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From time to time we invite thought leaders to contribute to this blog. This week, we are honored to bring to you Kevin Hillstrom’s insightful – and sometimes controversial – approach to Conversion Optimization testing.

 Kevin Hillstrom is President of MineThatData, where he has worked with sixty-five e-commerce, retail, and catalog executives to understand the relationship between customers, advertising, products, brands, and channels.  Prior to founding MineThatData, Kevin spent nearly two decades in various leadership roles in the retail industry, including Vice President of Database Marketing at Nordstrom, Director of Circulation at Eddie Bauer, and Manager of Analytical Services at Lands’ End.  Kevin has written numerous books about marketing, advertising, and customer behavior, and his MineThatData Blog is one of the most widely read Marketing and Analytics Blogs in the United States.  Kevin can be contacted at kevinh@minethatdata.com.

Testing is really important!  But, surprisingly, few people execute tests.

And, maybe worse, few people test meaningful activities.

Office politics make a huge difference.  We sit in meetings with Marketing, Creative, and our Information Technology team.  Marketing wants to test a new home page design, Creative claims ownership of the home page (“it’s our job to protect our brand, we can’t have any willy-nilly home page strategy”), and Information Technology controls resources (“we have to prioritize what is important, and this isn’t important, our conversion rate improved from 3.2% to 3.3% last year”).

As a result, we test things that are “easy”.  We test a yellow button against a purple button, we notice a 22% improvement in conversion rates when using a purple button, and we claim victory!

Except, on an annual basis, we seldom if ever observe a 22% increase in conversion, do we?

When we test things that are easy or ephemeral, we don’t get the long-term results we hope for.  In other words, we have to make changes.  We have to test things that matter.  Let’s look at eight testing topics that “matter”!

Testing Strategy #1 = Merchandise:  When customers visit your website, they are generally there to buy something.  So why not test the merchandise you offer a customer on your home page?  Focus on the merchandise that drives conversion.  I frequently look at what are called “order starters”, the items that most frequently appear first in the shopping cart or appear first in a customer order.  Test these items against the items your merchants or creative team would like to feature.

Testing Strategy #2 = Design:  We like to test things that are easy, things like “20% off” against “10% off plus free shipping”.  This is easy; this doesn’t require assistance from any other department.  However, design matters!  Test how you present merchandise to a customer.

Testing Strategy #3 = Personalization:  This doesn’t have to be the uber-personalization that the CRM folks advocate!  Instead, test merchandising strategies that are congruent with customer interests.  I used to work at Nordstrom.  We had customers who bought Cosmetics, and we had customers who purchased Men’s Ties.  You don’t necessarily have to offer the Men’s Tie buyer Cosmetics!

Testing Strategy #4 = Product Density:  So often, we test imagery, and for good reason … it’s easy to test!  Try something different, test product density.  You could offer the customer three items on the home page, or you could offer the customer thirteen items on the home page.  Yes, I realize there is somebody in your company that wants to “protect your brand”.  There’s probably somebody else in your company (the CFO) who wants to protect your brand in a different way … she wants to protect it by generating profit!  If you give the customer more opportunities to buy merchandise, you’ll sell more merchandise.

Testing Strategy #5 = Test Something Different:  This sounds pithy, but it is important.  Your Creative Team might partner with you by offering you the opportunity to test three different home page or landing page designs, designs they crafted.  Try testing something they didn’t craft, against something they did craft.  Either way, you win!  If their tactics work better, then you proved that they are experts, and you can quantify what their expertise means to the bottom line.  If your tactic works better, then you proved that changes are necessary within your presentation strategy.

Testing Strategy #6 = Test Annual Loyalty:  One might think that measuring the performance of different strategies via conversion rate is appropriate.  Unfortunately, it isn’t always appropriate.  When I worked at Nordstrom, I knew that my most loyal customers purchased once a month.  I also knew that my most loyal customers visited our website three times a month.  In other words, on an annual basis, the customer was visiting thirty-six times while purchasing twelve times.  If you implement a strategy that causes the customer to visit twenty-four times while purchasing eleven times, you’ve significantly improved the conversion rate while damaging your brand by nearly ten percent!!  We make these mistakes all of the time!  Measure longer-term conversion (monthly, quarterly), you are likely to observe different outcomes then when you measure conversion rate.

