Poor online
experiences impact conversion rates. The
conversion rate is a measure of the number of visitors who make a purchase
directly as a percentage of total visitors. Clients generally regard this as
the most important measurable metric so a common question I get asked is what are my top recommendations for
rejuvenating flagging conversion rates?
To answer
this I need to get under the bonnet of their website and conduct some basic
research – a combination of heuristic usability evaluation, studying the site analytics
to understand user behaviour and getting to know the user and their needs.
Identifying
areas to enhance the customer experience in order to maximize the number of prospects
that convert in to customers differs from website to website. Today I was asked
the same question again so dug out some recommendations from a few years back
for a client who was at the time suffering disturbingly high abandonment
rates. The good news is that they implemented
some of my recommendations and enjoyed a significant increase in conversion
rates which in turn gave them substantial increase in revenue.
Below is a
brief overview of some of my recommendations which addressed this clients
specific user experience deficiencies:-
- Simplify
the checkout process. Give the user less but get it right and close any existing
trap-doors. The checkout process was offering the customer too much
functionality. By giving the user too much functionality they were overwhelming
them. I recommended they get the basics
right and then incrementally develop further functionality on a proven foundation.
- Display Shipping
charges upfront. Shoppers won’t buy
goods if they feel there are hidden costs involved in the transaction. Withholding
shipping charges until further along the checkout process and high shipping
charges are the most frequently cited reason for shopping basket
abandonment.
- Provide highly visible
support options that links to a Customer Services hub which answers basic
customer service questions. Users must
be able to easily find customer service information. For this client a significant improvement was
realised by simply placing a customer service link in a prominent position along
with a prominently displayed phone number.
- Reinforce
trust and credibility. This included recommendations such as showing 3rd
party certification logos at key purchase decision
points and placing clearly labelled links to privacy and security policies next
to any fields that request personal information.
- Identify
key metrics and assign them to team members so that someone is accountable for
each team metric. It is critical that
someone owns the metric and is responsible for improving the metric. They also need to be responsible for
implementing the change within reasonable timescales and reporting the results to
business owners and senior management.
- Help
customers find products. Search term
analysis revealed that the categories didn’t immediately expose or describe the
sub-categories. To improve findability they needed to enhance the taxonomies and
content classification.
- Improve product
description data so that customer has sufficient product data to make a
decision to buy.
The actual recommendations for this client spanned pages and pages as they had some serious site deficiencies. This is just a handful of my recomendations which had the greatest measurable impact on the conversion rates. I'll get round to posting some of the other recommendations at a later date.