MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

This weekend I was paying for the 10 gallons I had just put into my old 1997 Honda Civic, when I decided that I’d purchase a nice cold soda for the road. I pointed out the pump where my fueled-up car was located and then slid the cold beverage to the convenience store clerk. He informed me that my total came to $25.89 and then he stopped.

Looking me dead in the eyes, he asked me what my name was. “Austin,” I replied a little hesitantly. “Austin, are you sure you want to spend $25.89 for 10 gallons of gas and a cold soda?” he asked. I nodded and attempted to hand him my Visa credit card.

He denied my overture and informed me that he could only help me if I were a member of his store. So not wanting to cause a scene with the five people who were now behind me, I conceded.

Can I just buy a soda?

He asked for my name again, and then moved on to more personal information. He informed me that my phone number, home address, and email address were all required for membership, but then gave me the option of telling him my age, date of birth, marital status, and household income level.

I, of course, declined. After all the information had been gathered, the clerk then passed me about 60 pages of the legal terms which I needed to sign to become a member.

Finally he took my card. However, in the middle of processing it, another clerk approached me saying that he noticed I was purchasing a can of soda. The coworker then made some suggestions concerning what I might like to buy along with my soda based upon previous customer patterns.

Once I had assured his coworker that I just wanted a soda, the clerk then again reminded me that my total came to $25.89 and again stopped, looked me dead in the eyes and asked, “Austin, are you sure you want to spend $25.89 for 10 gallons of gas and a cold soda?”

This might be how customers see our shopping carts

Ok, so this story is a bit of a stretch for a convenience store, but is an accurate reenactment of the experience at many ecommerce sites. This is exactly what we see across the Web with shopping cart experiences everywhere. In fact, we recently ran a test with one of our Research Partners and here is what the original checkout process looked like:

1)     Product page (click to purchase)

2)     Cart page (confirm you are ready to order)

3)     User account page (if you are new you must choose to create a new account)

4)     Create a user account page #1 (enter name, email and account password)

5)     Create a user account page #2 (enter shipping information)

6)     Create a user account page #3 (enter payment information)

7)     Order confirmation page (confirm order and account information again)

8)     Receipt page

To go from the product page to the receipt page took eight different steps. A customer has to register before being able to place the order, as well as confirm that order twice. After reorganizing and removing unnecessary steps, we were able to optimize this process to a single basic step. The increase in order completions was over 68%.

Is your shopping cart trying to do too much?

What this experiment illustrates is something we see over and over in the shopping cart process. Most shopping carts that companies use are bulky and have more features than needed (i.e. cart registration, order confirmations, cross-promotional offerings, etc.). Sometimes this means a shopping cart looks less like a basic transaction facilitator, and more like a boot camp obstacle training course with high walls and flaming hoops.

For instance, how many times have you had to join a web site before actually buying a product? How many “if you like this product, you might like this product” offers have you endured while checking out? Have you ever counted how many times you actually have to confirm your order before it goes through?

None of these features are bad per se, and some might even be helpful in the overall customer-client relationship. The only problem is when they get in the way of the natural thought sequence of a customer looking to purchase something at a specific moment in time.

Please, just let me out of here!

If I come to a web site, place an order in my cart, and hit “check out,” then please just let me check out. We must make sure our cart processes is sticking to the main objective – namely, closing the sale.

All these customer retention features and cross-promotional options can be strategically accomplished after the initial sale has already been completed. For instance, you can ask for the customer to create an account for future purchases or send them to a thank-you page that has cross-promotional offers.

Overall, this experiment leaves us with one key question: How many people might we be losing in the process by interrupting their order process? For this company, simplifying the checkout process meant 68% more orders. What is your potential?

Want to learn more?

For more information on how to optimize your shopping cart process, listen to our good friend Joel Book, the Director of eMarketing Education at ExactTarget and Charles Nicholls, the Founder of SeeWhy, in the free webinar entitled The 7 Secrets To Recovering Abandoned Shopping Carts.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickharris/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Ecommerce, Order Process, Research Topics eccomerce, Ecommerce, marketing, shopping cart abandonment, shopping carts, webinar

You get home from a long day in your marketing department or agency. Whip up a quick dinner. And just when you’re about to bite into your arroz con pollo, you hear that dreaded ring.

I call this situation Dan’s Lament. Our associate editor, Daniel Burstein, was sounding off to me about this situation earlier today. For some reason, at least in his household, they only get one type of phone call around 7pm and that, of course, is the dreaded telemarketer.

Now telemarketing is illegal at some level in the United States, as it is in many other countries, and Dan is on the National Do Not Call Registry. Yet there are those loopholes that ensure his phone still rings at dinnertime. In the latest case, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wanted to discuss his fishing habits.

Surveys. Non-profits. Or my personal favorite…political push polls. They all have found a loophole.

The more you segment, the less you blindly dial for dollars

I’ve really grown to hate telemarketers. Not so much because they prevent foodie friends of mine like Dan from enjoying a good winter vegetable salad with fresh, in-season kale, but rather as a professional marketer.

