Truckstop.com Followed a Structured CRO Program To Witness Uplift In Conversions Using VWO

Truckstop.com has two main target audience: the freight owners and agents who are very tech-savvy and the truck drivers who are not as tech-savvy. All the tests are designed keeping in mind these two personas so they can provide a seamless experience to customers of both spectra.

Apart from their overarching goal of a double-digit increase in revenue, Truckstop.com set two specific goals to meet:

• Increasing online Sales – the KPI tracked for this goal was the revenue increase per month.
• Demo request for lead generation – the KPI tracked for this goal was the number of leads coming in for their sales team.

To achieve these goals, Truckstop.com set out to run the two campaigns discussed here to generate more MQLs through increased demo requests.

Truckstop.com follows a continuous optimization process and VWO helped it lay down the foundations of this experimentation culture through the plethora of user research and analysis tools that we offer. They have a dedicated CRO team of 4 professionals and call themselves the Truckstop Experimentation team.

The highlight of all the campaigns run by Truckstop.com was that they extensively used the VWO Session Recording capability to understand user behavior on their website. They looked at 1000+ recordings to gather significant user insights for every campaign.

In 2018, the Truckstop Experimentation team, despite much reluctance, tested pop-up forms on their website for both their target personas. As is believed, the team thought that the test would fail as there is barely anyone who likes pop-ups on websites.

Keep reading to know if this assumption was correct or if the data from the test suggest otherwise. Let’s have a look at two campaigns run by Truckstop.com that reinforces what CRO preaches.

Campaign 1: Demo Pop-up – Load board for Brokers (2018)

Hypothesis: A pop-up demo form will help produce more MQLs.

Goal:  Increasing demo requests.

Solution: The original page did not have a highlighted demo request form. The Experimentation team decided to test a pop-up demo request form on its broker load board page. This is what it looked like:

Result: Contrary to what the team was expecting, after the completion of the A/B test, the variation resulted in a 26% uplift in conversions and beat the control. Control was at 64.96% conversion rate while variation was at 81.71%.

Campaign 2:  Demo Pop-up – Load board for Carriers

Hypothesis: A pop-up demo form will help produce more MQLs.

Goal: Increasing demo requests.

Solution: The Truckstop Experimentation team conducted a similar test for their Carriers load board page. With the same dislike for pop-ups, they decided to test the pop-up demo request form for carriers. Only, in this case, 2 variations were created.

Variation 1 had the same pop-up form as campaign 1 and this is what it looked like:

Variation 2 had a CTA that read “Looking for a demo?” at the bottom of their Carriers load board page. This is what it looked like:

Result: Here too, dismissing all personal opinions and likes and dislikes, variation 1 performed better than control or variation 2 with and resulted in an 11% uplift in conversion rate.

Using visitor recordings

Over a period of 6 months, the Truckstop Experimentation team went through 1000+ recordings not just for insights to aid their test campaigns but to improve their overall UX. Here is a snippet of our conversation with Tara Rowe:

Q. How many and what were your observations from these recordings?

Tara: We were able to determine where people dropped off on the application due to UX issues and bugs.  With this information, we were able to update our application process and help improve our conversion rate by over 25% of our previous conversation rate.

Q. How many and what changes did you make based on these recordings?

Tara: It was great to be able to see the platform (PC, MAC, Mobile) that the customer was using.  We were able to determine if issues were platform specific and adjust the process as needed.

Q. What improvements did you observe owing to these changes?

Tara: We saw a dramatic decrease in errors especially on mobile, we also saw a 137% increase in form completion rate due to changes made from this process.

Q. Any screenshots of the forms you changed – before & after?

Tara: Most changes were on the back end in error coding and so no screenshots are available.

Conversion rate optimization is not an isolated process. Following a structured CRO program involves visitor research, hypothesizing, prioritization, testing, deployment and drawing learnings from concluded tests. And Truckstop.com exemplified how one should evangelize CRO. In the campaigns discussed here, CROs core beliefs were reinforced:

• No place for personal opinions. Only data matters.
• Testing before deploying.
• Testing for different personas and target audience based on their needs and how they interact with your website.
• Research and testing for even the most minute changes: both front-end and back-end.

Following what CRO preaches, Truckstop.com was able to increase their conversions by simply A/B testing an idea that nobody thought would work. If you want to know more about CRO and how to put it to practice, read our Ultimate Guide to CRO.