Adobe Summit EMEA Winners of WhichTestWon Contest

I con­fess that I absolute­ly love to dis­cov­er how cus­tomers use Adobe Tar­get to per­son­alise and opti­mise their web and mobile sites and mobile apps. To get a glimpse into what our cus­tomers are doing with Adobe Tar­get, we recent­ly held a con­test with WhichT­est­Won, the online site that lets you guess which test vari­ant won in a real A/B test. We select­ed sev­er­al win­ning tests and asked the opti­mi­sa­tion pro­fes­sion­als who sub­mit­ted them to describe their tests dur­ing a ses­sion at Adobe Sum­mit in Las Vegas, Neva­da this past March.

We launched a sim­i­lar con­test for Adobe Sum­mit EMEA. Last week, we select­ed four win­ners who will sim­i­lar­ly high­light their win­ning tests dur­ing Adobe Sum­mit EMEA ses­sion P07: Step right up and guess WhichT­est­Won. And the win­ners are (drum­roll please):

We spoke with these opti­mi­sa­tion pro­fes­sion­als about their win­ning tests and here’s what we learned…

Our first win­ner, Rob Lynch, is the Lead Opti­mi­sa­tion Exec for RS Com­po­nents, a high-ser­vice dis­trib­u­tor of elec­tron­ics and indus­tri­al com­po­nents for busi­ness­es glob­al­ly. About 60% of their busi­ness comes from online sales. Late last year, they switched to Adobe Tar­get and the full set of Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud solu­tions because their dis­parate dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing solu­tions couldn’t talk to each oth­er. They want­ed a total­ly inte­grat­ed dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing plat­form. They wast­ed no time tak­ing advan­tage of that platform.

Rob’s team knew from cus­tomer feed­back and from their own expe­ri­ence as cus­tomers of oth­er sites that cus­tomers appre­ci­ate hav­ing a quick visu­al cue about whether or not an item is in stock while brows­ing the site. By show­ing the busi­ness impact of mak­ing the change through a quick A/B test, the opti­mi­sa­tion team had the proof they need­ed to con­vince the devel­op­ment team to make imple­ment­ing this fair­ly com­plex func­tion­al­i­ty change a top priority.

Our next win­ner, Sibylle Schuh­mach­er, works as the Direc­tor of Glob­al Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing for SAP, the lead­ing enter­prise appli­ca­tion soft­ware provider. Sibylle’s mis­sion is to offer vis­i­tors to the SAP web site a more rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence, which is a chal­lenge giv­en that 90% of their vis­i­tors are anonymous.

For Sybille, the abil­i­ty to inte­grate third par­ty data with Adobe Tar­get and Adobe Ana­lyt­ics is key to offer­ing a more rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence. These inte­gra­tions allowed Sibylle’s team to seg­ment anony­mous site vis­i­tors by attrib­ut­es such as indus­try, com­pa­ny size, and loca­tion. In this test, they seg­ment­ed vis­i­tors by indus­try, and test­ed indus­try-spe­cif­ic expe­ri­ence vari­ants on the SAP.com home­page and land­ing page. They dis­cov­ered that cer­tain indus­tries respond­ed very favourably, as indi­cat­ed by much high­er engage­ment rates with per­son­alised con­tent. Sibylle and her team con­tin­ue to test and refine their per­son­al­i­sa­tion and seg­men­ta­tion strategies.

Our third win­ner, Nathan King, is a Jour­ney Man­ag­er (as in cus­tomer jour­ney) at Roy­al Bank of Scot­land (RBS), one of the largest finan­cial insti­tu­tions in the UK. RBS has been an Adobe Tar­get user for many years, but in 2014, they migrat­ed from the old­er ver­sion of Adobe Tar­get to the redesigned, more intu­itive ver­sion with the Visu­al Expe­ri­ence Com­pos­er. Nathan explains that before the migra­tion, “Test­ing was in the hands of a select few.” After the migra­tion and some train­ing, he notes, “The Jour­ney Man­ag­er com­mu­ni­ty were giv­en con­trol, and have become more and more adept. The Visu­al Expe­ri­ence Com­pos­er gives us a lot more flex­i­bil­i­ty when mak­ing changes to test.”

Nathan sub­mit­ted a test that in his words was a “no-brain­er.” He want­ed to sim­pli­fy the lan­guage used on a page from which cus­tomers request­ed over­draft pro­tec­tion for check­ing, or “cur­rent” accounts. By clear­ly explain­ing what cus­tomers could expect from the approval process, he believed they would com­plete their appli­ca­tion for over­draft pro­tec­tion. He was cor­rect, and cus­tomer com­ple­tion of the appli­ca­tions and sub­se­quent bank approvals of those appli­ca­tions increased sub­stan­tial­ly. A win for the bank and its customers.

Will Harmer, our fourth and final win­ner, serves as Senior Man­ag­er for the Dig­i­tal Insights and Opti­mi­sa­tion team at the UK’s largest mobile com­pa­ny, EE. A long­time user of Adobe Tar­get, EE recent­ly shift­ed devel­op­ment of all tests to the new­ly redesigned Adobe Tar­get inter­face to take advan­tage of rich­er inte­gra­tions with the Mar­ket­ing Cloud and the Visu­al Expe­ri­ence Com­pos­er. Will notes, “[The Visu­al Expe­ri­ence Com­pos­er] is infi­nite­ly eas­i­er. With­in two days, our team mem­bers can learn what they need to build a test.”

EE cus­tomers have a great deal of choice about which phones and plans they can pur­chase. Through qual­i­ta­tive and quan­ti­ta­tive analy­sis, Will and his team found that the choic­es and plan details could be over­whelm­ing. They believed that by show­ing vis­i­tors what phones and plans oth­er cus­tomers pur­chased most—using social proof—visitors would feel more con­fi­dent in choos­ing a plan. Test­ing con­firmed that the­o­ry. The team is now explor­ing how social proof can guide cus­tomers decid­ing on oth­er com­plex decisions.

Now that you’ve met our win­ners and learned about their tests, I hope you’ll join Andrea Warn­er of WhichT­est­Won and me at Adobe Sum­mit EMEA ses­sion PO7 this week. In the ses­sion, you’ll hear more details about the tests and key take­aways and see if you can cor­rect­ly guess which test vari­a­tion won before we reveal the true win­ner. Plus, you can vote for the test that you think was the best and help select the win­ner of the People’s Choice Award.

See you at Adobe Sum­mit EMEA!