The technology and science behind segmentation have helped marketers target their message so much better than before, so I feel professionally insulted that someone would think they can, precisely at the dreaded 7pm, offer sandwich-toting Dan something he didn’t already think about buying in a store or online.

So I am a fan of do-not-call registries…even if they are only marginally effective.

Now I know what many of you may be thinking. “Wait a minute, Boris, I don’t mean to interrupt Dan’s enjoyment of a hearty winter vegetable salad or pastrami on rye, but these lists are a major challenge for me…I need to leverage the human touch for an upsell or to nurture a complex sale.”

The reality is that cultural and corresponding regulatory changes have led to a certain shift in the utilization of call centers, from making to taking calls. It’s not bad news. It’s great news for you savvy marketers that have the resources to leverage a call center, if you know how to do it profitably.

Is automation right for you?

If you are a Web marketer reading this, you might be asking yourself “what does this have to do with me?” However, looking at marketing holistically may be precisely where you can maximize return on your marketing dollars, as the automation afforded by the digital medium is not a one-size-fits-all solution to all sales processes.

Yes, it’s cheaper to sell online. Yet you may be doing a better job of selling and cross-selling over the phone, even though it costs you more. The question is where the higher net profit lies.

As the resident KPI (that’s key performance indicator) Guy at MarketingExperiments, among other things, I want to reintroduce you to a KPI that is critical to inbound marketing. It is the same KPI what would have been applied to a telemarketing campaign just a few short years ago: cost per acquisition (CPA).

The obvious use of this metric is to understand how much you can afford to spend on a media buy. You may be more familiar with this metric in the demand generation realms (paid search, affiliate marketing, lead gen, etc.). However, in conjunction with a bottom-line metric, such as revenue (preferably, lifetime) per visitor (RPV), it can also provide you with critical insights for directing your marketing efforts and formulating your messaging.

Even though your site can now do many things that have replaced telemarketing – from further qualifying a lead to completing an order to even getting that upsell – don’t let technology guide your decisions. Depending on the nature of your product, the human touch can be so much more effective for any or all of these steps.

So the best thing to do is… wait for it… test!

By varying the emphasis you place on calls to action that lead to a human interaction (phone number, live chat, call-me form), both in the layout of your pages (location, graphical weighting) and their prominence in the order process (from focusing the option as the primary action to not even mentioning it).

Experimenting with live chat is its own subject, as you can test how quickly (if at all) you want to turn the online chat into a phone conversation. You might even test a click-to-call button, although be wary of spam (and if you market in India, strict regulations).

What you’re trying to discover is whether the increased cost of acquiring a customer is offset or surpassed by an increase in closed orders, upsells, or higher-quality leads (e.g., for a complex sale, how does the increase in calls help your lead management efforts).

In other words, you will need to compare the change in CPA to the change in RPV (and depending on the nature of your business, both may need to be adjusted for the customer’s projected lifetime cost and value).

You have to be careful with how you juggle the numbers, as there are many potential pitfalls. Remember that your ultimate goal is increased profits. Depending on your business plan, your primary or close secondary goal is likely increased profits in the foreseeable future or over the customer’s lifetime. If adding human interaction results in sufficiently higher revenue per website visitor, it may be worth the extra cost.

But you’ll only know if you test. And use the right KPI.

How do you use inbound marketing, telesales, and customer service? What KPIs do you use to measure your success? Share your triumphs and ideas in the comments section of this post or start a conversation with your peers in the MarketingExperiments Optimization group.

Ecommerce, Lead Generation, Marketing Insights, Research Topics advanced track, Ecommerce, inbound marketing, Lead Generation, marketing, metrics

Why is the holiday shopping season so great? Your customer has an immutable purchasing deadline. Her fifth-grade, Wii-craving son won’t let her forget it, and neither should you. But as…tick, tick, tick…precious time passes in the make-or-break shopping season, are you flexible enough to take advantage of this natural urgency factor to get the greatest ROI out of your traffic?

In the September 22 Web clinic, our special guest Linda Bustos mentioned the idea of how online retailers may want to shift their focus from regular shipping of physical products to more holiday-conscious messaging, eventually moving toward downloadable products when the time runs short. I thought that this point deserved a deeper look.

Natural Urgency: An Opportunity for Increased Relevance
The holidays are a goldmine because you have extra insight into what your customers want, and when they want it. I will use the example of Christmas in the rest of this post (because it’s the single most commercially impactful holiday in the world), but the same principles apply to other holidays or even to specialty products and services that exist in relation to a specific “deadline” that the customer has to meet, like a wedding, a housewarming party, or one of your aunt’s cats’ birthday. When you know that urgency is a factor in your customer’s decision whether to buy from you, it is critical that you help this customer not only understand why your offer is the best choice, but also how you can deliver it on time. Providing this helpful information will help your customer buy from you.

The underlying principle here is that you must use everything you know about your customers (and every interaction they have with your site tells you something) to present your offer in the most meaningful, relevant way. For example, knowing what holidays are coming up within the next few weeks, you may want to test links to “Christmas gift shopping” on your site. While your catalog of products will not change, you know that anyone that clicked on that link is looking for a Christmas gift, and now you have a date to work with. You can test letting your visitor choose the target holiday, or if you have the data to assume that your customers are predominantly Christmas gift shoppers, your site by default can address that particular holiday.

