This is quite concerning, given the time, effort, and budget required to acquire new users. While there are quite a few reasons behind why a user uninstalls an app, bad UX sits right at the top of the list.

Most apps today struggle with retention issues mainly because users cannot accomplish their goals. From high loading times and constant crashes to unresponsive elements and confusing layouts, users continue to face UX problems while using apps. 

This is extremely challenging for product managers as these UX issues impact crucial product KPIs like user engagement, retention, conversions, referrals, and so on.

But, a major cause for concern is that most of the time businesses are unaware of these problems. This is why you need a strategy that not only helps you discover crucial UX issues but also enables you to optimize mobile app UX. 

In this blog, you’ll learn exactly how to do that with a specially curated 5-step framework that covers the entire cycle of mobile app UX optimization. 

Step 1: Identify where users are facing problems in your app

Before you go about optimizing your app and fixing UX issues, you first need to find out where exactly your users are facing these problems.

Are they leaving your app during the signup flow, or is an unknown crash occurring on another screen? 

While there are quite a few ways to identify problem areas, let’s look at some strategies commonly used.

App store reviews

The most obvious way to get feedback about your app is through reviews left by users on platforms like Apple’s App Store or Google Play Store.

By tracking these reviews consistently, you can identify common issues in your app or even discover problem areas that were previously unknown. 

However, since writing a review requires additional effort, a lot of users tend to skip it entirely. Also, most of these reviews are shared by users who either had an amazing or terrible experience. 

This could prevent you from gaining any honest, nuanced feedback from these reviews. 

Support emails

Another commonly used method brands rely on to discover issues within their apps is support emails. 

Users generally send these messages to your customer support team when they require some kind of help or encounter a problem in the app.

However, users only opt for this option when they encounter a problem. Also, not every user would take the time or effort to raise an issue or write an email about it. This again limits your visibility of user experience. 

In-app surveys

Using surveys is a great way to establish two-way communication with your customers. It also allows you to collect crucial feedback that can be leveraged to optimize user experience.

For example, when users complete a purchase, you can prompt a survey to know more about their experience or you can use it to get feedback about new updates or features. 

However, a common issue with this method is the number of people who fill up a survey. Since surveys tend to interrupt the user journey, people might either not take them or rush through their responses. In this case, the data might not capture the pulse of visitors. 

Also, there could be a gap in the data collected about user behavior as surveys fail to capture the voice of the silent audience. 

Quantitative analysis

In addition to previous methods, you can use analytics tools like Google Analytics, CleverTap, Moengage, or Mixpanel for deeper insights into user interactions with your app. 

These tools offer data on user demographics, actions, and engagement. They provide user data like time spent on a screen, number of user sign-ups, location of users, etc.

However, these tools primarily answer the ‘where’ of user behavior. For example, Google Analytics tracks user drop-offs from the sign-up screen of your app. But this information still does not tell you why this happened. 

This limitation leaves you making assumptions about user actions, rather than having concrete reasons for decision-making.

Qualitative analysis

Why do you need mobile app session recordings?

The best way to overcome the app optimization challenge is to opt for tools that enable you to conduct qualitative analysis. Through this analysis, you notice certain patterns or nuances in user behavior that are not clearly evident with quantitative metrics like session duration or bounce rate.

For example, let’s say you manage an e-commerce app. A user is exploring your collection of t-shirts and tries to choose a different size. However, the button to change the size is non-responsive. After a couple of attempts, the user quits the app. 

In this scenario, a tool like Google Analytics or CleverTap will show an increase in the number of people who left this screen and quit the app. However, this information does not reveal the reason behind this action. 

On the other hand, using mobile app session recordings, you will be able to watch this user event in real-time.

This means you no longer have to wait for users to report an issue within your app. You can review these recordings to discover these issues and fix them proactively before they cause major damage.

Tools like VWO Insights for Mobile Apps help you do this by offering deeper insights into customer behavior with powerful features like mobile session recordings and mobile heatmaps.

Secondly, when you release a new app version, you may want to know how new users interact with it compared to returning users. Or, maybe you want to study specific scenarios where the app crashed and failed to respond.     

This type of analysis provides some much-needed context to user behavior and allows you to make data-driven decisions to optimize the app. Depending on your tool, segmentation of recordings can be done in different ways.

For example, with VWO Insights for Mobile Apps, you can filter all recordings based on various factors like device type, location, android version, iOS version, screen viewed, app crashed, app not responding, etc. 

Why do you need mobile app heatmaps?

A heatmap is a visual representation of data that shows how users interact with your app. 

Color overlay is used to visualize where exactly users are tapping on a particular screen within your app. This is a crucial feature as it gives you a clear idea of how users are interacting with important sections of your app.

Let’s say you added a new section called ‘What’s Trending’ on the home screen of your news app. Since it’s an important section, you can use heatmaps to study the taps it receives and guide improvements based on this data.    

As another example, say your gaming app has a section where users can buy new gear and accessories. When you check the heatmap of this section, you notice that a very small number of users are clicking on the ‘View More’ button even though the product screen is receiving a lot of clicks.

Based on these insights, you can either change the placement of the ‘View More’ button or you can add a new ‘Infinite scroll’ feature that allows users to see more products without clicking anywhere.

How can your business benefit from qualitative analysis?

No matter what industry you belong to, qualitative analysis will give you deeper insights into user behavior and help you understand the factors that influence their actions. 

Let’s look closely at how businesses across industries can benefit from this qualitative analysis.

1. Shopping apps

Qualitative analysis is extremely crucial for e-commerce apps. It can help you to understand why users abandon the purchase journey. 

E-commerce apps often run flash sales or special offers to attract more customers. Since the traffic is relatively higher during this period, you may want to study user behavior and identify key areas that should be improved.

For example, your checkout screen has a section called ‘You Might Also Like’ just before the ‘Buy Now’ CTA button. The section recommends relevant products to the users based on what they are purchasing, making it an important part of your cross-sell or up-sell campaign.

However, during one of the flash sales, you observe the heatmap of this screen and notice that the ‘You Might Also Like’ section is receiving much fewer clicks. To understand this issue better, you watch session recordings of users who reach the checkout screen.

Surprisingly, you see that the product images in this section are taking almost 8-10 seconds to load, which is why users are skipping it altogether. 

Based on these observations, you can optimize the product images in this section and ensure that they load along with other elements on the screen.

This will result in faster loading times and will also increase cross-sell purchases from the checkout screen.

2. Finance apps

Industries from the financial sector can also use session recordings to analyze critical screens such as a loan application form or new account opening form. 

For example, consider you have an ’Insurance’ section in your app where users can buy a health insurance plan. 

Here, when users want to compare different plans, they can select their desired options and click on ‘Compare’, which takes them to a new screen where an in-depth comparison table is displayed.    

To optimize this comparison section, you want to study user behavior and identify possible friction points. Let’s say, you use the session recordings feature to know how users interact with the screen. 

Here, you see that users have no issues while comparing the two insurance plans. However, since there is no option to add another plan, users have to go back to the ‘Insurance’ screen. This action resets their choices and they are again asked to select their previous options along with the new plan.  

This issue complicates the entire comparison process and causes users to abandon the screen altogether. 

Now that you’ve identified a critical pain point, you can improve the flow of this process by adding a new button that allows users to choose a new plan directly from the comparison screen.

Also, you can use these insights to further optimize the ‘Insurance ’ section and guide improvements to the design or layout of the screen.

3. Food & drink apps

Apps that deliver food and groceries deal with a large number of users on a daily basis, which is why it is critical to observe behavioral patterns.   

For example, let’s you want to simplify the checkout process in your app. To know what changes are required and get a better understanding of user behavior, you analyze the heatmap of the checkout screen. 

Here, you notice that even though users are interacting with important elements like adding an address or choosing the payment method, the ‘Apply Promo Code’ section is not receiving a lot of clicks. 

To further understand this behavior, you looked at session recordings of this screen and saw that users are scrolling down without noticing the ‘Apply Promo Code’ section, hence you got a hypothesis that it might not be really visible.

Based on these key insights, you can make certain changes to ensure that the section receives good visibility so that users can easily benefit from it.  

4. Travel & local apps

Another industry that can greatly benefit from qualitative analysis is travel or hotel booking. Let’s say, your app allows users to book tickets for inter-city buses. 

You notice that users are spending a lot of time on the ‘Bus Listings’ screen, but very few are proceeding to the ‘Booking Confirmation’ screen. To understand why this is happening, you watch recordings and analyze user behavior.

Here, you observe that users are scrolling through a long list of buses and they are even struggling to find the right one. While analyzing the heatmap for this section, you also notice that the ‘Sort & Filter’ option is receiving very few clicks. 

This suggests that users are not using this feature effectively to narrow down their choices. 

To overcome this issue, you can improve the visibility of the ‘Sort & Filter’ feature or you can also recommend commonly used filters at the top of search results. 

5. Gaming apps

When dealing with gaming apps, session recordings can reveal glitches or bugs during gameplay and can also show how new versions or updates are affecting user engagement. 

For example, you want to know how users play through a challenging level in the game and whether they encounter any difficulties. To do so, you analyze the session recordings and notice that a lot of users are quitting the app after repeatedly failing at a series of tricky jumps.

You observe that users are struggling with the timing of these jumps. A possible reason might be the lack of pop-up tutorials at this particular level, which means users are unaware of the advanced controls required to clear the jump.

To solve this problem, you can introduce a couple of tutorials or demos just before users start this level. By doing so, you can help them understand the controls and also avoid interrupting their experience. 

Step 2: Decide which issues should be tackled first

Identifying user issues in your app is crucial, but what you do next matters most.

For example, let’s say you have a travel booking app where users can search and book flights, hotels, trains, etc. Since a major source of your revenue comes from users who book international flights, you want to optimize their experience. 

To achieve this goal, you check the recordings of users who dropped off while booking an international flight. Here, you notice that when users try to add coupon codes on the final checkout screen, the app stops responding and crashes.

On the other hand, a few users have also reported issues with the filter option on the screen that displays all available international flights.

While both these issues are affecting user experience, the one on the checkout screen should be high priority as it directly results in abandoned bookings and loss of revenue. 

An optimization framework thrives when you prioritize critical app sections, allowing efficient resource allocation and addressing key user experience issues.

Step 3: Share data-backed insights with your stakeholders

To create optimized experiences, avoid relying solely on intuition. Instead, continually track and share data-driven insights with all stakeholders involved in the optimization process.

For example, suppose you are studying the heatmap for an e-commerce home screen and notice a lot of clicks on one of the image banners. But, since the banner is non-interactive, it results in dead clicks and creates frustration among users. 

