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Then you should move on to the Quick Wins. These are the obvious things every Cart should be doing. And which are likely to have the biggest impact. And remember there are no rules, only guidelines, and even these propositions should be properly A/B tested as part of a Conversion Optimisation Process.

If you’ve already got the basics right, then you’ll want to skip to the next article in this series – a more detailed analysis of Cart conversion issues – coming soon!

1. Checkout Page Speed

This one often gets put to the side during Optimisation testing, because it’s not something that can be easily split tested.

However, there is plenty of data on the correlation between increased page speed on eCommerce sites and improved Conversion Rates. One data study indicates that a 1-second delay in load time could be costing you 7% in sales.

Guideline: Benchmark your site speed, and in particular your Cart and Checkout speed against your competitors, and ensure that you are competitive.

Read more about how to benchmark your eCommerce website against your competitors in our article series: Why eCommerce owners should care about site speed.

2. Remove general navigation from Checkout

There is almost universal support for the proposition that you should remove standard site navigation from the checkout funnel. If your site has standard navigation we suggest you A/B split test removing it as soon as possible.

Guideline: Use an Enclosed Checkout by removing the main site navigation and other non-checkout navigational elements from all steps after the cart step and until the Order Review step.

Why?

• It gets the shopper to focus purely on completing their purchase.
• It makes Information which gives the visitor confidence in their purchase more prominent, such as delivery details and customer service contact details.
• Security logos and messages are more visible, reassuring the shopper.
• Step-by-step checkout process makes it very clear how close the visitor is to completing their purchase.
• Customers can only head in one direction, towards the payment and order confirmation page.

In a case study from VeggieTales, the key performance indicator, Revenue Per Visit, was increased by 14% by removing the header navigation. And go check out the top eCommerce retailers around to see how they use Enclosed Carts.

You have to admire the distraction-free simplicity of ASOS checkout….

3. Re-directs and visual disconnects

This one is a conversion killer. Many smaller online stores use eCommerce platforms that redirect the shopper to a different domain during checkout.

Guideline: Keep visitors on the same security certificated and domain when the proceed to Checkout

If your checkout is on a different URL, or separate Security Certificate you need to carefully consider how this might be impacting how much visitors trust your site and their willingness to transact with you.

And while you are at it, carefully consider the kind of SSL certificate you use, as you want to one that will get you a GREEN tick with compatible browsers (EV Certified SSL).

4. Don’t fail at Step 1 – Allow Guest Checkout

Most people choose to shop online because it is convenient and easy. Adding items to their cart is generally pretty easy. But customers are often hit in the face when they go to Checkout. If you have good eCommerce Cart Abandonment tracking, you’ll realise that you lose a lot of customers at Step 1 of the Checkout.

There is no one best way to approach the Guest v New Account v Returning Customer conundrum. But there is one rule you should follow

Guideline: Always provide visitors with a ‘Guest Checkout’ option

And a bonus proposition:

Guideline: Make ‘Guest Checkout’ the most prominent option

In one case study a major US retailer replaced their Register button, with a Continue button and a message:

You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout

The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month.

Again we feature ASOS for best practice – you can’t miss that Continue to Checkout button!

As long as you don’t REQUIRE registration, you can look at a number of different ways to encourage registration during the Checkout. In most cases, the only real difference between a Guest and Registered customer is that you are saving their details for later. It makes a lot more sense to do that after they have committed to the sale.

5. Be upfront about all costs

No one likes surprises when it comes to fees. The fact that they’re hidden leaves a dirty taste in visitors’ mouth.

A 2016 survey by Baymard Institute of over 1000 site visitors across multiple eCommerce stores indicated that 24% of People Abandoned Checkout because in the words of the customers:  I couldn’t see “calculate total cost” upfront.

Guideline: Display the full order cost in the cart, including shipping and taxes, or at the least, a cost estimate that also specifies how the estimate is calculated.

Next steps

This article deals with just the Quick Wins in eCommerce Conversion Optimisation – what every cart should be doing! The 6 Guidelines in this article are just the start. If you have the basics in the bag, then the next article we’ll be more interesting for you – I’ll be looking at Checkout CRO in more detail, by reviewing some Australian Carts.

And if you are serious about getting more sales out of your existing site traffic, drop me a line and we can talk about how to implement a Conversion Optimisation program with guaranteed Revenue results. 

The post Quick Wins To Improve Your Shopping Cart Conversions appeared first on LiveSwitch.

