The Ultimate Guide to Onsite Journey Optimization

A modern guide to increasing your ecommerce revenue

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What will you learn?

A

Onsite Journey Optimization Basics

B

Mapping Out the Ideal Customer Journey

C

The Personalized Customer Experience

D

The Five-step Optimization Process

E

Real Word Strategies and Practical Examples

The Ultimate Guide to Onsite Journey Optimization

Download Guide
1

Why do you need onsite journey optimization?

2

The Onsite Customer Journey

3

Onsite Journey Optimization (OJO) in Action

Chapter #1

Onsite Journey Optimization Basics

Introduction

Online retailers and web store owners consistently tell us that their number one challenge is Customer Acquisition. They want more traffic to their online stores and higher numbers of those visitors converting into customers. The problem is, too many small businesses and  e-commerce store owners are trying to compete with online retail giants by using annoying, short term marketing tactics.

As more shoppers move online, competition for shoppers — and revenue — is more fierce than ever. Smaller businesses now compete with giants like Wal-Mart and Amazon to win new customers. But one of the ways any web store owner or e-commerce retailer can use to their advantage is by providing a smooth, personal online shopping experience.

Relevant, targeted messaging is how all businesses can acquire, monetize and retain online retail customers. This approach is called Onsite Journey Optimization. It’s a customer-centric framework we’ve developed that puts shoppers at the heart of the experience.

In this guide, we’ll tell you the philosophy behind Onsite Journey Optimization (OJO) and why it turns traditional Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) on its head. You’ll learn why onsite personalization increases revenue and how to implement OJO for your own online store.

And you’ll see how OJO increases conversions at all stages of the purchasing funnel. Your level of customer satisfaction will increase, shoppers will be more likely to be return buyers and their overall lifetime value will rise.

Onsite Journey Optimization also makes life easier and more convenient for marketers. You’ll also gain satisfaction that you’re actually providing value and assistance to customers, not just manipulating them to click through and buy.

Generic, one-size-fits-all messages are a thing of the past. The guide shows you how to migrate from a traditional e-commerce messaging approach to Onsite Journey Optimization.

The Rise & Fall of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

If you are like most ecommerce stores, you too are concerned about dismal conversion rates. You invest heavily in various marketing and advertising campaigns to attract visitors to your store. Then you only manage to capture a handful of these visitors into customers.

According to a February 2020 study published by SmartInsights, the average ecommerce conversion rate is 3.0%. The more complex the product, let’s say, consumer electronics (Laptops, TVs), the lower the conversion rate.

No wonder, that online merchants have been seeking solutions for increasing the conversion rate since the very beginning of internet shopping. Most of these solutions go under the name Conversion Rate Optimization, or more simply, CRO.

CRO is the process of optimizing our website to get more conversions out of our existing traffic. It is also often used as an umbrella term of methods, tools and best practices that helps you convert more of your website visitors to buyers.

The popularity of CRO has been steadily rising in the last decade. Here’s a Google Trends graph for the term over the past 10+ years. The search interest continues to keep rising.

The number of CRO tools also exploded in the previous decade. There are more than 4,600 apps in the Shopify app store alone, the average ecommerce site using more than 6 to help them increase their sales, some using more than 20.

Even though technology evolved a lot, conversion rates have stagnated during the last decade. With all the energy, money and technology, how is it possible that conversion rates still hover around 3%?

We believe that Conversion Rate Optimization has gone offtrack. While trying to increase conversion rates, merchants lost track of the real goal: serving customers better.

Unfortunately, today CRO in ecommerce eerily resembles a collection of techniques to trick the customer into making a purchase. While these may help gain an extra sale here and there, online shopping, in general, has not become a considerably more pleasant experience.

We are not saying that CRO in general is flawed. Most of these techniques are valid and can deliver results in the short term. We believe that the goal with these approaches is right; however, most site managers and store owners approach it with the wrong mindset. CRO, in general, has become identical to consumer manipulation.

Instead of helping customers, and finding better ways to serve them, many businesses simply try to trick users into doing whatever they think is best for their numbers.

• They interrupt website visitors with annoying popups, often even before they could have a glimpse of the website.

• They bombard them with seemingly random and irrelevant messages, hoping that “one of them might break through the noise”.

• They create fake urgency and push customers to buy now, even if they are not ready yet.

