Conversion Rates

Once you've built your website, the temptation is to think of it as finished. Maybe build another one. Certainly aim to drag more visitors, kicking and screaming if necessary, to your shop. After all, if you're making 10 sales for every 1000 people to visit, then getting 2000 people to visit will mean 20 sales! Right?

Not necessarily. Were that true, however, how much will it cost to double your visitor count? For more sites, plenty. What if you, instead of doubling your visitor count, worked to double your sales from your existing customers? How about bumping it to 5%? 10%? Higher?

Think a 5% conversion rate is aiming high? The top online converter in December 2008 was turning 31.1% of visits to sales. Amazon was at 23.7% for the same period. Yes, it was Christmas, but looking at the same report for July 2008 you can see top sellers with conversion rates of 15% to 25%.

9. Know your audience.

You are not Amazon. I repeat, for those of you in the cheap seats: You Are Not Amazon. Amazon is a global household brand with different stock to you. And a different market to you. Something that works for Amazon might work for you. But just because something works for Amazon does not guarantee that it will work for you.

Be aware of what your audience wants. The odds are they are telling you what they want. Do you have a customer support line? Listen to it. If all your calls start with "I tried to order online, but ..." then you have a problem with your site that your customers are actually taking the time to tell you about. How many potential customers who had the same problem simply went to a competitor instead of phoning?

Even if you don't have website problems (and if your conversion rate is 1% to 2%, I'd be shocked if you didn't), that phone line is a window into the requirements of your customers. If they are phoning to find out what it costs to have your blue widget delivered, or to tell you that your site is too slow, or to ask whether the green trousers come with a belt, they are telling you what they want your site to do for them.

8. Don't be afraid to make, and admit to, mistakes.

Most people are terrified of failure, or more specifically of being seen to have failed. Often, even when there is a great potential reward, people will turn down a reasonable idea - just because they are afraid of how people's perceptions of them will change if they are wrong.

I have known website owners who have refused to experiment with ideas because they didn't want to risk reducing their conversion rate (of 1%). I've known others who've refused to experiment with one part of a site because last time it was changed the conversion rate improved (therefore, presumably, changing that same bit in any way could only result in a decrease in conversions).

In the same vein, the sunk cost fallacy is a common cause of low conversion rates. Once someone has made the decision to do something with a site, you will find that person resistive to change. This is especially true where they have paid for the implementation of the change. It is even true when it can be demonstrated that the change in question is directly responsible for a drop in the site conversion rate.

Most people are remarkably blinkered to these sorts of issues - you may even be suffering from one of these blind spots yourself.

Learn to experiment, and learn to let things go - you learn from your mistakes, not your successes. And don't be afraid to try the same reasonable ideas that once failed again at a later date. You will rarely know precisely why an idea failed to improve a conversion rate, but an idea that doesn't work one year may be spectacularly successful the next.

7. Don't jump to conclusions.

It is extremely difficult to predict accurately what changes will have a significant positive effect. So many factors work together, and there are so many differences between users of one site compared to another, that experience can often work against you when you're trying to improve a conversion rate.

Let me take you on a journey through Site A (an online shop I had the pleasure of advising). The owner of Site A had changed his product listing. He used to have ten items per page, and he increased it to 20. The extra products listed on each page gave the users more choice, but his conversion rate didn't change. Next, he added larger product imagery to the listing - unfortunately this slowed the site down considerably, and his conversion rate went down 10%. Finally, he split his categories up, as they were getting a bit crowded and unweildy. After this last change, his conversion rate increased back to its original level.

After three rounds of changes, the owner of Site A had the same conversion rate for his site, and viewed the only positive change as the last one, change 3. He attributed it to better organisation of products. And here we have the problem - he was wrong. The positive change was actually change 2.

I'm going to run through this slowly, as this is counter-intuitive - after all, how can the change with the measured negative effect actually be positive? The reason the change was actually positive is that these things work together - they are not independant.

The first change to Site A was neutral. But when the second change was made, 20 extra images per page were being loaded. These images slowed the site to a crawl. When the third change was made, the categories each contained fewer products - about half categories had 10 products or less - and these new, smaller category pages loaded faster. The extra imagery did a good job of helping to sell to the users and the increase in sales came from these pages.

Site A still has the same conversion rate, however. But once the changes were correctly identified as positive (change 2), negative (change 1) and neutral (change 3), it is a simple matter of reversing the negative. So, the new categories were kept, the images were kept, and the number of items per page was reduced back down to 10.