Use a tool like Insights for Mobile Apps to share findings. Backed by data, these observations facilitate discussions with stakeholders to find efficient solutions and enhance user experience.

This approach ensures everyone is informed about user interactions, streamlining decision-making for future changes.

Step 4: Turn insights into hypotheses for your tests

After identifying critical issues, gathering data, and sharing insights, it’s time to optimize your app. However, implementing changes directly from observations might involve risk and create new problems.

To avoid this, convert your insights into hypotheses and conduct A/B tests. A/B testing involves showing different app screen versions to user groups and analyzing data to determine which performs better in terms of app UX and engagement.

Follow these key A/B testing best practices for optimal results.

1. Define your hypothesis and identify a goal

Before you start with mobile app A/B testing, it is important to have a well-defined hypothesis. 

For example, while analyzing the heatmap of your home screen, you notice that the CTA button is not getting enough clicks. You also observe that the button is placed a little lower on the screen which is why users are probably unaware of it.

Based on this, you create a hypothesis that bringing the CTA button to the top of the home screen will result in more clicks. Using this hypothesis, you create a variant of the screen where the button is placed higher on the screen. The metric you are tracking for this A/B test here is now clear: The number of clicks on the CTA. Your goal is to increase the same.

2. Test small before you go big

Making any kind of change to your app is bound to impact performance and UX. 

However, if you start your optimization journey by testing big changes like a complete app redesign, you face a higher risk of impact on revenue and sales.

To avoid this challenge, you should start testing small, incremental changes and focus on building a culture of experimentation within your organization. 

With this approach, you not only prevent any large-scale impact on the app or business, but you also gain the trust of other stakeholders by sharing consistent results and insights. 

So, when you do come around to run complex tests, it would be easier to get approval and support from the rest of the organization.   

3. Choose the right A/B testing tool for your mobile app

Once you are prepared to begin your optimization journey, you will need an A/B testing tool to get started. 

While there are a lot of mobile app A/B testing tools available today, you should choose one that matches your requirements and business goals. 

You must also ensure that the A/B testing tool has minimal impact on your app’s performance.

VWO empowers you to launch your experiments effortlessly and allows you to test a wide range of features such as in-app messaging, app layout, UI copy, and much more.

Step 5: Monitor behavior after the UX is modified

Once you start running experiments and implement certain changes to the app, it will gradually have some kind of impact on the overall UX and user engagement.

This is where you double down on your efforts and closely analyze how users are interacting with all the changes and tweaks.

Again, you can use the mobile heatmaps or session recordings feature with Insights for Mobile Apps to study user behavior after the changes have been implemented. 

Track the impact of your optimization efforts and look for ideas or opportunities to further improve app UX. 

By combining your testing efforts with advanced behavior analysis, you create an optimization cycle that will not only improve in-app user engagement but will also drive business growth in the long run.   

Register now for a product tour of VWO Insights for Mobile Apps and enjoy free 90-day access to discover real-time insights and drive app conversions. 

Time for a reality check! 

According to research on worldwide retention rates, the churn rate for mobile apps starts at 74.7% on Day 1 and gradually increases to 94.3% by Day 30. In other words, the retention rate across 31 mobile app categories is 25.3% on Day 1 but drops to 5.7% by Day 30. 

If you are running a gaming app or a publishing app, losing users means they’re disengaged. For eCommerce or delivering apps, it can seriously impact your revenue goals. 

So, what is the solution to reverse this churn trend? In this blog, we will tell you how to tackle the problem at its core using the power of experience analytics. 

To understand where to start, you first need to calculate the churn rate for your app. 

How to calculate churn for your app

The lower your churn rate, the better. A higher churn rate means more effort is required to improve user engagement and retention. 

Imagine you run a subscription-based streaming service. You want to calculate churn for your app to understand user engagement and make strategic decisions to improve retention if needed. 

Let’s say your app has 40,000 active users at the beginning of a month, and by the end of the month, 28,500 have stopped using your app. You can calculate the churn rate of the month, using the formula below.  

In this hypothetical scenario, your churn rate stands at 71. 25% and needs immediate fixing. To do so, understanding the reasons behind the churn becomes essential.

Why do app users churn?

According to a survey of 2,000 users, the primary reasons for app uninstallation are as follows: not using the app (39.9%, limited storage (18.7%), and excessive advertisements (16.2%). 

It is evident that non-usage commands the lion’s share as the primary driver of app churn. To uncover what drives users away, there are some key questions you must find answers to. 

Why did users drop off from the app and never come back?

Take an objective look at your app. Is its navigation cumbersome? Imagine using a different app with such difficulties – would you stick around? Challenging navigation increases the cognitive load on users, which can drive them to abandon your app. 

Further, intrusive ads alone can drive away 16.2% of users, making them one of the top reasons why users drop off from an app. 

Users constantly crave novelty. If your app stagnates, lacking updates or new features that align with users’ preferences, their interest will wane. 

Additionally, if your app lacks security features, privacy concerns can lead users to drop off and seek more secure alternatives that better cater to their needs.

Why do users sign up but are not active?

Generic content or offers blow out users’ interests faster than you think. 63% of smartphone users are more likely to purchase from companies whose mobile apps offer them relevant product recommendations. So, it’s worth checking if your app is missing that personalization angle.

Now, think about users who signed up but aren’t doing much. Could it be because your app is like a maze, making it tough for them to derive the right value from your app? Users do not have the time or patience to embark on a treasure hunt in your app. 

Your app should be seamless enough to enable users to achieve their goals efficiently, providing the expedition they need. 

Why do some users come back to your app? And how is their experience different from the ones dropping off?

At times, users simply choose to disengage. This change of heart has become increasingly common in today’s digital world, with several options available online. However, if you still see users returning to your app, it shows that your app offers something valuable that resonates with your audience. Some of these returning users may be your loyal customers who trust your brand and your app. 

On the other hand, certain segments of users who drop off to the point of never returning may be seeking more personalized experiences. This trend is especially noticeable among Gen Z, where over 60% of them explore alternative options even if they have a preferred brand. 

For them, a poor user experience, intrusive ads, or generic offers are the least accepted elements to be found on mobile apps today. To re-engage users who may be losing interest, optimize your app to leave a positive impression and foster trust. 

We have touched upon the reasons why users may not be engaging with apps. But remember, user behavior can vary significantly from one app to another. To have users keep coming back to your app, you need to figure out the exact reasons behind their disengagement and fix them. How to do so? We discuss that in the following section. 

What is user experience analytics all about?

When digging into the problems behind app churns, you will encounter two types of analytics offering a solution – quantitative and qualitative. 

As the name implies, quantitative analytics deals with the numbers, and the measurable aspects of the issue at hand. Some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) we can measure using quantitative analytics include:

• Monthly active users: This tells us how many unique users engage with our app in a given month. 
• In-app purchases: It measures the percentage of users who make in-app purchases. 
• Average revenue per user: By calculating the average revenue generated per user, we can assess the financial impact of churn. 
• Notification engagement: This metric informs us about the number of users responding to in-app or push notifications. 
• Feature usage rate: It helps us gauge the adoption and usage of specific features within our app. 

While these numbers provide valuable insights into user behavior and app performance, they don’t tell us the ‘why’ behind the numbers. 

For instance, if we observe a consistent drop in monthly active users, it signals that users are disengaging with the app, but it does not explain why they are engaging in the first place. 

This is where qualitative analytics becomes invaluable. 

It goes beyond just the numbers, uncovering the reasons behind user behavior. Qualitative analytics reveals the friction points users encounter on our app, how they interact with various elements, and what drives them to churn. 

Without these insights, numbers remain mere data points without direction. 

However, when we combine quantitative and qualitative analytics, they provide a comprehensive understanding of why users are churning and how we can address these issues effectively. 

Therefore, user experience analytics involves delving into behavioral analysis and comprises the following:

Watch the user journey with recordings

Session recordings are qualitative tools that capture real-time browsing sessions of app users, allowing you to review the recordings later to extract valuable insights into visitor behavior. 

Visualize user engagement with heatmaps

Heatmaps provide colorful visual representations of user interactions with different elements on your app. By using a color spectrum ranging from red to blue, heatmaps illustrate which elements on your app page are the most popular (hot) and least popular (cold). 

Study-specific user cohorts

In experience analysis, you can study how users from different cohorts behave on your app. For example, you can observe the behavior of users from specific locations. New users and returning users are also two distinct cohorts that you can delve into to gain a deeper understanding of their specific behaviors. App version, device type, Android version, and iOS version are other user cohorts that can further be analyzed to examine user behavior deeply on the shared characteristics. 

Our platform, VWO Insights for Mobile Apps, supports all these segmentation options and also allows you to create custom events specific to your app as filters. 

Understand funnel drop-offs

Funnels help you figure out where your users are losing interest and dropping off from your app. Funnel reports can also be filtered using different segments to deep-dive into user behavior across their journey on your app. 

How to use user experience analytics to reduce your app’s churn

Regardless of the mobile app, resorting to user experience analytics allows you to zero in on user behavior and use the collected insights to improve the app even further. These enhancements directly contribute to higher user engagement and reduced churn rates, ensuring people stick around and enjoy the app longer. 

Here are some use cases of leveraging user experience analytics from different industries. 

Shopping apps

When it comes to a shopping app, session recordings can provide insights into user struggles or obstacles that lead to cart abandonment. For instance, you can determine if users drop off after trying and failing to access coupon code links on your app. 

Heatmaps offer valuable information by highlighting which elements within your app receive the most user interaction. 

For instance, if users are not scrolling down to view reviews, as indicated by the cooler blue areas on the heatmap, you may consider relocating them to a more prominent position at the top. 

This approach enables you to design your app layout and arrange elements based on your users’ mental model. 

How do they help reduce churn?

Let’s say quantitative analysis has shown that users are churning from your shopping app. You believe that adding items to their wishlist will encourage users to return to the app and reduce churn. Therefore, your goal is to improve wishlist additions to tackle the problem of churn. 

But before you work on improving the feature, you want to understand users’ current level of interaction with it. So, you analyze recordings to see differences in behavior between users who add products to their wishlist and users who don’t. Interestingly, you see many users refrain from using the feature. 

These observations will lead you to make UI changes and optimize the wishlist icon, making it easily accessible and shareable for users. This, in turn, will increase wishlist additions, providing an effective solution to reduce churn. 

Food & drink apps

Food and drink ordering apps heavily rely on user experience analytics. Session recordings provide insights into how users browse menus and make selections, revealing any difficulties they may encounter in finding what they want. 