• They promote products with the largest margins, instead of helping users to find the products that really solve their problems.

• They A/B test buttons, colors and creatives that better interrupt users instead of thinking of how to create more value.

As an end result, customers are usually not buying more, but feel frustrated, disrespected and controlled. That not only stops us from getting better conversion rates, but also makes building a loyal, raving customer base much harder.

Is there a better alternative to ensure that you are converting your visitors without hampering their experiences? Yes! Enter Onsite Journey Optimization (OJO).

What is Onsite Journey Optimization (OJO) ?

Onsite Journey Optimization is about optimizing your website for your customer’s needs. That’s it. No magic tricks here.

OJO is simply about optimizing your website, your content, your messages and showing your customers the right messages at the right moment. What is the right moment? It depends: for each customer it can be different, based on where they are in their own customer journey.

The beauty of it is that putting your customer’s needs first will not just increase short term conversion rates (as customers get better help and feel more secure to make the sale), but it also builds authentic connections and long term relationships.

The short term effect of OJO done right is the increase in conversion rates. The resulting positive side-effecting is an increase in Average Order Value (AOV) and the Lifetime Value (LTV).

Onsite Journey Optimization (OJO) vs Conversation Rate Optimization (CRO)

Let’s review the many ways OJO and CRO are similar and different:

CRO OJO
Goal Increse conversion rateThe sole intent of CRO tactics is to increase short-term conversion rates hence the name Conversion Rate Optimization. Increase Conversion Rate, Average Order Value (AOV), and Lifetime Value (LTV)OJO focuses beyond merely increasing conversions. The focus is on creating a personalized journey that’s meaningful, and thus help maximize revenues in the long-run. OJO helps increase the Conversion Rate, Average Order Value (AOV) and Lifetime Value (LTV).
Focus Conversion Rate.CRO tactics and actions focus on increasing conversions, and often at the cost of poor user experience. Onsite Journeys.OJO focuses on optimizing the customer’s onsite journey and user experience, thus creating an ideal personalized user experience for each visitor.
Objective Find new tricks.TCRO techniques usually involve finding new hacks or tricks to convert more visitors — a new call-to-action, a new design, a new persuasive copy, etc. Value creation for the visitor.OJO is about creating value for the user or customer. The value creation varies based on where they are in the customer journey. It's about creating the right asset or message that's unique to the visitor's need at a given moment.
Strategy Control the user.CRO techniques are all about controlling the user and pushing them towards making a purchase (regardless of if they are ready or not). And it is often done by using techniques such as showing them a popup as soon as they land on the webpage. Help the user.OJO methods are about helping them find the best information or the right product. The most successful sites (such as Amazon or Netflix) give users control over their purchasing journey.
Horzion Short-term mindset.CRO techniques usually have a short-term mindset, such as maximizing sign-ups during an event or timely discounts. Long-term mindset.OJO focuses on building a long-term relationship with the visitor. Doing so helps build trust, generate larger orders, and repeat purchases.

In this section, I have given you a sneak-peek into what OJO is and how it differs from CRO. Before we jump into the details of how the OJO actually works, we need to understand how the customer’s onsite journey looks like from a customer perspective.

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1

Why do you need onsite journey optimization?

2

The Onsite Customer Journey

3

Onsite Journey Optimization (OJO) in Action

Chapter #2

The Onsite customer Journey

To be able to optimize your ecommerce sites to your customer’s needs, first you have to understand what your customer’s needs are. What does a typical onsite customer journey look like?

Here’s how an online shopping experience for a new mattress looks like today.

Let’s assume that our visitor is Kate, a 35-year-old mom who has to continually juggle between her busy schedule at the office and her home life with her kids.

After a busy day at work, she goes home. To unwind she scrolls through Instagram at 8 pm.

She sees an ad for a new mattress. It’s probably because she knew her current mattress is due for replacement, and she has spent a few hours last week searching for information on new mattresses.

From the Instagram ad, she visits the mattress store’s website and searches for options. She sees a subtle message about an ebook, promoting a “how to buy a mattress” guide. She clicks on it, and starts reading it.

But her shopping experience is interrupted by her kids. When she is about to leave the site, she gets a message about whether she would like to read this guide later by giving the merchant her email address? Being glad of the offer she opts in, and quickly gives her email address. After filling out the form, she stops shopping and focuses the rest of her day tending to her family.

