I imagine from the headline you know that we tripled revenue (243%) for one of our customers in e-commerce industry with zero marketing budget. For the fact each website has its own challenges and luckily 47% of our traffic is Organic and hence we were able to squeeze a lot from that traffic, we increased their conversion rate and in turn their revenue.
Let’s address some myths first
1. CRO is all about A/B testing headlines, changing the colours of CTA
Many digital marketers think that conversion rate optimization is all about A/B testing the headlines of their landing pages or fine tuning the colors of their call to action (CTA) buttons like ‘Add to cart’ etc., but it’s completely wrong and it goes deeper than that. Unless your conversion rates are very low like 0.1% doing those small tweaks doesn’t result in massive improvements to your conversions. Understanding your audience and their objections is the first right step towards improving conversions on your site. What happens when you are selling a gaming product like controllers (which is often used by kids & adults) and you don’t have any personalization for their parents to gift it to their kids or cousins or friends. This is exactly what I am talking about, know your customers, I have shared the exact process on how we uncovered all the details about our customers.
2. If it works for my competitors it would work for me
Couple of times my clients have asked me to do x (in this case they wanted to integrate Stripe as payment gateway in addition to Paypal & SagePay) and when questioned on why should we do that, they say their competition did that and they wanted to do the same and hoping that it would increase their conversion rates magically! We disagreed with them and reasoned out with the data that we have 60% of traffic from UK and 30% from USA and SagePay is a well-known player in UK compared to Stripe and we already have Paypal to address USA audience, we might try out Stripe later but that is not a priority. It turns out to be true rather than focusing our efforts to this we focused on the real hurdles and we are on track.
What works for your competitors doesn’t work for you as every business is unique so as their leadership and people running their businesses. So don’t blindly follow the footsteps of your competitors. One another major factor why it won’t work for your business is the quality of traffic. Conversions rate majorly depends on the quality of the traffic we get, let’s say you have 10% of organic traffic and your competitor have 50% of organic traffic you can see how this one parameter alters the equation of growth between your website and your competitors.
Don’t focus on the competition, they’ll never give you money.Jeff Bezos
Step by Step process to unlock your site’s growth potential
1. Know your visitors
The first step is to know about our audiences, their expectations and their objections. When we started our optimization campaign, we didn’t have the data about our customer’s, we started to survey them and incentivize them with a 20% off coupon to know more about why they did a purchase on our site rather than from our competitors, what were their expectations and did our products met their expectations, what were their objections before they brought from us and few of our customers came back and brought twice and thrice so what made them to come back etc., (If anyone of you wanted to know the exact survey questions, please let us know in comments I would be able to link to our typeform.)
3% of our customers replied back to our survey which is more than enough of the data we needed. What we learned from the survey is our customers biggest objection was the quality of the product since its custom made does it comes with a warranty if so is it a manufacturer warranty and wanted to know about our return policy if something bad happens. We started to address all those objections to our product page. In page analytics & Heatmaps helped us to uncover where to position the answer to their objections on the product page.
After introducing these changes to our product page our funnel improved a lot. I would share more apt details on exact improvements below.
Live Chat
I installed Intercom messenger on our site to interact with our visitors and know more about their objections or what questions they raise. I uncovered most of the issues, one of them were “Do you ship to Spain? Do you ship to NewZealand? Do you ship to the USA?” So I am completely convinced that we need to announce that “We ship Worldwide” and once we introduced it the shipping question probability reduced from 3 questions for a day to 2 questions in a week. Live chat also helped us to understand few other data points like many of our products were reviewed by famous youtube celebrities but we didn’t have their reference as tags for our products which made our customers who came from them searching on a black hole. For the matter of fact, I am the only person who handles Live Chat and as a Conversion Rate Optimization consultant its my responsibility and an opportunity to know more about the business and customer expectations. In fact, this understanding played a very crucial role in the result.