This information enables you to make improvements in the menu design for enhanced user navigation. 

Analyzing user behavior with specific dietary preferences or interacting with such filters can help you refine personalized recommendations. Filtering and watching user sessions by different times of the day can offer valuable insights into user behavior during peak ordering periods. 

Similarly, heatmaps can highlight areas of increased user interaction, such as ratings or images, helping you plan their design and placement effectively. 

How do they help reduce churn?

Consider you have added a new feature named “Nutritional intake” in your food app for every user. You have noticed that users who used this feature often returned to the app to see their accumulated nutrition/calorie data, which often led them to place orders from the app.

As the next step, you turn to session recordings to observe the behavior of users who are not using the feature and identify ways to encourage its adoption. For instance, placing the nutritional count on screens could attract users’ attention and drive more engagement. 

Therefore, this UI change (or any other) guided by qualitative analysis can improve the feature adoption rate, drive more orders, and reduce churn from the app. But before you implement any change, be sure to run a test and confirm its effectiveness. 

Finance apps

Session recordings help identify any difficulties users may have encountered while filling out loan forms, such as missing fields or incomplete information at certain steps. They provide a detailed view of user interactions leading to contact with customer support, allowing you to pinpoint areas where in-app guidance can reduce support inquiries. 

If you are interested in assessing how users respond to newly added investment charts or graphs in your app, heatmaps can reveal their interactions, enabling you to optimize the layout and information presentation for better clarity. 

You can also gain insights into user behavior when they make changes to their investment portfolios, identifying opportunities to offer guidance and support. 

Finally, filter recordings by the hour of the day will help you understand how users react to market fluctuations of any kind. 

How do they help reduce churn?

Let us say, you have observed a high churn rate on the ‘Add/Manage your payees’ screen of your banking mobile app. 

To understand why users are dropping off, you have analyzed their behavior through session recordings and noticed that they tend to scan only halfway through the form and drop off without completing the necessary details. 

Further, heatmaps show that users are attempting to click on the ‘Help’ button at the top, but it is inaccessible. Based on these insights, you can streamline the UI of the screen by retaining only essential form fields and making the ‘Help’ button accessible.

Finally, these changes will encourage users to fill out the form, complete the details, and seek help (if needed) with just one click of a button. Simplifying these actions will reduce churn and enhance user engagement with the app. 

Travel & local apps

Travel & local apps can also benefit from the capabilities of user experience analytics. Session recordings reveal booking abandonment patterns and provide insights into user behavior and preferences when making last-minute travel bookings, allowing customized offers and support. 

Further, filtering recordings by date will help you gain a better understanding of user behavior and preferences during peak travel seasons while filtering by screen resolution ensures a seamless mobile experience across different devices. 

Heatmaps offer insights into user interactions with map views, guiding improvements in functionality and design. Further, you can track events of saving favorite destinations, thereby identifying ways to improve this feature. 

How do they help reduce churn?

Imagine you have a brand-new travel and hotel booking app, and you have recently noticed a significant churn from the home screen of the app.

After investigating session recordings of the home screen, you discovered that a segment of users opening the app on older Android versions experienced app crashes when trying to make bookings. 

Subsequently, you shared the recording with the development team, who promptly resolved the issue. As a result, the booking process became as easy as a breeze for users. And what’s more? The reduction in user frustration led to less churn, increased bookings, and improved user satisfaction. 

Gaming apps

Gaming apps can also be improved with the use of these analytics. Session recordings highlight areas where users encounter challenges with controls or levels, providing insights for enhancing game design. 

Session recordings also uncover user interactions with tutorials and guides, offering guidance for improving instructional content and overall design. Further, filtering the recordings by game version will tell you how updates or feature introduction impacts user engagement.

Heatmaps too can help you gauge which areas of your app users interact with the most and ensure optimal placement of offers, purchase prompts, and other elements. 

How do they help reduce churn?

Suppose you have recently introduced a daily login reward system in your gaming app, offering users access to new content and in-game currency, all in an effort to reduce churn rates. 

To gain insights into user reactions, you have analyzed both recordings and heatmaps. What you have discovered is a mixed response – while some users are actively engaging with the reward system, others are barely interacting with it. 

You can conduct an experiment to enhance the placement and messaging of the feature, making it more prominent for users to engage with. This test can determine whether these changes will reduce churn rates and improve user experience. 

Reduce app churn with user experience analytics starting today

Before you jump right into reducing churn, understand what is causing users to leave. Doing this will give your churn-controlling strategies the right direction. 

VWO Insights for Mobile Apps is a robust user experience analytics tool that helps you pinpoint the root causes of your app’s churn. By leveraging insights from Session Recordings and Heatmaps, you can generate test ideas and optimize your app to boost retention and revenue growth. 

Sign up for a product tour now and gain a 90-day free access to uncover the reasons behind churn in your mobile app. 

Table of Contents

• What are customer engagement platforms?
• Importance of customer engagement platforms
• What are the 5 stages of customer engagement? How do customer engagement tools help in each of them?
  • 1. Awareness
  • 2. Interest
  • 3. Consideration
  • 4. Purchase
  • 5. Retention and advocacy
• Top 10 customer engagement tools to try
• Measuring customer engagement using a customer engagement platform
• The synergy of customer engagement software and marketing
• Final thoughts
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are customer engagement platforms?

A customer engagement solution consists of a suite of tools and technologies designed to facilitate interactions between businesses and their customers across various touchpoints. These platforms streamline and enhance the customer journey by providing personalized, relevant, and consistent experiences. Whether it’s through social media, email, in-app messaging, or other channels, these customer communications platforms enable businesses to connect with their audience in a meaningful way and increase customer engagement.

These platforms offer a range of functionalities, including:

• Personalized communication: Effective customer engagement tools empower businesses to tailor their interactions based on user preferences, behavior, and demographics.
• Multichannel reach: Whether it’s through social media, email, web chat, or SMS, customer engagement software enables brands to connect with customers through their preferred channels.
• Data-driven insights: These tools provide valuable analytics that help companies understand customer behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns.
• Automated campaigns: Automation features allow businesses to schedule and deploy targeted campaigns, saving time and ensuring timely interactions.

Importance of customer engagement platforms

Why is customer engagement software essential in today’s business landscape? Let’s explore a few key reasons:

• Enhanced customer experience: Customer engagement software enables businesses to deliver personalized experiences, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Data-driven decisions: By collecting and analyzing customer data, these platforms empower companies to make informed decisions and create more effective marketing strategies.
• Brand loyalty: Regular interactions foster a sense of loyalty among customers, making them more likely to stick with your brand in the long run.
• Increased conversions: Personalized and relevant interactions can lead to higher conversion rates as customers feel understood and valued.
• Improved customer feedback: These platforms facilitate the collection of feedback, enabling businesses to address concerns and continuously improve their offerings.

What are the 5 stages of customer engagement? How do customer engagement tools help in each of them?

To improve customer satisfaction, you need a process. This process involves several stages, each representing a different level of interaction and relationship-building between a brand and its customers. Customer engagement tools play a crucial role in facilitating and enhancing these stages. Here are the five stages of customer engagement and how customer engagement tools help in each of them:

1. Awareness

This is the initial stage of customer conversations where potential customers become aware of your brand’s existence. Customer engagement tools contribute to awareness by:

• Social media management: Tools like Hootsuite or Buffer help schedule and manage social media posts across multiple platforms, increasing brand visibility.
• Content creation: Tools like Canva or Adobe Spark assist in creating visually appealing content that grabs attention and communicates your brand’s message effectively.

2. Interest

 At this stage, customers show an interest in your brand and begin exploring your products or services. Customer engagement tools help by:

• Email marketing: Tools like Mailchimp or Sendinblue allow you to send targeted emails to your leads, providing them with valuable information and updates.
• Web analytics: Tools like Google Analytics help you track user behavior on your website, providing insights into what interests them the most.

3. Consideration

During the consideration stage, customers evaluate whether your offerings meet their needs. Customer engagement tools assist by:

• Live chat: Tools like Intercom or LiveChat enable real-time conversations with potential customers, addressing their questions and concerns.
• Personalization: CRM platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce offer personalized content recommendations based on customer preferences and behavior.

4. Purchase

This is when customers make a purchase or decide to avail of your services. Customer engagement tools support customer success at this stage by:

• eCommerce solutions: Tools like Shopify or WooCommerce provide a seamless purchasing experience, from cart management to secure transactions.
• Retargeting: Tools like AdRoll or Facebook Pixel help you show targeted ads to customers who have shown interest but haven’t completed a purchase.

5. Retention and advocacy

After the purchase, the goal is to retain loyal customers and turn them into advocates for your brand. Customer engagement tools contribute by:

• Customer support platforms: Tools like Zendesk or Freshdesk enable efficient handling of customer inquiries and complaints, enhancing post-purchase experience.
• Surveys and feedback: Tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform help gather feedback, allowing you to make improvements based on customer suggestions.
• Loyalty programs: Tools like Smile.io or LoyaltyLion help you set up and manage loyalty programs to reward and retain existing customers and boost customer loyalty.
• Social media listening: Tools like Mention or Brandwatch monitor social media for mentions of your brand, allowing you to engage with customers and address their feedback.

In each stage, customer engagement tools play a role in nurturing the relationship between the brand and the customer. They enable personalized interactions, streamline communication, gather valuable insights, and enhance the overall customer experience. By leveraging these tools strategically at each stage, businesses can effectively guide customers through the engagement process, ultimately leading to increased customer loyalty, advocacy, and business growth.

Top 10 customer engagement tools to try

Here are 10 customer engagement tools that deserve a spot in your arsenal:

• VWO: VWO offers A/B testing and personalization capabilities, allowing you to optimize website experiences for different customer segments.
• Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services): AWS provides a scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure that can power your customer engagement applications and services.
• Netcore: Netcore offers a comprehensive customer engagement suite, including email marketing, AI-driven personalization, and multi-channel communication.
• Moengage: Moengage specializes in mobile engagement, providing personalized messaging, push notifications, and in-app messaging to engage users.
• Twilio: Twilio’s communication APIs enable businesses to integrate messaging, voice, and video capabilities into their customer engagement strategies.
• Zendesk: Zendesk offers customer support solutions that enhance engagement through ticketing systems, live chat, and self-service portals.
• Intercom: Intercom focuses on real-time customer communication, offering solutions for chat, email, and customer feedback management.
• HubSpot: HubSpot provides a holistic platform for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service, facilitating seamless engagement across the customer journey.
• Salesforce Service Cloud: Salesforce’s Service Cloud offers tools for customer support, case management, and omnichannel engagement.
• Freshdesk: Freshdesk is a user-friendly helpdesk software that streamlines customer support, enabling efficient issue resolution and engagement.

