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

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

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

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

During our August 26 web clinic on optimizing affiliate marketing, several participants wanted to know more about setting up and measuring their programs. We’ve distilled those questions for the latest edition of our Ask an Optimizer column.

Q: What kinds of businesses are suited to using affiliates?

I think businesses that are devoted to ecommerce or lead collection are going to be exposed to the greatest number of affiliates — especially those that are somewhat familiar for your marketplace.

Q: How do you identify & recruit the best affiliates?

Form a good relationship with affiliate networks/managers. Also, watch forums for affiliates that seem like they are worth approaching. A word of caution: some of the “top contributors” to these forums are not always the most successful. Approach with caution some of the “loud mouths” out there.

Having competitive payouts and reasonable offer terms are a must, and will also be attractive for recruitment.

Q: Are there any options for regionalizing affiliate marketing?

Yes, but traffic is going to be much smaller. Also, some of the bigger affiliates are not going to fool with these restrictions. I would team up with other companies in the same space, and just sell the leads that are not pertinent to your area of service.

Q: Which affiliate marketing tool is most effective? Banner ads, text ads, email campaigns, or mini web sites?

It depends on the offer and the audience the affiliate is trying to reach.  If you are promoting a good offer, you should develop most of these elements. Don’t handcuff the effectiveness of your affiliates and your business with a lack of materials. Make sure that you are tracking the effectiveness for each of these communication methods, as you might find some interesting data.

Q: How do I find niches I can be confident will yield sales? Or how do I test rapidly?

Testing rapidly is a good way to jump to conclusions, and fail. Obviously if the disparity is huge that is one thing, but do not rush to conclusions because we have all seen how internet traffic changes.  Do not ditch your confidence levels and testing best practices.

Q: How do I mix the “best techniques” for landing pages with “Google rules” for quality score?

Part of Google’s rules with quality score are items that you should have anyway. For example, a big part of quality score is how relevant the page is to the target keyword/phrase etc. I often see people suffer by trying to communicate too much within the images on a page. Make sure that good and relevant information isn’t contained in unreadable (to Google) images.

We also talk about having continuity between your ads and landing page. So make sure you have headlines that match keyword/phrases and will reassure the user they are in the right place, plus score relevance points with Google.

Q: What’s the simplest way to track keywords that are converting or predict them?

Talking to your offer company and discussing tracking options can open up true conversion tracking for you.

For prediction, if you are already running traffic, look at your CTR rates and try to estimate with this new traffic (keywords) — is it more relevant or general?  With that, try to look at what you are going to spend with this new traffic, and the conversion rates you are already observing.

Then factor the quality/relevance of the new traffic, and ask yourself: will the spend this traffic requires still allow me to be positive? Prediction really just comes with time and seeing what works. There is no guaranteed formula.

For more info, check out last week’s list of additional research and resources on affiliate marketing.

Have additional questions? Other things you’d like to Ask an Optimizer? Use the comments section below or tweet me at: @ctrentmarketing

Clinic Notes, Marketing Insights, Marketing Q&A

At our July 29 web clinic on optimizing PPC campaigns, several participants wanted to know more about using forms and keyword insertion.

We distilled the questions and put them to Corey Trent, our lead research analyst on this clinic.

Q: Which is better: product description and fill-out form on the landing page or promotion on landing page and fill-out form on next page?  Is it important to have a form directly on the landing page?

In most cases, having both the description and form on the landing page is the best approach. When you start adding steps or clicks to the process, a couple of things can happen:

1. When a visitor has to click through to another page, the amount of friction increases. People are always mentally evaluating if the effort is going to be worth the payoff. When more pages and steps are involved, that adds more weight to it not being worth their time to continue.
2. When a form is on a standalone page, detached from the description, people can lose sight of the key product benefits, features and the value proposition that were outlined on page one. It’s better to reinforce your offer to help prospects overcome the anxiety of providing their information.

Q: Where is the best place to put the request form?

The best place to put a request form is where you have already built the case that what the user is getting is not only worth it, but a steal compared to the information they are going to give up.

As for where that form actually resides on your specific page — that’s an element you need to test. Whether it’s in a sidebar on the left or right of the page, or in the main content column, or “above the fold” on the page, or below several long copy blocks, there is no surefire place for a form that will work for every type of landing page and offer.

What’s extremely important is that the form is in the natural eyepath of your landing page’s visitors, and that it fits into the sequence of thoughts from intent to action that the visitor experiences on the page. In other words, be wary of placements such as putting your form above or before important content, or using equally weighted columns that downplay the significance of the form.

Q: What about keyword insertion in the landing page header? If keyword insertion does not match with a custom landing page (using dynamic text to match), is there still value in keyword insertion?

If you use keyword insertion in your ad, you’ll be best served by making the connection in your page as well because it increases relevance between the two.

Recently, we’ve seen instances where the effectiveness of header messages has decreased, so testing this with your pages is worthwhile. If you do not insert keywords on the landing page to match the ad, you should still ensure that there’s a logical, relevant connection early on the page that visitors will be able to understand to maintain continuity.

Either way, make sure that your copy is strong — don’t rely on keyword insertion alone to carry the load. Weak copy gives people a good reason to leave your site.

Additional topics covered in the web clinic and questions that we’ve touched on in past research briefs included: value propositions, relevance and offer pages.

You can hear more from Corey via the full clinic presentation and follow him on Twitter: @ctrentmarketing

Clinic Notes, Marketing Q&A, Paid Search Marketing (PPC)

Are you all Microhoo’ed out yet? Here’s a shortlist of cool, helpful posts from the past week, covering a range of online marketing topics.

• Social media: Our colleague and B2B pro Brian Carroll shares his thoughts on how to generate leads with LinkedIn without alienating your network.
• Email: ClickZ reminds us that Christmas is just around the corner (sort of) and provides a “must-do now” e-commerce checklist to help you get ahead.
• SEO: Winning the Web provides a list of don’ts to keep you from landing in SEO purgatory.
• Copy: Karen Thackson at Marketing Words Copywriting explores how an effective call-to-action is more than just using call-to-action words.
• PPC: Search Engine Roundtable notices that more advertisers have been granted access to Google’s bid simulator tool in the past week.
• Design: A catalog of e-commerce buttons and iconography from Checkout Optimization to inspire and delight e-marketers.

Note: In August, we’ll be returning to our regular schedule with more frequent blog posts. Look for that starting next week, with upcoming posts covering PPC, lead generation, testing and analytics, new landing page critiques, and more …

Internet Marketing News, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing Insights