Last updated Thu Nov 14 2024
10+ Conversion Rate Optimization Examples [+Tips]
Learning from conversion rate optimization examples from other successful businesses is one of the best ways to increase sales.
After all, you can see what works and make improvements to make your campaigns better and hit that goals you've set.
In this post, browse a collection of examples of conversion rate optimization from online businesses of all sizes:
Learn what works for your customers
Combine AI, CRO experiments, A/B testing, visitor analytics, and lead capture campaigns to find your winning formula
Interested in learning about CRO? These guides will help to learn more:
1. Using website popups strategically
Many businesses limit the potential of popups by sticking to a single, mostly generic-looking newsletter campaign. But, as many ecommerce case studies show, experimenting and using popups for different goals can produce conversion rates as high as 21%.
Using popups strategically includes making them:
Less intrusive: using page delay, scroll depth, and time on a website
More visitor-friendly: testing different incentives, product images, colors, and signup fields
More contextual: include offers relevant to pages on which they're displayed or based on shopping behavior (eg adding an item to the cart)
More diverse: using them to drive traffic to specific products, quizzes, making announcements, sharing upsell and cross-sell offers, stopping cart abandonment, showing the latest deals, and other non-signup goals
Municibid (a Pennsylvania-based online government auction service) offers us a great conversion optimization example of how even the newsletter campaign can be much better.
Instead of using the common newsletter campaign, they created dedicated popups for their biggest services: heavy equipment and automotive government auctions.
This was the campaign for the heavy equipment auctions page (note the zip code signup field, too):
And—
This one appeared on the automotive auctions page:
This simple strategy allowed Municibid to make their popups more relevant and personalized to website visitors.
As a result, conversions increased: the heavy equipment auctions campaign achieved a 30% click-through rate (CTR) and the automotive auctions reached a 20% CTR.
Learn more about the Municibid case study.
“Targeting visitors with popups by product type worked great for us! It allowed us to tailor messaging and focus on displaying one image of a great item, instead of trying to show the wide range of items we have with multiple photos…”
Sophie Eden, Director of Marketing, Municibid
Expert tip:
To run contextual and personalized popups, you'll want a tool with various display rules and ideally, targeting for ecommerce platforms like Shopify. This way, you can make campaigns that appear only to certain visitor groups or specific customers, which means endless chances for personalization and CRO experiments.
📘 These top popup software meet these criteria.
2. Showing behavior-based product recommendations
Behavior-based product recommendations include items a customer has viewed or those related to them. This strategy helps to improve the overall shopping experience by making it more positive and relevant.
OddBalls, for example, shows visited products in a neat feed in the website's header, so shoppers can easily access it from any page. It's called the AI Wishlist, as the list of products is generated by an AI algorithm that does so based on purchase intention:
For a great example of this conversion optimization tip, we go to émoi émoi, a French lifestyle store. Just like OddBalls, they offer product recommendations in the feed (see below).
As you can see, there are two categories of recommendations, visited and related products, and shoppers can choose sizes and add the items to the cart in a couple of clicks.
Not only does the AI Wishlist look modern and stylish, but it's also very effective in increasing conversions and sales on autopilot.
émoi émoi generated a 9.3% engagement rate as well as an 11.4% order click rate from the recommendations in just 30 days.
According to Lucie Poirier, the digital marketing manager at émoi émoi, personalization was the biggest reason for success, as the wishlists made more personal touchpoints throughout the customer journey.
📘 Get more details: émoi émoi CRO case study.
More inspiration:
20 examples of effective product recommendations from ecommerce stores
Personalizing shopping experience with onsite marketing
Onsite marketing is about creating personalized shopping experiences by engaging and converting visitors by using campaigns driven by their behavior and data, eg how they found the site, what they've bought before, and the pages they've visited.
Let's see a few simple examples of conversion optimization with onsite marketing.
For the first one, we go to Stumptown Coffee Roasters. The brand shows this small popup campaign only to first-time and unregistered visitors who viewed a couple of pages but have not added anything to the cart. The hypothesis here: those visitors need help with finding the right products.
Next up—
Let's break down a bit more complex tactic.
We go to Syos, a brand that makes high-quality custom 3D-printed saxophone and clarinet mouthpieces.