Measuring customer engagement using a customer engagement platform

To ensure the effectiveness of your customer engagement strategies, it’s essential to measure and analyze their impact. Here are some key metrics to consider:

• Click-through rates (CTR): Measure the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within your communication.
• Conversion rates: Track the percentage of engaged customers who completed a desired action, such as making a purchase.
• Customer feedback: Gather qualitative insights through surveys and feedback forms to understand customer sentiment.
• Time spent on site/app: Monitor the duration customers spend interacting with your website or app.
• Social media engagement: Analyze likes, shares, comments, and overall engagement on social media platforms.

By regularly monitoring these metrics, you can refine your strategies, gauge customer satisfaction, and optimize your customer engagement efforts for better results.

The synergy of customer engagement software and marketing

Customer engagement and marketing are inseparable partners in today’s business landscape. Marketing efforts are driven by customer engagement, and effective marketing strategies contribute to enhanced customer engagement solutions well. This symbiotic relationship creates a cycle of value creation, where engaged customers become brand advocates, further driving business growth.

Final thoughts

In the digital age, customer engagement is more critical than ever before. It’s not just about selling a product; it’s about building lasting relationships and providing memorable experiences. Customer engagement software offers the tools you need to connect with your audience, understand their needs, and tailor your interactions accordingly. By exploring options like VWO, Amazon AWS, Netcore, Moengage, and Twilio, you can take your customer engagement strategies to new heights, fostering brand loyalty and driving business success. Remember, the key lies in personalized interactions and meaningful connections.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

At least not in the current times.

Customer engagement, in its truest sense, is more about anticipating the needs of your customers and encouraging two-way interactions throughout their journey with you.

This is what people expect, especially in the B2B world. Today, companies are not looking for one-time transactions but are more interested in building long-lasting relationships that are not just healthy but also mutually beneficial.   

Why is customer engagement important to B2B companies?

Over the years, we’ve witnessed a tremendous shift in the way companies, especially the B2B ones, communicate with their audience. 

But, despite all the changes and trends, customer engagement remains a crucial factor that can make or break a company’s success. 

In this section, we’ll take a closer look at why customer engagement is important and why B2B companies need to focus on creating better customer engagement strategies.

Establish a stronger connection

Unlike most B2C transactions, where customer relationships are relatively short-lived, B2B relationships tend to be long-term and multi-dimensional. 

Here, the idea of customer engagement is more about building strong, deeper connections with the customers.

Having a robust customer engagement process is key if you wish to build trust, loyalty, and a long-lasting relationship with the customer.

Boost customer retention

It’s more cost-effective to keep existing clients than to acquire new customers. 

Therefore, a B2B enterprise is always focused on customer retention. And one of the best ways to do this is through effective engagement and communication.

When you continue to engage and build meaningful interactions with customers, you make it easier for them to choose your brand over any competitor. 

Understand customer needs

Active customer engagement gives you a chance to gain deeper insights into your customers’ needs, pain points, and preferences. 

Having this kind of information gives you a better understanding of your customers, thus enabling you to tailor your products or services to meet their specific requirements. 

Moreover, implementing this approach also allows you to deliver value to your customers consistently. 

Increase cross-sell or upsell opportunities

While long-term relationships and brand loyalty are key benefits of effective customer engagement, some B2B brands often ignore another crucial benefit of this marketing strategy – cross-selling and upselling their products.  

When your customers feel engaged, they are more receptive to upselling and cross-selling efforts. This strengthens customer relationships and also improves overall customer retention. 

By cross-selling or upselling, you not only increase revenue but also get an opportunity to demonstrate the true value of your offerings. 

Maximize customer lifetime value (CLV)

A large majority of your customers are probably not looking for a single transaction. Instead, they want smart solutions that can help them and offer multiple benefits for a long time.

So, to ensure that their lifetime value to your organization increases steadily, you need to build engagement and interactions across multiple touchpoints. 

Additionally, these customer engagement strategies also mean that your customers will most likely refer new customers and provide genuine feedback for your overall improvement. 

Top 5 B2B customer engagement ideas

Now that we’ve understood the importance of B2B customer engagement, let’s have a look at some innovative strategies that can set your business apart from the competition and help you create lasting relationships with your clients. 

1. Personalized content and communication

Personalization is king in the B2B world. Tailoring your content and messaging to match the specific needs and preferences of your users is the best way to grab their attention and build stronger connections. 

2. Interactive webinars and workshops

One of the most widely practiced customer engagement strategies is webinars and workshops. These events are a great way for brands to build a community and establish their presence among their target audience. 

While webinars provide valuable insights, they also allow brands to interact with users and build strong customer relationships. 

3. Seamless omnichannel experiences

Your B2B customers don’t engage with your brand in isolation. They interact with you across various touchpoints—website, social media, email, and more. 

Therefore, you need to build a seamless customer engagement plan that covers multiple channels without compromising on customer experience. Content mapping is an excellent way to do this as it involves building experiences for different stages of the customer’s journey.

This helps you to create personalized experiences that are meaningful and relevant for the visitor at every touchpoint. 

4. Proactive customer support

The cornerstone of any B2B customer engagement strategy is having a robust customer support team. This does not just mean that you solve queries or problems, but it is more about offering constant support at every stage of the user’s journey. 

For example, with a behavior analytics tool like VWO Insights, you can track and analyze visitor behavior across multiple touchpoints. This gives you a deeper understanding of your users and helps you understand their preferences, pain points, and suggestions. 

Based on these insights and reports, you can then fine-tune your engagement strategy and focus on solving problems before your customers even point them out. 

5. Thought leadership and educational content

Using educational content is a great way to position your brand as a thought leader. This is a powerful engagement strategy as users are always on the lookout for solutions to their specific challenges. 

By creating a section on your website for educational and thought leadership content, you can attract potential customers and start providing value even before they turn into customers. 

Some examples of educational content are whitepapers, ebooks, case studies, and articles that give the user a deeper understanding of industry trends, best practices, and innovative solutions.

While there are many more B2B customer engagement ideas, these five ideas will help you prepare a roadmap according to your overall business goals. 

6. Use a customer engagement model

A customer engagement model provides a structured framework and strategy for consistently and effectively interacting with customers.

These engagement models are mainly designed with the customer in mind. They prioritize understanding customer needs, preferences, and pain points, which allows for more personalized and customer-focused interactions.

Moreover, engagement models help you to provide a seamless and positive customer experience, leading to high customer satisfaction.

As the needs of customers evolve, you must choose the right engagement model to adapt and remain relevant. This flexibility helps businesses stay responsive to evolving customer expectations.

B2B customer engagement best practices

Once you implement these B2B customer engagement ideas, you will notice a shift in how customers interact with your brand. However, to truly, take your customer engagement strategies to the next level, there are some effective best practices that you must follow. 

Understand your audience inside out

To engage effectively with your customers, you must first try and understand their preferences, challenges, pain points, behaviors, etc. 

Creating buyer personas for different segments of your visitors is crucial. These personas should outline the key attributes, challenges, and motivations of your target audience. 

This allows you to tailor your customer engagement strategies to match each persona’s specific needs, giving you a better chance of connecting with them and creating memorable experiences.  

Also, regularly collect customer feedback through surveys, forms, and data analysis. You can use these valuable insights to shape your products, services, and engagement strategies to better align with customer expectations.

Deliver value at every touchpoint

Every interaction that a customer has with your brand should provide value. Whether it’s a blog post, email, landing page, or webinar, your customers should walk away with valuable insights or solutions. Effective content marketing is a great way to do this, especially for B2B brands, as it gives you a chance to address your audience’s challenges and interests.

Moreover, it also helps you to establish your expertise and position your brand as a leader in the industry. Ebooks, webinars, detailed guides, and in-depth blogs can empower your customers to overcome unique challenges.

Establish trust and credibility

Trust is the cornerstone of any relationship, including the one you share with your customers. Building and maintaining this trust requires consistent and transparent communication.

No matter what customer engagement strategy you implement, ensure that you are building trust and maintaining transparency about your products and services. 

A great way to build trust among your customers is through testimonials and case studies. These real-life examples go a long way in building confidence and showing how you helped customers achieve their goals.

Implement a multichannel approach

As mentioned before, a multichannel approach is important for any customer success strategy. 

Instead of relying on a single channel, you can diversify your approach across email, social media, website, and even offline channels, without compromising on the messaging and experience.

Additionally, you should also focus on personalizing your content and messages according to the channel. Tools like VWO Personalize collect customer data from various sources to help you understand and deliver personalized experiences at each stage of the buyer’s journey. 

Choose the right customer engagement model

Having an effective customer engagement model is a great idea as it provides a strategic approach to engaging with customers. But, choosing the right customer engagement model is key to delivering consistent, personalized interactions.

There are several types of engagement models such as retention models, high-touch models, low-touch engagement models, etc. You can either pick one or choose a combination of different models based on your customers and business goals.

Foster customer loyalty

Customer retention is the backbone of any business. There’s nothing better than customers who provide repeat business and also refer you to others. 

Prioritizing customer loyalty is key to the long-term growth and success of any brand. You can do this by implementing different programs that focus on the ongoing value you provide, not just the initial sale. 

These programs ensure your customers are satisfied and help in building a loyal customer base. You should also work on creating a customer feedback loop to actively seek input from your customers and use it to enhance your services regularly.

B2B customer engagement examples

Let’s take a look at some interesting examples of B2B companies successfully implementing different customer engagement strategies.

Human Interest improves conversions on lead forms

Human Interest is a San Francisco-based company that aims to solve America’s retirement crisis. The company helps small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) offer affordable and high-quality 401(k) plans to their employees.

The company had a few landing pages where visitors were asked to fill out forms to contact the sales team. They wanted to increase the number of calls scheduled via the contact form. 

The team at Human Interest wanted to run server-side experiments to test changes to their landing pages. For this, they chose VWO since it is known for its server-side capabilities, native integrations, and low latency experience.

The original landing page (control) had a simple headline, a short description of the product, and a CTA button. The team created another version of the page (variation) where the description was replaced with a contact form. 

The test results showed that the variation had an expected conversion rate of 3.77%, a huge jump of 75.84% from the control’s conversion rate.

Thus, Human Interest was able to increase conversions by engaging with its customers at the right place and at the right time.

EZ Texting boosts sign-ups with a chat widget

EZ Texting is a B2B brand that helps businesses execute marketing campaigns, promote events, and provide customer service. 

