20 Conversion Rate Optimization Experts Share Their Top Tip for eCommerce
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The document presents insights from 20 conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts on improving e-commerce conversion rates, emphasizing the importance of optimizing thank-you pages, reducing cart abandonment, and focusing on high-converting traffic segments. Experts recommend a systematic testing approach, prioritizing significant metrics and ensuring a seamless customer experience throughout the purchase journey. Key themes include leveraging data for decision-making, enhancing value propositions, and maintaining continuous testing to drive revenue growth.
20 Conversion Rate Optimization Experts Share Their Top Tip for eCommerce
- 1. PRESENTED BY 20 CRO EXPERTS SHARE THEIR FOR eCOMMERCE
- 2. Justin Rondeau @whichtestwon Chief Editor & Testing Evangelist of WhichTestWon Test your Thank You Pages! The Thank You/Receipt page is one of the most underutilized pages. Your customer is at their most excited right when they purchase a product, take advantage of this. Another major perk for testing Thank You/Receipt pages is you are not adding extra friction to the cart. Checking out is one of the most anxiety-inducing processes a customer goes through. Yes, cross-sells and up-sells in a cart work well, but they can become a distraction. Get the purchase, then push for more with dynamically produced content that is relevant to the purchased product.
- 3. Neil Patel @neilpatel Co-founder of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics One of your biggest conversion leaks as an ecommerce site is going to be your cart. People will abandon it. So when you get these users to come back to your site through re- marketing and email marketing, consider redirecting them back to their cart. From what I’ve tested, this simple trick can typically pro- vide a double-digit conversion lift.
- 4. Joanna Wiebe @copyhackers Conversion Copywriter at Copy Hackers Focus on the people who will buy. That might seem obvious, but I'm amazed by how many businesses are trying to convert 100% of their traffic. They see that they've got massive numbers of visitors coming from Pinterest, they see most of those visitors bounce, and they think, "Crap, we have to do something to get those Pinterest people to stick around!" But, in the meantime, legitimate prospective customers are arriving at their sites in much smaller numbers—let's say 10% of visitors—but the site owner doesn't focus on them because "there aren't that many of them." Focus first on the people who are likely to buy. Even if it's a small slice of your traffic pie.
- 5. Lance Jones @copyhackers CRO Consultant & Co-founder of Copy Hackers If you’re A/B testing (and you should be!), choose a single metric on which to base the success of your test. Just because you have the ability to choose multiple success metrics doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. In fact, it’s common to get mixed signals from multiple metrics across your test variations, and then making a ‘clean’ decision becomes difficult (i.e., “Which metric should I pay attention to?!?”). If you’re in the e-commerce space, Revenue Per Visitor is typically that single metric. It may feel uncomfortable to use just one metric in your tests, but doing so will make your optimization decisions so much easier!
- 6. Peep Laja @peeplaja Chief Conversion Architect at Markitekt / ConversionXL Start optimizing closer to the money—your actual gains in terms of revenue are going to be way bigger. Get your checkout flow to rock first, then cart page, then the product pages—so you slowly move further from the money. Leave your home page last: 20% up lift on your checkout page vs 20% uplift in your home page: checkout page win is gonna be way more absolute dollars.
- 7. Tommy Walker @tommyismyname Editor of ConversionXL.com I don't really have any top "tips" because I don't think it can be boiled down so simply. What I can say is that I think more businesses should be looking at the overall customer experience, both on a page-by-page basis, but also as a whole experience. This means the journey from PPC click to landing page, this means the trip from landing page to product page, product page to cart, etc. But this also means what happens after? What are the retargeting ads like? What are the reminder emails like? How do all of the pieces fit together to tell a larger narrative that is both personal & reward- ing? So, if I were to give a "tip" it would be to always be asking, "how can we make this a better experience?" Take nothing for granted, and always strive to make everything better.
- 8. Brian Massey @bmassey Conversion Scientist at Conversion Sciences LLC Everyone's doing CRO. Everyone who has a site, is running an ad, or is executing an email campaign is optimizing. All of these activities are done with the SOLE intention of getting someone out there to buy from us. The winners have one advantage: they are using more information for their day-to-day decisions. It's a considerable advantage. What is this "information" they have access to? It's talking to lots of custom- ers and noticing patterns. It's watching lots more customers through analytics. It's doing a test to see if an idea is good for the business. CRO is really about generating data—information—that tells a busi- ness owner what they should be doing. He who has the best data wins. How much data did you generate today?
- 9. Jeffrey Eisenberg @JeffreyGroks CEO of BuyerLegends.com Test more and test less—it's not a paradox. Most companies don't test nearly enough and those that test a lot often test lots of varia- tions. Test for impact first. Isolate the variables that matter by test- ing. Lots of traffic gets wasted on testing many variations of vari- ables that don't move the needle. Find out what does move the needle then test for variations. How do you know what matters? Develop your hypotheses using personas and buyer scenarios. Can you tell a story from your custom- ers' point of view where the variable seems to truly matter? Then test that! When you get good at this then test a whole lot more. The more smart tests you do the more you'll learn and the more you'll improve.
- 10. Oli Gardner @oligardner Co-founder of Unbounce If you’re an ecommerce site bidding on terms like “next day delivery,” please stop pushing me to your generic homepage. Instead send me to a landing page that confirms my search intent (next day delivery), and then—and *only* then—asks me to self-seg- ment by flower/chocolate/apology type. That would be a delightful wind of change.