Testing Strategy #7 = Test Strategies That Increase Profit:  If you asked 100 marketers to calculate profit, how many would be able to?  We have a responsibility to test strategies that increase total company profit.  Sometimes, 20% off plus free shipping increases profit, sometimes, 20% off plus free shipping significantly damages profitability.  We need to move beyond measuring conversion rate, we need to instead measure profit.  Our tests must inform us of the most profitable decisions, not the decisions that yield the best possible conversion rate.

Testing Strategy #8 = Re-Test:  If we need to get “technical”, your test results are only applicable to the audience that participated in the test, across the merchandise offered in the test, in the timeframe the test was executed.  This means we make a ton of mistakes!  A certain landing page that performs well in August is not necessarily likely to perform well in January.  Re-test strategies, regardless of statistical significance.  If you can prove that the same test works twice, you’ve proven that the tactic is meaningful.

As eCommerce marketers we can accomplish so much!

But we need to shift our focus from the easy stuff toward strategies and tactics that yield profitable outcomes.

Give these eight strategies a try, let us know what you learn!

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Ecommerce retailing is brutally competitive. When you add to it additional challenges such as pressure from overseas producers as well as wrong customer perceptions about the value proposition that seem insurmountable, sometimes retailers give up.

That’s why we are so proud of what our client AllPopArt, a producer of handcrafted pop art portraits and photos on canvas, was able to accomplish: through Conversion Optimization testing, not only did they improve the sales conversion rate (i.e., the number of web visitors who made a purchase) but the revenue per visitor went up as well.

Tactical vs. Strategic Excellence in Conversion Optimization Testing

At WiderFunnel we know that generating sales and revenue lift from Conversion Optimization testing is our number one goal.  But we also know that this cannot be all we deliver to clients: understanding what motivates web visitors to purchase from them beyond “buyers prefer a red button to a blue button” is strategic to our clients’ growth.

In other words, generating a sales conversion lift of 28% and Revenue per Visitor lift of 42% for AllPopArt through Conversion Optimization testing is tactical excellence, and we are very proud of that.

But delivering an understanding of the AllPopArt Value Proposition components that makes people want to buy –and buy more of! – is strategic excellence. The client can then leverage the insights well beyond sales to operations and the allocation of resources.

AllPopArt, for example, conducts surveys on an ongoing basis with both paying customers and website visitors at the pre-purchase stage. The surveys uncovered that the AllPopArt key differentiator was not clearly communicated and many visitors failed to see all of the features that made AllPopArt so unique compared to alternative options.

As a result, not only did we test new layouts and design combinations (no colors of buttons) but we also tested the presentation of their Value Proposition.

Ana Sanchez, Co-Founder & President of AllPopArt.com told us, “Knowing with certainty that a new web page layout and copy improve purchase conversions AND revenues is invaluable to us. I simply cannot imagine redesigning pages without testing in the future. I can’t wait for the next round of tests with WiderFunnel!”  – so we are well on our way to further improving these results AND delivering greater insights to their business model.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

We have just posted a the AllPopArt case study here and will be delivering a detailed webinar on Wednesday, July 27 at 11:00 am PST / 2 pm EST – register now!

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The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, has lots of applications in the online marketing world, like here and here. I even wrote about it here in a past life.

Another instance of the magical 80/20 ratio in Marketing occurred to me the other day as we were analyzing a client’s online checkout experience to prepare for rounds of testing. The checkout experience was wholly dry, transactional, and cold. After spending time in this particular checkout (which was NOT unique), I realized that the proportion of prospects who are “un-sold” when they encounter your shopping cart is likely 80%, while the audience segment that is truly “sold” is probably around 20%.

What I mean by “un-sold” is that they have a level of desire (think “D” from the AIDA sales model) which brought them to your checkout process, but they likely don’t have enough Desire to complete the desired Action of a full checkout.

What I mean by “sold” is that they have such an intense level of Desire (based on the product, the promotion, the incentive) that they will put up with all sorts of poor usability, confusing policies, and complex legalese in order to take Action and complete their purchase. If you have a product that is that Desired, congratulations, and please realize that you are in the minority!