Cart abandonment is where a visitor has added a product to your shopping cart and then for some reason does not proceed. It’s a measure of lost sales. Firstly let’s look at how you can work out what your Cart Abandonment Rate actually is, so we can see how eCommerce Conversion Optimisation can improve your sales. Even in the most basic eCommerce Reporting setup, you should be able to see your Cart Abandonment Rate. For example, in Magento, you’ll see this figure in Advanced Reports in Sales > Cart Abandonment.

In this screenshot, you can see weekly Abandonment Rate of between 80% and 85% with Abandonment of $1.54m over 4 week period.

No need to weep yet, as that $1.54m figure is not a real reflection of lost sales, as it’s impossible to have a 100% Cart Completion Rate. But is there room for improvement?

So what is this really costing you?

If you have inside knowledge of your industry you can get an inside picture of Cart Abandonment Rates to benchmark against. If not, you can start to look at some industry averages. Based on major surveys studies over the last two years, the average Cart Abandonment Rate is 73.47%

So in the example, above if we take the median Abandonment Rate at 81%, then a move to 74% (surveyed averages) would have a huge impact on sales – over $133,000 over a 4 week period, or $1.7m over a year.

Even a 1% change in Cart Abandonment would be worth almost $250k a Year.

What can you do to fix cart abandonment?

There are two main things you can do:

• Improve the Conversion Rate using Conversion Rate Optimisation – behavioural insights, data and A/B testing.
• Cart Abandonment Recovery – using onsite and offsite cart abandonment tools to recover drop-outs.

Shopping Cart Conversion Rate Optimisation

A large portion of cart abandonments are simply a natural consequence of how people use e-commerce sites – many visitors will be doing window shopping, price comparison, saving items for later, exploring gift options, etc. These are largely unavoidable cart and checkout abandonments, and probably represent around 60% of abandonments.

But what about the others?

1. Motivation Friction and Triggers

When you want to influence people’s behaviour, you can use this simple model.

Getting someone to complete a shopping cart checkout is no different.

• How can you increase Motivation and Reduce fears?
• How can you Reduce Friction, and make the checkout easier?
• How can you trigger people to take the next step?

The main difference in how you approach this, to a standard optimisation project, is that users have already shown a degree of motivation by adding the product to your cart, so Reducing Friction will be your main focus, and this means understanding all the friction points in your Cart.

2. Measuring friction in the Funnel

So if you are working on Reducing Friction, you need to get a strong understanding of where the frictions points are in your checkout process.

It is essential that you have a clear view of the dropout points in your checkout.

If you are using Google Analytics this means you should configure Enhanced eCommerce tracking. You can then see the dropouts at the various stages of the Funnel.

Your Cart Software can also display your Cart Funnel, depending on the Plugins and Reporting Modules you have installed. Best practice would be to track visitors, based on the sections of the Checkout they have completed so that even if you have a single page checkout, you can see at which stage in the form they are dropping out.

3. Experiencing friction in the Funnel

It’s all very nice to have the data, but there is nothing like EXPERIENCING your cart like a real customer. We highly recommend that you install customer journey video tracking software to get real insights into where customers are coming un-stuck and dropping out.

Note: We believe customer journey video tracking is a quicker and more effective way to get insights into your customer behaviour in your cart than controlled usability studies. Why? Because usability studies are done under artificial conditions and are task-based – they don’t reflect the different motivations and distractions the real customers feel. 

How you can fix the problem

Firstly, there is no one right answer to reducing friction. Instead based on your data, customer videos, and previous case studies, you should look for potential improvements to A/B test in a controlled Conversion Rate Optimisation process.

Secondly, you need to develop a Shopping Cart CRO process with clearly defined objectives, and an A/B testing plan where you can measure results in real $ revenue. The second article in this series will look at how to develop a Conversion Rate Optimisation process, and the most common Quick Wins to test.

The post Is your shopping cart bleeding sales? appeared first on LiveSwitch.

Cost Per Acquisition is the cost to you in direct advertising spend, for acquiring ACTION from a visitor. The term Cost Per Acquisition can be used a few different ways, so to clarify this article is focused on two models:

• Basic eCommerce – the cost for generating an actual eCommerce transaction.
• Lead Generation – the cost of acquiring contact information for a visitor interested in purchasing your product/services. Often used interchangeably with Cost Per Lead (CPL).

The other usages of CPA are in acquiring other ACTIONS eg. newsletter sign-ups, video, which we’ll talk about in another article.

1. Calculating Cost Per Acquisition (Basic eCommerce)

So here are 3 basic formulas you need to understand in any Conversion focussed campaign.

