Humble Beginnings

During my time at SCI, we've done a lot of A/B testing over the course of nearly 7 years, the earlier days making it happen with on-the-fly guerilla testing with Google Optimize and working directly with our Data Intelligence team to identify pockets of opportunity where they existed. Our main focus was our location page (funeral home, cemetery or a combo location with both a funeral home and cemetery present), concentrating on those high-value conversion areas on the page, above the fold specifically and in the proximity of our main CTAs that allowed families to contact us in both a pre-need (planning ahead) and at-need (a loved one has passed away) context.

Our design team made the HTML/CSS changes directly to the pages or groups of pages, while collectively our two teams tested all aspects of the tests beforehand, monitored during the tests' runs to identify a point of statistical significance, and after the tests had run, we all pored over the data and findings to share with the rest of the team.

Established Goals & KPIs

• Primary Objective - Generate measurable growth via ROI-positive optimization

• Secondary Objective - Risk mitigation of broad, unproven changes in user experience, as well as make faster, data-driven, business decisions

• KPIs - Form submits and booked calls for our location pages, and Send Flowers clicks on our obituary pages.

My Test Idea Contribution

My role in leading our CRO Program is being able to contribute meaningfully through ideas and suggestions for future tests within the backlog. One test specifically that I suggested had a major impact across our location pages, as it dealt primarily with the CTAs near the top of the page. Here's a recap:

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Visitors may not notice the right rail as they explore the location pages and don’t realize they need to scroll back up the page to access them.

PROPOSED SOLUTION

By making the right rail sticky we will see an increase in CTA and form submits on the location pages.

Estimated Test Duration: 2 weeks
Estimated Number of Visitors: 880,000

V0 - The Control

V1 - Sticky Right Rail + Hiding Secondary Nav

THE RESULTS

After just 11 days, the test achieved a clear statistical significance and was deemed a huge winner for the program.

Site-wide Form Submits: +29.8% @ 99% conf.

Location Form Submits: +32.6%% @ 92% conf.

This test alone had a Projected Annualized Impact of $11.8M and accounted for 98% of the entire program impact!

What happened next

The test was soft-coded across all locations to maximize the potential and plans were made to get it into an upcoming dev sprint. Due to the success of this test, there was a great need to have a "fast track" to production, as our current sprint cycle didn't accommodate for it. I strategized for weeks with Product Management and Engineering in order to account for a separate swim lane process for successful CRO tests so we could reap the benefits sooner and expose those impactful tests to our production users in a shorter amount of time. This has the added benefit of minimizing the amount of time that the test code stays soft-coded.

This was just one example of how a true "test and learn" mentality supported our company's success by making a small but meaningful change, along with working together with partners to ensure a swift delivery of that success to the greatest pool of users. I look forward to sharing more examples of how our CRO Program is making waves in other areas of not just our Dignity Memorial site, but other sister sites as well as we've continued to expand our testing reach!