How experimentation and personalization drive digital growth

In an increasingly digital-first world, delivering an optimized experience is central to engaging, converting and retaining online customers. Experimentation and personalization are key to providing the experience that each and every visitor to your website is looking for - putting it at the heart of digital growth.

1 Sharing insights to inform your digital growth marketing strategy

To help brands successfully embrace personalization and experimentation and to increase conversions and revenues, Kameleoon and leading experimentation agency Widerfunnel teamed up to hold a comprehensive web conference, featuring guest contributions from Forrester, golf brand TaylorMade and Chief Martec.

The webinar aimed to share thought leadership and practical insights to ensure brands thrive in the digital world, focusing on three key areas - delivering ROI, scaling your program and advice on achieving digital growth.

2 Delivering ROI from your experimentation and personalization program

The event kicked-off with an in-depth presentation from Edoardo Zavarella of Forrester, looking at how to quantify and measure the ROI from your experimentation and personalization program.

Using Forrester Consulting’s Total Economic Impact™ (TEI™) methodology, the presentation highlighted how experimentation and personalization deliver a range of quantifiable benefits to brands. Based on a commissioned TEI of Kameleoon, which included in-depth customer interviews and analysis, Forrester Consulting concluded that adopting Kameleoon increased e-commerce sales and revenues, improved engagement and made it easy to scale web personalization. This added up to a ROI of 291%, payback within 3 months and $5.8m of benefits at present value over three years.

This was delivered through:

Increased conversion rates

Clients saw a 15% improvement in conversion rates as they were able to optimize the web visitor experience and personalize interactions toward improving conversion. This led to $5.1m of benefits over three years for the composite organization analyzed by Forrester in the study.

Higher cross-selling rates

Use of Kameleoon enables clients to segment and target their web visitors by their affinity to certain product categories and to personalize the experience around their needs. This drove a 30% increase in cross-sell transactions, with Kameleoon’s behavioral and contextual-based analysis enabling brands to increase the number of successful cross-selling campaigns.

Reduced campaign set-up effort

Deploying Kameleoon significantly reduces the time needed to set up campaigns and promotions and more generally to design web experiences and interactions around the visitor. This led to a 49% reduction in campaign setup effort while increasing marketers’ autonomy through intuitive and user-friendly interfaces.

Improved customer experience

By enabling the delivery of tailored content and messages, Kameleoon allows organizations to provide a relevant, personalized experience, a vital but unquantifiable benefit.

Increased employee experience (EX)

Users feel more empowered as they can make simple changes and adjustments in matters of minutes, hence feeling more reactive and resilient — and more empowered in their work.

​

Source The Total Economic Impact of Kameleoon, commissioned from Forrester Consulting

Enterprises can simply apply the TEI methodology to their own organization to better understand the ROI they can gain from personalization. There’s more on how to achieve this on our ROI microsite.

3 Scaling experimentation to accelerate growth

Experimentation expert Chris Goward of Widerfunnel shared his experience and insights on how to develop your program in a manageable, scalable manner. There are five key factors involved in running a successful experimentation program:

• Process - how people coordinate their efforts
• Accountability - how the program is measured
• Culture - the shared beliefs that support experimentation
• Expertise - the right skills and experience
• Technology - the right tools to scale

For your program to scale, it needs to balance all of these five PACET® components - otherwise it will cause bottlenecks that hold back growth.

​

In this example the limiting factor is Expertise which prevents scaling. After overcoming this, the next constraint is Process. Until you can get all five factors to balance, you won’t be able to unleash the full power of experimentation. Therefore start by analyzing your maturity on the PACET components and identifying where you need to improve first.

A mixed method approach to experimentation

Achieving success isn’t about focusing on a single research methodology - what you need is to take a mixed approach that brings together behavioral (what people do), attitudinal (what people say), quantitative and qualitative methods to triangulate data and gain deeper insights.

​

Evaluating your program

Make sure you pick the right metrics for your business, choosing between productivity metrics (such as number of experiments launched over a specific time period), quality metrics (for example, the percentage of experiments that produced actionable results), and impact metrics (how business KPIs have been affected). Proper evaluation is critical to scaling your program, highlighting success and therefore unlocking future experimentation expansion.

4 How to achieve digital growth

To help brands turn their digital strategies into action, we assembled an expert panel to answer questions from participants:

• Chris Goward, Widerfunnel
• Edoardo Zavarella, Forrester
• Brandon Maskell, TaylorMade Golf
• Jean-René Boidron, Kameleoon
• Scott Brinker, Chief Martec

Here’s a flavor of the topics that they covered………

What processes did you go through to start and scale your experimentation?

Brandon from TaylorMade emphasised the importance of creating a framework and getting buy-in from senior management, which he has worked on since he joined the company 18 months ago.

He also explained that it is vital to establish risk tolerance for experimentation - everyone across the organization needs to understand and agree what you are going to classify as a winner.

Following this the next thing he looked at was making a business case for additional budget to scale up the program. As part of this TaylorMade brought in external resources from Widerfunnel to educate internal teams.

How can you gain executive level support?

Focussing on business metrics and impact is crucial, and take a staged approach, advised Jean-René Boidron.

Edoardo Zavarella added to this, emphasizing the importance of using tools such as the TEI to model the potential benefits for your business.

Are there quick wins you can use to justify investment?

The panel shared a variety of approaches to this key issue.

How do you educate senior leadership and take a more strategic approach to testing?

Take the time to help them understand the process - and explain the benefits in terms that fit with their business metrics.

What is a hesitant visitor?

Uniquely Kameleoon provides a propensity score for every visitor, showing how likely they are to convert. This enables brands to focus their efforts:

How do you move from an increase in conversion rates during a specific test to measure the annualized impact without figures looking inflated? How do you measure cumulative increases?

Chris Goward pointed out the importance of applying statistical rigor and bearing in mind that multiple experiments incrementally add to results.

Final thoughts on experimentation and personalization ROI

Thanks again to our panellists. Learn more by watching the full 1 hour web conference - simply click here to access the recording.