Adspend / $CPC = Traffic
Traffic x Conv. Rate % = Conversions
Adspend / Conversion = $CPA

Example:

• $5000 Adspend / $5.00 CPC = 1000 Visits
• 1000 Visits x 3% Conv. Rate = 30 Conversions
• $5000 Adspend / 30 Conversions = $166 CPA

We can simplify this even further by removing Adspend and Traffic because this simplification really gets to the nuts and bolts of improving your marketing campaigns.

$CPA = $CPC / Conv. Rate %

Example:

• $166 CPA = $5.00 / 3%

This simple model works perfectly for eCommerce, where the $CPA can now be directly compared with Revenue.

2. Calculating Cost Per Acquisition (Leads)

For leads based business, you should take it one step further, to take into account the conversions of those leads into sales. There are different terminologies used, but we prefer to keep it simple and use Cost Per Sale (CPS). If the sales team convert 1 in 3 Leads then the CPS is calculated like this:

$CPS = $CPA / Sales Conv. %

Example:

• $503 CPS = $166 / 33%

And in long form:

$CPS = $CPC / Website Conv. % / Sales Conv. %

Example:

• $503 = $5.00 / 3% / 33%

BreakEven (also called Allowable Acquisition Cost)

So that’s how we calculate the $CPA, but how do you work out how to set your maximum $CPA. The maximum $CPA should be set at a breakeven point. BreakEven can be either:

• Transaction BreakEven – a short-term transactional measure of the profitability
• Lifetime BreakEven – a longer term growth focussed break-even.

1. Calculating Transaction BreakEven

If you have one-off sales and no repeat business, the simplest formula for BreakEven is the profit on the average order.

AOV x Profit Margin % = Transaction BreakEven

Example:

• $300 x 30% = $90 Transaction BreakEven
• So, the example above doesn’t look good to spend $166 here? But see below….

We’ve left the profit margin very loose here because it’s somewhere between Gross and Operating Profit. So what should you use for your profit? It’s something like this

[Transaction] Profit = Revenue – Cost of Goods – Overhead

but taking into account that the Overhead is partly comprised of Fixed Costs. So if the fixed cost is already covered, then it can often be as simple as:

Gross Profit = Revenue – Cost of Goods

2. Customer Lifetime Value (Revenue)

BUT almost all business have repeat customers, so the value of a customer to the business is more than the first sale. A simple Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the total Revenue attributed to the customer over the lifetime. For service industries, it’s often a monthly contract value multiplied by the average number of months for a contract, based on retention rates.

CLV = AOV x Ave. Contract Term

For eCommerce or lead generation for products/services that are not on monthly contract, the CLV is based on the Average number of repeat transactions.

CLV = AOV x Ave. Repeat Transactions

It’s easiest to think of this as a Lifetime Multiplier eg. x3.0 (representing either average repeat transaction, or contract renewals).

Example:

• $900 CLV = $300 x 3.0

The above models are very simple. Calculating Customer Lifetime can involve complex financial modelling including discounting – see more information here: http://www.clv-calculator.com

Lifetime BreakEven (Profit)

If you know the Customer Lifetime Value, and the Profit Margin, it’s relatively

Lifetime BreakEven = CLV x Profit Margin %

Example:

• $270 Lifetime BreakEven = $900 x 30%

How to apply this to your marketing

So how should you use BreakEven’s to set your $CPA?

1. Paid Search and realistic $CPA bidding

The first thing to do is to take a realistic look at your Paid Search. If you have been using Transaction Breakeven for setting your $CPA in search, and wondering how your competitors are consistently outbidding you, one of the reasons could be that your competitors are taking a longer term view on acquisitions, and are prepared to bid above Transaction Break Even to get long term customers.

2. Conversion Optimisation

If you think your paid campaigns are already optimised, and yet your Cost Per Acquisition is still too high, the problem probably lies in your Conversion Rates. Remember the Cost Per Click is just one part of the equation.

$CPA = $CPC / Conv. Rate %

You need to look seriously at how to optimise your Conversion Rates – how to get more of the visitors to take action on your website. You can find out more about how to implement Conversion Rate Optimisation here.

The post How to workout your maximum Cost Per Acquisition appeared first on LiveSwitch.

If you missed part 1 or 2 they are here:

• Why eCommerce owners should care about site speed
• How to Benchmark your website performance

So assuming you have identified there your site is slow (against key competitors) what’s the next step?

1. What impact is this having on your business?

You can use Google Analytics to determine if there is a correlation between page speed and conversions.

This involves segmenting your traffic into Converters and Non-Converters and then looking at site speed to see what impact it is having.

