How systematic A/B testing grew PostNL's B2B revenue by 27%
Responsibilities
UX Research & Testing
Test Roadmap & Prioritization
Metrics Definition
Cross-team Alignment
Timeline
Q1 2024 – Q1 2026
Client
PostNL
The redesigned onboarding flow delivered measurable business impact and strategic value:
Improved from 4.7% to 8.4%
Avg. from 3.25 days to 1 day
Projected revenue lift from increased conversions and customer retention
PostNL's B2B customer acquisition was stagnant. Three product teams ran isolated experiments with no shared roadmap, leading to:
Led experimentation strategy for PostNL's B2B acquisition team. Coordinated with engineering, marketing, and CRO to prioritize tests, analyze results, and scale wins across the funnel.
Built quarterly roadmap prioritizing experiments by business impact and dev risk. Coordinated bi-weekly planning to align stakeholders.
Trade-off: Delayed high-risk pricing tests to Q3. First proved low-risk UX wins (73% conversion lift) before asking for heavy dev investment.
Tested radio buttons instead of dropdown for package volume selection—hypothesis: more visible options = higher completion.
Result: No lift. Users already understood dropdown. Radio buttons added visual clutter without improving clarity. Reverted after 2-week test.
Learning: Not every UX pattern improvement translates to conversion gains. Test assumptions.
Designed 3 customer segments (high/mid/SMB). Testing showed mid-volume behaved like SMB.
Decision: Consolidated to 2 segments (>10k vs. <10k packages) for faster dev and clearer messaging. Option to split later if needed.
Tension: 60% ad traffic from mobile, but PostNL's tools were desktop-centric.
Decision: Risk analysis showed mobile drop-off cost €200K+ annually. Prioritized mobile while maintaining desktop parity.
Result: +89% mobile conversion, -2% desktop (acceptable trade-off).
The biggest single change in 2024: I redesigned account creation from 18 required steps to 9, keeping every essential verification and setup requirement. Related actions were grouped, with progressive disclosure, and redundant data entry was removed.
Result: it contributed to 94.5% activation (up from 77%) and 22.6% faster time-to-shipment.
Visited clients at work to watch real platform use. Found gaps between designed workflows and actual behaviour that desk research missed.
Tested layouts, copy and interaction patterns to validate decisions. Benchmarked DHL and DPD flows for ways to differentiate.
Tested interactive prototypes with target users every iteration, catching friction before development.
60% of traffic was mobile, but I optimised desktop first because stakeholders did. Leading with mobile data would have changed priorities and shipped faster.
Too many status meetings explaining the 'why'. One clear document would have freed 5+ hours a week.
We ran tests one after another. Running non-overlapping flows in parallel would have saved about 2 months.
