Case Study: Can the Carousel Improve Sales?

Carousels take up a lot of valuable space on a landing page and often, they don’t deliver the sales they should. However, for this eCommerce business, we saw in biometric lab sessions and heatmaps that users who interacted with the carousel had a higher rate of conversion.

So the business tasked us with optimising the carousel with a view of driving more sales through it.

Hypothesis and Psychological Technique Applied

We theorised that conversion on the carousel can be improved by making the carousel more interactive.

We believed that if we allowed visitors to add to basket from the carousel, added Social Proof messages, and used friendly headline and CTA copy (applying the Personification/Metaphor Effect), we would be able to increase sales for these promoted products.

Experiment

We made the following changes in the Variation:

• Added an emotive headline
• Brought 3 products into view as opposed to just one product per carousel
• Added social proof content on selected products
• Added micro-copy that appealed to the visitor
• Reassured visitors that they’ve made a great choice when they added the product to their basket.

Control

Variation

Results

From the observed data, we were able to see that the Variation showed a high probability of being better than the Control.

Learnings

This experiment tapped into people’s emotions, reassured them that they were making a good decision like many others, and made it easy for them to act positively upon that decision. This helped transform the carousel into a key and valuable revenue-generating element on the page.