This is the topic of a talk I gave at the February 2010 Atlanta eCommerce Merchants Association monthly meeting.
Before we get into the 3 ways you can improve your conversions, what exactly is a conversion?
Simply put, a conversion is an action that you want your visitor to take. In e-commerce, that action might be purchasing a product. For business to business sites, it might be filling out a lead-gen form, subscribing to a newsletter, or downloading a whitepaper. It could even be simply clicking on a promotional banner on your home page.
The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that complete the conversion, or action you want them to take. If 100 people visit your website in a day, and 3 people buy place an order then you have a 3% conversion rate.
The average conversion rate for e-commerce retailers is 2%. But that number is heavily skewed by the top 10-20 retailers who often have conversion rates of well over 20%, some as high as 30 or 40% during peak selling seasons. For example, Schwan’s had a 45.9% conversion rate in December 2009 (source: MarketingCharts)
How do you find your conversion rate? I recommend using Google Analytics, with Conversion (Goal) Tracking configured and E-Commerce Reporting turned on. With a few simple snippets of code, Analytics will track every product sold and every conversion.
Okay, so on to the three ways you can dramatically increase conversion rates…
1. Simplify
The biggest reason website visitors leave without completing a conversion isn’t because they weren’t interested in buying… it’s because they got distracted or frustrated at some point in the process. By simplifying the signup or purchase process, you’re taking away those barriers that are keeping visitors from converting.
Side Story: A few years ago in our e-commerce business we decided to offer free shipping on orders above $100, and flat rate shipping on all other orders. Initially, we created a coupon code for the free shipping and customers had to enter it in the shopping cart during checkout. We started to get a few complaints from customers that overlooked the coupon code or couldn’t remember it once they were on the checkout screen.
During the holiday shopping season last year we did some user testing through UserTesting.com and realized it was a common problem. I decided to make the flat rate shipping the default, and automatically select free shipping for all qualifying orders (in US over $100). Our conversion rate increased by 50% overnight.
There are lots of ways you can simplify the experience. Look for anywhere customers may get confused or frustrated. Here are some areas to focus on:
- Proximity of Critical Infomration
You may have 30 different sections of information on your product detail page, but you should keep the most important information – product name, photo, options and add to cart button – all within close proximity to each other and the top of the product page. - Simplify Action Language
Make calls to action, buttons, links and anything clickable as simple as possible. Make them action verbs. Instead of saying “Click Here” say “Add to Cart”, or “Download Your Free Trial” 
Simplify Navigation
Once a user has started the conversion process (i.e. added an item to their shopping cart), reduce navigation options as much as possible. Take a look at the Amazon.com checkout process (to the right) as an excellent example. They have hundreds of links on every page, until you get in the shopping cart.- Eliminate Unneccessary Steps and Fields
Don’t ask for information you don’t absolutely need. For an email newsletter signup, ask for only their name and email address. For an ebook download, keep it similarly short. Even on e-commerce conversions, simplify the process as much as possible by letting customers automatically fill in shipping from billing information and by keeping the number of steps or pages in the process minimal. Consider testing a one-page checkout.
Some Resources:
- Consider doing some usability testing. You may not be able to see areas that need improvement because you’re so used to your website. Using a service like UserTesting.com you can get the perspective of potential customers.
- See where people are clicking (even things that aren’t clickable). You might find visitors are clicking in areas you didn’t even make clickable, or aren’t clikcing on someting you want them to click. EyeTools, ClickTale and CrazyEgg are excellent click-tracking resources.
2. Build Trust
Potential customers are naturally distrusting. There’s a huge emotional and psychological hurdle you have to get them through before they’ll be comfortable giving you personal and private information (especially their credit card info). There are two ways you can build trust… by adding information about your company and policies, and by using third party validation.
Add Supporting Information
Anything you can add about your company and policies will help your visitors build some trust in you and your company. By providing the following information in a prominent place on your website, you’ll reassure visitors that have doubts about completing a conversion.
