging content on the page encourages users to filter more narrowly, leading to a reduction in the time it takes to find what they need. For example, placing categories above the fold than placing product tiles below the fold.

Next, we found inspiration from Etsy’s PDP (product detail pages), which displays icons with a description to clearly communicate that the product is a digital download.

And finally, we drew additional inspiration from Etsy’s product pages. We found they offer related searches and categories to entice users to stay on the site rather than navigating off-site to comparison shop.

Putting our research-backed ideas to the test

We used the above research and examples to inspire our testing strategy and devise hypotheses to tackle eManualOnline’s challenges, resulting in great wins and conversion rate increases.

1. Category page filters

When we first tested the category pages, we found users were hit with content fatigue, unsure of where to go and what to do next.

Although users found what they wanted using the side filters, heatmaps, and session recordings revealed users constantly scrolling up and down on category pages, potentially indicating a need for better filtering options and content hierarchy.

Our hypothesis? Simplifying the content in the side filters will increase usability and increase transactions.

Our results? We A/B tested 1 variant against the control. Variant 1 removed superfluous categories from the sidebar.

Overall, variant 1 had a 10.84% advantage over the control at 98% statistical significance.

Our learnings? Simplifying the sidebar with fewer extraneous options improved usability and increased conversions.

2. Offline download delivery priming

Our user testing reveals users were confused about how eManualOnline delivers the 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.

Our hypothesis? Highlighting delivery methods will clarify any confusion and increase transactions.

Our results? We A/B tested 2 variants: variant 1, the control, and variant 2, making delivery methods clear at various touchpoints.

Variant 2 showed a 14% lift over the control, with an overall lift in per-session value of 13% at 99% statistical significance.

Our learnings? Clarifying access methods for offline downloads results in stronger purchase intent.

3. Promoted categories – Collections pages

During our session recordings, we found users willing to navigate through breadcrumbs, but a still-high bounce rate on product pages, which left room for ad spend improvements.

Our hypothesis? Adding navigational elements to the collections page would encourage deeper page depth from paid ads, decrease bounce rates, and lead to increased transactions.

Our results? We A/B tested 2 variants: variant 1, the control, and variant 2, which added promoted category pills to collections pages.

Variant 2 showed a 23.72% lift over the control, with an overall life in per-session value of 23.73% at 98% statistical significance.

Our learnings? Promoting categories and using category pills helps users find the best fit products and leads to an overall increase in conversions.

When another challenge struck, The Good was there

When challenges arise (and they always do), it’s always good to have a helpful friend. That’s something eManualOnline found when Google’s algorithm change removed them from Google Shopping.

Their products are downloads and not physical goods, so Google removed eManualOnline. This change presented a major challenge because, like many businesses, a significant portion of revenue could be attributed to Google Shopping.

But, even though their site went through a stressful event, they recovered some of their revenue through the Digital Experience Optimization Program improvements from The Good.

Working together led to over £500,000 in revenue gains

While eManualOnline was on the Digital Experience Optimization Program, we had a 50% win rate on our testing.

Because of their willingness to try new things in lieu of the familiar, we were able to make both bold changes and small tweaks, which yielded large dividends of £530K in annualized revenue gains.

Experimentation is an active science that, when successful, can lead to extraordinary things.  

The post Being Bold Brings Big Benefits (like a £530K increase in annualized revenue) appeared first on The Good.

Exemplary ecommerce teams leave no stone unturned, making incremental changes based on data and methodical testing.

To see it in action, look no further than the ecommerce pros at Laird Superfood: Alisha Runckel, Vice President of Ecommerce and Growth, and Angela Williams, Ecommerce Manager.

Alisha and Angela’s “stay curious and test to learn” mindset has contributed to a best-in-class ecommerce site, a robust subscriber base, and the tripling of their conversion rate, subsequently resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in incremental revenue.

We talked to them about the principles that led to their success and what it takes to go from having a few loyal fans to building a subscription empire with sold-out releases.

Laird Superfood: Plant-Powered & Delicious

Laird Superfood aims to provide great-tasting plant-based products that are high-quality, convenient, and available to all. Die-hard fans will know them for their original lineup of plant-based creamers, but in recent years they have expanded to offer premium coffee, baking mixes, and even snack foods with the acquisition of Picky Bars.

The company was founded on the idea that nourishing, plant-based foods can fuel you all day. It began when its founder, pro surfer Laird Hamilton, started adding plant-based foods to his morning coffee to increase his surfing performance. The result was a coffee blend with fantastic flavor and tons of energy.