2. Shopping cart Abandonment from 85% to 68%
Next biggest issue is the Shopping cart Abandonment, Industry is plagued with high rates of shopping cart abandonment. Current industry average stands at 68.63% which is huge. But our client abandonment stands at a much bigger number which is 85.74%. Please have a look at our funnels below
Its terrifying to know 85% of the people add to cart and just abandon it. Biggest reason was the unexpected costs that we showed up on the cart one is international delivery charges and at that time, we were offering only ‘Next day delivery’ at £5.99 which is unexpected cost that was never informed to our customers. We do offer international delivery but never informed them it costs £16 to £20 which is another hurdle. We started to address those hurdles and we saw a significant improvement. We started to provide coupons to customers using exit intent tools, there are dozens of them and we were using Optimonk and offered an exclusive coupon to our customers in exchange of their emails. We had a 22% conversion rate for the popup where the industry average is 8% to 10%
Free Shipping
Visitors expect options for shipping when Free shipping is the norm, we started to experiment our shipping options, 1. Free shipping (usually takes 4 to 5 days), 2. Next day delivery (Delivery before tomm. 1 pm). We charged for the next day delivery. It turned out to be good for us. Free shipping did increase our conversion rate to a degree. We still don’t have exact data but soon we would, I would update when we know how much it did increase our conversion rate. Definitely please provide free shipping on your store. After all these experiments our shopping cart abandonment did decrease and conversion rate through funnels on cart to checkout have increased significantly, after all, the experiments our current funnel conversions looks like below:
So we have decreased our abandonment from 85.74% to 68.14%, Still I think its pretty huge, we should segment it and still need to dig deeper but yes that is for another blog post 🙂
3. Iterate & collect data on your hypothesis
Conversion rate optimization is all about knowing your audiences, their expectation and addressing their objections. Create Hypothesis with the observations, run experiments for each hypothesis, collect data and refine your hypothesis. Iterate till you see a significant improvement in your conversion rate. We were able to increase our conversion rate from 0.29 to 0.71 which is 146% increase in our conversion. We are still far away from our promise land where our website can convert highly, increase revenue and provide value to our customers. We are about to iterate again to see if we can increase our conversion rate again. So the rule of thumb is never stop iterating and never stop experimenting, Your conversion rate may be higher but still there would be a room for improvement, make observations, identify your customer objections and address those.
Challenges
1. Maintaining constant improvement on conversion
Though the results which we have provided to our client which is nearly tripled their revenue and their conversion rate, Maintaining the same growth of tripling down in future months is absolutely the biggest challenge for us. What happens when Google introduces some major change in their algorithm and our traffic goes down from 47% to 20% I certainly think we won’t be able to produce the same results, remember we don’t do PPC campaigns yet. We are still trying to increase our conversion rate but we cannot predict our conversion rate growth as it depends on lot of internal and external factors. Obviously we cannot control the external factors so we should be able to tweak all those on what we have control over and to a certain degree the external factors as well. But what if our traffic moon shots all of a sudden when one of the Youtube celebrity just reviews or endorses our product ? its a good for us and definitely can help us increase our conversions as well. To address the constant growth of conversion rate I definitely think we should have a growth plan for next 6 months which addresses the risks involved and list of processes that would bring in and maintain momentum.
2. Run experiments at the minimum of 3 months, if your first month doesn’t provide improvement don’t quit yet
Conversion rate optimization should run for 3 months at minimum so that you have given enough time to run your experiments and collect data. If your first month doesn’t provide improvement don’t quit yet and come to the conclusion that the site cannot be optimised, it means we have not understood our customers and their objections. Please prepare a plan at the minimum for 3 months, run your experiments and iterate for the results.
What were your challenges when you run your conversion optimization campaign? Please do share your conversion rates? Be your site may be e-commerce, SAAS etc., Our conversion rate at the moment is 0.71% we are trying to improve that and would share more details as we perform experiments on our site. What were your number one change that increased conversion rate significantly? and would love to hear your experiments. Please leave them as comments.