You can also look for variations in site speed within a month, and compare Conversion Rates.

2. How site speed works

Firstly, I’m assuming you’re not a developer so here’s a quick overview of how your developer can work on speed optimisation.

Firstly there are two parts of site performance:

2.1 Front-end Browser

Your Front-End is how page and all its resources are shown by the browser. This includes delivery of the page content, images and javascript.

Images: Courtesy of GTMetrix

Back-end Website

How the site gets pushed out to your customer’s browser (for the Front-End to display) depends on your website’s Back-End – the server, hosting, and back-end code/database. This is just as critical as the front-end.

Images: Courtesy of GTMetrix

So is this a back-end or front-end problem?

Your developer can use the various tools discussed in the first article, as well as other diagnostic tests to determine this.

But a good starting point is to ensure that you eliminate Front-End issues early. This is because these are easy to identify. Basically, the Google PageSpeed and GTMetrix (YSlow) give you a Score for Front-End optimisation. If these scores are good – then focus on the Back-End. If these are bad, ask your developer what is involved in improving these, because there are often low-cost quick wins in fixing Front-End problems.

3. What Can I do To Improve My Site

This is a comparatively brief overview. This section is not for developers, it’s to arm you to see where you can get the best return on investment in optimising your site.

Front-End Optimisation

Google PageSpeed actually lists areas for improvement, that you can point your developer to.

I group these into three main categories:

1. Reduce code and compression: You should talk to your web developer, about what they have done, or can do to reduce the code overhead on your site, including compression, JavaScript optimisation and minimising the HTML.
2. Browser caching: Code changes to allow the browser to reuse code that has already been downloaded to the browser, without having to re-download.
3. Optimise your images: Tests show that particularly on image heavy sites, reducing your file size by 5-10% can speed your site up significantly. Often initial builds of websites are optimised, but as other people get involved, including designers, and your staff updating products, poorly compressed images are used. There are a number of tools for optimising images (including automated compression) which can make a big difference to site load times.

Back-End Optimisation

Back-End optimisations are not as easy to identify. Resolution of problems involve:

1. Server Caching (Page Caching): Because eCommerce pages are a combination of design templates, assets, and product information pulled from a database, it takes time for a server to assemble each page. A page cache builds the page once, and send that “pre-built” version to anybody that requests it. Most eCommerce systems have options or plugins for page caching. Has your developer been active in choosing the most efficient?
2. Hosting: Have you considered the Cost / Benefits Analysis of better or dedicated hosting? If paying an extra $300 per month resulted in 5% more sales would that be stack up as a good ROI? 
3. Content Display Networks: A CDN is actually a network of servers distributing the same sites based on geographic locations. Your site is cached on servers located all around the world and served to your customer based on whichever server he is closest too. For example, if your CDN has servers in Melbourne and Sydney, your Sydney customers would be served the site from the Sydney servers and the Melbourne ones from Melbourne.
4. Prioritise Above the Fold Content: You can improve the experience of your users by having above the fold content (the top of the page) load faster, even if the rest of the page continues to load in the background. Talk to your developer about how you might achieve this.
5. External code calls: Get your developer to check external plugins like social share icons and tags are not slowing down the load times. Tags can be consolidated using Google Tag Manager for better performance.
6. Code Optimisations and Plugins: Code optimisation involves analysing the code and database queries and finding the spots where the code is inefficient and fixing those problems. In Magento or other eCommerce systems this may involve upgrading to most recent versions, and/or a review of Plugins.

3. Next steps

Go ahead do some speed benchmarking against competitors. You’ll also get some insights into quick wins from Google PageSpeed and GTMetrix, that will enable you to start a conversation with your developer. Then you need to way up the costs of the potential solutions against the Conversion Optimisation benefits.

The post How to fix page speed for better conversions (part 3 – eCommerce Conversion) appeared first on LiveSwitch.

The college wanted to increase the attendance at their Open Day. Because the Open Day is on campus in Leura, in the Blue Mountains attendance is no casual “drop in” for a prospective student. They need to be motivated to get on the train or drive to the Blue Mountains.

The school had an existing campaign landing page which they recently updated with new branding and imagery reflecting the school’s position in the Torrens University umbrella. While the imagery is strong we could see a number of opportunities to increase the sign-up conversions. Getting sign-ups is important because this allows the client to send reminders, and market to prospective students even if they don’t turn up on the day. And the psychological commitment of saying Yes is likely to increase the likelihood of attending.