In 2015, Laird and his friend Paul Hodge launched Laird Superfood. Today they still operate as if products are made for friends and family.

The company believes that the foods you eat should be good for you and the earth, and should enable you to perform at your highest level. They value integrity, authenticity, health, and performance.

A New Website & 3 Key Principles Laid The Foundation Of Laird Superfood’s Success

Today, Laird Superfood has a model website that every ecommerce company would love to emulate. But it wasn’t always that way.

When Alisha started at Laird Superfood, the company was small – just a handful of people on the corporate team. She joined to lead their marketing efforts and learned right away that their ecommerce website was full of disjointed code, and lacked the flexibility to test or change anything easily.

At the time, Laird Superfood was a one-size-fits-all, “batch-and-blast” brand. They didn’t segment customers or investigate data cohorts. They had no way to personalize the experience for customers.

Alisha quickly understood that the company needed a clean slate. Alongside a contract developer, Alisha relaunched a new theme and migrated several systems to new apps better suited to the company’s needs.

With a new site came the capability to test, learn, and implement. This was essential, as Alisha was determined to lead the team using three key principles:

• Data-driven decision-making
• Testing everything
• Always listening to customers

Following those three principles at every step of their growth was foundational to their success.

“There are no silver bullets,” she told us. “Ecommerce success is an accumulation of good decisions made over time”.

One of the crucial good decisions Alisha made was hiring Angela. Snagged from the customer service team, Angela has a natural inclination toward solving problems for customers with the goal of endearing them to the brand.

With a new set of tools at her disposal, Angela quickly learned the value of testing and became fundamental to the ecommerce team. “This team would be lost without Angela,” Alisha told us.

Laird Superfood was poised for success with a new site and a growing team. But as all clever ecommerce leaders know, those are just the first steps towards the ultimate goal of building a seamless customer experience that converts.

Fostering A Culture Of Experimentation On The Ecommerce Team

Wary of ego plaguing her effort to scale Laird Superfood’s ecommerce vertical the right way, Alisha focused on the antidote: making sure the whole team embodies a “question everything” mentality. This mindset drives them to use the data, challenge their assumptions, and stay curious about website users.

“I think curiosity wins in this business,” Alisha told us. “If you can stay curious and continue to ask questions, you’re going to be successful. Asking, ‘Why are they doing that? Why is that happening?’ every day is so important.”

Alisha knew that gut-based decisions are often based on inaccurate information. The only way to make smart, incremental changes is to base every decision on data.

“When people follow their gut instincts, it can be successful to a point, but if you’re not testing it first, I think you’re going to be very surprised. So we’ve prioritized testing for everything that we do.”

After too many assumptions, you could end up building your website on a house of cards—making decisions based on incorrect assumption after incorrect assumption.

And without experimentation, if by chance you happen to be right, you don’t know why you’re right. But the why is critical to the learning process. You can’t replicate an effect if you don’t know why it happened.

“Sometimes it’s better when you’re wrong because you learn something new and that forms other strings of hypotheses,” she says.

Take their navigation, for example. At first, they wanted to modernize the menu by consolidating everything under one Shop button. Consolidating categories under “Shop” would allow the team to make other important site destinations front and center.

After testing, however, they quickly learned that it wasn’t the right approach for their brand. Their customers prefer to see those primary shopping categories broken out on the page. That was just one assumption they threw out thanks to testing.

In order to foster a culture of curiosity and experimentation in the team, Alisha and Angela place a high value on collaboration and asking questions. They’re politely critical about everything, no matter how small or seemingly irrelevant. They shop online and explore their competitors throughout the week for inspiration, then share their ideas in a weekly brainstorming session.

“Nobody feels like they can’t ask questions,” Alisha says. “Nobody feels like they don’t have a voice. As a manager and a leader, that is – by far – the most important thing.”

Using Data To Understand The Customer & Build A More Personalized Experience

Alisha and Angela’s curiosity-first mindset infiltrated every component of the site: the navigation, header, footer, product filtering, the type of homepage content, product detail page structures, and more.

“We prioritize the user’s experience on our site. So, we focus on projects that will improve their experience, whether that be adding information, improving flow, or making it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for,” shares Angela.

No element, image, or bit of copy was spared from their consideration. Even seemingly simple elements, like the language of their shipping threshold offer are tested.

“[Testing the shipping threshold messaging was] just a simple test, but one that allowed us to use the right language that resonated the most with our customers,” Angela said. It seems like a small element, but it helped the team better understand what the customer values.