Marketers, designers, developers, legal counsels, and copywriters often assume that all prospects are 100% sold by the time they enter checkout.

This is a dangerous assumption. It is more likely that 80% are un-sold and need continued persuasion throughout the process. The Fireclick Index reports that last week’s funnel conversion rate was 25%. Remove the 20% who are dead-set on buying, and you get only 5% of those who “add to cart” being persuaded to finish your checkout process.

In your checkout, therefore, the biggest revenue gains are to be made in persuasion and optimization, NOT in usability/design. Gorgeous design is unnecessary for those who are “sold,” and doesn’t have what it takes to sell the “un-sold.”

Assuming you believe my theory has legs, what is an eCommerce site leader to do?

Here are some things to test in your cart/checkout process to go after that elusive 80%:

1. Test enhancing the credibility of your checkout – there are many things to test here, and none of them are a “sure thing.”
2. Test increasing the readability of your checkout – a site cannot be persuasive if it cannot be understood.
3. Test optimizing product images in checkout – have you been so busy working on product pages that you’ve neglected the images in checkout?
4. Test product benefits in checkout – does your checkout only talk about shipping weights, SKU#s, and other technical details? What about the value of the product(s) in their cart?

When was the last time you went through your checkout process? Try going through it today with a lens of skepticism, hesitation, and fear. Does the process still persuade the un-sold?

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While it is often taken for granted and not considered as sexy as Social Media or as much of a workhorse as paid Search, email marketing is enjoying a dramatic revival.

According to a recent survey, half of businesses plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2011, and another 43% plan to maintain current levels. Only 7% of respondents plan to decrease marketing budgets, a significant improvement over the 11% reported in last year’s survey.

However, despite budget increases, survey respondents indicated a lack of resources/staff to be the biggest email marketing challenge in 2011. Integration with customer data and email deliverability rounded out the top three email marketing challenges for 2011.

But no mention of conversions and business results as being a challenge at all!

Perhaps it is because email marketing is the evergreen of online marketing. The been-there-done-that, sort of tactic. But is it really? Can it not work much, much harder for marketers?

It’s time to take a second look at email landing pages: make them work harder too

Since email marketing is such a ubiquitous tactic, maybe it’s time to take a second look at it and demand the same sort of results from email marketing that savvy marketers expect from paid Search campaigns (I am reserving comment on what is expected of Social Media. But I digress).

While the survey is mute on business results as a challenge, we have a number of clients who are very concerned about email business results. One of them is WineExpress.com, the exclusive wine shop partner of The Wine Enthusiast catalog and website, which have been providing quality wine accessories and storage for over 25 years.

One of the most visited pages of the WineExpress.com website is the “Wine of the Day” page. The page’s central focus, aside from the featured product of course, is a virtual wine tasting video featuring the company’s highly regarded Wine Director.

Conversion Optimization Testing on a Daily Email Landing Page

Each day (yes, each day!) management sends an email to its significant opt-in email list promoting a different wine selection, which ships for just 99 cents. Savvy marketers that they are, they have run extensive testing on its email campaigns.

But then they realized they were missing a key component in their optimization efforts: the post click experience on the “Wine of the Day” landing page!

So, in order to further stimulate sales conversions, Glenn Edelman, VP, Marketing at The Wine Enthusiast, contacted us. He had been searching for a conversion optimization solution and after speaking to many Testing Tool vendors had quickly realized that his challenge wasn’t a technology one, but one where he needed to find deep expertise in conversion optimization strategy and services – regardless of the tool.

When I met Glenn, one of the first things he said to me was, “I told this testing technology vendor ‘you are just selling me software, but you don’t know what we should test. I am not convinced we can value from the tool alone.” Music to my ears!

We worked together to develop and execute a conversion optimization strategy for the WineExpress.com Wine of the Day email landing page. We developed and tested 3 design Variations, aiming mostly at testing different layout approaches…

The Result: 41% INCREASE in Revenue per Visitor!

If you would like to learn more, join our upcoming webinar on Wednesday March 9, 2011 at 11 am PST / 2 pm EST – plus you could win a Gift Certificate to WineExpress.com.

To register, click here now!

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“Come back! Come back!”

