A best practice that my colleagues on the Client Services team have written about for the Monetate blog (and in our eBooks and white papers, too) is the value of reducing steps in the conversion funnel by helping visitors quickly connect with products that will be of interest.

This week’s winning test campaign features an example of how an online retailer of women’s fashions did just this by successfully leveraging customers’ past-purchase history to personalize both the site navigation and the homepage message for return customers.

Targeting customers who had purchased from a particular brand, the ecommerce firm highlighted a product image from this brand in the top navigation drop-down menu with an appeal to shop this collection. In addition, a sub-hero banner on the homepage lent support to the effort with another mention of the brand for those customers who wouldn’t turn straight to navigation menus to begin shopping.

Since incorporating product images into drop-down menus is fairly novel, how did well did customers respond to this test? Across the board, KPIs for the test segment increased nicely. The retailer improved:

• conversion by 6.05%

• average order value by 7.46%

• add-to-cart rate by 5.66%

It’s just another example of how acknowledging customer affinity can make for more productive shopping trips to your website.

A quick reminder: I’m co-presenting on the “Website Testing Wins!” webinar this Wednesday, October 10, from 2-3pm, with WhichTestWon’s Justin Rondeau. We’ll share the results of a dozen website tests from the ecommerce, travel, and financial services sectors, plus ideas for how to make your site more relevant and run more concurrent tests to find what works faster. Hope you can make it!