New tools and techniques available for Ecommerce web design optimisation have made it possible to incrementally improve performance and ascertain the most effective methods of internet marketing. In the past, the return on investment from Ecommerce websites has been difficult to track and monitor, and therefore difficult to improve. This has held back the online success of many businesses as their financial controllers have been rightfully conservative about investing in activities with an unknown return on investment.
A/B Split Testing
When designing or re-designing a website, the decision on which of the design mock-ups to use as the final version has rested with the management and been an internal decision or been out-sourced to a customer research group. Google’s A/B split testing makes it possible to let your customers (website users) decide which decide is the best by providing your online marketing team with metrics including conversion rates, goals completed and most importantly, return on investment.
There are three key areas that influence return on investment, persuasion design, calls to action and conversion architecture.
Persuasion Design
To improve marketing and sales the message from the ecommerce websites design and content need to be persuasive enough to encourage using to take an action. This can be achieved by experimenting with different images and text used and how the information is laid out (or information architecture). The effectiveness of persuasion design is affected by how hardware and software affects the user experience such as screen display size, the use of mobile browsing or browser. The website should be designed for the most popular common visitor set up (available from visitor information in Google Analytics) but different versions are recommended in some circumstances. For example, a mobile phone application website with a high volume of traffic from mobile handsets would greatly benefit from creating a mobile version of their ecommerce website.
Call to Action
The primary goal of an ecommerce website is to generate sales but there are other valuable goals such as setting up a customer account, newsletter sign ups, social media interaction etc. It is important to emphasise calls to action to make it easy for user to convert their interest into an action. Calls to action should be presented with respect to the information architecture of the page. As potential customers are persuaded to buy they should be given the option to convert during each step. There should always be a call to action above the fold on the landing page. If the page is long the call to action can then be repeated lower down the page. It is also important to put values on different types of conversions so they can be effectively prioritised in the design.
Conversion Architecture
The process of converting a customer starts when a user enters the website and ends when they complete a purchase or newsletter sign up etc. The aim of conversion architecture optimisation is to maximise the proportion of visitors to conversions by improving payment processes and sign up processes etc. Using Google’s goal tracking it is possible get an insight into where conversion architecture is failing. For example, an ecommerce website might lose a lot of potential conversions after the users have filled in their address and details and move to the payment form. With the insights from goal tracking it’s possible to test different solutions to try and decrease the number of users failing to complete a purchase. If a website only offered Paypal and Google Checkout, it could be the case that the lack of payment options was causing the high drop out rate.
More Split Testing
Persuasion design, calls to action and conversion architecture can all be improved by split testing. Improving your websites performance is an on-going processes and using A/B split testing to increase conversion rates can be more effective than investing in things like PPC and SEO. It’s better to get 2 sales from 10 visitors than 1 sale from 100 visitors.