December 1: Make your site holiday conscious
Just twenty-five shopping days until Christmas. If you’re in B2C ecommerce, you probably know this number by heart. Share this sense of urgency with your customers, remind them about the last time they had to do last-minute shopping, and communicate the sense of content that results from knowing that you don’t have to worry about making it to the store after work when the gifts are being safely shipped and delivered.

Of course, the critical number that matters online during holidays has to do not with shopping… but with shipping. Make sure your shipping cutoffs are crystal clear on your site. “For guaranteed delivery by Christmas, you must purchase by…” If you fail to communicate this information, your customer will look for someone that does. Don’t expect your customers to dig through your “Terms” pages to figure this out. “Unsupervised thinking” on your pages is especially lethal and especially inexcusable when you know that there is specific information that your customer needs to make a purchasing decision.

December 15: Reflect urgency using clear delivery options
As you get closer to shipping deadlines, you may want to amplify the message that shipping costs will soon increase, and that the customer will save money by purchasing today. Not only does this help create a reasonable sense of urgency for your customers, perhaps it will also remind you to figure out what a Bakugan is before you end up arm wrestling another guy wearing a “World’s Greatest Uncle” t-shirt for one at the toy store on Christmas Eve.

December 19: Increase emphasis on alternative shopping options
You will reach a point where guaranteed delivery by Christmas is still possible, yet increasingly or even prohibitively expensive. If you have a brick-and-mortar companion store, now is the time to use that to your advantage. You can emphasize how customers can save money on shipping by ordering online and simply picking up at the store. Make sure you communicate how easy the pickup process is and the advantage of not having to fight through the maddening crowd of shoppers. You may consider an express pick-up line at the store, and if you have one, emphasize its additional convenience on your site. You can also offer a better price or holiday-specific bonus item for buying online (which would allow you to collect payment immediately) instead of at the store.

If you don’t have physical locations, proceed directly to the next recommendation…

December 24: Prominently feature electronic-delivery items
By now, the children are all nestled snug in their beds, and all the gifts are tucked under the tree… Or are they? Your target customer just might be pulling his hair out, trying to figure out a last-minute gift. Here is where an ecommerce site can be a huge advantage by creating a digital offering that last-minute customers can buy… even as the clock approaches midnight.

These could be either all-digital products, like streaming or downloadable audio, an online brokerage account, or a gift card, or you may have to get creative and craft an offer that combines digital and physical components, such as an instantly downloadable cookbook that goes with cookware that will be delivered after the holidays.

An important aspect of digital products is presentation. Especially in the case of gift cards (even the physical version isn’t much to look at), you need to help your customer create a sense of giving a “real” gift. That is, help your customer out and don’t make it look like he has forgotten to buy a gift for his mother-in-law for the third year in a row.

Perhaps you can make an attractive, customizable PDF that the customer can print out to give the digital gift a physical nature. Communicating the benefit of giving (remember, your value proposition here is in part what the giver will feel) such a digital gift may take some education as well. Again, do not rely on unsupervised thinking. Don’t expect that it’s obvious to your customer that printing out a gift card document (really, its only function is to have a record of a coupon code) and putting it into an envelope will put them right back on the “favorite nephew” list. You could test communicating this by showing an image of someone giving this virtual gift to a delighted recipient.

The bottom-line is – it must seem substantial enough that the customer doesn’t feel self-conscious about giving it in person. If the gift is for a long-distance recipient, perhaps you could use video or Flash to make a customizable, attractive gift.

This is a great opportunity for nonprofits and charities as well. Consider buying paid search ads with keywords such as “last-minute gifts” on the 24th and 25th. Create a virtual gift that embodies the power of your charitable mission – perhaps an ebook of stories from people that have been helped or a virtual gift card so the recipient can choose where the donation is spent.

Above all, make it seem like a real, worthwhile gift that anyone would be happy to receive. Even with all-digital gifts, you can give your customer the option (perhaps for a small additional fee) to have a physical document mailed to them later, so that the digital gift will feel a little less digital (and, again, clearly state that “you will be receiving an official copy of your donation certificate…”).

Beyond December 25
Obviously, the above recommendations are ideas on how you can make best use of timing to play up a sense of urgency for a universal deadline. Except, it’s not universal. There are many other dates to keep track of this time of year. Hanukkah begins at sundown, Friday, December 11th. Military families often face much earlier shipping deadlines for guaranteed Christmas delivery to deployed family members. As do those shipping internationally in general.
Use the power of Internet marketing to serve these segments as well. Buy paid search ads with keywords relevant to these customers, and make sure you link those ads to relevant pages that focus on the dates important to them (don’t display your countdown to Christmas for customers that searched for “Hanukkah gift ideas”).

Sometime in January
Now that you’ve had time to recover and learned what a Bakugan is, take a look at your metrics. How much did the metamorphosis of your offer from regular shipped products to driving customers to a physical location to selling an all-digital gift improve your ROI? Whether it was a banner season or a disappointing season, make sure you learn what works best for your site and use that information next year.

