What parts of your ecommerce product page are seen in the crucial first seconds of a visit?
What’s the worst and the best thing that could happen to your e-commerce site?
The answer is that a Conversion Scientist tried to buy something from you.
It’s good because, we are very likely to write about our experience. It’s bad because we are going to point out what you’re doing wrong.
We recently tried to buy some stand-up desks for some of the team here at Conversion Sciences. Like so many shoppers, we found ourselves paralyzed by choice.
In true Conversion Scientist form, we decided to collect some data to help us with our choice. We compared desks at National Business Furniture, Rakuten and World Market. However, our decision to buy was based on how their product pages performed, not on price and features.
We invented the game Product Page Roulette.
Find out which site won our dollars (and probably the dollars of many other visitors) in my Marketing Land column An Expensive E-commerce Game: Product Page Roulette.
48 Tweetable Stats To Make You An Online Marketing SmartyPants | Unbounce
@unbounce has provide a post with a double payoff. First, this is a great list of conversion-related stats and, second, a great example of how to design content to be sharable. The content is sharable for the following reasons:
The title contains the call to action “48 Tweetable Stats…”
There’s something here for everyone
The quotes are Twitter-sized for easy sharing in 140 character
Each quote has a call to action in the form of a “Tweet this” link. Every quote
So, if you’ve got something you really want people to share, follow this recipe. For article-style content, use pull quotes and put a “Tweet this” link with each.
These guys are real smarty-pants.
E-Commerce Customer Acquisition Snapshot | Custora Blog
The interesting graphic shown in this post by Custora shows how e-commerce businesses are gaining customers and how that has changed since 2009.
It is no surprise to see cost-per-click (CPC) search advertising growing over that time. However, it is gratifying to see that email has grown the fastest, far outstripping banner advertising, Facebook and Twitter.
In my book I say that email is the biggest social network on the planet. It appears to be so for e-commerce companies as well. Want to get Brian’s For Further Study posts delivered right to your inbox? Click HERE to sign up.
The picture below illustrates all too well the dangers of running a website without some kind of conversion optimization effort.
What you are seeing is the office where an un-optimized website was hosted. The site was designed by an agency that let the charismatic CEO influence the design. Unfortunately, little attention was paid to the shopping cart. It was assumed that visitors would just figure things out.
They were wrong.
The abandonment rate – a measure of the visitors that start the checkout process but don’t finish – rose to alarming levels very quickly.
The abandonment rate of a website housed in this building approached infinity causing a gravity well, or “black hole” to form.
As the abandonment rate approached infinity, a rare singularity was created that threatened the entire building. Left unchecked, the entire business could have been consumed by the black hole that developed from the singularity. The gravitational forces of this website black hole are so strong, not even money can escape.
This is a situation in which a poorly designed website not only loses money, but sucks away all future opportunity. There is nothing worse for a brand than a bad online experience.
By inserting a Conversion Catalyst into the site, the abandonment rate returned to safe levels, saving the business and several surrounding buildings.
A Conversion Scientist was able to avert catastrophe by inserting a Conversion Catalyst into the site and completing some targeted split tests. Problems were isolated and corrected. The abandonment rate returned to safe levels saving the business — and several surrounding buildings.
The moral of the story is that untested websites not only threaten current sales, but can create ripples across the time-space continuum that some businesses never recover from.
Is there a black hole in your website from which money is not escaping?
Ask us about a Conversion Catalyst for your website.
@neilpatel collects some of the most interesting eye-tracking images available and provides seven insights that can help you design your pages and choose images. We have done our own eye-tracking study of business video and you can get the full report now. The report offers similar conclusions for the use of video in a landing page. It includes over 30 minutes of embedded video that you can watch yourself.
Neil’s conclusions include:
Be careful you you use [images of] people
That people love media (especially on search results pages)
That men and women look at images differently
That simple images can be more effective
The power of the left side of the page
The power of faces
That people love hand-written notes (my favorite)
Enjoy the images he provides.
Shopping Cart Abandonment: Why It Happens & How To Recover Baskets Of Money
@peeplaja offers a great post on shopping cart abandonment
In my book I say that abandonment is like cholesterol: There is a good kind and a bad kind. For each there is a strategy for reducing the impact of abandonment on your business.
Good abandoners leave because they aren’t done with their shopping process. The challenge is to get them to come back and buy when they are done. There are several strategies here for retargeting the visitor who abandons using email and ads.
Bad abandoners leave because you surprised them or didn’t provide the information they were looking for. This kind of abandonment can be treated by improving the checkout process and by using pricing and shipping strategies.
Abandonment is the most heartbreaking of conversion killers. it is also a fertile place to increase the performance of your website.
