Yo! Free Samples Increased CTR Using VWO Testing

The primary objective of Yo! Free Samples was to deliver time-sensitive deals to its customers before they expired.

John ‘Samples’ Clark is the key writer at Yo! Free Samples. He carefully curates daily online deals and posts them along with the requirements of each of its customers. One of the unique challenges in his domain is that the content should remain perpetually fresh. You wouldn’t want customers clicking on an expired offer and leaving empty-handed.

When John came across web push notifications from VWO Engage, he sensed a solution to this problem and decided to give it a spin.

Setting up VWO Engage was easy. All John had to do was install the VWO Smartcode to his website and, voila! Since then, he has received quarter of a million sessions from push notifications alone and 99% of them have been from returning visitors.

Earlier, John used to reach out to his customers through email newsletters. After adopting push notifications, he has unlocked a very effective symbiosis between the two channels. He reaches out to his customers with an offer, first thing in the morning, through a push notification. He ends the day with an email newsletter, sharing the best offers.

Sometimes, his newsletter subscribers would write to him about offers that they missed – deals that would have expired by the time they opened the emails and landed on the website. In such cases, he has the solution ready now – push notifications. He introduces the upset customers to this channel and once they subscribed to it, they received real-time offers whenever they logged onto the platform.

The working relationship shows that a new channel need not work as an alternative to your tried and tested ones. It can also work in tandem to send the right message, at the right time.

Yo! Free Samples gets an average click rate of 17.96% from their push notifications. This is huge when you think about the average click rates for commercial emails which is around 2-4%. Their best click rate for notifications is a whopping 39%. Since notifications are linked to specific landing pages, the users are led exactly to where the offer is available on the website. This has ensured an average session time of 2 minutes and 52 seconds among users landing through notifications.

Push Notification Tips by John Clark

John states that the images used in the notification play an important role in persuading the receivers to click on them. What worked best for his platform were the actual images of samples on offer. Keeping the copy succinct and on point, similar to paid search ads, also helped them boost their click rates.

“VWO Engage is helping me start the day with my readers on the right foot by providing them content at the right time. It keeps the content fresh when other channels can get stale fast – a unique problem faced by the deals space,” said John ‘Samples’ Clark, Website Owner of Yo! Free Samples, when asked about his experience using VWO Engage.