And the moral of the story - it is very easy, in hindsight, to attribute positive and negative effects to changes, but it is extremely difficult to do so accurately and correctly. Examine the effects of changes and, if you can, isolate and test individual effects.

6. Track everything.

Many people make the mistake of only tracking small pieces of information. Or tracking everything but only looking at a small part of the data. Data is your friend, and you need to understand what the different metrics available to you are actually measures of if you want to have any clue what effect your work is actually having.

Most important, of course, when looking at the conversion rate, is the volume of sales. Some people only look at that number. But other numbers can tell you about how useful your site is throughout the shopping process.

The percentage of repeat visitors tells you something, about whether you are engaging visitors early in the purchasing process and bringing them back for the sale. A high bounce rate indicates pages that are failing to deliver on their promises. Add to cart rates, cart abandonment rates, login vs registration vs abandonment rates, product removal (from cart) rates - all of these will identify areas of your checkout and purchase process that are underperforming, or improving.

5. Get On With It!

There's no better way to ensure an unchanging conversion rate than doing nothing. Don't wait - start today. The more you experiment, the more you will learn and the more opportunities you give yourself to improve your numbers. Get in the habit of testing and tracking constantly. There's always room for improvement.

4. Make the most of your space. But avoid clutter.

How many sites have a nice piece of prime real estate at the top of the page simply saying "your cart is empty"? Too many. The user usually knows their cart is empty. They've not added anything to it. Why occupy a prime sales spot with worthless information? You could hide the cart, or link to a "getting started" article - an introduction to your products, or recommendations.

A cart is designed to catch the eye - but before something is added to the cart, this is an unwelcome distraction from other, more relevant, calls to action. You want your users clicking through to products and then adding those products to their baskets - and you don't want to distract them in the meantime with an empty cart space or a useless "checkout" button.

3. Unobstructive convenience is key.

When I worked with Juno Records in London, one of my most startling discoveries was that far from being obsessed with speed, some of the users of the site would spend a day - or more - building a cart of products.

There was a good reason for this - the shopping page of the site at the time was several megabytes - but users would happily load the page, and browse the mammoth list of products. They could listen to snippets of tracks, and they would browse the entire list - top to bottom - listening to snippets and adding things to their basket.

One of the first versions of the new Juno site had a cart on a seperate page to the products (as is standard for most ecommerce sites). When you added a new item to your cart, it took you away from the page you were on. Given that users had spent time at this point browsing through the product list, and by moving them to a new page you lost their place on that product list, this was not a usability improvement.

Likewise, some users would leave their cart half-built and return to it the next day. Or several days later. The default session timeout on one early version "broke" the site for those users.

One trick to avoiding problems like this is first to know your users. Their habits may not be what you expect.

But more importantly than that, think "unobtrusive convenience". Make the user's life easier, but don't make them work unnecessarily for that convenience.

For example, save the user's cart for them, but don't force them to create an account to do so - cookies are your friend. The user should be able to leave, and then come back later and continue shopping. Check that moving users to a new page when they add an itemt to their cart doesn't disrupt their shopping. Don't force users to create accounts when they want to buy - offer them the option but don't let it get in their way if they're not interested.

2. Be smart with discount codes and coupons.

Discount codes and coupons can be a great way to drive sales. They can also backfire, making customers who would otherwise buy feel like they're not getting a good deal, or missing out on a saving. This isn't good for business.

There are several solutions to this, but ideally you should look to downplay discount code redemption in the checkout process. One good trick is to ensure everyone has a discount, even if it's not a great one. Another is to move code redemption into the account system instead of the checkout system. Yet another is to identify users with discounts (if you can) when they log in and then offer to apply the code if they have one available.

1. Be clear about your pricing strategy.

Pricing is tricky for almost every industry. Price yourself too high and you'll lose out to cheaper competitors. Price yourself too low and you'll end up appearing cheap. Price some products high and others low and you'll look like you're pushing some brands over others, or worse that you're expensive for some products (which tends to make people think you're expensive for all products, even if you're not).

It's important to be clear with your pricing - if you're aiming to be the cheapest then be the cheapest. Offer price comparisons or price matching. Tout your prices above all else. If you're going for higher prices and selling quality of service, don't shout about your expensive prices.

This also applies to shipping. Delivery costs are almost always an additional expense incurred during the checkout process. If you add delivery costs during the checkout process, then exactly when you don't want people reconsidering their purchase, you're giving them a reason to. Make delivery free or flat rate and add it from the start of the shopping process. There's no harm in reducing delivery cost - and telling the customer you've done so - during the checkout process.