As always, the ideas above are meant to be tested, and we hope that you will share some of your interesting test results with us.

Daniel Burstein contributed to this blog post…and hopes Boris goes wassailing around the office with his guitar for the holidays.

To listen to Boris Grinkot’s last-minute holiday tactics to increase revenue from your house email list, join us this Wednesday for our next free web clinic – Optimize your Email in Three Steps: How one marketer tripled revenue from their house list.

Ecommerce, Practical Application, Research Topics B2C, clinic, Ecommerce, email optimization, holiday, landing page optimization, marketing, optimization, pay-per-click, PPC, retail, shopping

Editor’s note: Anyone involved in eretailing should know ecommerce analyst Linda Bustos. The driving force behind the award-winning GetElastic blog, Linda is also a MarketingExperiments certified optimization professional and knows our methodology inside-out. So we were delighted to have Linda as a featured guest on our ecommerce clinic and now on our blog, with her wrap-up and takeaway tactics from the session.

Just as shoppers often wait until the last minute to finish their holiday shopping, often online retailers find themselves behind on their holiday optimization.

Procrastinators need to implement ideas that don’t involve long lead times for design, development or approvals. In the Ecommerce Holiday Playbook for Procrastinators web clinic, we shared tips and tactics that online retailers can implement in as little as five minutes to make the most out of the “most wonderful (selling) time of the year.”

The 5 areas covered were:

• SEM (Search engine optimization and paid search)
• Shopping engines
• Email
• Landing pages
• Post-holiday (ring in the New Year!)

1. Search Engine Marketing

• SEO: Add value propositions in meta descriptions and page title tags to increase clickthroughs

If you’re familiar with the MarketingExperiments Conversion Sequence, you’re well versed in the importance of value propositions. They are the key to success in any optimization effort. Are you leveraging your value propositions at every marketing touch point?

If it’s true that 80% of web sales begin with a search engine query, it’s important that you sell yourself in your search listings, whether they be organic results or pay per click. Are you communicating why someone should click on your link, instead of anyone else’s? What is it about your store that is unique?

Make sure searchers can see in your title tags and your meta descriptions what it is that makes shopping with you the best choice.

• PPC: Bid on relevant holiday keywords, such as …

People are not just searching for products, they are searching for ideas. It’s quick and easy to set up a holiday Ad Group or groups targeted to gifts and gift ideas for different holidays and recipients. Then flip the switch December 26th for after-Christmas sales. Last year Google Trends, which tracks the most popular searches of the day, exploded with searches for after Christmas sales.

2. Shopping Engines

• Add free shipping, value proposition
• Plan for increased bids during holiday period
• Know when to turn down your bids (after shipping cutoff)
• Sanity check data-feed accuracy
• Pull non-holiday categories if budget is a concern

We know that shoppers use search engines to hunt for gifts, and often their searches direct them to a comparison shopping engine like Google Products, Shop.com, BizRate, PriceGrabber etc. Shopping Engine Optimization is the “other other” SEO, and is also called Data Feed Optimization.

Data feeds are the way merchants provide their catalog information to these sites, and the information you include in your data feeds may vary from engine to engine. Some engines allow you to add shipping offers or other value propositions in extra fields. So it’s important that your feeds are tailored to each engine and really take advantage of your options.

On the strategic side, you should also be planning for increased bids to remain competitive. Holiday click prices are often higher than the rest of the year. While you don’t have to increase bids, depending on what other retailers are doing you may have to to keep appearing high enough in results, and it also provides you with a slight advantage if your competitors don’t turn up their bids.

Don’t forget to turn down your bids after your shipping cutoff date. This is different for every retailer, so make sure you have a process to do this.

And make sure your data feeds are accurate – that you’re not listing out of stock product, pre-orders, backorders and non-holiday items, especially when you’re working with a set budget and you’re spending more per click. It may make sense to remove categories that are typically not gifted to others (like computer cables if you’re an electronics store) temporarily for the holiday season.

3. Email

Stress the benefits of online shopping in your subject lines, including:

• Save time
• Save gas
• Avoid lines
• More selection
• Hard to find items
• Gift finder tools

Some of my favorite examples from last year are (emphasis mine):

Easy-to-Make Holiday Cards. We’ll Mail Them.
Avoid the Rush! Get Your Gifts Now, Save $15 & Pay NO Shipping!
Avoid the crowds – Shop from Home and get Free Shipping
The Gift Guide Is Here: The Best Gifts at Even Better Prices
Email Exclusive Free Shipping, No Threshold. Today Only!

Holiday time is both great and gruesome for sending retail email. On one hand, when you deploy retail email you hope that the recipient is interested in shopping that week. During the holidays, you’re nearly guaranteed that he or she is. However, you are also competing for attention against any other retailer that the subscriber has opted in to.

Like Dr. Flint McGlaughlin says, the goal of the email is not to sell but to generate interest in visiting your site. The offer and the creative is important here, but before one sees your email message, they must be persuaded to open your message. Subject lines matter!

