A very simple way to quickly improve a website’s performance is to pick out some key pages (eg. checkout pages, signup forms, product pages) and try out different versions of the page to see which performs best. This article explains 4 different test methods & the advantages of each…
Here’s a really simple way to lose customers: If they go away from the computer for 10 minutes with your website open & then they come back & try to continue browsing your site, make sure that the next link they click fires up a great big “Sorry, your session has timed out” notice, wipes out their cart & requires them to go right back to your homepage…
If your website includes any kind of buying mechanism, you’ve probably thought a little bit about ‘abandonment’. ‘Abandonment’ (sometimes called ‘an abandoned cart’) is when a potential buyer leaves your site without completing a transaction: ie. they added something to their basket, but they didn’t check out.
One way of looking at a basic e-commerce sale is to break it down into four steps:
If a potential customer ‘abandons’ on your site, it means you’ve managed to get them past steps 1, 2 & 3: You’ve found a visitor who is happy with your product & comfortable enough on your site to think seriously about making a purchase.
When, between stages 3 & 4, your visitor decides not to buy, one of two things could have happened:
There will always be abandonments caused by the first group of visitors & that is nothing to worry about. But, if you can figure out what happened (or didn’t happen) to cause the second group of visitors to give up, you could gain extra sales & therefore make more money.
Here’s a simple four-step plan to tackle abandonment on your site:
Occasionally when you look back through your website stats, you wonder “what did we do on that date that made our sales figures jump so much?” You may then spend the next hour or so digging through old emails & logs to try and work out what change you made that increased your sales/visitor numbers/page views (or - much worse - what you did that reduced your sales!)
There’s a really simple way to solve this problem. It takes all of 5 minutes to set up & will pay off for as long as your website exists (possibly longer):
It’s as simple as it sounds - set up a log (maybe in excel, maybe in a textfile, perhaps just in a mail folder) where you record every change you make to your website that may affect your results. Here’s a very basic example:
Using that, in 6 months time when you’re looking at your web analytics tool & you see that your overall sales conversion jumped 2% on the 11th of March, you can refer to that log & see “ahh, we made the ‘buy now’ button larger”.
One very common measure of website success is traffic: Greater traffic equals greater success. You can see just how common this idea is when you think of some of the more widely quoted web metrics:
Yet, unless you’ve already done so, putting some work into your website’s ‘conversion rate’ (its ability to turn a visitor into a customer) is usually more rewarding. Here’s a quick example that proves the point:
As you can see, with 500 visitors & a 3% conversion rate, a site can be much better off than one that gets 1000 visitors & only converts 1% of those into customers.
Conversion rate doesn’t have to be visitors:orders, here are a few other ideas:
What’s your current overall site conversion rate? Are you tracking it individually for key pages? Are you tracking it over time?
The word ‘usability’ sounds quite scientific & technical. You might see it alongside words like ‘laboratory’, ‘test procedures’ and ‘validation requirements’. But it’s not really complex at all. Usability is a very simple concept: Things should be easy to use.
With that in mind, here are 5 questions you can ask yourself to make sure new visitors perceive your website as easy to use.
A new visitor to your site should be able to answer those questions no matter what page they land on.
It’s easy to get stuck into your routine & tough to figure out which tasks are going to make the difference with your website. There are certain ‘golden’ tasks you can perform on your website that will provide a much higher return on your time. Finding that golden 20% means spending your time in a way that’s going to benefit you the most. Here’s a quick, easy task you can complete fairly quickly that will provide value for years to come.
If you go to http://www.yoursite.com/asdfgh what happens? Error pages (often called ‘404s’ because they return a ‘404 error’ code to the browser) mean that something has gone wrong on your site. Often when a visitor hits an error code they will simply move on to another site. Here are some simple things you can include on your 404 page to avoid that:
If you’ve already done all of the above, one more useful tip is to make sure your error page doesn’t look like an error page. That sounds counterintuitive, but it works: Many visitors will immediately see the ‘Error’ style page & navigate away, or hit the back button. If you give them a chance to see that you’re providing useful content before their automatic response kicks in, you have a chance at shuffling them toward your useful content rather than losing them.
Many websites make the mistake of giving equal weighting to their ‘buy now’ or ’sign up’ buttons. Some even hide them, thinking this looks better aesthetically. The truth is, making your conversion buttons subtle does look better aesthetically, because having a ’stand out’ button puts the focal point of the page in an odd place. But that’s exactly what you want: the point you want your visitor to reach should draw their eye immediately, and plainly remain the centre of attention. Make your conversion point the brightest, most contrasted element on the page.
Don’t make your visitors’ eyes dart all over the page. If you’re presenting a choice of options, keep them in one column. If you’re presenting a single product, ensure its details are in logical order.
If your landing page offers visitors 10 different options, try presenting one of those as the ‘logical click’. For example, making the top item double size, or adding a ‘Recommended Item’ splat to it. This works especially well for items where visitors may not know enough to make a logical choice. Try varying the number of options on your landing page. Presenting visitors with the choice of 1000 scarves can often result in the ‘wood for the trees’ phenomenon, and have them quickly exiting via the back button.