While they continued to finetune their site with incremental changes (like tweaks to messaging) the Laird Superfood team simultaneously took on mammoth projects aimed at delivering a more personalized customer experience.

For example, together, Alisha and Angela built Laird Superfood’s Daily Ritual Quiz. If you’re new to the brand and you’ve never tried their products, the quiz will help you find the best products for your needs, based on your responses. At the end, you get the chance to subscribe to those products. These subscriptions offer a number of perks, like free coupons, extra reward points, and more. It’s a powerful way to help new customers find exactly what they need.

The quiz certainly wasn’t easy. It required a number of workarounds and customizations, especially when it came to taking payment. But the results are undeniable. They acquired thousands of new subscribers in the first month.

What’s more, the quiz documents user responses and builds a profile that helps them personalize future content and offers within their CRM. If a user says they don’t like turmeric, Laird Superfood will never talk to you about turmeric. If the user likes sweet foods, Laird Superfood will focus its messaging on the sweetest products to that user.

These initiatives provide an exceptional experience for their users and collect valuable data that they can use for ongoing relationships with customers.

And ultimately, they increase conversions.

Success Working With The Good On The Digital Experience Optimization Program

In many ways, The Good is a third player on Laird Superfood’s ecommerce team. There is a shared perspective that to optimize your website, you must start with data, research, and listening to the customer.

When Alisha was originally exploring optimization partners, she immediately recognized The Good’s data-centered mindset and the appreciation of incremental change that were the foundation of her own growth philosophy.

During the first conversation, “there was no doubt in my mind that working with The Good was the right decision for us to make,” she said.

Both teams are highly collaborative, each offering testing ideas for improvement. The Good then designs and develops variants for testing and analyzes the data being collected.

“The Good has definitely been pivotal in our increase in conversion rate,” says Angela. “We rely on them for a lot. The concepting, the design for the test, the execution, and then analyzing the A/B test results to see if we should run iterations or implement winning tests on our website. That partnership has been really pivotal in our success so far.”

The results are undeniable.

Since 2019, Laird Superfood and The Good have implemented 57 experiments with a win rate of 54%.

This year so far, Laird Superfood’s ROI is 17:1 (meaning they earned $17 for every $1 they spent).

These results came from incremental changes and the relentless “test to learn” mindset we keep mentioning.

For example, one test focused on replacing an unnecessary element with social proof. Through a combination of preference testing, competitive analysis, and A/B testing, The Good helped Laird Superfood create a new homepage design.

With the validation of A/B testing, Laird Superfood and The Good removed out-of-place “Add to Cart” buttons and replaced them with each product’s star rating. This helps users understand the degree that other users like those products (social proof).

The results were a 6.63% uplift in conversion rate, which is incredible for such a seemingly small change.

To be clear, this was just one variant of many experiments to find the highest-converting version of this element. Good testing requires testing many ideas to learn about your users.

Most importantly, small changes like this produce valuable information that can be used on subsequent tests. We learned that Laird Superfood customers are motivated by social proof, specifically ratings and reviews of other customers.

So, this one test could lead to a series of social proof experiments that influence countless elements of the ecommerce store and all of the business’s marketing activities, thereby improving the customer experience and driving more potential customers to product detail pages.

A Powerful Partnership With 17:1 ROI

Alisha and Angela believe working with a collaborative and inspired agency is one of the many smart moves that made Laird Superfood successful.

Small changes to the conversion rate, when stacked up, can unlock serious revenue, but only if you abandon your assumptions and approach every opportunity objectively.

“Your conversion rate is so important,” Alisha told us. “If you have a 2% or 2.5% conversion rate, you’re leaving 97.5% percent of the people out. So if you can capture even half a percent more, that’s meaningful. And it pays for itself.”

Together, the ecommerce team at Laird Superfood and The Good turned the site into a conversion beast that emphasizes the customer experience. They used data to make smart decisions that boost the customer experience and let incremental changes add up over time.

Alisha calls their partnership with The Good a “no-brainer” and The Good feels the same way. Alisha and Angela’s culture of curiosity, objective thinking, and methodical experimentation make them powerful ecommerce experts.

And something we all agree on: the key is to “stay curious and test to learn.”

The post How Laird Superfood’s Team Saw 17:1 ROI On Optimization Efforts <strong>with a “Stay Curious, Test To Learn” Mindset</strong> appeared first on The Good.