Remember that we as ecommerce marketers want customers to use the online channel to shop. It’s great if you have local stores that may still benefit from your demand generation, and converting online can be attributed back to which campaign and email version referred the visit. This gives you better insight into what is and isn’t working. So may I suggest that you really communicate the benefits of shopping online, as well as shopping from you. The above examples do that.

4. Landing Pages

Address the FUDs (Fears, Uncertainties and Doubts, or, Anxiety)

• Clear link to gift guide (create new category if needed)
• Clear link to store locator
• Clear shipping cutoff link
• Shipping policies, return policies, countries ship to
• Customer service number (every page is a landing page)
• Promote e-gift cards (never too late!)

Just as important as driving traffic is having an optimized website prepared to convert it.

If you already have a gift guide feature, make sure you’re flaunting it — not just in navigation as a text link that blends in with the rest of the links, but clearly on your homepage and on product/landing pages.

Have a clear link to your store locator if you have offline stores. It’s fine to have it subtle the rest of the year in the header or footer menu, but around the holidays – especially after your shipping cutoff date — this deserves more prominence.

Customers want to know what your hours of operation are and even telephone numbers, so make sure that info is on your store locator page.

Shipping cutoff information is also very important. Many retailers do put this information front and center on the homepage. I recommend you show it on every page, because every page is a potential landing page. Don’t assume everyone starts at the homepage and absorbs your messaging and remembers all your details (research shows that’s often not the case).

Ditto for links to return policies and shipping policies, including countries you ship to. Even if your shopper is in the US, they may be shipping overseas.

Don’t forget customer service numbers on every page of your site and every step of the checkout process.

And if you do offer electronic gift cards which can be sent instantly, this is important to showcase – especially after your shipping cutoff.

5. Post-holiday

Post shipping cutoff strategies include promoting gift cards, any in-store pick up options and even gift notifications sent immediately to gift recipients, letting them know they weren’t forgotten but that their gift may arrive a bit after the holiday.

For example, Upresent.com is a service for merchants to offer such messages.

Last holiday, Musician’s Friend offered a $20 comeback coupon for the gift buyer, which is a great incentive to come back and purchase again during the typically slow month of January.

Finally, though we are really close to the holiday, it’s not too late to think about your merchandising for post-holiday. Popular approaches include showcasing items for New Year parties…

…and New Year resolutions – like Drugstore.com’s emphasis on products to help you lose weight, stop smoking, get fit, look your best, go green or be healthy.

For more ecommerce tips, tactics, ideas and research, be sure to visit (and bookmark) the excellent GetElastic blog.

Clinic Notes, Ecommerce, Practical Application clinic, Ecommerce, email optimization, erteail, getelastic.com, holiday, landing page optimization, linda bustos, marketing, optimization, pay-per-click, PPC, search marketing, SEM, SEO, shopping

At our web clinics and optimization training workshops, two of the most frequent questions  are: “What else can I test?” and “Do you have a good example?” To answer these queries with practical test ideas and examples, we’re pleased to present our new “What else can I test?” column.

More than 60% of US online retailers are seeing shopping cart abandonment rates of over 20% this year, according to a recent eMarketer article. Among the most cited and common reasons for that abandonment: just doing comparison shopping, lack of money, looking for a coupon, and no alternative payment methods available.

In a recent survey with one of our research partners, we found that the number one reason for abandonment was shipping prices, followed by “I did not intend to purchase at this moment.”

Here are a handful of ideas, drawn from our research, that can help combat those issues and decrease your cart abandonment rates:

1) Offer alternative payment methods. Credit cards are still the most popular method of payment with about 55% of online retail purchase volume in 2008 (eMarketer), followed by debit cards with 27%. The forecast for next five years shows credit cards as the #1 payment type. However, alternative payment types like debit cards, Bill Me Later, PayPal, and Google Checkout are growing fast in popularity.

Test offering any of these alternative methods and don’t forget to promote them in your shopping cart as well as on your homepage and product pages. It’s important to let visitors know all the payment options available as soon as they land on your website. See examples:

Alternative method of payments - example 1

Alternative method of payments - example 2

Note: Some online retailers are seeing a significant improvement in average order value by providing a Bill Me Later option.

2) State your shipping prices or rules upfront. Simply state your shipping prices or rules in a visible area in your website and cart page. The best locations are next to the shopping cart, page header or footer or within content in the product pages. See examples:

Shipping prices upfront - example 1

Shipping prices upfront - example 2

3) Offer exclusive products online. These can help with shoppers who are just browsing and researching. You may need to do some research to find attractive products that you won’t lose money on if you only offered them online. See example:

Online exclusive offer example

4) Put your nav bar to work for your cart. It’s a common mistake to think that the navigation bar needs to stay the same in your cart page. I understand usability might be the reason, but you don’t want to offer more links to your visitors to abandon the cart. Instead your nav bar can become your center of “anxiety relief.” Use it to state your shipping prices, customer support options (phone number, email, chat), method of payments available, and security seals. The nav bar can help reduce your visitors’ anxiety by making them feel more secure and comfortable with your checkout process. (If you don’t have a navigation bar use the bottom section of your cart page). See example:

Anxiety relief nav bar example

5) Promote your promo codes. The feeling of missing a promotion because you don’t have a promo code can be frustrating. It actually can lead to abandoning the cart to go and search for promo codes online. Instead of wasting your visitors’ time, offer them a way to get promo codes directly from you. GetElastic provides a great example of how to do this. Another option, if visitors come from a channel that you can control (email, PPC, banner, affiliate), is to have the promo code prefilled for them. You can use the visitors’ session or URL to carry over the promo code value and use it right in the shopping cart page.

