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

Our most recent free webinar included case studies and live optimization focused on subscription-path pages. But the underlying principle we covered is just as important to ecommerce, demand and lead generation, email — across all marketing communications, really.

The principle: Clarity trumps persuasion.

Sounds simple, right? Maybe even too elementary? Perhaps you’re thinking, “My CEO and six-figure marketing budget don’t need catchy maxims. Give me something I can use.”

Don’t be fooled. There’s a powerful idea hiding in those three little words. But it’s easy to miss because we’ve been trained to persuade. To sell the sizzle, not the steak.

We try to entice prospects into our sales funnels with peppy copy, splashy offers and incentives that don’t cost too much. Meanwhile, behind the curtain of our clever creative, we’re not concerned about connecting with people. We’re chasing sales numbers and revenue goals. So we ignore the fact that our prospects hate being pitched and sold to — just like us, when we’re in their shoes.

Problem is, that leads to web pages that make prospects wary and distrustful. Sites that make users jump through hoops. Transaction pages loaded with elements that create friction and anxiety in users’ minds.

Want to slash through all that on your site, and improve conversions? There are many ways to do that, but the foundation starts with building simple, straightforward pages and processes that match your visitors’ intentions. In other words, clarity trumps persuasion.

Click here to learn how to apply this principle and see how three sites used it to lift their conversion rates by 200%, 76% and 38%.

Clinic Notes, Internet Marketing Strategy, Lead Generation, Marketing Insights, Order Process, Practical Application, Site Design

For those who attended our free webinar on lead generation yesterday, we’d like to thank you for your time and trust. Despite some initial tech glitches, the session got rolling quickly and we covered a lot of ground, including:

• three lead-gen case studies, with some surprising results
• the impact of friction and incentive on the leads process
• a guest appearance by our good friend and partner, lead-generation expert Brian Carroll, and
• a live site review and optimization session.

Regular blog readers already know that we’ll be posting a link to the clinic content here in a few days. In the meantime, here are some of the takeaway points:

• Never use an incentive that requires you to sell it before the main offer is clear. Even good incentives can fail due to presentation errors.
• Friction is typically a negative factor, but not in every case. There are ways to use it to your advantage.
• Friction occurs at the page level as well as throughout the lead-gen process. Look for ways to reduce it in both areas.

We also looked at three key questions you need to ask (and answer) when optimizing your lead-gen strategy:

1. Have you looked at your site pages the way a customer does vs. the way your company does?
2. How does your process demonstrate to your ideal customer that you understand him/her?
3. Have you analyzed your competition’s lead-gen process from start to finish and compared it against your own?

On their own, these quick bulleted lists are great for scanning, but they don’t really do justice to the session. We hope you’ll check back next week, when we’ll post a link to the full presentation along with answers to some of the questions raised at the clinic. (Note: You can also be notified by email via the MarketingExperiments Journal.)

Clinic Notes, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing Insights, Order Process, Practical Application

What can you do when your order path is eight pages long and “corporate headquarters” has strict policies that essentially tie your Web marketing hands behind your back?

Fighting the system, or sulking around the office out and aggravating your co-workers would get you nowhere. Your only option is to accept the parameters you have to work within and find a solution that gets results.

The MarketingExperiments research team was recently confronted with this situation (not the first or last time). One of our research partners had very limited options with their order process. All of our best practices pointed to removing several steps, eliminating unnecessary fields, and reducing friction and anxiety. But none of the strategies we initially proposed were acceptable.

Now what? How could we break out of the constraints to improve results?

Every online marketing professional is familiar with the idea of the order process as a funnel. From the start of the process, say your landing page, the number of prospective buyers gradually erodes with each ensuing page.

With that in mind, we took the path element with the highest impact on abandonment and moved it to the last possible step. The objective was to get prospects as deep into the funnel as possible before they ran into the most anxiety-inducing part of the process: facing a decision to submit sensitive information.

The results? Even we were surprised by the impact of this change: Our partner achieved an 86% increase in conversions compared to the original order process. Look for more details on our tests with this partner in our upcoming Web Clinics.

General, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing Insights, Order Process, Practical Application

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

So you’ve got your Value Proposition honed like a Puukko knife and your landing page is optimized for a smooth, anxiety-free glide to the checkout.

Now comes the scary part. The leap of faith that you, the “customer not present,” his bank, the card processing company, and your bank all have to take together to finish the transaction.

If you’re the proprietor of Android’s Dungeon & Baseball Card Shop.com, how do you know it’s Rod Flanders buying all those Itchy and Scratchy comics and not Bart?

In the current economy, wouldn’t it be nice to feel confident you’re going to get paid?

And what about everyone else (mentioned above) who gets a taste? Of course they should be paid fairly for services rendered, but how can you avoid paying the excessive fees that eat away your net returns?

You may want to check in with our friend Scott Adams of The Direct Response Forum, a non-profit trade association that helps companies navigate the vast gray area between their checkout pages and their bank accounts. The DRF is holding its 19th forum in San Diego, Aug. 11-13, focusing on the latest ways to save money and avoid being ripped off in that gray area.

Topics will include basic training in credit card processing, chargebacks, and recurring charges. And panel discussions between merchants, card companies, and service providers will cover best practices, regulations, and security.

Let’s see: Potentially saving thousands of e-commerce dollars. San Diego in August (or whenever, really). Throw in a carnitas burrito from Taco Express, and it could be the best business trip you take all summer.

Order Process