How Early Adopters are Seeing Big Experimentation Impact

Measuring the true influence of your marketing initiatives on business growth has always been a tricky undertaking, especially in today’s multi-touch, hyper-competitive, lightning-paced digital marketplace. However, the practice of experimentation has become increasingly valuable in helping companies to solve this dilemma by allowing them to test, iterate, and ultimately double-down on the tactics that are most impactful.

We partnered with eTail, the global e-commerce event series, to publish a new report: The Business-Critical Impact of Experimentation, where we surveyed 136 leading retail executives from a broad range of companies to explore the impact that experimentation has had on their businesses. The report revealed some fresh insight around how retailers are resourcing their experimentation program, allocating their testing budgets, how experimentation is driving growth, and the barriers they face in implementing a purposeful testing strategy.

Below we share three of the key findings from the report.

Early adopters are seeing major dividends from their testing program

Those who have a purposeful testing strategy are seeing tangible benefits through increased sales. Within a leading group of digital retailers, key business stakeholders and their teams recognize a link between experimentation and the creation of actionable insights that can lead to increased revenue. Currently, a leading 6% of respondents attribute over 20% of their commerce growth to their experimentation programs.  

Adopting the right solutions that can effectively measure results will help to keep momentum for your testing program strong. With the right expertise and investment in place, the value of winning experiments can add back significantly to the revenue creation potential of digital platforms.

Experimentation plays a major role in revenue growth within organizations of all sizes and stages of maturity

There’s no such thing as outgrowing the need to test. Respondents represented companies with employees numbering in the thousands to those with less than 100, and unanimously spoke to the importance of testing and experimentation in sustaining growth and competitive advantage within a constantly evolving market.

A strong experimentation program will continue to produce results within both growing retailers and their more mature counterparts. Half of respondents saw greater than 5% commerce growth that they attribute to testing year-over-year.

We’re investing in headcount and technology across the entire customer journey

Digital retailers are investing in headcount across different disciplines related to testing, and while there is a significant focus on marketing that reflects a top-of-funnel bias, analyst and developer head counts are also growing. Likewise, technology spend related to testing is focused on both mobile and web touchpoints, as well as personalization, echoing a revenue-generating experimentation focus that is supported by efforts spent on retention and upsell phases of the customer journey.

To break down the silos that might otherwise keep these elements separated, consider the creation of a digital team or center of excellence to own testing across all phases of the customer journey.