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

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.

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.)

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.

Your landing page could be a marketing expert’s dream, complete with credibility factors, bold text, and a natural eye path. But what happens when a customer proceeds to checkout and they become suddenly hesitant of their purchase because of a poorly designed page?

With this in mind, should website optimizers focus their attention on the landing page or the checkout page?

Certainly both pages deserve particular attention, but optimizing your Shopping Cart seems far less obvious. A recent article at MarketingSherpa sheds some light on this topic.

Here is a short excerpt:

While marketers toil away on their landing pages, getting more and more people to advance to subsequent pages, the average ecommerce shopping cart is abandoned nearly 60% of the time. In response to this high number, the company in this article conducted a multivariate test, that is, they tested elements on a page in different combinations and then isolated the results of each variable. They discovered a dramatic increase in conversion rates by simply adding an instructional headline, yellow information fields, and a blue button that read “Click Here to Order.”

So whichever page you optimize, you must keep in mind one fundamental yet remarkably simple rule: simple changes in page design elements can yield a significant increase on conversion.

Earlier this year, we published an article that addressed how minor changes to your website can have a major impact on your conversion rate. With a multivariate test, we discovered that even a highly-optimized page can be improved with small changes in the headline, page design, and color.