Due to her busy schedule, mattress shopping has slipped her mind. But 2 days later, she now gets an email from the store with some very compelling customer reviews about the mattresses.

All of this piques Kate’s interest in the mattress brand, and she wants to know more. A day later, she searches multiple websites and reviews-sites to learn more about that brand to make sure she is making the right choice.

Once again, life gets in Kate’s way. This weekend she and her family went on a road trip to unwind from the week.

Later next week, Kate wants to finish her mattress purchase. She has already decided on the mattress she wants to purchase, but not sure where to buy it from. She visits the same website to check it out again. However, this time she receives a message welcoming her back and offering a 10% discount for first-time purchasers.

Kate decides to make a purchase using the coupon that day. Once she confirms her purchase, she is excited to receive the delivery of her new mattress.

Kate, 35

8:00 pm

Gets home after a dard day.
Scrolls through Instagram and clicks on ad for a new mattress.

8:15 pm

She starts browsing, but get distracted by her kids, and abandon shopping.

2 days later

She meets a FB ad about the same mattress 2 days later with some compelling reviews.

3 days later

She googles the product and looks around what others say about it.

5 days later

New comfortable about the mattress, she visits again, and get welcomed by a 10% OFF offer.

5 days later

She decides to buy, gets the discount and finishes the purchase.

Kate decides to make a purchase using the coupon that day. Once she confirms her purchase, she is excited to receive the delivery of her new mattress.

The Age of 1-Phase Sale is Over

Imagine that today, you walk into a mattress store without any knowledge on how to buy a mattress. Within a few seconds, a salesperson walks up to you and without a question just offers you a discount on every floor model. Then leaves you there to let you make your decision on your own.

Do you think that you’ll make a purchase right away? Or do you think you might choose to go to another store where the staff gives you more help and is more considerate of your needs.

That’s precisely what your online shoppers are doing. Welcoming every visitor with a 10% OFF coupon before they could have a look around is just scaring them, and instead of spending more time on your store, they flee.

The riskier and the pricier the product, the longer the customer journey is. But even for less complicated and less expensive products, it’s counterproductive to try making a sale at once.

Imagine that Kate in the previous example would have been welcomed by this 10% off offer on her first visit. Would the probability of her buying the mattress have increased? Not likely. Instead, she would have become just frustrated, and left.

As we could see in this example Kate was NOT ready to buy at her first visit. But this doesn’t mean that she was not a potential buyer. It only means that she was in an earlier stage of her own customer journey.

After working with and studying thousands of ecommerce stores, we have found something that most visitors are not ready to buy at once. We found that usually only 3% of your visitors are purchase-ready. The remaining 97% are not prepared to purchase now, but they can be made buyers in the future.

Of course this 3% can vary a lot based on your industry and your marketing, but the main concept is evident across all e-tailers regardless of their products.

So there are 97% of your visitors (30 times more than those who actually buy!) who are potential customers in the future. How can you convince them to become customers?

Micro vs Macro Conversions

To convert more of your visitors, you must first let go of your own needs, and take the customer’s point of view. What do you customers exactly need in a given moment? Your store has to communicate the right messages for each stage of the customer journey.

We can learn a lot from offline retail on how to do it right. To illustrate, let me walk you through a typical conversation in a retail clothing store.

You will notice that the store associate rarely or ever will ask you to purchase something right away. Also, they rarely flash the “for sale” or “discounts” right away.

The first question they ask you is, “Can I help you with something?”.

If you say “No” — they usually leave you alone.
If you say “Yes”— they will follow up with another question “Do you have any specific requirements or ideas?”.

You might say that you are looking to purchase new skirts for the summer.
The associate might then say,” these skirts are trendy now.”, and point you in the right direction on the retail floor.

Once you sort through the selection of skirts and choose the clothes you want to try — the same associate might visit you and offer some suggestions to go along with skirts. She might say, “And these skirts go rather well with these tops.”

Now, let’s imagine that you have indicated an interest in both the skirts and the tops. The associate then says, “Have you seen our 50% off items? There’s a few in your size.”

By this time, you manage to find skirts and tops that match your needs. The good news is that you can purchase these today at a steep discount.

After making your selections, you then head off to the cashier and make the purchase.

