How TomTom used Hotjar to drive big increases to email CTR and conversion rates.

In the e-commerce world, what’s best for users is best for business. Improving user experience means answering questions about why users behave the way they do. To increase conversions, marketing and UX teams need to go beyond the raw numbers in their traditional analytics tools to understand user behavior.

For TomTom, the leading independent navigation company, working with a feedback and behavior analysis tool could not come at the cost of risking the security and privacy of its users. In Hotjar, they found the perfect solution that could deliver on all counts.

Would Hotjar help TomTom gain new behavioral insights without compromising user security?

“At TomTom, we take data privacy very seriously. GDPR compliance and protecting user anonymity are of paramount importance to us,” explains Dave Powell, TomTom’s conversion specialist. “Before we adopt a tool like Hotjar, we need a lot of assurances that there are strict safety protocols in place.”

In 2016, Dave knew that TomTom needed deeper insights into user behavior, especially if they wanted to continue improving user experience with the end goal of driving more sales. He tells us that at that point, “all we had was a disjointed and not very good A/B testing tool. Figuring out what was going on with our users was like working in complete darkness.”

Having worked with Hotjar before, Dave knew that it would deliver game-changing insights. All he needed was proof that Hotjar would keep TomTom’s user data private and secure. Since Hotjar is built with privacy by design, all of TomTom’s concerns about privacy were addressed and sorted. 

A flood of new behavioral insights to act upon

With TomTom’s team satisfied that their end-users were protected, they implemented Hotjar—and they were immediately staggered by the flood of new behavioral insights they could act upon.

It wasn’t long before Dave and his team were making website improvements based on Hotjar’s behavioral insights, using Heatmaps and Session Recordings. Being able to see how landing pages render for users from different countries with different devices helped him find and fix mistakes before they impacted conversions.

One issue related to a certain page’s checkout process. “We couldn’t see the problem internally—as far as we knew, it didn’t exist. We only identified the issue with Hotjar.” Within half an hour the issue was identified and fixed. “You can’t put a price on what that’s worth—it’s invaluable.”

Qualitative feedback that drove massive increases in email CTR and conversion rates

Dave tells us that his favorite tool in Hotjar is Surveys, which allows him to ask satisfied customers why they made a purchase—information he can then turn into compelling copy for email campaigns and landing pages.

Now there’s no more guesswork for Dave and his team about whether changes they make to TomTom’s site will help user experience. Using Hotjar alongside other analytic tools, they get all the quantitative and qualitative data they need to make meaningful improvements to the customer journey.

According to Dave, Hotjar is the number one tool he uses on a day to day basis—and without it, TomTom wouldn’t have been able to get such impressive results.