Can you actually beckon your ecommerce clients abandoning their shopping carts to come back?

Yes, you definitely can – and here is how.

But allow me to start this post with an “Aha Moment!” I had recently. A few Sundays ago I went with my mother for Dim Sum lunch to a local restaurant, a large and lively place. When I gave my name to the owner to be added to the waiting list, I noticed all the tables were large, accommodating 8 people or more. After a few minutes waiting, my mother and I agreed that it would be unfair to the restaurant owners for just the two of us to tie up a large table that could accommodate a big party, so we decided to leave (there are many similar restaurants on the same street and we’d find a less busy one).

As we stepped out of the restaurant, we suddenly realized the owner was running after us, yelling “Come back! Come back!” Clearly, she was not concerned about us occupying a large table or, in ecommerce terms, she didn’t want us to “abandon the shopping cart”: she wanted our business and was clear about that. So we turned around, returned to the restaurant, were seated and enjoyed the great food.

So this got me thinking about Conversion Optimization (as I guess most things do). Ecommerce Marketers can optimize the conversion funnel (aka, the online shopping experience) for great results. And yet, in the end, some people will go through the complete process – with the exception of just the last step — and bail out.

Can there be a way to fix that? Is there a way to run on to the (metaphorical) street and yelling “Come back! Come back!” to your shopping cart abandoners?

Yes, there is and it is called “recovering abandoned shopping carts”

Recovering abandoned shopping carts enables ecommerce marketers to carry out “end-to-end ecommerce Conversion Optimization” by optimizing both sides of the same coin: before and after customers enter the conversion funnel.

Want to learn more about recovering abandoned shopping carts? If Yes, then here is a webinar for you!.

To give you an opportunity to learn more about this hot topic, we have partnered with SeeWhy to present a webinar on Thursday, January 13 on how you can seamlessly optimize both ends of the same ecommerce coin:

• Before: optimizing the ecommerce conversion rate driving your web visors into your shopping cart

• After: optimizing the ecommerce conversion rate by recapturing those who (shamelessly) abandon the shopping cart anyway

You can register for the webinar here.

Webinar highlights:

“Learn about the Two Sides of the Same (eCommerce) Coin”

Date: Thursday January 13th at 10am PST | 1pm EST

Presenters: Charles Nicholls, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, SeeWhy and yours truly

Length: 60 minutes

Cost: Free — But you must reserve ahead by registering

Vancouver Olympics Store
A/B Split Testing

With the closing of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, all the medals have been handed out, and all the tourists have fled the city. I was fortunate to have been a part of the Elastic Path Software Team that managed the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store since the store launched in December 2007. So, in the spirit of the Games, I will share a little retrospective on my experiences!

During early days of the online store operations, it had a very limited product assortment. Each week as we got closer to the Games, more and more products got shelved in our warehouse. Eventually, the warehouse grew to almost up to 5,000 SKUs.

With that much inventory to sell in a very, very short period of time, we had to ask ourselves, how do we sell all of this quickly? Is the current customer experience worthy of a gold medal?? Is there a way to increase online revenue?

We knew there were areas of the site that could use optimization: our homepage could be less busy; our product details page could better display key information; our checkout process could be shorter (too many people were abandoning the process mid-way).

So many opinions, so little time

However, since these were “opinions,” and nobody had answers based on facts, we decided to quickly validate the various theories, just in time for the Winter 2010 Games buying season (this deadline was a serious one!).

First we had to decide on which testing tool to use. We selected Google Website Optimizer (GWO) because we expected it would be easy to implement. GWO is a free website testing and optimization tool that would help gather data to reveal which page converted best.

However, we had the challenge of integrating GWO into our backend. Even with our strong team of developers, we had to enlist external help in order to meet the tight deadlines.

We turned to another local company, WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization, for help with our A/B split testing project. They were amazing at walking us through the entire planning, design, and technical implementation process while answering all of our questions. In addition, WiderFunnel interpreted the various data points we had gathered in Google Analytics so we could confidently select the winning page templates.

Going for Gold!

We completed four different A/B Experiments. WiderFunnel provided the conversion analysis, hypotheses, wireframing, graphic design and development in two of those experiments. The other two experiments were done by our own in-house team.