Bonus!

One excellent (and practical) way to increase your website conversion rate is to add consumer reviews to your store. They are a proven way to increase sales, and they have an excellent positive effect on your search engine optimisation work. A service like FeedbackFair will give your reviews extra credibility.

Your conversion rate is a measure of the number of potential customers that go on to buy. In the context of a website, it is usually the percentage of visitors that make a purchase. Many websites concentrate solely on increasing the number of visitors they have, when often they have fairly simple problems with their site that, if solved, would have a huge effect on their conversion rate and improve their site's bottom line at minimal expense.

Improving a website conversion rate can be relatively simple. Here are 10 techniques for doing just that:

10. Make The User's Life Easy

Let's start with something that sounds simple, but apparently is too complex for many companies to get right. The more difficult you make your web site to use, the less people will buy from you.

A well designed website should aim to prevent nobody from buying - to allow 100% of the people who want to buy to do so. So where do they go wrong?

• Accessibility
  Making a site accessible is a legal obligation in many countries. Despite that, inaccessible websites are still being created. That can affect your sales, depending on how inaccessible you are, as visitors find the site impossible to use and go elsewhere (and end up recommending one of your competitors to their friends as well). A fairly typical inaccessible site could be losing 5% of potential sales because of this. (A really inaccessible website could even prevent search engines indexing it, giving a far higher amount of potential lost sales.)  
• Browsers
  Many designers only pay attention to Internet Explorer. The justification for this is usually that 99% of the site's users use IE. It never seems to occur to the designers that perhaps the reason they have so few visitors with other browsers is that their site is fundamentally broken - it doesn't work in anything else. Percentages of people not using IE varies from site to site - over 60% of visitors to this site use an alternative browser, for example. The number most often quoted though, is that 80-85% of web users are using IE on Windows, which means that an average site that doesn't work in anything else could easily be losing 15-20% of sales.  
• Be Bold!
  What happens when a user decides to buy a product? They add it to a shopping basket. How do they add it? They click a button or link (usually a button). What happens when they can't see the button? They go elsewhere. There are some users who are still uncomfortable scrolling. Having things above the fold is still important. And yet there are still plenty of sites out there with buttons that are too subtle, or don't say the right thing, or are hidden away at the bottom of the page. "Add" is rubbish button text. "Buy" is ok. "Add xxx To Your Basket" is great. "Add xxx to Your Basket" in big letters on a big, bright button, near the top of the page, is even better. Calls to action, like this, don't have to be gaudy or tasteless, but they do have to be obvious and clear. Sites I have worked on where just the call to action was changed have reported anything from a 1% to 30% increase in sales as a result.  
• Usability
  If your potential customers want to find out more before they buy, can they? Is it obvious to the user where to go to find the technical specs on your products? Are they online at all? Are they in PDF format? Can users even find your products in the first place? This is probably the most common mistake I see on any website - a complete failure to think of what the user wants and needs, and how they might use a site. Plenty of sites have product pages with a photo and some sales patter - and nothing else. Anything from 1% to 99% of potential sales can be lost through poor usability.

When you combine all of the problems above, it becomes fairly clear how easy it is to have a site perform poorly. Make your site accessible, make sure it is usable, make sure it works in common browsers, and make your calls to action clear and unambiguous, and you should be in a position to start converting the people who want to buy.

9. Be Clear, Open and Honest

If you have a product out of stock, say so. Few things annoy users as much as reading all about a product they are after, adding it to a cart, and starting the checkout process - only to find out the product isn't actually available.

The same applies to pricing - a user might spend $100 on a product, but when they find out the shipping is $100 on top of that, they are unlikely to continue the sale. Showing delivery pricing is tricky business, but not impossible. An Ip to Country database will allow you to work out where a user is from and show them a likely delivery cost, for example. If you can't do that, show delivery prices for the countries most appropriate to you - where your products are most often delivered, or for major world regions.

8. Don't Waste Time

One of the biggest mistakes sites make is asking for too much information. Your conversion process may be sale, or it may be a request for information. Either way, don't waste the user's time asking for things you don't need to know. This is, of course, doubly important when it comes to asking for information the user deems private, and that they don't want to give out without good reason.

You don't need to demand the user's email address before letting them download a PDF. You don't need their phone number when they fill out an email enquiry form. A user may not want to buy from you twice - so why make them create an account so they can buy again later before processing their first order? You can give the user the option to do all of these things by all means, but make sure it's not compulsory.

