In December, we hosted a seminar featuring Simon Dahla, the Global Head of Activation & Conversion Programs at Spotify, and John Ekman, the founder of Conversionista. Over 100 attendees showed up to take part and listen to John and Simon share insights for increasing conversions and driving growth for businesses. Below are the key points that were discussed during the seminar. We’ve also included a video of John presenting the “8 hot test strategies”.
If you’re looking to optimize your website for higher conversion rates and reach its full potential, there are three key goals you should aim for in regards to your visitors. According to John you have to make them:
- Stay: Keep visitors engaged and on your site longer
- Pay: Encourage visitors to pay for your product or service
- Come back: Foster loyalty and repeat visits from customers
But how do you achieve this and how do you start testing?
What should my site’s conversion rate be?
This is a question that gets asked a lot, and the answer John has is simple, but optimistic: Higher than what you have today! There is always room for improvement, from incremental fine tuning to big changes, you can always make the online shopping experience better for users and as a consequence your conversion rate.
Where on my website should I test first?
The most important thing for increasing conversions is to discover what really matters to your users and which pages are the ones that have the highest potential for improvement or the elasticity as John calls it. When you test on some parts of the website very little happens, there is no test elasticity. But if a test gives you negative results, it shows that there’s room for improvement. So negative results do not equal bad news! Same goes for when a test shows a positive uplift. There is elasticity, and potential for further optimizing. Generally speaking the product page has the most potential because this is where the visitor actually makes the decision to purchase.
Optimizing this page is the key to driving conversions, and where the real work of moving the needle happens.
How does Spotify work with growth culture and optimization?
Five years ago, Simon Dahla was asked to optimize the checkout process for Spotify that at the time had 138 million monthly active users. Today, they have grown to over 450 million monthly active users and from what we gathered it has been some hectic years. Throughout the seminar, Dahla emphasized the important role testing and optimisation had on the success for Spotify.
Key points for running a successful A/B testing programme
One slide that really stood out during the seminar was one of the simplest. It read: “If you want to increase the success rate, double your failure rate.” In his own words it basically meant: Run a shit ton of experiments if you want to get some results! Here are more of Simons key points for running a successful A/B testing programme:
- Your test programme should be high-velocity and constantly test and optimize different steps and areas of your site.
- Start with existing data and ideas from the backlog! Don’t introduce new hypotheses before checking what’s already been done.
- Talk to your users and A/B-test copy to get easy and fast tests!
- Use frameworks! Like the «ICE» method, to prioritize ideas, reject bad ones, and test in the shortest possible time frame to save time and resources.
- Automate reporting and Quality Assurance processes to increase speed and reduce the risk of human error.
- Document everything and make test results and insights internally available for all members in the company, not only for your internal team.
Are you running a test-programme for your website? What strategies have you implemented to increase conversions, and are they working? If not, it may be time to reassess and try new approaches. The key is to constantly test and optimize to find out what works best for your business and your visitors.