The company wanted to introduce a new chat widget on their sign-up page. The idea was that the widget would offer instant support and guidance to users who were about to make a successful sign-up.

EZ Texting ran an A/B test with VWO to test the impact of the new chat widget. You can see the original page (control) below. 

The new version of the page (variation) had the same form and layout along with the new addition of a live chat widget.

After the conclusion of this test, EZ Texting saw a 31% increase in sign-ups. The chat widget was placed strategically on the page so that users could get instant solutions to their queries.

Hubstaff increased visitor-to-trial conversions with a homepage redesign

Hubstaff is a popular workforce management platform that provides time tracking and project management software for different companies. 

They wanted to redesign their homepage to showcase the company’s growth and drive attention towards their relevant features. The team spent a considerable amount of time creating and redesigning the new homepage.

Once the designs were ready, Hubstaff launched a Split URL test. One section of visitors was shown the original homepage (control), while the other section was shown the new version (variation).

After running the test for three months, the variation launched by Hubstaff witnessed a 49% increase in visitor-to-trial conversions along with a 34% increase in visitors sharing their emails. 

Hubstaff was able to effectively engage with their customers and even optimized their website experience with the help of experimentation.

Conclusion

As we saw in the B2B customer engagement examples above, brands need to focus on the preferences, challenges, and behaviors of their customers. By doing so, they can improve their strategies and build long-term relationships with their customers.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

The highest converting source of test ideas isn’t just best guesses from you or your boss, ideas from Google Analytics, or looking at your competitors for inspiration. So what is it? 

It’s actually A/B test ideas based on feedback from your visitors and customers. I’ve been doing CRO for 15 years and have consistently got much better converting results from A/B tests based on conversion research insights from visitor surveys, customer surveys, user testing, and live chat analysis. 

In this article, you will learn some of the best ways to start doing conversion research and gain better eCommerce A/B test ideas. 

Create a visitor survey to discover their issues

One of the fastest and best ways to improve conversion rates for eCommerce websites is to discover what is causing your visitors to leave without purchasing, in particular, what their most common issues, doubts, and frustrations are. Here are some examples you may find:

• They are unsure of what size to choose
• They don’t understand how a particular product feature works
• They are confused about your guarantee
• They want to see more images of the product in use

Knowing their issues helps you understand what needs improving or explaining better on your website to ensure other visitors don’t have these same issues, and therefore they will purchase more often. From these insights you gain, you can then create higher impact A/B test ideas.

To discover these revealing insights, set up a short visitor survey using a tool like VWO Insights. This should make this survey pop up after users have been on a product page for about 2 minutes (no sooner, or it will annoy them) and include these essential questions:

• Do you have any doubts or hesitations about this product?
• Is anything missing or stopping you from purchasing?

You can either use a single question poll that appears in the bottom right, but to get more feedback I recommend using a full-page survey to ask 4-5 more detailed questions, like what their purchase influencers are, where else they are shopping, and questions about your product page like your images. 

To increase your survey response rate, you should offer your visitors the chance to win a gift card for your website if they take the survey. 

Watch session recordings for bugs and issues

Another fast way to help you understand common user issues and bugs is to watch recordings of users interacting with your website. This can reveal many things that are not a good user experience, and even broken elements on different devices or browsers.

You can use this session recording feature in VWO Insights. This can be quite time-consuming to watch, so to get faster results you should filter and find session recordings with these potential issues in particular:

• Rage clicks. This is where a user repeatedly clicks on something. This usually indicates confusion or frustration that something isn’t working as they expect it to, or is actually broken. 
• U-turns. These happen when someone repeatedly goes back to the page they were previously on, often indicating that they can’t find what they are looking for.
• Checkout abandonments. It’s very important to look for potential reasons why your users are leaving your checkout without ordering. 

Make sure you watch recordings on both mobile and desktop as each will likely have different issues.

Discover the top website issues from your customer support team

A simple form of conversion research that requires no additional tools is to ask your customer support team for the most common website problems or issues they get from your visitors and customers. This is particularly good for discovering what product information may be missing on your product pages or FAQ that would convert users more often. 

Don’t just rely on your customer support team to let you know these issues, as sometimes they will forget issues or may think they are not important, so may forget to tell you something that is actually very revealing or useful. That is why you should do a more detailed analysis yourself if you have live chat on your website. 

To do a live chat analysis, simply log in to your chat tool and review all the recent live chats and do a search for words like ‘can’t find’, ‘issue’, ‘not working’, ‘problem’, or ‘confusing’ and see what issues you can discover. You will quickly notice patterns of the most common issues. 

Find out what nearly stopped your customers from purchasing

Discovering your visitors’ issues is very important, but it’s even more revealing and important to understand what nearly stopped your customers from purchasing, and their reasons can sometimes be different from your visitors.

When you discover your customer issues, you can improve your website so that other visitors don’t encounter those same issues that may stop them from purchasing.
There are two ways to do this. The simplest and quickest way is by embedding a quick question on your order confirmation page, and asking this question:

• Was there anything that nearly stopped you from purchasing?

Asking this question will create a goldmine of insights that will help you create high-impact A/B test ideas. Here are some common examples of what I have found from doing this conversion research that nearly stopped customers from purchasing:

• They found the size guide too hard to use
• The product images weren’t detailed enough
• The navigation menu wasn’t very helpful
• Delivery was cheaper on another website
• The font was too hard to read on mobile

You should also create an in-depth customer survey and email this to your most recent customers.

This should include 5-10 questions about their journey through your eCommerce website, like what they thought of your product images, your checkout, and what they think could be improved.

Just like the visitor survey, you should incentivize this to get better feedback and more responses. 

Do user testing to gain in-depth feedback from your target audience

Doing user testing on your target audience is another high-impact part of conversion research, as this is essential for understanding in much more detail what their issues, doubts, hesitations, and needs are.

It works very well because you get a 10-20 minute video recording of each user tester using your website and answering questions and completing tasks that you give them. 

The first step is to create a good list of about 10 tasks and questions that you want feedback about on your website. For example, ask what their first impression of your homepage is, how easy it is to use your navigation, and what they think of your product page imagery. 

Here are the two questions that I’ve found to bring the most insightful answers:

• What are your biggest doubts or hesitations about this website?
• Would you have purchased from this website? If not, why not?

You also need to ensure you use demographics and screener questions to ensure that the user testers match your target audience. For example, you can select a particular age range, and ask a screener question to ensure you only get responses from user testers that are interested in what is on offer. For example, if you sell shoes on your website, you would ask ‘Have you bought shoes online before?’ and then reject anyone who answers no.

I highly recommend a tool called Userfeel to do this user testing, as they offer user tests from just $30—and you don’t need an expensive subscription, like with other tools such as Usertesting.com.

You will be intrigued about watching these user tests, and they not only help you find high-impact A/B test ideas, but also helps you think much better from the perspective of your website visitors. 

Create A/B test ideas from insights and then prioritize them

Once you have completed each of these types of conversion research, you need to review the results and prioritize the more important ones, and then create A/B test ideas from the insights you have gained. 

The first step is to create a spreadsheet and add all the main conversion research findings to it, along with how often they are mentioned or noticed, and then give each a rating out of 10 based on their potential impact on your website conversion rate and revenue.

For insights that get mentioned the most, or are from several sources of conversion research, give them a higher rating, as this indicates more proof that it is a bigger issue. For example, you may find out from both your visitor survey and live chat analysis that visitors are confused about how your guarantee works. 

Then create A/B tests that relate to each of your highest-rated findings or insights – those will likely have a very high impact on your conversion rate and revenue, and will usually give much better results than simply relying on the best guess for what to A/B test. 

Start this now and whenever you have a major launch on your website

These are just a few of the types of great insights and A/B test ideas you can get from doing conversion research and I suggest getting started with each of these now.

Then do this conversion research at least once per year, or every time you launch something major on your website, like a new product page or navigation, as it’s important to discover any new issues and gain more high-impact A/B test ideas.

You can also get a free CRO consultation from me to discuss how I can help you get the most out of your conversion research and CRO efforts, and increase your eCommerce conversion rate and revenue.

Do they convert to become paid users? 

Do they engage with it or abandon it after a few seconds? 

Are they finding what they need or struggling to navigate your interface?

To truly make delightful user experiences, you must deeply understand how users interact with your app after downloading it. And that’s when user experience or behavior analytics kicks in.

Traditional analytics tools, like Google Analytics or Mixpanel, focus on quantitative data around user events (e.g., 1000 screen views, 20% drop-offs), and behavior analytics focus on “why” the user took a particular action (e.g., why someone viewed a screen, why someone dropped off).

Let’s take one example.

Imagine you invited someone to your party but learned that the person left in just 10 mins without saying any goodbyes. You got this information from your other guests, but nobody knows why the person left. 

If you had a CCTV camera to monitor everyone coming to your party and understand their experiences, you could have quickly discovered that the person was afraid of pet dogs at the party. He was visibly scared when he arrived due to one of his interactions and decided to leave. 

After knowing this, you kept a separate play area for pet dogs detached from partying humans for your next party. The person came again and was the last one to leave the party.

In this example, the information provided by your guests is what traditional analytics do, and what the CCTV camera told you is behavior analytics. 

It can help you understand the nuances of user behavior, especially frustrating user experiences. 

As per a study by PWC on US consumers, one in three consumers (32%) say they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience.

With the data-backed insights from behavior analytics, you can run experiments, personalize experiences and optimize your app to ensure a seamless user experience. 

In this post, you’ll discover the world of behavior analytics and how it can help you take your app to the next level. 

You’ll explore real-world examples of businesses that have successfully leveraged it and receive tips and tricks for getting started with this powerful tool. 

So, let’s dive in and unlock the true potential of your mobile app.

Behavior analytics tools for mobile apps

Behavior analytics tracks and analyzes user behavior to gain insights into their actions and motivations while they use your mobile app. Session recordings and heatmaps are the most popular tools used to analyze the behavior of your mobile app users. 

You can extract qualitative insights from these two tools by analyzing them against critical user funnels in your app. For example, review the session recordings of users dropping off your purchase funnel.

Let’s look at both features.

Session recordings

With session recordings, you can watch a video replay of how your users or a set of users experience your app. 

A typical tool like VWO Insights’ session recordings captures all user sessions and events like taps, screen views, screen changes, crashes, long presses, flings, scrolls, etc. It ties it all to a single user profile so you can individually study each user journey across multiple sessions. 