7. Help The User Trust You

Most people are still cautious when buying online, and rightly so. There are plenty of people you really shouldn't give your credit card information to! It's important to give the potential customer every reason to trust you.

An address - bricks and mortar, not a P.O. Box - is a good start. A phone number, with people answering the phone, also helps. Showing a privacy policy and explaining shipping procedures clearly can also help the user to trust you. If you have a SSL certificate, show the "VeriSign Secured" logo to the user.

Design and content also play a part in trust. A poor design gives off an unprofessional feeling. If a company can't afford a decent website, or won't spend the money on it, how can a user be sure their order will be treated with the importance it deserves? If content is inaccurate or badly written, the same applies - show that you take pride in what you do.

6. Have a Clear Returns Policy

Returns on the web are, and are likely to remain, a major issue for consumers. With a bricks and mortar shop, the customer knows where the shop is and that to return the product they simply have to go back there and explain the problem. With the web, this is more of an issue. This is especially true for clothing (where people cannot try things on before buying).

Users are impressed with sites with a good returns policy and are more likely to buy from them. Have people phone for returns - they can then explain the problem to a real person, which is always a good first step. Free return shipping is usually a good option, if commercially viable. People don't like to pay to return things, especially if it is a mistake by the retailer. Finally, give the user plenty of time to return things. 28 days is fairly common, but if it takes you that long to deliver a product, what use is the return policy? 28 days from the date of delivery is better.

5. Keep the User Informed

When somebody buys something online, they want to know when it's going to arrive at their door. People are impatient, after all. Giving them an estimated delivery date during the checkout process is a good start. Emailing them when their product is dispatched is great. Giving them a tracking number if using a delivery service that supports online tracking is even better. Keep the user informed at every step of the process, before and after sale, about as much as you can.

How will this improve your conversion rate? Leaving the customer happy once they have made a sale means they are more likely to speak favourably about you later. They may even recommend you to their friends and within online communities. They are also far more likely to buy from you again.

Think about it like this - if a salesman is doing their absolute best to help you, and to make your life easy, and answering your questions, you might buy what they were selling. If they completely ignored you after you'd bought from them, how would you feel about them? They might well have undone all the good work they put in, because once you'd completed your purchase they see no immediate value in you. A company that shows it cares about their customers, even after they've finished shopping, will make a user far happier and far more likely to return.

4. Offer Different Payment Options

It might sound obvious, but you should offer the user a reasonable selection of methods of payment. Not everybody has a credit card, and those that do don't always want to use them. You don't have to accept cheques, but when deciding on payment methods, consider alternatives to the usual methods. Make the user's life easy and give them what they want.

3. Improve the Value of Visitors

People that buy from you are doing so because they like what it is they see. If a user adds a product to a basket, show them other things they might like as well. If they are viewing a product, the same applies - show them similar items. While they might not buy the product they first saw, other similar ones may not have issues that put them off the first. Upselling and cross-selling are tried and tested sales techniques, and there is no reason not to use them on the web.

2. Be Memorable

A good site will include information. A poor one is just an online catalogue. Information (articles, advice, reviews and so on) all help the user early in their buying process. Users start with research online, just as they do offline. If you can make contact with the user at that stage of their process, and give a favourable impression, there is a good chance that they will come back and buy from you when they finally decide to make a purchase.

Being memorable, and making sure you stick in the user's mind, is dependant on a lot of factors. You must have a USP (see the next point), and branding is important (no good if your visitors remember why you are great but don't remember your name), as well as the quality of your site and information.

1. Know Your USP

Finally, the most important point of all - your Unique Selling Point (USP). Your USP is what sets you apart from your competition. If a visitor goes to several sites looking for a product, why would they decide to buy from you instead of somewhere else?

Many companies do not know their USP. Almost all companies have one, but not all of them are aware of it. If you are a family run business, that's a potential USP. Great customer service, low prices, products that can't be bought elsewhere, free delivery, great support - all of these are USPs. Tell your users what yours is. Shout it from the proverbial rooftops.

Part 2

In March 2009, part 2 of this series was added: Nine More Tips for Improving Your Website Conversion Rate.

Bonus!

One excellent (and practical) way to increase your website conversion rate is to add consumer reviews to your store. They are a proven way to increase sales, and they have an excellent positive effect on your search engine optimisation work. A service like FeedbackFair will give your reviews extra credibility.