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- 12. Linda Bustos @getelastic Director of ecommerce research at Elastic Path / GetElastic.com My top tip is to apply segmentation to your CRO, either before you run the test (exclude/include segments) or after when you analyze. The reason being that geography, referral source, referring keyword, new/returning visitor, device type, etc. can all have different conver- sion responses to a test, which may be more effective to target differently (depending on the test hypothesis). If you take the average lift and apply it to all segments, you may ac- tually be reducing results in one or more cohorts.
- 13. Keith Hagen @conversionIQ Co-Founder & Vice President Conversion at ConversionIQ People shopping online have no attention span, and compulsively (now habitually) skim and scan pages for cues to move forward." If you want to get their attention, you need to get in their way, not try to take them where you want them to go. Develop a new persona, call him Ferris the Ferret.
- 14. Bryan Eisenberg @TheGrok The Godfather of “CRO” Scott Cook, founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of Intuit, is a former Procter & Gamble veteran with exten- sive background in traditional product development, marketing and market research. He often shares how he has shifted his company to be more agile to deal with ever changing complexity that today's in- creasingly high paced and chaotic marketplace demands. He reminds executives that "the job of today's leader is to remove the barriers to experimentation." Work with your organization's team to come up with "leap of faith assumptions" and find "the evidence to support those assumptions with tests and experiments." If some- one so strongly rooted in traditional marketing methods can work hard to change their corporate metabolism and culture then there is still hope for every company out there, if they work at it.
- 15. Tiffany da Silva @bellastone Conversion rate optimization at Shopify Ask questions, listen to your customer and do things that don't scale. When I started my first affiliate site I was 9 years old and knew nothing about business. When I first started receiving sales I didn't stop to try to think why it was happening I immediately started emailing my cus- tomers and asking them why they chose my product. I didn't try to au- tomate it, I didn't take any shortcuts, I wrote each email personally. I learned that day that my site though tailored for women was being visited by men. I immediately changed the look and feel, tone and content to fit my market. Without taking the time to ask questions and talk to my customers I would have never gotten that product/market fit early on.
- 16. Andrew Youderian @youderian eCommerceFuel.com Founder & Store Owner It's easy to think that gorgeous design alone can help conver- sion—which isn't the case. Design is, of course, an important trust signal but understanding your customers and presenting them with a compelling offer / call to action is much more important. I've often made the mistake of thinking a pretty face lift will increase conversion when ultimately it was a clean, no-frills design and compelling message that was needed.
- 17. Michael Aargaard @contentverve Senior Optimization Consultant at ContentVerve.com / Atcore ApS Start with the end in mind and make sure your checkout experience is seamless. Every single visitor on your website has to go through your checkout flow in order to become a paying customer. At this point in the conversion process, every little lift equals more money in the bank.
- 18. Chris Goward @chrisgoward Founder & CEO of WiderFunnel For eCommerce retailers, a continuous testing strategy is critical for making great website decisions. If you’re just chasing after the so-called “best practices” from blogs, seminars and consultants, you could be making big mistakes that hurt your profit. For example, in testing the product page template for WineEx- press.com, we found layout and design changes that lifted revenue per visitor by 41%. In other words, before that test, they were missing that 41% revenue!
- 19. Rich Page @richpage Founder and CEO of Website Optimizer Don't just focus on improving the obvious ecommerce things like your shopping cart and product page, or copy case studies. Take a step back and really figure out your unique value proposition, in par- ticular the reasons why someone should use your site instead of your many competitor's sites, and then make sure you are clearly promot- ing this (never just presume your visitors know what it is!) This should be shown on your homepage in the form of short bullet points, and ideally a small version in your header or sidebar, so visi- tors will see and understand it no matter what page they arrive on. Another way to 'think outside of the box' is to ramp up your efforts to collect visitor emails and send autoresponders to bring them back to purchase. This works very well for service driven websites, but can also work well for ecommerce stores.
- 20. Angie Schottmuller @aschottmuller Director of Optimization, Three Deep Marketing Always accompany "what" with "why." From headlines to call-to-action (CTA) buttons to analytics reports, people generally care little about the "what" if the "why" remains unclear. Transform your features to benefits, your CTAs to specific value, and your data to actionable insights. "What" paired with "why" naturally paves a story that facilitates de- cision making for your customer and your business.
- 21. Karl Blanks Chairman and Co-Founder at Conversion Rate Experts Declutter. Not everything on your site will be helping conversions. Identify page elements that might be hurting conversions—or simply wasting visitors' attention—then test removing them, either with A/B split-tests or multivariate tests. "Decluttering tests" are easy to run because you don't need to create anything new.
- 22. Paras Chopra CEO of @Wingify Process, not Tactics! Working with hundreds of eCommerce customers on their A/B test- ing and optimization efforts, I have realised that having a process for increasing conversions gives a sustained competitive advantage. Many companies start with tactical A/B testing where they have cer- tain ideas of their own (say let's try adding a trust widget on check- out page, changing colors, shifting nav bar, etc.). They test these low hanging fruits in a few months and then they struggle to come up with more ideas. On the other hand, some companies start with a goal to increase conversions and then develop a process around it that involves user survey, analytics research, ideation, prioritisation, and execution. These are the companies that execute new tests every week and are able to optimize conversions effectively. @paraschopra
- 23. Download a FREE Case Study Today! Learn how to use email remarketing to of abandoned carts