How to Design Kickass Long Form Sales Pages-ConversionXL
@peeplaja “People have an infinite attention span if you are entertaining them.”
I get a lot of questions about sales letter styled landing pages. Do they work? Do I need to write that much?
My stock answer is that they do work, but that your copywriter needs to know what they are doing. These kind of landing pages typically work with visitors that already know and follow your business.
Peep says it best: “Buyers are readers.” There is more wisdom in this entertaining post.
Want to get Brian’s For Further Study posts delivered right to your inbox? Click HERE to sign up.
PayPal is a preferred method of payment for many of your visitors. Even if you’ve got a merchant account and gateway all setup, you should consider PayPal as an alternative source.
However, measuring transactions through PayPal is problematic. Or it was?
As you might expect, I work with a number of eCommerce sites. Companies that sell things online is a faaaaaast moving target, so I’m glad to have folks like Willo O’Brien to keep me up to date on best practices.
Warning: You’re being left behind by some very innovative companies.
Which companies? Check out my notes form her SXSW presentation Social Shopping: The Future of Selling Online.
Tom had two sites targeting the same audience, and getting about the same traffic. Both had analytics installed. This was a rare opportunity to see how two very different approaches to website design affected online sales conversion out in the real world.
Read this before changing your website.
It’s time-consuming to offer 45 minutes of my time to anyone who wants to improve their online sales conversion rates. I just can’t think of any better way to introduce businesses to conversion concepts.
And the people I meet on the phone are priceless.
One such person is Tom Jackson of Heliski.com. His is a rare and instructive look at the power of the written word and the ineffectiveness of standard design strategies when it comes to conversion.
Tom had two sites targeting the same audience, and getting about the same traffic. Both had analytics installed.
According to him, one was “dated, awkward, wordy, but it’s working.” The other, he said, was “newer, looks better, better organized but WAY underperforming in lead gen.”
Take a look at Tom’s two sites. Which would you pick as the hands-down winner? Which would you image would have cratered his income had he relied exclusively on it?
How analytics (and a session with the Conversion Scientist) saved one business’s online sales.
I did a complete evaluation of these two pages in my Search Engine Land column, and you might be surprised at my conclusions: strong copy beat slick new design.
Two very different sites: one “dated, awkward, wordy;” the other “newer, looks better, better organized.” So why was the “dated, awkward, wordy” winning the conversion game so handily?
From a distance the two home pages couldn’t look more different. HeliskiingReview.com uses non-standard layout. Text is knockout white on blue, usually considered more difficult to read than Heliski.com’s black on grey.
The newer site uses a more “image- or brand-oriented play, establishing its value proposition as “the ultimate heliskiing destination.” Unfortunately, you can’t heliski on the site, so this is an empty promise.
The body copy couldn’t be more different in approach. HeliskiingReview.com uses plain language with specific, value- and benefit-oriented points in easy-to-scan bulleted format. Specifics are almost always important for conversion.
A designer might say that the big star with “send me info” was “too TV.” However, it certainly does draw the eye to an important call to action.
and the conversion champ is…
HeliskiingReview.com had a conversion rate of 2.27% vs. Heliski.com at 1.99%. That’s 14% better. However, HeliskiingReview.com delivered much more qualified prospects. Tom was able to book trips for 15.29% of the HeliskiingReview.com leads. Heliski.com had a close ratio of only 1.33%.
That’s 1146% more bookings and tens of thousands of dollars in sales.
What we can Learn from Tom (or How Analytics Saved One Business’s Online Sales)
The moral of the tale is that Tom measured his sites’ performance. He had the analytics in place, and was smart enough not to make changes to his site without being able to measure their effect. By leaving both sites up, he was able to rollback the changes.
Do you know how changes to your site affect your business? You should.
I’m offering a two hour short course on June 11 in Austin entitled Web Analytics: Tools and Best Practices. This is an Austin Entrepreneur Network short course, which means that it’s only $25. We love our entrepreneurs.
Join me and find out how you can avoid huge mistakes – mistakes that rob you of leads and steal your sales. This is the second time I’ve done this presentation.
We also take a hard look at their Home page.
Flavia has one thing going for them: they have metrics installed. In fact, they are double covered with metrics from Omniture Site Catalyst and Google Analytics. This means they know if a change will make a difference in their sales.
When we’re looking at an eCommerce Web site pattern, we want to focus on the following key strategies:
Product Pages
Category Navigation
Transaction or Shopping Cart
For this ConversionCast, we don’t have the time to dive into the purchase process, so we’ve focused on the Home Page, Product Pages and Category Navigation.
Tell us what your eCommerce site offers in the comments below.
What parts of your ecommerce product page are seen in the crucial first seconds of a visit?
