Optimizely Blog

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About Cara Harshman:

Cara is a storyteller and journalist. From 2012-2016 Cara was a Content Marketing Manager and Blog Editor at Optimizely. She wrote A/B Testing the book on behalf of Optimizely’s co-founders. Follow her @CaraHarshman.

30 Ways to Increase Ecommerce Conversion [Infographic]

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30 Ways to Increase Ecommerce Conversion [Infographic]

The average consumer visiting a website has an attention span of 8 seconds. Put another way, you have 8 seconds to capture someone’s attention when they land on site. Besides compelling content, great photography and snappy headlines, there are a number of other factors that contribute to the rate at which your site converts browsers into buyers. In this infographic, we share 30 ideas to increase your retail store’s e-commerce conversion rate by removing friction from key areas like landing pages, homepage and checkout funnel.

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Why You Should Love the “Like” Button Redesign

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Why You Should Love the “Like” Button Redesign

One of the most iconic and frequently clicked buttons on the internet is getting a redesign. The Facebook like button that 1.6 billion users click more than 6 billion times per day is officially being replaced with six buttons to better capture the range of emotions we exhibit on Facebook — like, love wow, haha, angry, sad. If you’re thinking, OK…so what? think again, because this is huge. The way Facebook designed Reactions — their name for this new capability — demonstrates the magnitude of this change.

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Develop Your Personalization Strategy With This Toolkit

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Develop Your Personalization Strategy With This Toolkit

Personalized online experiences are outperforming generic ones and becoming more familiar and evermore lucrative. This practice of online personalization means showing more relevant, targeted content to specific segments of your visitors in order to increase key goals such as customer lifetime value, loyalty and conversion.

To make the prospect of personalization more digestible, we have broken it down into a 4-piece toolkit available for free download today.

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How to Run More Effective A/B Tests: An Optichat Recap

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How to Run More Effective A/B Tests: An Optichat Recap

Good ideas are the foundation of our work as optimizers. The source doesn’t matter — whether it comes from our heads, a user testing session or our website analytics — as much as the quality. Instead of one-off ideas, we need to equip ourselves with scalable strategies for brainstorming effective A/B tests. Hiten Shah, founder CrazyEgg, co-founder of KISSMetrics joined #optichat to discuss tactics for running effective A/B tests.

Here’s a recap of the questions, answers from Hiten and the #optichat community.

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3 A/B Testing Case Studies on Seeking The Global Maximum

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3 A/B Testing Case Studies on Seeking The Global Maximum

As the following case studies reveal, there are huge wins to be had from thinking big and being open to questioning the status quo. There are also important revelations lurking in smaller tests that can point the way to a major redesign. And sometimes testing is the only way to find true north amidst the chaos and confusion of major changes.

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#optichat Recap: Optimizing Black Friday & Cyber Monday

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The last weekend in November is the biggest shopping weekend of the year -hands down. The competition during this weekend is extremely high, and many retailers are unsure of how to optimize their customers’ experiences. We hosted a Twitter chat with online retail experts to discuss what retailers can do to capitalize on high traffic from Black Friday and Cyber Monday and what pitfalls they should avoid during the holiday shopping rush. Our guests included Linda Bustos, author of the new ecommerce blog, Ecommerce Illustrated and Get Elastic, the ecommerce blog operated by Elastic Path.

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Marc Andreessen Talks Killer Robots, Unicorns, and The Future of Tech

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Marc Andreessen Talks Killer Robots, Unicorns, and The Future of Tech

Few folks on the planet are as recognized for thinking about the future as Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)* and one of the world’s most prolific venture capitalists by number of investments. Marc likes to discuss the future. A lot.

So it was fitting for our Co-founder and CEO, Dan Siroker to invite Marc to discuss the future of technology, privacy, and disruption at Opticon, our annual user conference.

Here are the 5 quotes from Marc’s conversation with Dan that really captivated the attention of the audience and gave them a birdseye view of how Marc sees the world evolving.

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13 E-commerce Conversion Optimization Case Studies

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13 E-commerce Conversion Optimization Case Studies

Ideas for A/B tests can come from the darnedest places. But there’s nothing like case studies from other similar companies to get the hypothesis juices flowing. Here are 13 e-commerce conversion optimization case studies from Optimizely customers. Each one has a clear takeaway you can use as inspiration for your own test hypotheses. Scroll forth and grow that list of experiment ideas!

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Case Study: Testing Personalized Experiences at Secret Escapes

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Case Study: Testing Personalized Experiences at Secret Escapes

This is part two of an optimization case study with Secret Escapes, a flash-sale luxury travel company. In part one we covered how Secret Escapes used Optimizely to experiment on their iOS app onboarding flow, double signup rate, and generate positive ROI from paid mobile marketing.

In this post, we’ll dig into another series of experiments that are driving continual increases in new user signups and revenue. In both experiments, Secret Escapes is testing the impact of personalized experiences.

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