The lesson that ecommerce stores can learn from this typical retail conversation is the difference between micro vs. macro conversions.

Offline merchants know that there is no point in rushing the purchase process. They focus on micro-conversions instead of making a sale (macro-conversions). They are willing to be patient, invest time in the conversation, and help the customer have a sense of control over their purchasing decisions.

Online stores must adopt the same mindset. Trying to force or push the sale is usually a bad experience for your customer. Instead, offer your customers the right message at the right time, and focus on those micro-conversions.

Don’t rush the purchase — solve the current need (the actual micro-conversion). Solve one problem at a time. The eventual sale will happen at the customer’s willingness.

But how can you solve the problem of each visitor?

The Right Message To The Right Person

The reality is this — every website visitor is unique, and their needs are different. There is no such thing as the average customer.

It means there is no single message that will solve everyone’s problem. You will need different messages to solve different problems.

Let me use an example of a fictitious jewelry store (Acme Jewelry) to illustrate this fact.

Acme Jewelry has two unique visitors on the site today:
• One is Ben, a 38-year-old man.
• The other is Amelie, a 26-year-old woman.

 

Ben, 38

Looking for a wedding ring around $2,000

Amelie, 26

Looking for a birthday gift around $100

Ben is getting married soon, so he is looking for the perfect wedding ring. He also has a $2,000 budget and wants to find a ring that matches that price range.

On the other hand, Amelie just realized that she needs to get a gift for her friend’s birthday this weekend. She is still not sure what to buy and is open to recommendations. And she does not want to spend more than $100 for this birthday gift.

From studying Acme Jewelry’s marketing data, we find that the Average Order Value (AOV) is around $1000, i.e., on average, each customer spends $1,000 each. And we also discovered that the most popular products are the necklaces.

Most ecommerce stores take this info and create messages based on this AOV and category information (“data-driven decision making”). They then show the same message to each visitor.

Do you think both Ben and Amelie need to be shown the same messages that promote necklaces around $1000?

You probably answered — No.

But, this is what most ecommerce websites do. They assume the average customer persona (or buyer persona) applies to all visitors. They then show the same messages, same popups, and exact offers to both Ben and Amelie.

Do you think this will persuade both Ben and Amelie to purchase something from Acme Jewelry today?

Most likely not.

What do you think their individual user experience will be? Will they feel confident and comfortable purchasing from this store? Will they come back?

One of the main reasons for poor conversions is that stores display impersonal and generic messages that do not match the customer’s needs.

It’s paramount that you deliver the right message at the right time to the right people.

If you are talking about stuff about what the customer does not need, then here’s the reality — they are not going to spend their money today on your store. Due to their frustrating experience, they will bounce and probably never return to your store.

Finding Customer-Message Fit

To be more effective as an ecommerce store, you must understand the concept of the
Customer-Message Fit (CMF).

Let me illustrate using this diagram below:

• On the left is the customer’s needs — They are struggling to find what they are looking for. That’s why they are browsing your store (or any others).
• On the right are your messages — Every ecommerce store probably has tons of messages they use on different occasions.
• The sweet spot is right in the middle — That’s the customer-message fit.

Your messages will only work if there’s customer-message fit. Otherwise, your visitors will ignore the message. If your message speaks directly to their needs or problems, they are more likely to convert.

When there is only a partial-message fit, there is a low conversion rate. Also, your visitors will often bounce away from your website; and shop somewhere else.

Let’s go back to the example of Ben and Amelie, visitors at Acme Jewelry.

You will need to display a more suitable message to ensure that you are helping both of them solve their unique needs. You will have to show Ben a unique message and Amelie another unique message.

If both Ben and Amelie are shown personalized messages that speak directly to their specific needs, what do you think the end-results will be?

Yes, you guessed it right!

Both Ben and Amelie will likely purchase something from Acme Jewelry today.

That is the power of finding Customer-Message Fit. It is not just a bunch of tricks, but it is about helping the customer, finding the right solution for their needs.

Recommended Reading

3 Techniques to Increase Customer- Message Fit

We are sure you have heard about personalization in marketing. There are softwares, tools, guides that discuss the concept. However, it isn’t just enough to change some images and text on your messages to capture buyers’ attention and interest.