This helps identify friction points when users abandon the app and areas where they may be spending too much time. You can do mobile A/B testing on the data-backed observations you extract from session recordings. For example, a SaaS app may use session recordings to identify where users are getting stuck during the upgrade subscription process and then make minor improvements to help users and increase upgrades.

Benefits of mobile app session recordings

Understand abandonment better

Study user experiences exactly where the users abandon the app. One of the reasons for cart abandonments is app crashes or not responding. Watch sessions that led to crashes and ANR issues. 

Resolve user issues faster

Often there are to-and-fro emails with users before your team can get to the bottom of the issue and reproduce it. Session recordings allow you to drill down into user sessions with issues and resolve them fast without bothering the user to provide reproduction steps.

Do better UX research

You can use session recordings to see what users experience to support your surveys or user interviews better. It is like watching a friend using an app while you make observations.

Easier communication and collaboration

Share exactly how users are experiencing the app’s features, the roadblocks, and what you need to do to improve the product’s stickiness, resolve bugs or improve usability. Instead of just showing the quantitive numbers, attach proofs of usage and get stakeholder buy-ins.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps visually represent where users are tapping or scrolling on a given app screen. It helps you understand which areas of the app are getting the most attention and which are overlooked. 

For example, a news app may use a heatmap to identify where readers are tapping the most in the article and then use that information to add internal or external links to the article to improve engagement and time on the app. 

Benefits of mobile app heatmaps

Understand user attention

Quickly understand which parts of your app users tap the most and the least. You don’t need to configure or dig numerical data to figure it out.

Improve engagement with CTAs

Analyze user engagement with call-to-action buttons compared to other screen elements. For example, you can see that your CTA is not getting tapped often, but another unimportant button is getting a lot of taps on the screen. Replacing the button positions could be a helpful insight.

Hypothesis testing

Support hypothesis testing if you plan to redesign your app. For example, changing the order of an app section may increase engagement, as earlier people were not scrolling till the section. Analyzing the scroll map before and after the change can help you validate or disprove this hypothesis.

UI decluttering

Identify cluttered areas in your app’s UI. For example, you can use a heatmap to see if users are tapping non-interactive elements instead of interactive ones, indicating a need to simplify the UI.

With the power of behavior analytics, you can derive data-backed and unlimited optimization ideas to:

• Create frictionless user onboarding
• Boost app engagement & retention
• Improve your in-app conversions and purchases
• Resolve and fix errors faster

Let’s dive deeper into these use cases and look at some popular brands later.

How do behavior analytics help you optimize mobile apps?

Although each industry and every business in it has a unique approach to optimizing user experience, a few things are essential to everyone. Let’s discuss them ahead.

Create frictionless user onboarding

Signup and onboarding are the most critical parts of the user journey. If a user has a bad experience later in the journey, it is still something you can recover from, but if you don’t get the onboarding right, you will never see the user again on your app. 

You have to make sure that the experience is intuitive and quick and that it pushes the user toward the most important value of your app. In short, user activation. 

With session recordings and heatmaps, you can identify the points of confusion and frustration during onboarding. Then eliminate them to have a seamless onboarding.

E.g. – 

The data for a social media app shows that many new users get lost on onboarding screens and drop-offs. The users might want to start using the app fast, but it asks you to follow all screens. 

But it offers a skip button, too, which is not prominently displayed across the onboarding screens. Session recordings reveal that many users don’t see the button, do rage taps on the screen, and drop off without moving forward. Making the “Skip” button prominent in the onboarding screens could help users navigate the onboarding faster. 

Boost app engagement & retention

You have successfully onboarded and activated your user. Now what? How do you ensure that your users actively engage with your app features and return daily to use them?

You can start with questions and answer them with session recordings and heatmaps, or at least develop a hypothesis for a new experiment you can do to optimize your app.

Questions like:

Are users even trying your features? 

Are they spending too much time on a particular feature?

Which features do they ignore? 

Are they tapping a non-interactive element? 

How far are users scrolling on a screen?

Are they looking at important sections you want them to see?

For example, if you notice that customers are spending a lot of time on a particular feature, you can use that information to your advantage. You can make it even more prominent on the app to encourage customer engagement or focus your marketing efforts on promoting that feature.

Another hypothetical example could be an app similar to Instagram in its early phases, which just showed content created by other users. Users spend much time in their feeds but do not interact with the content. The dead taps on the posts indicate that users want to react, but there is no way. That’s when the team introduced the features of liking, commenting, and saving the post after looking at this behavior.

Improve your in-app conversions and purchases

Engagement is vital to ensure the users like what you built in the app. But your ultimate goal is to make money. You can make money by enabling in-app purchases, subscription upgrades, or through ad revenue.

To accomplish this, you must ensure the user can easily access buying options, navigate through the purchase funnel, and have a smooth payment flow. 

This part affects your bottom line the most; hence you must get it right.

The best way to analyze this is by configuring your important funnels and checking which step users abandon the purchase. 

Is it the Cart page?

Are users expecting something on the checkout page?

Is the checkout form too long? 

Is the subscription price too much for the user? 

Is the CTA placed right?

Could users see all the payment options clearly?

There could be other questions you may have in your mind after looking at the quantitive data of your funnels. But session recordings and heatmaps could give you the answers for conversion rate optimization.  

For example, say one challenge your app faces is having millions of free users but a meager paid conversion rate. After analysis, it was found that many users clicked on the upgrade option, then clicked on a few non-interactive text elements, and then abandoned the upgrade. This indicates that they might be looking for more information before upgrading. 

Giving more detailed information about the benefits or a trial product version may be required. This way, the analysis provides a direction for improvement.

Resolve and fix errors faster

Once you lose credibility on the app store and google play store, it takes time to return. When users continuously face app crashes or app not responding errors, they don’t just get irritated but also go to the app store to give a thrashing review and lowest rating. 

This affects your overall app store optimization performance, and fewer users discover your app. Not only do you lose existing users, but you also lose the chance of getting new ones. 

It is essential to resolve user issues quickly and reply to these reviews with quick fixes. You gain their trust, and they feel they are important to you. 

But how do you fix issues fast? 

The usual route is reactive. When someday gives you a bad review, you react and try to solve it by asking for more details by email. 

With session recording tools like VWO, you can quickly filter sessions with rage taps, app crashes, app not responding, or other stack trace issues, reproduce them, and resolve them proactively without your users contacting you. 

E.g. – 

You release a new search filter and a bunch of features in a new app version. As soon as you release the latest version, you start getting a lot of complaints about the app crashing. You are all over the place to reproduce the issue. Asking users to send screenshots, checking error logs, and whatnot.

What if you could filter out session recordings based on app crashes for the day and watch 5-10 recordings? You could have gone to the bottom of the issue without hassles.

How do popular brands use behavior analytics?

Here are real-world examples of big brands using behavior analytics for mobile apps.

Costa Coffee

Costa Coffee is a British coffee chain with Coca-cola as its parent company.

According to Costa Coffee’s case study by UXCam, customers who sign up for the loyalty program through their app spend almost three times more than non-registered customers annually – a whopping 173% increase in spending per customer!

The team realized that almost 30% of new app users dropped off between downloading and registering for the loyalty program. Although they had identified this issue using a quantitative analytics tool, they needed more information to understand why users were dropping off. The numbers alone just didn’t cut it!

Costa Coffee employed session recordings to watch sessions of dropping users. They found that almost half of the users dropped off because of the “invalid password” field validation during the registration. This helped them revamp the registration process and increase their loyalty program’s sign-ups.

CricHeroes

CricHeroes is the world’s biggest Cricket app, with 17M+ users. It allows players to keep scores of matches and track their performance with analytics.

As per Smartlook’s case study, the CricHeroes team wanted to give the best user experience and grow its user base, but the challenge was that they could not visualize where users were getting stuck. 

One of the core engagement challenges was to make users message each other. CricHeroes used automatic nudging to encourage users to message each other.

While looking at the user journeys via session recordings, the team identified new nudge points to start a message. Adding these new points allowed users to send 11% more messages on average. 

Not just this, they could resolve customer queries faster than ever by filtering session recordings based on a particular user session and quickly determining the cause of the issue. 

BigBasket

BigBasket is India’s best online grocery delivery platform offering subscription and on-demand delivery. 

But even the best things can be improved, and BigBasket’s design team faced a few challenges. With limited insights into user behavior and a long UAT process that took five days, they needed a solution to help them better understand their users. 

And that’s where mobile app session recordings and heatmaps came in! Now, they can monitor user behavior, conduct UI/UX research, and test quickly. 

They’ve identified conversion bottlenecks, monitored new feature updates, and helped the dev team replicate crashes and app freezes. 

This has reduced UAT time from 5 days to just a few hours, a 3x lower complaint rate, and 100% more conversions! Now that’s what you call a win situation!

Vertigo Games

Vertigo Games is a game development company that creates first-person shooting games. 

A few questions bothered the Vertigo team for a new game called “Critical Strike,” especially since they didn’t have any mobile analytics tool. 

Questions like:

How do gamers complete or not complete the onboarding guide?

Are players completing the missions as per the intended design?

How to reproduce the exact steps to what caused a bug?

The team decided that a behavior analytics tool would give them a holistic view of quantitive and qualitative data to engage, retain and monetize gamers.

The Vertigo team started using session recordings and heatmaps coupled with event-based funnels to understand the reasons behind the high drop-off rate from critical game flows. It helped them detect problems and reproduce the exact path to errors.

How to choose a behavior analytics tool for your app?

Performance

What is the effect of SDK on your app’s performance? You should carefully evaluate that the SDK provided by the behavior analytics tool is lightweight and shouldn’t lead to slow app loads. Check if your server requests become bulky with the SDK.

Privacy & Security

You must confirm your users’ data is private and secure. Ensure the platform complies with GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Since the tool deals with sensitive data, you should have the flexibility to show or hide elements in the session recordings while your data is protected with leading enterprise-grade encryption. 

Experience Optimization Features

To have a holistic view of everything and run your experience optimization program smoothly, you need a platform to generate insights about your app user’s behavior, enable collaboration with your team with custom workflows, prioritize insights to act upon, run experiments, and deploy the new experiences. 

Not many platforms in the market could achieve all of this for you. You may find something that helps you generate mobile app insights, but you won’t be able to run your complete experience optimization program on them. That amounts to staggering license costs and multiple tools management.  

We have built VWO from scratch to complete this loop for you. With our recent foray into mobile app insights, you can generate insights for websites and mobile apps, run tests and deploy experiences. All by collaborating with your unlimited team members in a single place. 

If you want to try it, start a VWO free trial here. Mobile app insights are available upon request once you begin the free trial. You can connect with the support team via chat.

