5 real-world examples showing the value of rich media in Ecommerce
Ecommerce professionals and conversion rate experts have been lauding the benefits of rich media like video and 360 degree views for retailers more and more over the last couple of years. Yet a huge range of high profile ecommerce businesses are still yet to adopt product video, high resolution imagery or 360’s.
A number of the clients I work with have benefitted a lot from adopting rich media and have seen big increases in engagement and conversion. I’ve been talking about how rich media can add value to your proposition and general user experience for ages (such as here on SEJ and here on my personal blog) but I thought it would be useful to feature some quotes from expert retailers who have reaped the benefits. Thanks to…
Two webcasts on increasing conversion rates from the Smart Insights Digital Marketing Priorities 2013 summit
At our recent free summit many viewers asked to share the slide and recordings, so to collect them together we have a short series of posts to point you in the right direction. If you take a look at the end of this post you will see there is one for each topics covering each of the processes of Reach, Act and Convert and Engage in the Smart Insights PRACE digital strategy framework.
The two webcasts focusing on converting site visitors were:
1. Persuasive design priorities for 2013 with Paul Rouke of PRWD
This webcast was presented by user experience consultant Paul Rouke who reviewied of major and subtle persuasion tips & techniques which positively affect user behaviour. It also included live examples of where brands are combining different techniques to enhance the influence on user behaviour.
Related…
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January 4, 2013
Improving your testing workflow to get bigger, quicker wins
Should you test one thing at a time or many at once? A poor experimental workflow can waste loads of your time! Here’s an extreme example: We’ve seen a company take six months to do something that took another company thirty minutes. That’s 8,760 times slower.
To grow quickly, you need to implement quickly, so our work with clients goes beyond suggesting what they should test; we build their in-house capability to “get stuff done.” This article describes a framework for speeding up your testing—so you can grow your profits quicker.
Many small changes or one big one?
If you’ve read the case study of our work with Crazy Egg on optimisation, you may recall that the winning challenger homepage was much longer and much more effective than the control:
Our winning challenger was much longer than…
Checkout abandonment statistics show where you should focus your site improvements
I'm often asked about average ecommerce rates by site owners looking to boost their sales. It's a year-round concern with this compilation showing that even for established brands during sale periods, the average add to basket conversion rate is around 12% during a visit with convert to order around half that at 5.6%.
If this sounds poor compared to the conversion rate a physical retail outlet would achieve, that's a fair improvement on ten years ago when we used to speak of a "rule-of-thumb" for average Ecommerce conversion rates of around 2%. The improvement in averages since then suggests the value in conversion rate optimisation. That said, it's inevitable that online conversion rates will be lower than offline with price transparency available through comparison sites and many still researching online and purchasing offline (the ROPO effect).
Reasons for shopping cart abandonment?
To encourage…
How run-of-site template design features can make a large impact
Is this a question often asked by online marketers? When it comes to website optimisation is the footer something you usually consider? Well if it’s not, it probably should be; because how you use your website footer can have a major impact on conversion rates.
As part of a full conversion rate optimisation and UX-Driven MVT strategy, we conducted an A/B test for one of our clients, Radley+Co (the luxury hand bag people). It was a simple test, measuring how conversion and revenue would be affected by introducing a mega-footer containing the product list broken down into categories. Once our UX Designers had created the new version we used the Optimizely testing tool to implement this A/B test across every page of the website. We tested a smaller footer only featuring a simple one line navigation menu against a larger mega-footer. Both…
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November 20, 2012
Two winning tests for a multilingual Ecommerce site
In this case study, we’ll show you how to increase your win rate by doing some diligent research. Plus, we’ll show you the results of two interesting tests.
E-commerce sites have a particular challenge when it comes to conversion rate optimisation compared to landing page optimisation for example. Implementation can require significant technical resources.
Because of this, it’s important that e-commerce marketers change only things that are likely to work. They don’t have the luxury of being able to “throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks.”No one can win every test, of course, but you can increase your win rate.
At Conversion Rate Experts, we have the advantage of having worked on many e-commerce stores, but even if you don’t have the benefit of experience, there are simple things you can do to radically improve…
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October 30, 2012
Does optimization ever end? How we grew Crazy Egg’s revenue by 510%
Do you suspect that your conversion rate couldn’t be improved upon? In this case study, you’ll see specific methods for getting win after win from a site that already is an extremely strong performer. The example focuses on a home page, but the principles can be applied to landing pages also and supporting pages were included here.
Plus, we’ll tell you how to get a free, annotated PDF of all the persuasion techniques we used to create wins—so you can apply them to your own site.
Overview of conversion rate optimization
Many people ask us if there’s a point at which conversion rate optimization gives diminishing returns. If that point does exist, Facebook, Amazon and Google don’t appear to have hit it yet. It’s astonishing what you…
How to increase sales by improving your product pages?
If you review the analytics for an ecommerce site using the content drill down in Google Analytics you will often see that product pages have the greatest "footfall" measured by total number of pages viewed by page type. This shows the importance of making the design, copy and calls-to-action on product pages as good as you possibly can. You can really reap the rewards of small changes across page templates for all product pages.
To give you ideas of what you can test and improve, here are my 6 recommendations on how you can improve sales by improving your product pages.
1. Split testing
Split testing, for me is a fundamental element of ecommerce, as it allows you to accurately reflect on multiple pieces of content or designs. Also, given the simplicity of some of the A/B testing tools available (especially…
Creating website conversion strategies to improve ROI
Over the last four years we have completed research with thousands of digital marketers in collaboration with Econsultancy reviewing what they are doing to improve their website conversion. There are literally hundreds of different ways to improve conversion and we know digital marketers battle to know where to start. However, based on this year’s in-depth analysis, we believe we have now managed to break a very complex issue down to the five most important ways to improve website conversion. These are:
Responsibility: Make one person responsible for website conversion, give them authority and accountability, plus ideally a financial incentive.
Structure: Implement a structured approach. Conversion rate optimization needs to be a systematic process, not a one off project.
Testing: A/B or MVT is the best way to keep improving your website performance.
Usability Testing: The best way to understand why your customers are doing the things they are…
Best practices in carousel design for effective web marketing
Carousels are an extremely popular element on home pages, intended to display a variety of content in an aesthetically pleasing way. Since I’m based in Australia, they’re more often called “Sliders”, others call them “rotating banners”. The inclusion of a carousel is probably one of the most common requests I get from clients during design revisions:
“Can we put a carousel there?”
Sure, why not you may say, they look great right? With the gentle animations and dreamy transitions, who wouldn’t want to sit there and admire it. But more often than not I think that carousels are wasted real estate, done poorly, and highly unusable.
While carousels are still a very popular tool, I’m actually noticing a decline in their use on larger sites who are often leaders in modern design/layout techniques. Still, the trend decline will take a while to hit the majority…