6) Plug in a progress bar. This is a very simple and easy update to your cart and checkout pages. Especially for those online retailers that have a short (two to four steps) checkout process, having a progress bar can help reduce visitors’ anxiety and encourage them to continue. For longer checkouts (more than four steps), I’d recommend testing first reducing the number of steps and then testing a progress bar. See example:

Progress bar example

7) Brand your checkout process. Along with the progress bar, naming your checkout process can reduce visitors’ anxiety. By naming I refer to using adjectives to describe the nature of your checkout process. For example, “easy checkout”, “1-2-3 checkout”, “express checkout”, etc. Test different names powerful enough that can create a sense of relief in your visitors’ mind. See example:

Branded checkout example

For more tactics and suggestions on how to optimize an eretail website, join us for our Sept. 30 web clinic: Ecommerce Optimization: A holiday playbook for procrastinators.

Ecommerce, Lead Generation, Practical Application Alternative method of payments, checkout, Ecommerce, promo codes, shopping cart abandonment rate, what else can I test

Thank you to InterstateBatteries.com for submitting its View All Batteries page for an optimization review. We hope you find this diagnosis helpful for testing new ideas and improving results.

You’ve probably heard of Interstate Batteries, whether it was while getting your last oil change, paying too much for your last set of tires, or even under your hood. Interstate Batteries is one of the premier automobile battery companies in the country.

But did you know they sell batteries for everything? I certainly did not. In fact, “batteries for every need” is what they told us is their value proposition.

Ironically, the biggest problem they may have to overcome is not on the page below, but rather correcting the misconception that they only sell automobile batteries.

THE CHALLENGE: Improve usability of the View All Batteries page by making it easier for visitors to quickly find the battery they need.

Let’s look at the page to diagnose problem areas and provide actionable recommendations (click to enlarge):

Conversion diagnosis: 5 ways to improve this page’s results

1. Optimize your product

If you’re Interstate Batteries, you have several obstacles to overcome:

• Common misconception that you only sell automobile batteries
• Your company name, URL, and logo conveys that you only sell “interstate” batteries
• Huge competition! (Do you also have batteries to power a drum major bunny?)

Outside of the page, you are going to have to make strides to inform consumers that you do have “batteries for every need.” Whether it’s accomplished with your PR, branding, or advertising departments, this is a product problem that this blog post cannot solve. But it is a very important issue to address as indicated by the MarketingExperiments Optimization Sequence:

Our research has shown it is most important to optimize your product first, then the presentation of your product (your web site), and finally your channels, such as PPC ads and natural search. Improving your product may include its name, perception, quality, and so on.

I’m definitely not recommending changing your name or URL as you have a significant amount of brand equity. Interstate Batteries is well known across many demographics, the logo is memorable, and consumers trust the quality of product. But somehow, consumers must simultaneously identify Interstate Batteries with BOTH your flagship product and also your secondary products.

Take Nike for example. Everyone identifies them as an athletic shoe manufacturer. But at the same time, the vast majority of consumers are acutely aware of the fact that they sell clothing, soccer balls, footballs, watches, and even sunglasses.

2. Effectively communicate the page’s value proposition

You have utilized color (red font) to emphasize that you sell every type of battery. You have quantified the word “every” by stating you sell over 16,000 different batteries. These are both good starts to communicating your value proposition, but it’s incomplete.

You need to take a more holistic approach to expressing your value proposition. This means ensuring that every element of your page either states or supports the value proposition:

• Design
• Copy (including font style)
• Images
• Colors (if you sell natural products, use green)
• Logo
• Price

And every element on your page, those listed above and others not mentioned, must be strategically positioned so that you “supervise” the thought process of the visitor. Whether they are at the top, bottom, or side navigation of the page, something should state or support the value proposition.

Recommendations:

• Headline – Place it at the top left where the eyepath starts and make it a larger font.
• Intro paragraph – Use a bold font to highlight key points such as “16,000 different batteries.”  Consider replacing it with three bullet points that are easy to scan.
• Button copy – Do not use “submit”!  How about “Find my Battery”?
• Image – Instead of making a visitor work to see all the batteries (scanning horizontally, moving their eyes closer to the screen to see a small image, scrolling), immediately show an image at the top that has 5-10 diverse types of batteries. This will give someone the picture of what’s available.
• Sorting functionality – Take a look at sites like Best Buy, Amazon, or eBay which are all companies that sell a variety of products. One page element that communicates “variety” is a left column that narrows results by type, function, component, price, and more. If I see that you have batteries that cost $5 and batteries that cost $500, I’ll know that you sell a large variety.

3. Make it EASIER for customers to find the right product

Q: What can I do on this page?

A: Take a long time scanning back and forth to figure out exactly what you sell and if you sell what I need.

