Optimization, Personalization, and Merchandising
As a member of the Optimization, Personalization and Merchandising team, I collaborated with business stakeholders and developers to plan and design A/B tests used to gain insight on how to reduce friction and drive sales for the Verizon Wireless digital properties. Our focused experiments allowed us to safely and confidently launch incremental changes that made a big impact. I was the designer on the team working closely with a content strategist and lead designer.
Target audience
Verizon wireless new and existing customers.
Business goal
To reduce friction to drive sales and upgrades.
User goal
To easily learn about and purchase wireless products.
Outcome
Our experiments led to a sizable lift in orders.
Process
Surgical changes and open communication
Our projects kicked off with a call with our business and development partners to discuss areas of the website where drop-offs were detected and how we might improve the experience. After defining the goals of each experiment, our team would regroup to ideate and design stimuli to submit for testing. We focused on quick and surgical changes that would be served to a percentage of the traffic to the website to measure how they would perform against what was already in production. Below are the details of two successful tests that were eventually moved into production because of the positive impacts they made.
Gridwall personalization
Our team was brought in to help develop a framework to enable personalized messaging that speaks to a specific audience and encourages user behavior. This project focused on raising customer awareness of upgrade status.
Project goals
- To increase the upgrade funnel click-through rate from the upgrade gridwall to product description pages through targeted messaging
- To prioritize audience messages so that the best tailored message is communicated
User experience
Personalized messaging appeared on the gridwall and product description pages for three specific audiences: those who were upgrade eligible, those who displayed intent to upgrade, and those who had been known to upgrade in the past.
Results
The personalized messaging and layout of the stimulus proved to have an impact on order lift for customers who were eligible to upgrade their device and those who had previously displayed intent to upgrade.
- Upgrade eligible: 3.28% lift in orders
- Intent to upgrade: 14.6% lift in orders
- Projected ~10K incremental orders over a 4 month period, valued at $2M
Next steps
The following study builds off of the new personalized messaging designs to help users compare different devices they had shown interest in selecting for their upgrade.
Product description page device recommender
The next experiment we conducted built on our learnings from the success of the personalized messaging to upgrade. Metrics on the smartphone gridwall were showing that a large number of users were going from that page to product description pages and back, then dropping off. Our hypothesis was that this behavior indicated that users were getting frustrated when trying to compare devices, presenting an opportunity for the OPM team to test ways to optimize this experience.
Project goals
- To increase adds to the cart
- To decrease the drop-off of customers comparing devices on product description pages
Results
- 4.6% increase in orders
- The estimated impact from November to December 2018 was 22,000 incremental orders with a projected $4.2M increase in sales revenue
- The new experience performed so well during testing that it was moved to adoption
User experience
After our research and discovery work we identified a few ways to make it easy to compare devices while remaining on a product description page. Our first iteration was to add a row of recommended devices to the page, based on the current device in view and the user’s browsing history.
Putting it all together