To be a more effective ecommerce marketer, you need to understand more about the customer journey and the psychology behind the various stages of their journey.

Recommended Reading

How to Optimize Your Marketing Messages Based on Customer Journey Stages

Understanding and internalizing this will help you create messages that yield above-average results.

In this section, I have given you a sneak-peek into what the onsite journey looks like from a customer point of view, and why focusing on this journey is the best way to maximize conversions.

In the next chapter, I will share all the steps involved in a typical Onsite Journey Optimzation process(with a real-life example of a successful ecommerce store).

1

Why do you need onsite journey optimization?

2

The Onsite Customer Journey

3

Onsite Journey Optimization (OJO) in Action

Chapter #3

Onsite Journey Optimization (OJO) in Action

You are probably excited to learn about what actionable steps you can employ to make a difference in your ecommerce store’s conversions and your customers’ experience.

I will cover the practical steps involved in the OJO process to understand OJO’s nuts-and-bolts. It will not be some theoretical stuff that no one uses, but the exact same methodology and process we are using to optimize our customers’ and our own websites.

Here’s a high level overview of the process:

The Onsite Journey Optimization (OJO) process typically involves 3 main steps:
• Step 1 — Onsite Journey Analysis
• Step 2 — Optimization Plan
• Step 3 — Implementation
I believe it is much easier to understand the concepts behind OJO when seen in action, so I’ll introduce the process through a case study.
blendjet

To illustrate, I will use an example of one of the fastest-growing Shopify stores, BlendJet, an eCommerce brand that sells state-of-the-art blenders to help their customers lead healthier lifestyles.

Within the first 3 weeks they sold out of their first 7,000 BlendJets, and by the end of 2018, had over 100,000 customers in 100 countries. They were featured on The Ellen Show, The Today Show, The Kelly Clarkson Show, and HBO’s Silicon Valley. Now they have over 1 million customers in nearly every country.
They started first optimizing their customers’ onsite journey in the summer of 2020, and had great success since then.
Now, let’s jump into the details!

1. Onsite Journey Analysis

You cannot solve a problem that is unknown. First you have to understand what are the problems your customers are facing when browsing through your website.
So the first step is to analyze the current onsite journey of your visitors, find bottlenecks and uncover opportunities to provide a better customer experience along their journey.

1.1 Marketing & Customer Discovery

The first phase of your analysis is to understand your market and your customers thoroughly. The goal of this process is to get a clear picture of who your customers are and the market you are competing in.
The more you know your customers, the easier to communicate to them.
The two most important part of the discovery is answering the next two questions:

• Customer Personas — Uncover who your buyers are, their problems, and their goals. Understand why they will choose your products; and how they will use your product. The biggest opportunities usually lay within HOW they choose your products, what aspects do they consider and why they find it difficult to make their choice.

• Value Propositions — Pinpoint reasons why they will buy from you and not your competitors. These (sometimes unique) value propositions are often hidden for new visitors, and there’s huge opportunity in better communicating these values in the right moment.

There are other interesting topics worth thinking over, which you can find in our Market and Customer Discovery Template.
For BlendJet, their ideal customer profile is a busy and health-conscious consumer who wants to create smoothies or shakes no matter where they were (the gym, their home, or on the go). Also they often use Instagram and other social media sites, and most of them never contemplated buying a “portable blender” before meeting BlendJet.
One of BlendJet’s core strengths lies in creating easy to understand and convincing product videos that raise problem & product awareness at the same time. That also means that a huge majority of the traffic they receive are already conscious of the product itself, and the main values it provides.

1.2 Data Analysis & Opportunity Discovery

After understanding your market dynamics and your customers, time to get data-driven.
The next step is to analyze your data from various sources, and find leaks where your store is losing money. These leaks usually indicate some kind of issues with your onsite journey, and your goal is to uncover these problems and find out critical areas of improvement.
Google Analytics reports are a great place to start. It is very easy to get lost among the hundreds of reports Google Analytics provide, so we usually recommend starting with the largest sources and the most visited landing pages, and looking for segments that convert suboptimally compared to others.
Using Google Analytics data BlendJet uncovered several areas to focus on.
One of these areas was the international traffic sources. Even though the majority of traffic BlendJet received was coming from the US, there were a huge number of visitors arriving from other regions.
Recommended Reading

How to identify Onsite Journey Optimization opportunities from your existing data? (TODO)

Using Google Analytics data BlendJet uncovered several areas to focus on.
One of these areas was the international traffic sources. Even though the majority of traffic BlendJet received was coming from the US, there were a huge number of visitors arriving from other regions.
These countries’ conversion rates were inferior to US traffic, and provided excellent optimization opportunities.
Here, we are not listing all the identified opportunities, but if you are interested in reading all of them, you can check them in the BlendJet OJO Case Study (TODO).