- Phone number (preferably toll-free)
- Guarantee/Return policy
- Hours of Operation
- Customer reviews
- Company history/photo of facilities
Third Party Validation
As many as 53% of visitors surveyed indicated the presence of a seal (or third party validation) would have prevented their termination of an ecommerce transaction. You could be losing half your sales due to not having some form of third party validation. (source: W3ROI)
Nothing is better at building trust than social proof. People will trust complete stragers long before they trust you or your website. By adding third-party validation to your website, you can let other companies and people help build trust for you. There are lots of validators you can use, including:
- SSL Security Seal
- BBB Online / Chamber of Commerce
- Industry/Trade Associations
- McAfee Secure / Hackersafe / Comodo Hackerproof
- TRUSTe Certified Privacy
- Customer Testimonials
- Customer reviews
- BizRate Customer Satisfaction Surveys
- Credit card and payment provider icons/logos
- Shipping carrier logos
Third party validators should be placed in context on your website. For instance, place customer testimonials on pages throughout your site, such as your home page. Put product reviews on the product detail page, security and payment validators on the payment page and final conversion steps. This way, you’re building trust from the time a visitor lands on your site, all the way through the conversion.
3. Test
Testing is the only way to continually improve your conversion rate. By testing, and testing often, you can make constant improvements that over time can mean massive increases. You might find that the newly designed landing page, although beautiful and sleek, converts much worse than a simpler cleaner design with a clear call to action.
What are some things you can test?
- Images
- Description/Copy
- Offer Text
- Headline/Byline
- Layout
- Call to action buttons
- Shopping cart layout and/or buttons
Rely on science, not intuition or “experience.” Use Google Website Optimizer to test changes. Check out these great tutorials that will show you how to use Website Optimizer.
There are two different kinds of tests available: A/B Split Tests and Multivariate Tests.
A/B Split Tests
A/B split tests are entire changes that you make and test. You might have two completely different landing pages, or two different shopping cart layouts. Or you might just test three different Add to Cart buttons, or the button text.
Website Optimizer serves up each option equally to your visitors, tracking conversions. Once it has enough data for a statistically relevant sample, it will tell you which one is the best at converting.
Multivariate Tests
With multivariate tests, you can test several different sections of the same page. You can test two different headers, three photos and four add to cart buttons, for instance. With this particular combination, there would be 24 unique landing pages served to visitors equally, and we just had 3 variables.
The more variables you have, the more total variations there are, and the more visitors and conversions you’ll need to get a statistically relevant sample size. Unless you have a substantial amount of traffic coming to your website (i..e thousands of visitors per day) you probably want to stick with A/B split tests and test one element at a time.
Some Testing Tips and Tricks
- Only Run One Test at a Time
Don’t test a landing page and your shopping cart at the same time, because you won’t be able to tell which change is increasing or decreasing your conversion rate. You can run two separate tests as long as each is completely independent of each other. For instance, a test on your shopping cart and a test on your email signup. - Keep Tests as Simple as Possible
Don’t try to change 20 things at a time, or choose 20 variations of the same button. Design 20 buttons, and use your experience, intuition and maybe recommendations from friends to narrow it down to the top 4-5. If none of them equate to a substantial improvement you can always try more in another test.
Great Resources
Here are some other great resources that have invaluable information about increasing conversions:
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Brandon,
Thank you for your time last night. An excellent presentation and very pertinent information.
Best Regards,
Steve Maguire
Great points Brandon! At ion we’re always preaching all three of these points. I would also add (perhaps the obvious): analyze all the great data that will be coming in from testing!
-Kristina, @ion_interactive
Thanks Kristina! Of course analyzing the data is extremely important, but the talk I gave last night was only 30-40 minutes I had to briefly gloss over the analytics. I think that’d be a great topic for another talk and blog post though. I may also add a few resources to the list above for learning Analytics!
Great information here! It’s always important to test when doing business online. A split test can really give you great insight into what’s going on and what may or may not need to be changed. When doing business online, it’s so important to always take time out to do the small task at various times.
Thanks for the information I agree with the article and especialy with the importance of securiy seal for online website.
We start few months ago the use of a website security application scan from http://www.gamasec.com and we saw in no time the inpact in our sales conversion.
so yes the GamaSec security seal was benefic for our sales.
I’m glad to see that testing was one of the 3 ways to increase your conversion rate! Give Performable a look as well as A/B Tests when you get a minute.