How To Improve Conversions Throughout the E-Commerce Checkout Funnel

We often talk about conversion in relation to the entire buyer’s journey, from locating a brand through to the sale and back-end relationship building. But for small e-commerce sites, there’s one particular portion of the funnel that needs to be optimized. When a customer selects a product and enters your checkout queue, it’s critical to make it as fast and easy as possible for customers to give you their money.

Purchase abandonment is a common hemorrhage point for e-commerce sites and it’s important to identify the causes and plug these gaps. By using basic user experience (UX) analysis, as well as data from analytics, it’s possible to find points of friction in the checkout funnel. You can then create hypotheses about why these occur and test to improve your general approach to the shopping cart and checkout funnel. If you’re a small e-commerce firm that’s working through conversion issues in your checkout area, here’s a checklist that you can use to evaluate your performance.

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By |2014-04-21T14:49:27-07:00March 28th, 2014|Conversion Rate Optimization|4 Comments

The Definitive Guide to Improving Conversion Rates with Trust Signals

TV pitchman Kevin Trudeau recently made headlines with a ten year jail sentence in connection with his “Cures They Don’t Want You to Know About” series of books and infomercials. The case study highlights persuasive techniques used for ill gain, and it’s certainly a cautionary tale on ethics in online marketing and information products. But when I was following the case, it brought to mind another consideration: trust signals are more important than ever, not only to win you customers but to set you apart from from fly-by-night companies in your space. This reality is particularly germane to online businesses.

Against the backdrop of the ever increasing noise of advertising in every sphere of our lives, legitimate businesses must work hard to earn the trust of prospects and customers. It’s not a one step process, but something that is created through an initial connection and builds strategically over time by meeting expectations and over delivering at every point in the customer life cycle. It’s also about constructing a user experience that leverages trust signals – the right trust signals – to help overcome objections and friction points at the moment they develop in the funnel.

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By |2014-04-21T14:49:46-07:00March 25th, 2014|Conversion Rate Optimization|2 Comments

How to Generate Value from Digital Marketing [Infographic]

Every online business is investing in some way in digital marketing and a look into the Google Trends data suggests that more marketers and organizations are trying to figure out the best ways to realize a return on that investment. In this infographic we’ve pulled together some relevant activities, statistics and trends about Customer Acquisition and Customer Optimization, two sets of activities that marketers need to balance to generate value.

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By |2014-04-21T14:50:34-07:00March 20th, 2014|Digital Marketing|2 Comments

How the Stanford D.School Methodology can Improve your Conversion Rate

Stanford’s D.School is known as a hotbed of creative innovation, teaching professionals from all fields how to innovate efficiently in ways that will resonate with users. It’s known as a proponent of qualitative methods for making the best products.

CRO is widely viewed as a process of applying experimentation, in statistically significant test sizes, to select the best layout, elements, graphics, and copy to get your viewers to do what you want them to, and relies heavily on quantitative data.

So how can applying the D.School’s qualitiative methodology boost your quantitative conversion rate?

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By |2014-04-21T14:50:51-07:00March 13th, 2014|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

What Matt Cutts’ Revelation on Social Media Means for CRO

Google’s Matt Cutts is making headlines again, with the release of a new video that challenges some common assumptions about the role of social media in search optimization. Responding a reader question, Cutts addresses a common perception: that social media signals (e.g. number of followers, likes or retweets) play an important role in the SEO process. Yet it turns out that this assumption is completely false. Google’s algorithm currently doesn’t have any factors in it that relate to signals from sites like Facebook or Twitter. This has major potential ramifications for how you think about the relationship between social media, SEO and CRO.

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By |2014-04-21T14:52:06-07:00March 7th, 2014|Digital Marketing|3 Comments

How Digital Maturity Impacts the CRO Process

In conversations about online marketing, there are often  a lot of “you shoulds” and “you musts” that enter the discussion.  Yet every recommendation isn’t appropriate for every business. That’s why it’s critical that you test everything to make sure it’s the right fit for your products, audience, and business goals. An operating framework – such as Cialdini’s influence model – can be a great starting point for developing and testing hypotheses. One such framework that offers an important point of reference for organizations developing testing programs is Digital Maturity. Here’s a closer look at the ideas behind Digital Maturity, how it relates to a company’s data culture,  and ultimately its impact on your organization’s conversion rate optimization efforts.

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By |2014-04-21T14:52:28-07:00March 5th, 2014|Strategy|4 Comments
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