Oral-B increases conversion rate of product detail pages by +20.85% in less than 30 days 

Oral-B story

In 1938, Henry Sargol invented a soft nylon bristled toothbrush that was less abrasive to tooth enamel, better for massaging the gums, and more effective at picking up tooth powder.

Robert William Hutson (1919–2001), a young dentist in San Jose, Ca., learned of Sargol’s designs and decided to develop them further. His first patented Oral-B was called the “Oral-B 60,” as it had 60 tufts.

In 1984 the Gillette group acquired Oral-B to grow the brand and the innovations. Braun, another brand within the Gillette group of companies, began using the Oral-B name for electric toothbrushes, the first electric brushes to be made by the company.

Over the years, the Oral-B brand has expanded to include toothbrushes, toothpastes, flosses, oral irrigators and interdental products to name just a few.

Oral-B is one of the leading brands within the dental care industry, continually innovating and adapting, bringing new products to market to help the public achieve better standards of oral care.

Before

OralB.com launched as an integrated DTC site experience in April 2020 as the team saw an opportunity to capitalize on existing organic website traffic. August 2020 saw another milestone month with the launch of Oral-B iO, the brand’s biggest innovation of the decade.

iO was the most awarded brush of 2020 and one of the most technologically advanced brushes on the market. For those reasons alone, it is important that the online experience of buying an iO is best-in-class, and optimizing the product detail page and checkout journey became top priority for OralB.com.

CHALLENGE

Before using Obviyo’s platform, Oral-B’s DTC team would from time time redesign key pages to provide a better customer experience.

In spite of best efforts and the use of UX best practices, pre-launch A/B split tests of new designs would often fail.

Images below show an example of one such A/B test failure where the new design produced -12% drop in conversion rate.

In this example, the new design tried to improve multiple areas of the page: product images, pricing communication, product option selection, and content layout.  With so many changes, it was unclear which of those changes worked and which ones did not.

All the Oral-B team could do was to take a wild guess and try A/B testing another design.

This was taking time, wasting resources, and ultimately it was preventing further innovations in customer buying experience.

After

Obviyo’s growth marketing platform provides a fully integrated data platform, personalization, and experience optimization capabilities. The Oral-B team took advantage of the large scale experimentation abilities of the platform’s optimization features. They ran multiple A/B tests in parallel, leveraging the platform’s adaptive algorithms.

SOLUTION

Instead of a whole page redesign Obviyo enabled Oral-B team to innovate new page designs by experimenting with individual page components

This approach enabled the Oral-B team to validate with precision which of the individual component redesigns were successful, while at the same time being able to measure how multiple changes perform together as an ensemble.

The adaptive algorithms that intelligently allocate more traffic to winning treatments were minimizing, if not completely eliminating the risk of experimentation, while at the same time accelerating time-to-results.

Results

Time period: 30 days