1.3 Opportunity Prioritization

For BlendJet, several opportunities were identified that could be targeted with a hypothesis.
Unfortunately there are usually more opportunities than resources to deal with all of them at once. So you might need to prioritize them to focus your OJO efforts on the opportunities with the biggest impact to help you get the best ROI of your time and resources.
Here is what the opportunity list looked like after prioritization for BlendJet:
Now, you have a list of prioritized opportunities. The next step is to start finding solutions for these opportunities!

2. Optimization Planning

You now have a clear understanding of your problems and opportunities. The next step is to develop a solid plan to solve them.
It’s one thing to know which pages or sources to optimize. But it requires proper planning to ensure that you do it effectively. As I’ve mentioned before, OJO is not a silver bullet. To be effective and successful, this stage is critical.

2.1 Solution Brainstorm

The first sub-step is to go through the prioritized opportunity list, one-by-one, starting with the highest ranked opportunities, and brainstorm messages (solutions) that would solve these exact, identified problems.
Let’s have a look at the previously mentioned opportunity: international traffic is converting poorly. What could be the solution for this problem?
The hypothesis here was that they might not be aware that BlendJet is indeed shipping to their country. I’m living in Hungary for example, and even though there’s a thin line on BlendJet’s website claiming “international shipping”, I’m still left to wonder how much will it cost or how long will it take.
Our solution here could be a simple, well targeted and personalized message to everyone visiting from Hungary to welcome them and let them be 100% clear that there is proven, free shipping available to Hungary.
As you can see there could be more than one message or solution for one problem – and that is fine. At this point of the process the more idea you have, the better.
The end result of the brainstorm usually looks like this, as was in the case of BlendJet:
Now we have a lot of solution ideas, let’s form them into an actionable plan.

2.2 Journey Plan Formation

After thorough brainstorming, you will have a big list of potential messages, that each aims to solve an exact, identified opportunity.
The next step is to develop this idea-list into an actual implementation plan, which is called Journey Plan.
First, you might want to prioritize and filter this list, and stick with a manageable amount of messages. There are usually more ideas than time to implement all of them, so we have to filter them down to those with the biggest impact potential.
Next comes the most important part: deciding who and when should see these messages. In practice it means that this is where you’ll decide the message’s format (popup, sidebar, sticky bar, etc.) and targeting (which segment of your visitors should see the message.
There are a lot of ways to deliver a message to an audience, and choosing the best one for the problem at hand can significantly improve your chances of getting to Customer-Message Fit.
Recommended Reading

How to Optimize your Marketing Messages Based on Customer Journey Stages

Here’s the Journey Plan that BlendJet came up with after considering each message:
Once you have a clear understanding of who to target and what their needs are — you increase the odds that your final messages are effective and successful.

2.3 Draft Message Plan

Once brainstorming and journey plan formation is complete, next you can jump directly into creating your messages – directly in your Onsite Journey Optimization Platform, like OptiMonk.
Often we recommend creating low-level message wireframes first. Draft the messages for each of these plans is usually much quicker, and gives you a chance to really think about the message, without the need to bother with design issues.
This image below is an example of a Draft Message, created for the “People from Hungary loves Blendjet!” message. As you can see, it is very “low fidelity” to concentrate more on the content of the message, and less on the form/design.
And here is a message plan created for the “We are shipping to Hungary – now FREE!”
The goal here is to create a customized Sticky Bar with a “Free Shipping” offer for visitors/customers from that country. They planned that this Sticky Bar be shown to all visitors regardless of their customer journey stage.
If you are interested in more examples, check out the full case study of BlendJet, where you can not only read about all the identified opportunities, but also see what messages we proposed as solutions for these opportunities.
Now that you have created all your Draft Messages, you can now implement your OJO plan.
Recommended Reading

3 Techniques For Increasing Your Ecommerce Conversions

If you are interested in more examples, check out the full case study of BlendJet, where you can not only read about all the identified opportunities, but also see what messages we proposed as solutions for these opportunities.
Now that you have created all your Draft Messages, you can now implement your OJO plan.