In these experiments, we tackled our four most important problems: checkout process, product details page, homepage, and category page. Each one of the experiments generated improved conversion rates and improved average order value!

In addition to more sales per web visitor and a higher revenue per order level, we noticed another benefit impacting our company, a cultural change. Since we began engaging in testing and optimization, we’ve noticed that opinions expressed in meetings were now being complemented with facts, new feature implementation processes have better structure, and team members had a renewed trust in each other because decisions were now data driven.

When something sparks a debate, someone always pipes up, “Why don’t we test that?”

About the Author
Captivated by innovation, Jānis Lanka (@janislanka) is particularly drawn to fresh thinking in areas such as ecommerce, entrepreneurship, marketing, design, and user interface. Jānis currently heads the front-end taskforce at Elastic Path Software, an enterprise ecommerce solutions provider.

We worked with ONP to plan, develop and execute a Conversion Rate Optimization strategy. The strategy we recommended and executed included an A/B/n experiment to quickly establish a higher starting point for further optimization.

The results? An amazing 210% conversion rate lift to Order Form entrances.

Want to learn how we did it and get a few take-aways for your own Ecommerce businesses? Great! Here is the info on the February 3, 2010 webinar:

Length: 50 minutes

Cost: Free – But you need to reserve ahead by registering here

Presenter: Chris Goward, CEO, WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization

Bonus: Attend the webinar and win a FREE Custom Landing Page evaluation

Register here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/574166939

In our previously presented webinar, we showed how this test for Sytropin was constructed along with the intricacies of developing a successful conversion optimization test. If you’d like more detail on how the test worked and how it could work for you too, contact a WiderFunnel Conversion Optimization expert.

We have lots more Ecommerce Case studies too, such as:

• How Ecommerce Conversion Optimization for BabyAge.com delivered a 22% Sales Lift
• Coastal Contacts got a 29% Ecommerce Conversion Optimization Sales Lift
• Outrigger.com got 48% more visitors into the booking funnel (and ultimately got 60% more booking ecommerce sales)
• Colonial Candle now has 20% higher retail sales from the ecommerce conversion optimization testing WiderFunnel delivered

Want to find out more?

Get the details on WiderFunnel’s Ecommerce Conversion Optimization services here.

If you run a single-product eCommerce site, as opposed to multi-product niche stores, you know you face unique challenges.

Most marketers, even multi-product eCommerce marketers, aren’t aware of the unique complexities you face:
• Market must be created
• Product must be seen to be appreciated
• Prospects are not aware of product capabilities
• No one searches for a product they don’t know about
• Sales tend to be one-shot with the potential for repeat sales
• The chances of a web visitor to purchase on website tend to be low to moderate since, by definition, there is only one product to select from

Plus, and this is huge, all the marketing costs must be carried by single product and cannot be spread over many products.

So when we started to optimize the conversion rate for Sytropin, a product of Speedwinds Nutrition (a Portland, OR-based business focused exclusively on developing top quality nutritional supplements), we knew we had a big challenge in our hands.

As most single-product eCommerce websites, management knew it needed to improve the sales conversion rate and had reworked its Pay-per-Click landing page and conducted extensive testing – both A/B and multivariate. But their visitor-to-buyer conversion improvements had reached a ‘conversion rate plateau’ and now they needed expert help.

By working together with WiderFunnel, management was able to break out of the ‘conversion rate plateau’ and generate a quantum leap conversion rate lift to their AdWords landing page: 50% more sales conversions from the same traffic.

If you manage a single-product eCommerce site you should read the case study and then attend the by-registration only webinar (and take a peek behind the scenes on how the test was designed and executed).

Find the Sytropin Case Study here and register for the in-depth webinar to be presented November 4, 2009 here.

To read more Conversion Optimization case studies, go here.

Chris Goward, the WiderFunnel Marketing CEO, will be presenting a detailed case study on how the BabyAge.com test was developed.

Attend this webinar and get lots of practical advice on eCommerce testing.

-> Live Wednesday, October 21, 2009 2pm Eastern

-> Live Q&A

-> Get a chance to win a complimentary landing page evaluation

(Note: Attendance is limited to 100 seats.)

Sign up to attend for free here.