Litmus, Liveclicker and Unbounce speak on conversion optimisation for ecommerce
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) can be a very complex creature – particularly when it comes to optimising ecommerce sites and campaigns using Email marketing to engage our audience. The opinions in this article focus on email marketing. A common theme is that during the process of optimisation we need to put our subjective opinions aside, create some robust hypothesis-based upon data and insights and try to start optimising for the biggest wins first – not always an easy task.
So we asked three of our expert speakers from our email marketing summit the following question:
“So many channels, so many aspects of a campaign to test. What’s your key piece of advice that you would provide to increase conversions for an ecommerce site?”
Dave Holland, European Regional Director of Liveclicker and expert presenter, gives us his…
10 tips to create an effective Cart Recovery Programme
According to research recently released by Britain’s Retail E-mpire, the UK will become the world’s leading ecommerce exporter, with online sales generated by UK retailers from international markets expected to soar sevenfold to £28bn by 2020. However, according to our latest research, on average 84% of people who visit a site abandon their purchase before checkout, costing retailers billions in lost sales.
So what can we do about this problem? Well first of all – let’s switch it around and look at it as a fantastic opportunity rather than a problem. Opportunities are always easier to action than problems – right?
The Opportunity for retailers
So we now have a lot of potential buyers who in many case simply need a small nudge in order to complete the purchase and the good news is, that these abandoned sales are 10 times more likely to convert…
How to utilise continuous improvements and ‘big bets’ to achieve operational and strategic excellence
As part of any digital transformation agenda, the ability the test and learn gives businesses the opportunity to experiment, iterate and grow skills and competences throughout the organisation. For digital marketers, this opportunity is becoming increasingly important as technology continues to advance and larger companies face new and emerging threats from more nimble, innovative competitors.
To drive meaningful digital transformation at scale, businesses must therefore be open to the adoption of a test and learn culture, which will enable marketers to optimise digital media activation, create first-class digital experiences and develop learning across the organisation. Much of this will be dependent on each organisation’s stage in the digital transformation journey:
Three big digital trends
The importance of developing a test and learn culture is reflected in the numerous …
Get the right strategy in place before you start testing
Starting and running a conversion programme is all about asking the right questions. The questions you want to ask of the tests themselves, but also the questions you need to ask yourself and your team to get the most out of the programme.
Here are our 18 chronological questions to ask yourself and your team if you have recently started a conversion optimisation programme.
Before you test
1. Are a broad range of specialisms feeding into the optimisation programme?
The most effective optimisation programmes need input from strategists, user-centred designers, front end developers, copywriters and analysts.
2. What sources are you using to feed into the ideation process?
Typically the highest quality tests (i.e. the ones that will deliver the biggest uplifts and/or provide the greatest insight into the business) make use of a number of the following techniques/sources: persuasion/emotion/trust (PET), heuristics, user research (remote or moderated)…
A review of the popularity and effectiveness of different CRO approaches
Segmentation and targeting are so important to delivering relevant marketing messages which boost conversion, yet the research suggests that many digital marketers are leaving money on the table because they are not serious enough about segmentation and targeting. In this article, I'll describe research we commissioned to understand the effectiveness of different approaches for segmentation and targeting as part of CRO. I noticed that another recent study has shown a similar situation in the US where 76% of marketing execs say they don't target with Behavioural targeting data according to a Razorfish study.
After 25 years in data-driven marketing, I’m biased, but the facts speak for themselves. The graph below is from the RedEye Whitepaper 'The 7 best ways to improve website conversion and sales for larger e-commerce businesses'.
It shows that for website conversion segmentation is more highly rated compared with,…
A review of the costs and benefits of more investment in CRO / analytics
According to the Customer Journeys research we conducted with the eCommerceExpo conference, surprisingly few business are actively involved in CRO - 33% of companies have limited or zero conversion rate optimisation (CRO) activity. Instead, it seems that many people / business are opting for reinvention every few years and focussing on other marketing activities.
It prompts the question of why conversion rate optimisation is under-rated by so many businesses. However, it's good to see that many business are investing in Conversion rate optimisation since its complex, exciting, far reaching, multi-skilled and most importantly a results driver.
If your business is not yet utilising CRO principles then you should certainly start to consider how you can help your team and business by building the business case for it. It will require some work…
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August 1, 2016
A structured guide to improving leads and sales from your website
You'd think Conversion Rate Optimisation would a “no-brainer”. You can get more leads/sales from your website without spending extra money on marketing for new visitors. Sold. But it seems as if the jargon and complexities of analytics can get in the way of understanding approaches how to improve conversion rates.
To help demystify what’s involved with a structured approach to improving conversion, we’ve created a 6-step process, which is the foundation of all our client projects, dubbed Conversion Architecture. To help explain to non-specialists what’s involved in a typical conversion project, I’ll be sharing how we approach each step in a series of articles on Smart Insights.
In the first in this series, we'll cover Step 1 - Analyse
Step 1 Analyse
This is probably where most people start to get a glazed look…
Recommended design patterns and best practices for retail Search Results Page
This is the 5th in the series looking at key Ecommerce pages, we hope it gives you some ideas for testing and improving your on-site search page. It's a key page on retail sites, since a high proportion of sessions can involve a search and typically average order is higher when a search takes place.
In the context of different types of user journeys, this page can sit in different places in the conversion path. It may support early stage research to help visitors learn more about your different product categories or services or it can be an end-stage conversion driver to match people to specific products as they search for specific product names, types and product labels/SKUs.
Key Ecommerce Search Results Page Wireframe requirements
This template provides an outline of the core elements, with colour coding definitions referenced in the Guide. UX and UI designs can vary across…
Are you really getting the most value from your landing page?
While businesses often focus on getting the word out to consumers, they often fail to give the same attention to setting up the best trail of breadcrumbs. Landing pages are key to conversion, and if your snappy email sends people to a confusing or bland landing page, good luck getting anyone to answer your call to action.
To create a better landing page and improve your conversion rates, you must understand the challenges in front of you, recognize your areas of weakness, and implement a data-based strategy to overcome your flaws.
Common Landing Page Mistakes
The modern Internet user has an attention span of about eight seconds. If your page requires too much focus from your site’s visitors, you’ll struggle to convince them to do anything but close the page and go elsewhere. For every second your page takes to load, say goodbye…
How to nudge your customers towards conversion
Take it as an established truth: your customers are lazy. They want you to come to them, offer your product and ask minimum effort in return. They will pay you more if you allow them to be lazy.
This means your first concern is to check whether your website will be admired by anyone except you. Ask your friend to “buy” something there. Did they manage it in 4-5 clicks? Have you made your registration form too complicated? Are delivery prices and conditions clear? To scale this to a more, I recommend you run a series of user tests with services like User Testing or What Users do in this Smart Insights list of online customer research tools. You can also review this checklist for eCommerce beginners with which you can verify your online store. For those who want to get a…