That’s not a good answer. Instead you want your customers to say “quickly and easily find the battery I need.” It’s part of our job as marketers to make it as easy as possible for someone to buy from us. That means reducing the difficulty and time elapsed to get from point A (motivation to buy a product) to point B (adding that product to cart).

One way to do this is to add the homepage’s “Battery Finder” selection box to this category page. That will give visitors to this page the same opportunity to narrow their choices with a three-step process, especially if they overlooked this feature on the homepage.

Another option is to emphasize the search box as the primary objective of this page. Currently, your search box is tucked away up in the header. And if that’s not enough to make it difficult to find, there are a lot of heavy images drawing the eyepath away from the search box. Test changes that will make the search feature more prominent, such as moving it or setting it off with visual cues, to see if usage increases.

4. Reduce the number of steps to get to purchase

Current process:

Six steps just to find a simple AA battery!

A six-step process, whether it’s for a battery or a sailboat, gives the visitor too much time and opportunity to exit the process. Don’t turn a sprint into a marathon.

Implementing the recommendations in diagnosis 3 will help reduce the number of steps to get to a purchase. You may also consider adding some JavaScript to each one of the links so that all six steps are located on the first page.

Here is one example to test:

Finally, review your metrics platform to see where people are dropping off. If most people exit on the “chemistry” page, then you can speculate that either that word or concept may be confusing to your average customer. In that case, you may want to add some clarification either in the form of copy on the page or a tool tip.

5. Take advantage of your (empty) shopping cart indicator

This page follows the typical approach of ecommerce websites with regard to notifying customers how many items are in their shopping cart. When there are no items in the cart, the shopping cart says no items.

The customer probably knows when they haven’t pressed an “add to cart” button, so this indicator is not providing any value.  Instead of letting this space go to waste, take advantage of it by communicating information such as discounts, shipping rate, free shipping, or secure shopping.

We’ve found through testing that clarifying shipping information can significantly reduce shopping cart abandonment rate. This is because many online shoppers will add something to the shopping cart and click into it only to see the shipping price. This strategy manages the customer’s expectations. If they expect to see $5 shipping and instead see $10, then you may lose them — not because of product quality, but simply because of shipping.

Here’s an example to help visualize the strategy:

or:

For more tactics and suggestions on how to optimize an eretail website, join us for our Sept. 30 web clinic: Ecommerce Optimization: A holiday playbook for procrastinators.

Ecommerce, Practical Application, Site Design design, Ecommerce, Email Marketing, landing page optimization, marketing, online marketing, Value Proposition

I guess it was bound to happen. For last Wednesday’s web clinic — Optimizing Your Ecommerce Site — we packed in a bunch of research, special guest Stefan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa, and two new case studies with gains of up to 56%.

We had a great crowd, lots of live Q&A, a cool contest — and, sadly, a vaporized recording. So you can now access the presentation in our standard research brief format (with all the charts, key points and takeaways from the session); however, the flash version is in the ether. Sorry about that.

Back to some good news, eh?

The five clinic participants who will receive a free copy of the 2009 MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Guide are:

1. Cathryn Foster of Dot Zinc
2. Amy Wang of JPMorgan Chase
3. Richard Flaherty of CambridgeSoft Corporation
4. Bethany Siegler of UniqueThink
5. Tom Gray of Gray eMarketing

More good news?

Thanks to your feedback, we’re expanding our web clinics in several new ways, including: teaming up with more featured guests, pulling in more case studies and research from our community of marketers, and tackling some new topics.

A perfect example is our free web clinic next Wednesday, June 10: Twitter Experiments: Getting beyond the “now what?”

Sign up for the free Twitter clinic, join the @MktgExperiments team, and keep an eye on the hashtag #webclinic in the days to come. Oh, and please share with your tweeps, too.

Clinic Notes, Ecommerce, Internet Marketing Strategy B2C, clinic, Ecommerce, eretail, marketing, optimization, pay-per-click, PPC, SEM, testing

As part of our mission to “discover what really works” in marketing and optimization, we often use “radical redesign” tests to help research partners improve results.

In that same spirit, we had a little fun with our recent B2C landing page optimization web clinic: a contest with multiple winners, audience voting, additional content on the blog, and a game show angle.

The reviews and recommendations were grounded in our optimization research, as always. But the delivery included an extra dose of levity.

Based on feedback from our live audience of more than 828 marketers, these elements were a hit, so look for us to continue testing new ideas.

B2C Landing Pages: Live optimization

You can now access the Feb. 11 clinic in three formats for your convenience:

• View the complete presentation (slides and audio)
• Read the print-friendly research brief with additional links
• Listen to the MP3 version

Our research team also analyzed six more B2C landing pages for the blog, from the “elimination-round” contestants.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the live web clinic — especially those who submitted their landing pages for review.

Got some ideas for upcoming clinics? Want to share your thoughts on this one? Use the comments field below.

Clinic Notes, Ecommerce, Email Marketing, Marketing Insights, Practical Application, Site Design Internet marketing, landing page optimization, landing pages, marketing, optimization, optimize

At our recent clinic on PPC campaigns, our optimization team critiqued actual landing pages and ads submitted by attendees. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to get to all of them in the hour-long session.

