Examples and tips to improve your conversion funnel for your persona?
Visualizing your conversion funnels, personalizing them for your buyer personas, optimizing their CTAs, landing pages, and other elements requires knowing things you may not know and testing new concepts.
Conversion funnels are the freeway systems of website infrastructure, with landing pages as on-ramps and exit pages as off-ramps; but also with a variety of bridges, underpasses, toll booths, and traffic cameras throughout.
MarketingSherpa shocks us with the statistic that only 68% of B2B marketers have identified their funnel. And, naturally, in order to optimize your funnel and explore the things that you do not yet know about funnels, you first need to define what your funnel is.
The Basics: What is your conversion funnel?
Theoretically, your funnel is the series of steps prospects take on their journey to becoming your customers. Graphically,…
What Makes Great Ecommerce Website Design? Part 3: The Product Page
The product page is one of the most important page templates for retail sites, if you look at the footfall across a site (for example, from the Content Drilldown in Google Analytics for well architected sites). So, Part 3 of my series of recommendations on ecommerce website design dedicated to best practice I look at product pages. Previously we looked at retail home page and category page best practices.
The product page is the page that most customers who are engaged in buying mode will spend some time on: reading descriptions, comparing specs and flicking through product images..
Although some websites feature a 'quick buy function' which may enable customers to 'skip' this page. However this behaviour depends on the stage in the buying cycle the customer is at (and whether or not in-depth information is required). For example those customers who already know exactly what product they…
Learning to avoid Dumb AB testing mistakes
Back in 2005, I started my first forays into split testing of emails, landing pages and funnels whilst working at LOVEFiLM. I'm nearly at my 10 year anniversary, and after seeing over 40 million visitors split tested with stuff, I've become rather battle hardened to all the curious, strange and just plain stupid ways I've managed to break my own experiments.
I'll be doing a talk this Wednesday at the Smart Insights Digital Marketing conference on how to improve structured testing to boost profits, so to introduce it, I wanted to write a little about one critical way we can all improve our AB and Multivariate testing. So, in this article, I'll be exploring device and browser compatibility or 'Getting with what your customers have at their fingertips'.
AB testing your developers instead of…
Recommendations and examples of using style guides to support a CRO programme
When we kick-off a Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) programme with a new client we always try and find out what existing guides or tools they have that we can use during our programme. These may be branding guidelines, style guidelines, UI Pattern libraries, etc.
For example, here is a really good description of how Envato, who run the Tuts+ sites, carry out Style guide Driven Development.
However, the responses we get from clients are wide-ranging. As Mark Boulton (@MarkBoulton) pointed out recently:
We're not going to dive into that debate around whether style guidelines are a help or hindrance here, instead I wanted to give recommendations from a CRO angle and investigate how we can…
What Makes Great Ecommerce Website Design? Part 2: The Category Page
In Part Two of my series of blog posts looking at the factors that help make different parts of an ecommerce websites more effective in experience, merchandising and SEO, I review examples of category pages. In Part 1 I looked at 5 Ecommerce home page best design practices.
You can think of Category pages serving as the 'Departments' within your website like they do in a department store - the ladieswear department, childrens wear department and so on.
These areas in a department store are typically demarcated by very visual merchandising, such as mannequins dressed in the types of clothes that you'd find in that department, visual posters/ signage showing branding or imagery depicting the section you are in - smiling children on posters indicating that you are in the childrens' section.
These subtle visual prompts are often un-noticed yet serve to ensure that…
Best practices from the 2014 Form Conversion Report
It all started with a common question from our customers. 'How do I increase my conversion rate?' Marketers know that increasing your conversion rate is one of the simplest ways to impact your bottom line. Conversion rates are a key indicator of how well your website is capturing leads and performing in your industry. Online forms, one of the biggest components of the conversion, are an often overlooked part of helping improve rates.
With help from our customers, Formstack noticed a gap of online information around form conversion rates. So, we decided to tap into our own data goldmine and put together a report of our findings. We’ve uncovered some tips that’ll help every industry with conversion rates and optimization practices.
Tips on optimizing your on-line forms
Conversion Rates by Industry
One of the first things we looked at in our data was the average conversion rate of each…
5 examples of retail home page good practice
Great ecommerce websites are likely to be based on personal preference. But many would agree there are common practices for persuasive design that should be tested, if you're not using them already.
In this post, I take a look at a range of less well-known small to medium business ecommerce websites where I have deconstructed the practices to suggest a shortlist of 'must have features' for the homepage. It's part one of a series of posts, next I'll be looking at category pages. Of course, in a blog article there is a limit on what can be sensibly covered. See the relevant Smart Insights guide for more details.
Recommended Guide: Ecommerce Design Patterns
Use our wireframes and examples to test and create more persuasive Ecommerce designs to boost retail sales.
Download our Ecommerce Design Bible.
Home page feature…
Ideas for the next generation of conversion optimisation
Conversion Optimisation has become a regular fixture in a marketers toolkit. The ability to gain efficiencies based on data driven facts is a great opportunity for many businesses. As testing becomes commonplace we are approaching the next innovation in testing which is rarely discussed. CRO Testing currents involves running variances against a base. You monitor performance on single or multiple KPIs and a winner is found. The winner then get the majority/all of the traffic and we move onto the next test. We look for statistically significant results in the data to show success in performance and live and die by the numbers.
What happens when a user prefers the version of the test that “fails”. If 90% of people preferred the new version - you still have 10 out of every 100 having a preference of your base. We talk about segmentation and targeting when setting…
How and when to use A/B or Multivariate Test Design
When running a testing programme you will have to decide for each test whether it should be run as an A/B test or a multivariate test. The decisions you make when designing your experiments will significantly impact important variables such as the depth of the insights, the speed of testing and delivering winning variations and therefore the impact of your testing efforts.
The 1,024 Variation Test
So when should we run that 1,024 variation multivariate test (Google actually did this) and when would an A/B test be more appropriate? First, let’s consider some of the important variables:
Time to test - The number of variations in your experiment will affect the length that your test needs to run.
Traffic required - Your traffic volumes will also determine how quickly you…
How to use personalised product recommendations to increase Ecommerce sales
The importance of effective product recommendations cannot be ignored. When done correctly they can heavily contribute to the success of a website, both by increasing the quantity and the size of orders being placed.
Studies of personalisation have revealed that, when recommendations are made intelligently, those products being recommended can enjoy conversion rates over 900% higher than sitewide averages. Amazon have famously leveraged this technique to attract a huge customer base and vast revenues - a look at their homepage will reveal a site committed to personalising its shopping experience around the needs of each and every individual customer.
Today, the importance of website personalisation as a method for boosting conversion rates is recognised by most digital professionals. An Econsultancy report recently named website personalisation as 2014's top digital priority by…