Including a higher priced item on a landing page to contrast with your primary product can work as an ‘anchor point’ for your visitor. Is $200 cheap for a juicer? I have no idea, but if it’s sat next to a $600 juicer then it looks like a bargain to me. Some visitors like to buy based on emotion, some like the satisfaction of making a logical choice. Finding ‘a bargain’ satisfies both of those audiences equally.
Think about what information your target audience would need in order to buy your product. What reservations might they have? Answer them.
If you have an offer, spell it out simply. Read through your copy and, if something is ambiguous, clear it up. This is very important online, as visitors are much less likely to ask clarifying questions than they are in a store. In a store I can ask an assistant something and get an instant answer. On the web, your visitors are more likely just to go to your competition in the hopes they can explain what you haven’t.
There are two core audiences on the web: Those who will skim-read your copy, picking out the elements they want & those who will go through combing your copy word-for-word. Using bold headings and pulling important information into summary bullet points satisfies both audiences equally without risking lost sales from either.
The web is an incredibly visual medium and, apart from looking nice, images can often answer the visitor questions you’d never have thought of. This applies whether you’re selling electronic goods, clothing, food, or practically any other item you’d care to stock. Images tell a story. If your visitor is planning to buy a pair of jeans online, she’ll conjure up a mental image of how she’ll look in those jeans. The more easily she’s able to paint that mental picture, the more likely she is to buy.
Email response rates vary wildly: Every email campaign & list is different. For one list, a 10% open rate be a great success, for another, a 50% clickthrough rate might be considered a failure. So it’s difficult to make generalisations about what kind of rates are ‘good’.
On top of that, it’s unlikely your competitors will want to share their email metric data with you. So how do you get a picture of where you stand?
MailChimp has just very kindly released a statistical analysis of 3-million emails sent out by their customers. Split across a couple of dozen verticals (from Advertising, through Legal Services, to Web Design), it shows Open, Click, Soft Bounce, Hard Bounce, Complaint & Unsubscribe rates for each vertical.
The average results across all verticals come out as:
How do your emails compare with that average? How do you compare against your vertical?
Go to Google & search for the phrase “click here” and you’ll see somewhere between 1.5 and 2 billion results. To put that in perspective, searching for the phrase “thank you” will return around 255 million results. Even “microsoft” only returns around a billion results. That puts “click here” well up in the top 10 most popular phrases on the web & possibly makes it one of the most (over) used phrases in the English language.
So if a couple of billion other pages are use “click here”, why shouldn’t you? Here are a few quick reasons:
Reason 1. Don’t Patronise Your Readers
People understand what a link does. If it’s underlined & it’s on a website, you don’t need to spell it out. When was the last time you saw a book with “Read Me” written in big bold type on the front cover?
Reason 2. Improve Your Site’s Scanability
Say you’re trying to get your visitors onto a page containing driving directions to your office. You could either explain that in plain copy & waste the highest-contrast element of the paragraph on a meaningless phrase, or, you could make sure the first thing their eye sees when scanning the paragraph tells them exactly what your link does. Glance at these two examples & see if you can figure out what the links do without reading word-for-word:
Example 1
Our facility is centrally located and can be reached simply by both road and rail networks. For directions click here. Free off-road parking is available nearby.
Example 2
Our facility is centrally located. Follow these directions to our office to reach us by either road or rail network. Free off-road parking is available nearby.
Even a passing glance tells you what’s behind the link in the second example.
Reason 3. Boost Your Search Rankings
If you’ve managed to build 100 links to one of your pages with the key phrase “silver necklaces”, you’re going to rank higher in the search engines for the phrase “silver necklaces”. Conversely, if all of those 100 links use the key phrase “click here”, those search engine algorithms are going to associate your page with the phrase “click here” and you’ll lose out on all those potential necklace sales.
A simple example of that concept in action is the phrase “leave”. Search any of the major search engines for the phrase “leave” and you’ll see the highest ranking pages will be Disney, Yahoo and Google themselves. Why is that? Well since child-protecting legislation came in, Adult and Gambling sites are compelled to include an “Are you of legal age?” entrance page. Many of those pages include a link for minors to leave the site, containing the phrase “leave now” or “exit now”. Obviously they need to send visitors leaving their sites somewhere. Disney, Yahoo and Google are obvious non-offensive choices and, as a result, they’ve each built a healthy ranking for the word “leave”.
Reason 4: Call Your Readers To Action
If you listen to radio ads, you’ll often hear them finish with something like “Call us today on XXX XXX for your free quote” or “Visit your nearest store today”. The reason you hear this kind of formula so often is that it gets results: tell your customer/reader/donor what you want them to do & they’re more likely to do it.
“Click here” was the original web-based call to action, but it’s so commonplace and implicit it does nothing. You’re no more likely to click that link than you are any of the other 2-billion. To improve your results, tell your customer what action they’re really going to take by clicking that link. A couple of examples:
Each of those stands out more as a link than “click here”, they tell the visitor exactly what’s behind the link without forcing them to read an entire paragraph, and they conjur up the image of the visitor taking that action.
Reason 5: It’s the Quickest, Cheapest Way to Improve Your Campaign Results
Unlike most methods of increasing results (buying traffic, tweaking layout, crafting a sales pitch, etc), changing your link anchor text takes next to no time, next to no money, and it can dramatically improve your results.