One page we weren’t able to cover was sent in by FreedomVOICE Systems. You can click on the screenshot for a larger view of the page and sample PPC ad. (To avoid skewing their numbers, we won’t use the real URL.)

FreedomVOICE said top performing keywords included “toll free number” and “800 numbers” and that optimization steps they’ve already taken included testing ad copy, using negative keywords, and setting position preference.

The analysis and suggestions that follow are from two of our leading analysts, Jimmy Ellis, Director of Optimization Research, and Aaron Rosenthal, Director of Channels Research.

Jimmy Ellis:

The current page is trying to do too many things at once. The objective of this page is most likely to get someone to “search” for the phone number. And the results page (if they find an available number) should be trying to get them to “start their free trial”.

Some of the obstacles and problems I see include:

• Ad copy starts with 800 numbers and a 15 day free trial and landing page starts with “unmatched reliability” and no “real” headline.
• Design does not flow properly and has multiple competing elements and objectives that are not in the proper sequence. Currently visitors are asked to “order” … then to learn “more” … then to “search for 800 numbers” … then to compare plans… but why are there contracts with a free trial?
• You should never put an “order” section or button on a free trial offer. It instantly increases customer anxiety and makes them second guess the benefit of the free trial.
• The sequence that would likely work best would be: Search for the toll free number, then compare plans, then start the free trial (ordering is removed completely), with links to allow them to learn more if they need more information after their number search.

To reduce friction and anxiety, increase the expression of the value proposition, and improve the clarity from top to bottom, here’s how I would redesign the page:

1. Start with a headline that says something like, “Toll Free 800 Numbers — 15 Day Free Trial”.
2. Subhead: Search for your new Toll Free 800 Number.
3. Then feature the blue phone/search box.
4. Security and credibility indicators go under the blue box (move up from the bottom of the current page).
5. The End.
6. The order info, features, and comparison would be displayed and communicated on the phone number results page — when they are ready to make a decision.

Aaron Rosenthal:

• That incentive “Free teleconferencing for 1 year” at the top of the page gets lost in the design. Most people won’t even see it.
• All the different boxes make the information very difficult to digest.
• As for the ad, you may also want to test using “free” in the headline and in the URL subdomain.
• Also, make sure to test subdomain vs file folder. We have seen that subdomain does not always outperform a file folder; sometimes the file folder format works best. Example: TollFree.FreedomVoice.com (subdomain) vs. FreedomVoice.com/TollFree (file folder).
• If your rates are substantially lower than 2.9 cents per minute you may want to test using this in your ad copy because it would give you an advantage over the advertiser in the number one spot.
• That takes me to your value proposition: If you are the least expensive, or you’ve been doing this the longest, or …? Test that in your body copy.

I concur with all of the above and would reiterate that the eyepath on this page needs immediate attention. We know that your designer will hate our suggestions. Nevertheless …

• Try using heatmaps and clickmaps to see where visitors’ eyes and clicks are going. Then simplify the graphics. There are 18 shiny bubbles on the page, including the keypad and five different call-to-action buttons, splashed from corner to corner, drawing visitors’ eyes all over the place. The different colors don’t provide enough contrast to overcome the similar shapes. Plus, all the shiny bubbles and fish-eye warped stock images convey more of a funky, grab-a-ringtone vibe than a B2B offer.
• I’d also examine the analytics against your sales funnel to refocus those calls-to-action. How many clicks do you get on the live help, “Click to Call” button? Not many? Test a new page without it.
• You could also use stronger calls-to-action on buttons if you broke out of the bubble shape with an oval or rectangle. Example: “Get Your New Number” instead of the “Search” button below the keypad.

The goal is to strip out any elements that get in the way of a clear path to a decision/conversion. By making this a more focused, relevant page that closely matches visitors’ expectations from the ad, you can expect significantly better results.

We hope you find these ideas useful and, just like our clinics, we’d like to hear your feedback as well. Use the comments feature to share your thoughts on the page and/or these suggestions.

Thanks again to FreedomVOICE Systems for providing its campaign information for the live optimization critique.

Clinic Notes, Ecommerce, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing Insights, Practical Application, Site Design advertising, adwords, design, optimization, pay-per-click, PPC, search marketing, SEM

Technically, this isn’t a preview because our Web Clinic on optimizing eCommerce sites took place on Wednesday, May 7. But let’s set the semantics aside.

Thanks to your feedback, we’ll soon be reproducing our Clinics in a new format that integrates the audio and presentation slides. Here’s a peek at the new format.

We’ll be using this new format and making it available to our MarketingExperiments Journal subscribers this summer. We’ll also continue posting our Clinic content in the current formats (audio and HTML-based research briefs).

Our goal is to provide the information and examples in a variety of formats, so you can find the most convenient and valuable format(s) for you.

Got comments or questions about the new format? Please let us know.

(And if you missed it, you can find our April 16 Clinic on metrics here.)

Clinic Notes, Ecommerce, General, Order Process, Research Topics, Site Design Ecommerce, optimization, webinars