When I visited their homepage but tried to leave I got this exit-intent message (below).
Using a giveaway is a really smart idea here: free products are a big reason why customers can consider buying from a brand they don't know. Besides, over 30% of first-time customers are acquired through contests and giveaways.
So, a giveaway campaign can help Syos convert first-time and unregistered customers and nurture them with emails.
But—
What if I close that campaign and go see some more products? Will my experience be about the same as in most online stores (eg static)?
Not the case with Syos.
When I browsed a couple of alto mouthpieces (in other words, a specific type of product) and didn't add anything to the cart, I saw a red notification about a new onsite notification.
I clicked to see this—
The website is asking if I need any help choosing because they have a quiz for that:
When I took the quiz and added a product to the cart, I got some relevant recommendations in the side bar, too:
Even small things like this made the browsing and shopping experience at Syos feel personalized. And definitely more engaging compared to many other static websites of competitors.
More examples of onsite marketing campaigns for CRO:
Dedicated lead generation campaigns for new and repeat visitors
A limited-time offer popup appears exclusively for visitors who view more than two items within a specific product category
Displaying relevant product recommendations in real-time based on the browsing history, buying history, and cart content
Dive deeper:
3. Highlighting promotions without adding clutter with notifications
This example of conversion optimization is about two things: overcoming choice paralysis (having too many options in one place) and keeping the website clean. A good solution is onsite notifications—the feed you've seen above in this post.
Onsite notifications are great for this goal because they can easily showcase new or best-selling products, highlight upcoming sales, or share special offers—all above the fold of your website. Here's how Black Ember, a California-based brand, shares marketing messages:
Black Ember is also an amazing case study example of conversion optimization with onsite notifications. The brand promoted a few new products (tactical backpacks) and drove over 4,000 visitors to them in 21 days through the notifications.
What this case study shows is that the brand's visitors found notifications a convenient and non-pushy way to discover products. So, this channel can be an effective way to increase website conversions on online stores.
Here's the performance of one campaign:
“Our first priority is to provide our community with a positive, engaging, and easy-to-use UX. We have found Wisepops to perfectly complement the design and functionality of our website.”
Black Ember
4. A/B testing landing pages
This approach involves creating two or more variations of a landing page to determine which version performs best in achieving specific business goals, such as increasing sign-up rates or sales conversions. By analyzing different elements, marketers can derive data-driven insights into user preferences and behaviors.
Some of the most commonly A/B tested elements are:
Headlines. Different messages, font sizes, colors, animations, value propositions, etc.
Hero images or videos. Different lifestyle product images and videos
Trust signals. Free shipping guarantees, customer testimonials, secure payment badges
Zola, a wedding building service, gives us an example of this tactic.
Here's one version of their landing page for wedding websites. It's got a big hero image, a bullet list with the benefits of their builder, and black CTA buttons:
While there's also a second version—
This one has templates above the fold, a different hero image, different benefits, CTA colors and copy, and a slightly modified headline:
More inspiration:
5. Preventing bounces with exit campaigns
An exit-intent campaign presents a final offer to persuade a visitor to convert or continue browsing when they try to leave. Statistics suggest that these popups can convert up to 3% of visitors, potentially enhancing a website's conversion rate.
Exit campaigns can contain extra incentives like discounts and free shipping, customer reviews, or simply remind customers about all the benefits they can enjoy if they buy.
Hallow, the most popular Catholic prayer app, used exit intent popups to increase conversion rates and improve downloads. They had a special offer around lent: a 90-day free trial, and shared this message with this good-looking campaign (below).
To enhance the promotion of their offer, they showcased their influencers on the exit intent popup. This campaign drove 32,533 visitors to the app signup page.
“We recognize that our different channels don’t operate in a vacuum and the work we do in one channel can support our marketing efforts in a different channel. Someone who saw our exit intent commercial could have been reminded about our Super Bowl commercial and decided to try Hallow. Or someone seeing one of our Mark and Jonathan ads on social media may be more likely to click and try Hallow if they’ve already seen our Mark and Jonathan exit intent pop up.”
Stephen Spiewak, Director Of Organic Marketing, Hallow
6. Using limited-time offers to drive urgency
Limited-time offers drive a sense of urgency, so they can boost conversions in a short timeframe. When used from time to time, they can drive traffic to your store from your newsletter subscribers and social media followers, as well as new customers if you run paid ad campaigns.