3. Implementation

Finally, it’s time to put things into motion. It often includes designing, setting up and launching the campaigns, and then evaluating the results.

3.1 Designing Message Creatives

If you have skipped the Draft Message Plan part, and started setting up your messages directly in your Onsite Journey Optimization Platform, then there’s no need to create seperate design plans.
On the other hand if you first drafted the message plans, without bothering with the design, now it’s time to pimp them up :).
Here is the design plan for the “People from Hungary loves Blendjet!” as an examples of the design creative:
And here is the design plan for “We are shipping to Hungary – now FREE!”:
Here the designers ensured that the creatives, images, design all match BlendJet’s brand. But most importantly, the creatives must emphasize the message.

3.2 Setting Up & Launching New Messages

Once the design plans are finalized, it’s time to launch your messages. In OptiMonk, it is made simple to create, customize, personalize, and edit your onsite messages.
Here you can see the settings for the “People from Hungary loves Blendjet!” message:
OptiMonk also gives you expanded capabilities to customize the design and the creative (copy) in a simple drag&drop interface.
If the campaigns are set up, it’s time to launch them. Now you can lay back, relax and just count the money rolling in :).
Or can you?

3.3 Evaluating Results

The launch of your campaigns is usually an important milestone – but definitely not the last one. It’s very rare that someone creates the perfect messages at once.
Your next task is to evaluate your new messages’ success and performance — conversions, sign-ups, subscribers, orders, new revenue, etc.
We recommend checking them first after 1 day (just a quick “smoke test” only: are they working? Impressions and conversions are growing?). Then depending on the traffic you have it might make sense to check them out monthly, bi-weekly, weekly or even daily.
The goal is gauge your messages’ effectiveness and success, if you need to make any necessary course corrections.
You can measure your messages’ top level effectiveness (impressions, conversion rate, conversions) directly in OptiMonk:
But you can even go one step further, and measure the direct contribution of each message to your revenue!
Google Analytics allows you to measure each message’s assisted revenue directly, and you can even compare different versions of each message.

Learn & Repeat

The Onsite Journey Optimization process doesn’t end here.
Based on the results you will validated or devalidated several of your hypothesis. You learned a lot what is working, and what’s not. You may have new ideas to try. It’s time to go back to Opportunity Prioritization (Step 1.3) to begin a new cycle.
Onsite Journey Optimization is a cyclical process. We recommend running these cycles as a 2-to-4 week sprint. This timeline gives enough time to test your hypotheses and assumptions.
Once a sprint is over, you are back to analysis, brainstorming, planning, ideation, and you repeat the cycle.
A prerequisite to get the maximum potential of the OJO process for your store is to have the right experimentation mindset – just as you need it with all kind of optimization practices.
You’ll need to have an open mind and keep experimenting continuously. OJO is not a copy-and-paste approach that you can simply copy from another e-tailer (such as this one from BlendJet) and plug into your store.
The critical mindset here is continuous experimentation and analysis. Your data will tell you which messages are working and which are not. Using this data will allow you to optimize further to ensure that you are effective with your OJO.

Conclusion

There are huge untapped opportunities in your store – if you have the right mindset. Onsite Journey Optimization is about having this right mindset.
As you’ve seen for every 100 visitors arriving at your ecommerce store today, only 3% are ready to purchase at once. What are you doing with the rest 97%?
Will you write them down as “lost opportunities”, or acknowledge that they are all good, potential buyers, just they are in varying stages of their own customer journey – and act accordingly?
It’s up to you. The Onsite Journey Optimization methodology we have discussed in this eBook will help you do just that.
Onsite Journey Optimization is about going beyond your own needs. It’s about optimizing for your customer’s needs. Always keep searching for new ways to help your customers, and optimize their onsite journey.
Putting the customer’s needs first will not just result in increased conversion rates but also build authentic connections and long term relationships.
References:

https://martechtoday.com/martech-continues-its-explosive-growth-but-are-we-facing-an-overload-223465
https://acquireconvert.com/shopify-statistics/
https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/shopify-statistics/#gref

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