From your landing page to your headlines and images, every element of your e-commerce website could be a tipping point for a customer’s purchase. Optimizing these elements creates a smooth shopping experience that drives conversions and profit.
Unfortunately, making changes without evidence of efficiency can also lead to a less intuitive experience that can turn away almost 90% of your customers. The best way to eliminate the guesswork from your optimization process is to test your website continuously, especially in advance of peak season.
With a busy Q4 around the corner, you should start preparing for BFCM as early as possible by testing out the most essential aspects of your digital store.
These five site tests will ensure your site is fully optimized and can be executed using any testing solution or e-commerce platform.
1. Theme Tests
Even a small theme change can significantly impact the customer experience. For instance, adjusting your website’s color contrast can substantially boost your conversion rates. A well-optimized theme will not only invite site visitors to explore your store but also ensure easy, efficient placement of holiday promotions and banners.
Before you commit to any sitewide theme changes, however, roll out alternative theme versions to small testing groups. This will help you evaluate the impact of these themes on profit and conversions without redesigning your entire website.
For example, OpenStore wanted to create theme consistency across its portfolio of Shopify brands without hurting any individual brand’s profitability. To do so, they A/B tested every brand’s existing theme against the one it wanted to introduce, ensuring the theme swap would lead to universally higher margins. Theme testing provided the critical data they needed to confidently roll out changes across their brand portfolio.
2. Landing Page Tests
When you direct users to a landing page, you have less than 15 seconds before you lose about half of them. Fortunately, users typically see your landing page after they express interest in your brand by clicking on your ad. This means you can easily drive conversions and ROAS by simply optimizing your landing page.
To determine if a new landing page would boost your profitability, set up a split URL test for multiple landing pages, each with different copy, images, and layouts, and assign a page URL to each test group.
By testing an existing landing page against a few alternatives, Laird Superfood, a plant-based superfood company, discovered their old landing page worked for new visitors, but the new one resonated more with previous visitors, leading to an overall $9K increase in monthly revenue.
3. Copy + Headline Tests
Optimizing your site’s copy is an easy way to boost engagement and conversions without completely overhauling your website. With simple A/B tests, you can measure the incremental profit from small text changes or completely different messaging.
Take Original Grain, a modern watchmaker that experimented with its brand’s copy by testing headline variants for its Christmas sales. By simply changing a few words, they generated a 50% increase in profit per visitor.
Even better, setting up a copy test takes just a few clicks. Simply create alternative versions of any text on your site — from headlines and offers to product descriptions and CTAs — and send your variants to different testing groups. Then, closely monitor the conversions, bounce rates, and profit to find the optimal version.
4. Welcome Offer Tests
Offering a discount in exchange for a visitor’s email will grow your list of customers and sales opportunities. However, discounts may also lower your net revenue and margin. To make up for lost profits, you need offers that always drive a high sales volume.
For example, a brand offering portable chargers discovered that its volume discounts generated minimal incremental sales. To unlock better profitability, the brand tested its existing price with a discount against an overall lower regular price. The lower price significantly outperformed the current one, doubling the brand’s conversion rates and generating a 115% increase in profit per visitor.
To test how price changes affect your margin, build three to five tests with different offers and present them to separate testing groups. Experiment with different pop-up styles and discounts and measure how each offer impacts AOV, revenue, and profit.
5. Image Tests
The right images can boost conversions by making your customer experience more memorable. To learn what visuals resonated with its customers, Fulton, a brand known for its supportive insoles and refined aesthetic, tested the more polished, branded content on its homepage against raw, UGC-style images. Casual images generated 40% higher profit per visitor, even though they didn’t line up with Fulton’s usual branding.
To pick visuals that will stand out during a busy shopping season, test the images for your landing pages, PDPs, and product collections. You can change image composition, placement, and size to see which combination maximizes your conversion rates and sales.
Start Testing Now to Get Your Store BFCM-ready
To optimize your store ahead of BFCM, you’ll need a robust testing platform with detailed analytics. Once this is covered, the easiest way to start experimenting is to test your offers. That way you can determine which thresholds and discounts drive the highest profits without affecting your conversion rates. Plus, you can easily experiment with multiple discounts by simply changing their percentage.
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Drew Marconi is the CEO and Co-Founder of Intelligems, a profit optimization platform for e-commerce merchants that helps stores a/b test and personalize their content, prices, offers, and shipping rates. Drew is passionate about helping e-commerce brands make informed decisions about their offers using data-driven insights. He and his team believe that in today's challenging economic environment, brands need to build a culture of testing and iteration to make the most of their resources and find the optimal price that balances conversion rate, profit per order, and attracting the right customers.
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