For this conversion rate optimization example, we go to Charlotte Bio. This organic cosmetics store used a tried-and-tested strategy: a flash sale. To promote the sale, Charlotte bio sent announcements to email subscribers and ran some paid ad campaigns just an hour before the start.
To announce this limited-time sale to website visitors, a sticky bar and a small non-intrusive popup were made with Wisepops. Both had a copyable discount code:
Altogether, the campaigns generated over 700 discount code applications within six hours, with the mobile popup being the most effective.
“The campaign generated six times more customers in six hours than we get on a full regular day, which we really did not expect.”
Marilou Bertrand, Director of Digital Marketing, Charlotte Bio
For more conversion optimization projects:
Here are CRO testing strategies and 15 ideas of limited-time offers with examples.
7. Ensuring a positive experience with gamified campaigns
Gamified campaigns like spin-to-win wheels, scratch cards, product quizzes, and Easter egg hunts on websites bring some interactivity to the shopping experience. Launching such campaigns is pretty easy, as you only need a popup builder or a dedicated gamification app.
Soi Paris has a great example of conversion optimization through easily implementable gamification techniques. The brand's website featured an egg hunt on the Easter weekend, in which visitors had to find "eggs" to get exclusive discounts.
First, this message announced the hunt:
The "eggs" were placed on a few product pages like this:
Upon clicking, the "egg" displayed a message congratulating the visitor and getting the discount. It also featured a countdown to remind shoppers that the code was valid for only 48 hours.
This conversion optimization project resulted in 233 customers redeeming the discount codes.
Read Soi Paris CRO case study for more details.
“We are really satisfied with the results of this campaign, it exceeded our expectations. In three days, it helped generate 42% of our revenue (month to date) with a nice average order value. We also received a lot of positive feedback from our customers. They really enjoyed our egg hunt!”
Elodie Trebuchet, Director of Digital Marketing, Soi Paris
8. Introducing new products with quick videos
Video tutorials and how-to guides are a way for online businesses to introduce visitors to their products, which could be especially important if they're new or innovative. Often, such videos are placed on the homepage (in the hero section or as a popup) to engage as many shoppers are possible.
Flaus, a store selling an innovative electric flosser, gives us an example of this conversion rate optimization in action. There's a small popup with a muted video that starts playing immediately when visitors come to the website.
In the video, we see the brand's founder explaining the benefits of the product as well as giving reasons why we should consider switching to Flaus. This way, she can quickly showcase her product's benefits and features before visitors even scroll down on the homepage.
How to make similar campaigns:
9. Focusing on new products with website design
This example of conversion rate optimization focuses on the promotion of specific products or collections for a limited time, aiming to increase awareness and accelerate sales. By featuring products in hero images and banners, you can drive more visitors to them.
Asphalte, for example, effectively uses this conversion optimization tip by highlighting new collections (like the sustainable hoodie collection below) with hero images and banners:
To keep a link to a product available on all pages, Asphalte also uses onsite notifications.
Here's how a visitor can find it regardless of the page they're on:
CRO case study
Learn how Asphalte converts 4,000 leads/mo and brand mission awareness:
10. Giving quick support with chatbots and live chat
Using live chat and chatbots on a website can significantly enhance conversion rates by providing instant support and personalized interactions. These tools allow for real-time communication, which reduces friction in the purchasing process.
Some of the most important ways that a live chat or chatbot can help with CRO are:
Answering the most frequently asked questions
Share discounts based on browsing behavior
Giving real-time support to visitors
Collect customer feedback
Allowing to track orders
Related:
How to collect customer feedback (including with live chat)
Summary
Conversion rate optimization is a continuous process. I hope these examples from successful businesses gave you a few good ideas on how to build, improve, and maximize the results of yours.
To learn more about engaging your visitors, check out these resources from our blog:
Oleksii Kovalenko
Oleksii Kovalenko is a digital marketing expert and a writer with a degree in international marketing. He has seven years of experience helping ecommerce store owners promote their businesses by writing detailed, in-depth guides.
Education:
Master's in International Marketing, Academy of Municipal Administration
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