I hope you enjoyed the blog. Until next time!

There are five shades of orange and five of the color blue. What was initially a simple question is now a complex decision-making process. This scenario is an example of Hicks Law.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

What is Hicks Law?

Hicks Law is a UX design principle to simplify the decision-making process. Hick’s Law, also known as Hick-Hyman Law, named after psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman, states that the more options available to a person, the longer it will take to decide which option is best. In other words, Hicks Law is used to simplify choices and remove barriers in decision-making.

The formula for Hick’s Law is defined as follows:

RT = a + b log₂ (n)

Being aware of how to simplify choices to increase your conversion rate is critical to adhering to Hicks Law. In addition, increasing your conversion rate requires understanding the psychological principles of decision-making. 

For example, ASOS provides the following options for creating an account:

There seem to be two primary options at first glance:

• Third-party platform sign up 
• Email sign up 

But in reality, there are four options to sign up. First, users have to decide between three third-party platforms. Furthermore, if a user chooses to sign up with an email address, several form fields and questions are present.

In such cases, leveraging user interaction data will give you a directive on what can be tested in your user experience to remove distractions and offer the optimal number of choices to your users. 

How to use data to simplify choices

VWO Insights gives you the ability to isolate variables by leveraging the power of: 

• Funnel tracking 
• Session recordings 
• Heatmaps
• Surveys 
• Form analytics 

By using VWO Insights, you can quantify variables on web pages to consider removing elements that users do not use—or perhaps removing elements that add more complexity to accomplish a conversion goal. Take a free trial to understand the advantages of VWO Insights in detail. 

For instance, VWO Insights’ heatmaps could reveal that the sign-in option for Apple receives little to no interaction from users in the ASOS example. 

On the other hand, maybe users engage more with the Facebook and Google sign-in options. In addition, form analytics may reveal low levels of interaction with specific form fields for the email option; these form fields could be eliminated. 

Here is an example of what the user experience could look like by using the data gathered from VWO Insights to adhere to Hicks Law: 

Several elements are removed to simplify the process of setting up an account. But the question that then arises is – will this variation convert as much as the original? The answer to this can be found through A/B testing. 

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

How to approach high-velocity testing

High-velocity testing is critical to refine the options presented to users. For instance, ASOS could also test the following variations to gauge conversion rate performance: 

• Multi-step form vs. email-only account creation. 
• Collapsible form fields vs. static form fields. 
• Two third-party platforms to sign up vs. Three with no email option.
• Two third-party platforms to sign up vs. email-only account creation.

Increasing the velocity of tests increases data collection to isolate variables that may be causing bottlenecks in your conversion funnel. But unfortunately, 68.2% of companies do not perform more than four tests per month. You can increase your testing velocity with VWO. Take a free trial and find out how.

The more A/B tests you run, the more you will increase your odds of success by simplifying choices for users. However, setting up a test must be done with audience segmentation in mind. 

This is because what works for one user may not work for another because of cognitive bias in users.

Segmenting cognitive bias

Cognitive bias kicks in when predisposition occurs. For example, are you a cat person or a dog person? Perhaps, if you grew up with a dog, you would have a stronger affinity for dogs.

Understanding your audience’s cognitive bias is critical to increasing your conversion rate. Therefore, the test variations you create from analyzing data based on Hicks Law should be targeted to specific audiences. 

There are 188 known biases, which allows plenty of scope for audience segmentation. For example, you can use a cognitive bias called the ‘mere exposure effect’ for an audience segment. 

The mere exposure effect

The mere exposure effect was a famous study conducted in 1968 that confirmed the cognitive bias that familiarity breeds content. 

A professor arranged for a student to show up to class covered in a black bag repeatedly. As students observed the student in the black bag, they were hesitant to interact at first. 

But as the study progressed, the student covered in the black bag started looking familiar to others, and those who were initially hesitant now started interacting with him. 

Similarly, several of your users will have the cognitive bias of not interacting with something unfamiliar. 

But since familiarity breeds content, setting up retargeting audiences for your test variations would be advantageous to increase your conversion rate. 

Only 2% of website visitors convert on the first visit. Imagine going through the process of simplifying choices on your website by leveraging data and deploying high-velocity tests to gather data just to have only 2% of your audience convert. 

By adhering to Hicks Law you not only simplify choices to remove barriers, but you also set up retargeting for segmented audiences based on the cognitive bias to increase the propensity of conversions. 

Final thoughts

It is critical to gather data points and deliver a personalized experience to users based on how they are likely to process the information presented to them. 

Offering every option is not ideal when users have different needs. Practice having one-on-one conversations. Don’t try to speak to a crowd, or your message will go unheard. 

Instead, use data to find segments, remove the noise and talk to the specifics. Creating a flawless user experience is equivalent to hitting a moving target. As the needs of your users shift, your landing page and website designs will need to shift too. 

This is where A/B testing comes in. It’s an amazing method that makes it possible to prove—with data—if a particular change has an impact and whether it’s positive or negative. In an A/B test, you can split your traffic between your page or element versions, and even define the audience that gets to view the variation. The version that gets the best results is the winner.

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Once you know that you can test changes on your store before making a decision, it seems like a no-brainer to use that method moving forward. 

Getting started

So where should you start testing? How do you come up with ideas to test? 

You may have some ideas—probably even a document full of possible changes based on your opinions and experience. But that may not be the best way to come up with your tests.

We will show you a better approach—where to focus your attention and how to find tests that will increase your chances of getting meaningful, positive results. 

The following process removes the guesswork and moves you closer to those great results you’re looking for.

Where to focus your attention

Google Analytics won’t tell you what to test, but it does indicate where you should focus your efforts, that is, which part of the funnel to test. Google Analytics provides a Funnel Visualization Report that shows how many visitors are dropping off your store at each stage of the funnel.

Every eCommerce store is different depending on the industry it’s in and other factors. But a funnel visualization combined with some benchmarking lets any eCommerce store owner know which part of the funnel is the weakest link. Once you know the most problematic step, you can improve it by performing tests aimed at it.

For example, in the image above, you can see that a lot of people abandoned the checkout. From 466 people that started the checkout process, only 131 people completed it. This indicates that you may have to work on your checkout. And because that’s a step where a lot of people abandon your store, improving it could yield the biggest results.

In the Dorado Fashion case, VWO found that there was a high drop-off on the checkout page. To address this and increase the Average Order Value, the VWO team tested a cart page variation that incentivized additional purchases for users who already had an item in their cart. This variation had a notice that said – “You are 1 product away to get Extra 30% Off”. The test ran for 26 days and the variation won with a 14.14% increase in clicks to the Thank You page. You can read the full case study here.

On the other hand, if you already have a very good checkout conversion rate, it’s harder to get significant improvements there.

Visualize your funnel as a leaking bucket. The more water you can keep in the bucket, the more money you get. By fixing the weakest steps of the funnel, you are effectively fixing the biggest holes in the bucket.

After fixing the big holes, concentrate your efforts on the medium holes and so on. To apply this to your online store, you want to find out which is the biggest hole and work on it.

Google Analytics helps you find the “what”—the step of the funnel that isn’t working—but it won’t tell you why it’s not working. You can determine why by using heatmaps, session recordings, on-page surveys, user testing, and other methods to help develop solutions to the problem.

What to test

Choosing what to A/B test is one of the most important decisions you can make:

• You can avoid wasting time you would otherwise spend testing things that make no difference.
• You can gain valuable insights that can then become test ideas. 

Methods

We suggest you use a mix of methods to get the best results possible. Typically, the findings from one method overlap those from others. That’s a clear signal that you’re on the right track.

You can use the following four methods that employ these tools:

1. Surveys and polls
2. User testing
3. Competitors and other big eCommerce stores
4. Customer service logs

Surveys and polls

Asking questions that uncover concerns is one of the best ways to identify what you need to address on your eCommerce store. Posting surveys and polls on your store is a very effective method for gathering those insights. By asking your current and potential buyers multiple questions, you can collect very valuable responses. The value comes because these users are experiencing the store as would any real customer, so their insights are very pertinent.

There are multiple places to conduct surveys and polls. You can place a poll on your product page or homepage. You can also send surveys via email to people who’ve already bought from you. You can add an incentive to encourage them to answer.

My preferred method is to place a poll on the thank-you page. This placement is very powerful because users have just gone through the entire buying process just seconds before, so, if they have any questions or concerns, those will be fresh in their minds.

Each location in which you place a survey or poll can give you insights about different parts of the funnel.

Questions to ask

The best questions are those that uncover fears, uncertainty, and doubts (FUDs). Technical issues are relatively easy to find in your store. However, FUDs are the main factor in people opting not to buy from your eCommerce store. Here are a few examples:

• They may fear that your product isn’t of a high enough quality (for example, they’re looking for a specific grade of aluminum, but you don’t list which grade you use).
• They may be uncertain about a specific characteristic of your product (for example, they wonder if it’s waterproof, but there’s no mention of this on the website).
• They may have doubts about your warranty and returns policies.

Addressing FUDs is one of the most effective ways to increase your conversion rate. After discovering which FUDs aren’t addressed on your website, create tests that aim to solve those FUDs.

In the Moho case, for example, VWO improved Moho’s revenue by communicating their offer of a 2-year guarantee on the product. The primary web store of Moho is Horloges.nl, which they use to sell watches from various manufacturers. This guarantee increased user trust and improved the Average Order Value by 6%. You can read the full case study here.

Examples

You can place a very simple poll—even a single question—on just about any page:

• “Do you have any questions you can’t find the answer to?” Place this on a product page to tell you which information users feel is missing (doubts) or don’t find clear or detailed enough (uncertainty).
• “Was there something that almost stopped you from buying from us?” This poll question on the thank-you page has produced amazing insights. By definition, everyone who answers this is your target customer because they just bought from you, so their opinion matters.

Another way you can gain useful insights is to ask your customers why they bought from you. You may think you know your unique value proposition (the quality or qualities that set you apart from your competitors), but your customers usually know exactly why they bought from you.

If you can find out why people buy from you instead of the competition, you’ll have good content to apply to your store. Sometimes you’ll even discover unique value propositions you didn’t know you had (e.g., your product is of a higher quality than the competition’s or maybe you have the best prices overall)! Use these valuable insights to develop test ideas that better articulate your value proposition and increase your conversions. 

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User testing

User testing shows you how visitors perform particular tasks in your store. It’s especially useful because you get to see, first hand, how users navigate your store, revealing friction points in the user journey as well as store usability issues. Use these friction points and usability issues to develop solutions you can try in an A/B test.

