Looking to improve your site’s conversion? Many people focus a lot of effort and money on improving the design of their site but is that the only way of improving conversion? No, there are other approaches that you may not yet have considered. Whilst these are perhaps less obvious, in many cases using these could lead to considerable conversion improvement - often more significant than continuous improvement of a site’s design.
This post outlines 3 approaches to improving website conversion: 1. Improve site design (the usual focus of effort); 2. Improve site speed; 3. Demand / Supply match (for ecommerce sites this is often untapped and has much greater potential than 1. Future posts will investigate and elaborate each of these approaches.
1. Improve site design
This is the most obvious and most common approach to conversion improvement. I split site improvement into Aesthetic and Ergonomic improvements:
Aesthetic Improvements
Improving the visual attractiveness and appeal of the website in the hope that people will trust the ‘brand’ and aspire to own its products or use its services. Many many people focus the vast majority of their effort on aesthetics. Perhaps because often the people responsible for marketing have a background and experience in static print media, brochures, print adverts etc.
Ergonomic Improvements
Improving the usability of the site. Are the calls to action obvious, well labelled, placed in consistent and logical positions; does the site help try to prevent errors; is the flow between the various stages of a checkout process natural and logical, can the user undo previous actions and change previous personal information, quantities of product etc?
2. Improve site speed
A less obvious way to improve conversion is to improve the speed and responsiveness of your website. I say this is less obvious, perhaps it is obvious that faster is better but how many of us settle for a slightly sluggish site, where pages take 1 or 2 seconds to appear? What is less obvious, is that loading pages faster (certainly faster than 1s) can make a significant difference to conversion. Why?! Fast sites encourage learning by investigation. There is no wait “penalty” for clicking on links/buttons. The browsers’ Back button gives a quick ‘undo’ feature.
Not convinced!? Take a look at the effort Google are going to to speed up the web with Chrome, Speedy, Google DNS etc. Google even have a website dedicated to it, Lets Make the Web Faster. As Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer says, “Users really respond to speed.”. Various studies and experiments by Amazon and Google show significant improvements in usage and conversion with speed.
Personally, the biggest step change in conversion I’ve ever seen occurred when we improved the page response time on a site by a factor of 4, taking pages from a slow typical response time of around 2s to just 0.5s. In that case it was pretty obvious we needed to do something about speed but the magnitude of the improvement in conversion was quite surprising – and very welcome!
3. Sell what your users are looking for
“Sell what your users are looking for” and its corollary, “Acquire users that are looking for what you sell”.
Sounds simple and obvious doesn’t it! But is it? What are your users looking for? I don’t mean what do you think they are looking for but what those actual users are actually looking for on your site. Do you know? Do you know what they’re looking for this month? Next month will you know what they are looking for?
I’ve seen this point arrogantly and confidently dismissed by some very experienced people with many years experience in busines but not online business. Why did they dismiss it? Well their years of experience in their industry sector and their sales figures showed that most customers wanted product X. They weren’t wrong about average trends across this industry sector but what they hadn’t considered is what the customers that their marketing was driving to the site where looking for might not match the industry averages. The mismatch between the demand their marketing created and the products they sold meant they had low conversion and hence poor return on their marketing spend at all but the lowest levels of spend. Their marketing was a very weak lever and as such it was hard to compete and hard to scale the business. Their best selling product was product X but if you stock product X rather than products Y and Z, that’s not surprising is it. As it happened about 35% of visitors where looking for product X but the other 65% where looking for products W, Y, A, B and Z which they didn’t offer. 65% of their visitors just were never going to convert into customers because they didn’t sell what these people were looking for.
Online business is not different to Offline business in some mysterious nefarious way, but with online you can relatively easily measure customer intent and desire and perhaps quickly respond to it. Business is competitive, if you don’t respond, sooner or later someone else will and they’ll beat you.
There are two approaches to solving this demand/supply mismatch: 1) change your marketing to attract more targeted traffic to your website, traffic that wants to buy product X; or 2) start selling the products your users are looking for, products W and Z as well as X. Before you can do either of these though, you need to know what user are after.
How do you know what your website’ users want? Look for onsite signals. Can you redesign your site so that users self-segment? Perhaps you can add filters or look at what people are searching for. Do you have this data? Have you ever analyzed it? Given this data, is your marketing spend proportioned to match?
For example, say your site sells televisions, what size televisions are they looking for? What % of users click on the “40 inch” filter? How does this compare to the products you offer? What if 35% of your users are looking for 40 inch televisions but only 1 of the 20 models you stock are 40 inch, 35% of your demand is for 40 inch televisions whilst just 5% of the range you offer matches. Even worse, what if you spend 40% of your money on adwords adverts for terms like, “40 inch lcd” or perhaps you have a banner advert on a home cinema lovers community site which mostly attracts the people looking for relatively large televisions.
Few businesses realise and make profitable use of such data, yet it is potentially available on many many websites, certainly all ecommerce sites.
I’ll follow up on each of these areas with future posts and update this post with links to the follow up posts. In the mean time, I hope you’ve found this both useful and thought provoking.
