Ditching beliefs: Bling's insights on smart CRO investments
According to Business Wire, the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) global market will nearly double its profit in the next years, going from $64 billion in 2022 to $130 billion by 2027. ERP businesses provide software to automate various organizational processes and internal functions.
Bling is a Brazilian SaaS B2B ERP that offers integration services with marketplaces and e-commerce for websites of all sizes. Their plans start at R$30 and offer digital accounts, billing invoices, inventory management, and much more.
To optimize their CRO strategies, Bling decided to personalize marketplace integration pages to improve user experience. The chosen approach to validate this strategy was running AB tests and analyzing their results. In this article, you will learn more about Bling’s insights and what they have learned from test results.
Learn step-by-step how to dynamically change images and copies based on the ads that brought users to your site.
Bling’s challenge
The tech market for business management is reinventing fast. The same is true for ERPs, which get more competitive each day that passes. Bling’s marketing and design team developed a project to personalize the top fold on all their marketplace integration pages so that when a new user arrives at their website, they will see a banner matching their specific interest. This means that if a new user finds Bling through an Amazon integration ad, they land on a page with the Amazon banner copy instead of a generic one.
However, this project would require time and budget, especially because the ERP integrates with many marketplaces. How could they be sure that this was the best approach and that the time invested would yield return? Would the personalizations genuinely make users visualize the ideal content?
Implementing more than 20 new landing pages without being sure about results wasn’t feasible for Bling. This is where AB testing came in as the best solution to gather data and insights to validate the hypotheses.
AB testing
Running this project would require the work of design, marketing, and technology teams. To measure ROI, the teams decided to compare the performance of Bling’s standard integration page with the personalized version of it when shown to small parts of their audience.
Bling used Croct to test their hypotheses and understand what their 1.5 million users would like to visualize when accessing their integration page. The company's team created copies, keywords, and logos related to each marketplace to generate the proper connection with each audience and demonstrate that this solution was ideal for their business.
Bling's marketing team assumed the personalized pages would outperform the default marketplace integration page by displaying a specific solution for each audience. Surprisingly, this was not the result obtained at the end of the tests. In most cases, the original banner outperformed the personalized variants regarding conversions.
Since many elements were altered between one version and another, it is difficult to pinpoint which one was the decisive factor for users preferring a specific one. This led Bling to formulate new hypotheses and immerse themselves in the user journey.
The tests were decisive in not proceeding with the project as more experiments should be conducted. If the entire traffic had visualized the low-performing version of the page’s content, that would mean losing conversions. That’s why new optimization paths emerged after analyzing the results.
This change in the planning saved hours of the technology team's investment in a project that would not bring the expected results.
What we can learn from this case
An increase in conversion rate does not solely define the success of AB tests.
Experiments serve to generate insights. When the tested variants do not produce better results, we save resources and many hours of implementation and make sure not to lose conversions. The tests conducted by Bling also allowed for experimenting with new layouts and approaches, besides increasing the data pool for the following campaigns.
Bling is an excellent example of how personalization and AB testing can optimize conversion and enhance the customer experience in a SaaS product. Their strategies highlighted the importance of flexibility and continuous learning to achieve more effective results.
The team continues transforming the customer journey by optimizing banners, layouts, and CTAs.
To test hypotheses efficiently, create your free account and start using Croct today!