No Industry Is Exempt From the Impact of Coronavirus

It would be nearly impossible to name an industry not affected by COVID-19, positively and negatively. Some currently surviving, with regards to increases in traffic, are industries like gaming/gambling, media, and other streaming platforms. On the other hand, there are many industries struggling at the moment with a significant impact on traffic and demand for their services, such as the housing industry, hospitality, and some B2B technologies.

So, what can these industries do to keep their experimentation program up and running?

Influx of New Users
With the high influx of new users, it is a good chance to optimize your onboarding flow. You might not know much about the behavior of these new users, however, the increase in traffic allows you to experiment on what works and what does not work for them when it comes to onboarding.

• Form optimization through shortening, pre-filling, or utilizing login with third parties like Google can all be explored to ensure you are capturing the new users
• Onboarding funnel steps can be explored by testing the length, order, number of steps vs one continuous form as well as progression

Creating Urgency through Gating
If your site is struggling with a large influx of visitors and might not be able to cope with this increase in traffic, one option to explore through experimentation is gating your site. This could be in the form of creating a landing page where people need to sign up and will be informed when they will have access or could be a live ticker on the site telling them which position they are in (like a queue in the store).

Extending free trial or subscription timeframes
If your users signed up for a free trial before the crisis hit, maybe they currently cannot use your service to the fullest extent because you had to limit your operations. For example, sports games may have been canceled which means your users can no longer submit a sports bet, it might be worth considering to see the impact of extending the free trial period or offering an additional month of a subscription for free. With a simple test, you can see if your user base would respond to this positively.

This Moment Affords Multiple Opportunities

Use this time wisely. If you are unable to run experiments or cannot support your business in another way, use this “down time” to work on your roadmap. Dig through direct and indirect data that you never had time before. Determine new test ideas from user problems and create those 10 solutions for each problem, that you never had for time. Build out your test plan and create a robust roadmap with a strong prioritization framework. Be ready to run as fast as you ever have when all this is over.

More here: Ideate and Hypothesize

If you should have questions about certain ideas mentioned here, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager. They will be happy to assist you.

Please make sure to give your priority to staying healthy and staying at home. Keep yourself informed by authorities with regards to new regulations.