User testers are often asked to navigate a site and add a product they like to the cart. Observing this process, you’ll see what path the user takes: maybe they use the filters, the search functionality, and/or the collections. It opens a whole new world because you are navigating an online store through the eyes of someone else. User tests can help you identify biases.

For example, your cart page may be confusing enough that some people don’t know how to continue to checkout. However, because you browse your site daily, you know how to take that step, so you think it is easy. The new perspective you gain from a user test can show you the barriers your users may encounter and help you brainstorm test ideas to address those barriers (e.g., you can A/B test a simplified cart layout that makes it evident to users how to continue to checkout).

Competitors and other big eCommerce stores

This one is controversial because you don’t know if your competitor’s store is performing better than yours, but I like looking at competitors’ sites. Look for interesting things you could bring to your store, like fit finders, money-back guarantees, comparison charts, wizards, and the list goes on and on depending on what you sell!

You don’t know if these have been tested by your competitors or if the concept will work on your store, so you get to test it on yours. Sometimes competitors find ways to solve customers’ problems, and you lose nothing by trying those out in your store. I’m not suggesting you copy your competitors’ websites. I am suggesting that you look for potential issues that your competitors have addressed that you have not.

What’s important here is that you do your research and find improvement opportunities for your store. Approach your research the way a customer does: they often compare products in multiple stores before buying. As a business owner, you should do the same and always assess how your eCommerce store stacks up against your competitors’.

You can also look at the big eCommerce websites like Amazon. Because almost everyone uses those websites, chances are good that your customers are already comfortable with that format and functionality, so something similar might work for your store. For example, trying out high-level changes (such as updating product page layouts, offering swatches, etc.) could be beneficial.

But, of course, not everything that Amazon does will work on your eCommerce store. Make sure your approach takes into account the unique context and particulars of your store. For example, Amazon can’t talk about the unique value proposition of a particular product or brand on the homepage because it offers so many brands. But, on your homepage, you probably should talk about your unique value proposition.

As always, these are all just ideas to test. You will know for sure if it works after you test it!

Customer service logs

Customer service logs are one of the best places to find FUDs to address. They’re very valuable because these are your customers directly reaching out to you and telling you their FUDs. This is one of the most direct and honest forms of feedback you can get.

There are multiple methods for collecting, organizing, and getting insight from your customer service data:

1. Gather all customer service interactions and put them in one format. 
2. Categorize every interaction by topic.
3. Determine which issues come up more often than others.
4. Address those issues in your A/B tests.

Sometimes the main concern for potential customers is the warranty. If that comes up for you, that’s a strong sign that making your warranty more prominent or revising it in some other way would be a good thing to test, something that will yield results you can use.

On the other hand, if nobody is asking or complaining about the warranty, then maybe you shouldn’t focus your efforts on that area.

Conclusion

Good tests that yield useful results come from good ideas backed up by research and data. Start a 30-day free trial with VWO to focus on the weakest links of your funnel and the biggest points of friction in your user’s journey. 

The methods described above can help you find those weak links and provide great insights so that you can develop meaningful tests to improve your metrics.

The unpredictability of conversion stems from the unpredictable behavior of us, humans. Just the change of the color of a CTA button or adding a single word to your landing page headline can bring about a drastic change in your conversion rates. 

Download Free: Visitor Behaviour Analysis Guide

For example, Cocohanee, an eCommerce website, increased their number of transactions by 40% simply by adding their USP on the product pages and redesigning their menu! Who would have thought about that?

If only there was a way to understand and decode user behavior and use it for optimizing landing pages, right?

Though we cannot completely analyze and predict user behavior, user behavior analytics can help us speculate at least some parts of it and increase conversion rates.

You too, can use user behavior analytics to bring about a drastic improvement in your conversion rates and increase the ROI of your business (check out VWO Insights). Let’s have a look at how you can do that.

1. Use heatmaps for your landing pages

Heatmaps are a system for data visualization where you can view users’ behavior using a color-coded system. Using heatmaps, you can precisely visualize human behavior. The colors indicate the number of clicks on any part of the webpage.

Using heatmaps for your landing pages can be an excellent way to understand how your visitors are interacting with your webpage. You can understand where the users are focusing their attention.

Using heatmaps for landing pages, you can find data about your landing page content, the images and videos that you have added, and the call to action button clicks. This way, you can find room for improvement and use it to improve your conversion rates.

You can also use scrollmaps to identify the ideal length of your landing page. Using a scrollmap, you’d know the ideal position to place your sign-up form and CTA to get maximum conversions.

You can use a mouse-tracking heatmap to track mouse movement. This way, you can identify the places where most of your visitors are hovering over. You can set goals for your heatmaps and document important observations. Based on these, you can come to accurate conclusions that will help you bring about drastic changes in your conversion rates.

Once you’ve found how your visitors are interacting with a particular element on your landing page, you can use A/B testing to test different variations of the same element. This way, you’ll be able to optimize your conversions.

A great example of the use of heatmap would be the case study of Paltalk, a B2C chat service based out of the USA. Using heatmaps, it was observed that users were not able to effectively view the different categories of virtual gifts. With a change in design for the virtual gifts menu, Paltalk increased their conversion rate by 11.32%!

Take a full-featured free trial with VWO to leverage heatmaps for your website.

2. Personalize the experience based on the user journey stage

Not every user of yours would be the same. Some would be new and unfamiliar to your brand. Some might have heard your brand’s name but don’t really understand your offering. While some others might have been stalking your website for a while.

This means users at different stages of their customer journey would have different perceptions about your brand and your offering. So, is it fair to target them with the same messaging and expect them to convert? Absolutely not!

Instead of targeting all your users with the same landing page and messaging, you can try to segregate your users based on their customer journeys and then target them with different landing pages. This strategy can be extremely effective in improving your conversion rates.

For the segregation of your customer data based on their customer journey stages, a potent Customer Relationship Management tool such as SuperOffice can be powerful. SuperOffice will gather all your prospect and customer data along with the information about the touchpoints with each of these users.

Using a CRM tool such as SuperOffice, you will be able to create customized target lists of users based on their customer journeys. 

You can then target each of these lists with different landing pages, email campaigns, advertising, and messaging. You’ll definitely see a massive increase in your conversions this way.

Here are some other ways to personalize user experiences:

• Visitor data collection – Collect prospects’ data and use it to offer ultra-personalized experiences to them. You can collect visitor data by cookies, web beacons, email activity tracking, or even asking the visitors directly.
• Visitor profiling – Based on the customer and prospect data collected, you can create your ideal customer personas to offer personalized experiences to each of these personas.
• Set your goals – Before implementing personalization, it is good to set goals for the same. What do you want to achieve using personalization? In this case, it would be increased conversions but you can set a few other goals too.
• Plan and implement – Next, you can start working on your strategies for personalization. You can use A/B testing to try different variations of your personalization strategies. This way, you’ll get much better results.
• Measure success – Finally, you should keep track of your metrics and understand if your set goals were. This way you can keep improving your conversion rate over time.

3. Find the reason behind increased bounce rate

If you are experiencing increased bounce rates on your website, especially on your landing pages, then this is not something that you should ignore. Increased bounce rates can be a major indicator of the fact that something might be going wrong.

So, get down to the root cause of it. You can use heatmaps and session replays to understand the reason behind increased bounce rates. There can be multiple reasons for this. Some of them being:

• Inconsistent branding and messaging can drive away your website users. Hence, ensure that you use consistent branding and messaging along all the touchpoints.
• Slower page load speed can be a major reason why your users are bouncing.
• Your headline and the entire landing page copy may not be enticing enough for the user to stick around and convert. So, make sure to add a more benefit-driven copy that directly hits the pain points of the users.
• Add some more engaging elements such as an image, an illustration, a video, and some form of social proof. Adding these elements will persuade the user to put their trust in you and fill-up your form.

Once you’ve found the most probable reason for the increased bounce rate, you can use A/B testing to confirm the reason. For instance, if you think that the headline of your landing page is the reason for increased bounce rate, you can try split testing by varying your headline and optimize your conversions this way.

Download Free: Visitor Behaviour Analysis Guide

4. Vary your landing pages based on the traffic sources

Most businesses have multiple traffic and referral sources for their landing pages. Some part of your traffic may be coming from emails, some from social media advertising, while some from SEO. 

The users from all these traffic sources would have come across different messaging. For example, your Facebook ad might read “Free landing page optimization tactics,” while another referral traffic source might have read “Free checklist for increasing conversions.”

The simplest way to gather customer information is by implementing the use of DNI (Dynamic Number Insertion) technology of call tracking into your SEO campaigns. It provides you a deep insight into traffic source, geographical location, which campaign drove the most traffic, and much more. It helps you to optimize your campaigns more effectively and target your landing pages according to the traffic source

Though these two messaging might be indicative of the same, it is better to stick to the exact same messaging throughout. Hence, you can consider having different landing pages for different traffic sources. 

Doing this will ensure that your landing pages are appropriately customized for every user segment. And this will definitely lead to an increase in the number of sign-ups.

5. Use session recordings to optimize your landing pages

You can also use session recordings of your landing pages to analyze the user behavior with great detail. 

With each session recording, you can look for details such as the mouse movement, user clicks, scrolling patterns, and the area of your landing page where the user is spending the most time. 

Using session recordings, you can improve the performance of your website’s core metrics by improving the site navigation, site design, form design, and form flow. You can run experiments and reduce bounce rates, ultimately leading to increased conversion rates.

Using session recordings of your landing pages, you can understand common browsing patterns and distractions that are keeping the users from clicking on your CTA button. 

There may be a huge number of reasons for reduced conversion rate such as a misplaced CTA, a distracting ad, or a lengthy form. Whatever the reasons may be, you’ll be able to analyze that through session recordings and make appropriate amendments.

Using this data from session replays, you can try to change your landing page structure, which will ultimately lead to increased conversions for your business. 

For example, suppose you find many of your users are stopping at a particular point in your landing page. This may be because the users find this part more interesting and want to stop and read through it. So, you can consider placing this part above the fold to make your landing page even more impactful.

You can then use A/B testing to test if your observations based on session recordings are working as expected. Request a demo with the experts at VWO for valuable insights on your website.

A good example would be A/B testing done on the Locations Hawaii website. Using 3-variation A/B testing where the CTA button was changed in each variant, the number of leads was increased by 23%! 

Start using user behavior analytics to improve your conversions

You now know the various tactics you can use to analyze users’ behavior and come to precise conclusions based on it. 

Using behavior analytics can be a major turning point in your business’s growth. So, start implementing these strategies right away and watch a massive boost in your conversions.