Hypothesis

We were confident that we could get more potential students to sign-up to attend Open Day. While organic site traffic was being sent to a landing page on the website, to create a valid split test, we had the opportunity to test our proposed improvements, using traffic sourced from multiple paid channels. We split the traffic from both Facebook and Google 50/50 between the control landing page and the improved version.

This the original landing page vs the new landing page.

While visually they may appear very similar, there are important differences in how the new page is constructed to increase conversions.

The results

The new landing page increased the conversion rate by 98%, when tested against exactly the same traffic channels (Facebook and SEM) over the same time period, cutting the Cost Per Attendee by close to half. Given that the opportunity to convert committed attendees to actual students is high (conversion rates are commercially confident) the test was taken as having a significant effect on bottom line revenue, and a wider rollout of conversion focussed landing pages is underway.

Analysis of why the campaign was so successful

Our process

We used the BRAIN framework to identify where improvements could be made.

By reviewing the Motivation, Triggers and Friction in a structured framework we identified the following areas for testing (colour coded).

Value Proposition

The client understood their Customer Value Proposition but we saw room for clarification of the CVP to focus on the key differentiators from their competitors.

Key Questions: What is your college’s customer value proposition? Why should someone choose you instead of all other options available to them?  
Hint: If your answer is “because we are the best” or something similar then you need to dig deeper. How are you the best? Can you prove to a user you are the best? Consumers inherently ignore such claims as they have heard it all before.

Authority and Social Proof

The original headline referred to the Blue Mountains as the No 1 Hotel School in Asia Pacific. But where’s the proof? People tend to ignore broad statement such as “best” or “number 1” unless you give Reasons to Believe. We took the underlying proof and highlighted that the school was No 1 to the people who count to you as a student – your potential employers – Managers in Luxury Hotels. And we used the strong brand of the client’s hospitality partners to create a halo effect for the client.

Key Questions: Are you using SALT (social proof, authority, liking and trust) to support your value propositions? How can you leverage the authority of other brands? 

Message Alignment

We use specific language to align with the student audience including taking some of the more formal language and making it more accessible. Who can resist a free lunch?

Commitments

We reduce the Friction points to complete the form, by carefully reviewing each request in form. 

Key Questions: Is this form field really necessary? Is there an easier way to get information that would serve the same purpose? What are you asking your visitors to do on your site? Is it too high an ask? Are there smaller commitments you can ask from them that will still get them in the sales pipeline and guide them through the journey quicker?

For example, we changed the original requirement for an address to a simple postcode – a substantial reduction in the effort required by the visitor.

Read more about how you forms could be killing your conversions in our Are you in Bad Form? article.

Scarcity

We provided small nudges for visitors to take action now before it’s too late – while they are still “warm” and engaged. 

While the counter had a long countdown at commencement, it still operates to induce sub-conscious FOMO (fear of missing out). 

What you can do

For a lot of marketing managers, It can be difficult to tie all these concepts together into a process that leads to more sales for your university or college. That’s why we’ve made it easy for you. For a cheatsheet visual guide to creating an effective landing page get in contact and we can email one to you.

The post Case Study: How Blue Mountains Hotel School Increased Leads for Open Day by 98% appeared first on LiveSwitch.

If you missed part 1 – it’s here: Why eCommerce owners should care about site speed

So is your site slow?

Actually this depends on a number of different factors including:

• How competitive is the specific market for your online store?
• What are your eCommerce traffic sources? For example site speed will be more critical for your end-of-funnel traffic who are looking to transact.
• What are the pages that you are testing (e.g. product pages / shopping cart pages)?

A good starting point is to to benchmark pages-types against your competitors

Why? Because different markets have different tolerances to site speed. Even in one market, there will be big differences between segments. In fashion retail, visitors to a unique boutique may be OK waiting for high quality images of beautiful people and products to load. But what about visitors to a fashion retailer selling multiple brands? How long would you wait on ASOS for a page to load to buy Nike trainers, when you know you can get them at The Iconic or Nike Store, in 2 clicks?

How to benchmark your site

I’m assuming you have developer/maintenance person you are going to talk to about speed issues. So the point of benchmarking is to empower you to have sensible discussions with them about how the site is performing. Different tools test different aspects of the your online store page load (server, front-end etc). You don’t need to understand these too much – your developer will be able to dig in further. These are the leading tools:

1. Google PageSpeed Insights – used by Google as one indicator in its ranking algorithm, so a good starting point. This tool doesn’t show site speed in seconds, but indicates whether it considers speed optimisations have been done. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
2. Pingdom – gives a reasonable estimate of real world page experience times. You can set your tests to run from different locations including Melbourne (unlike most free tools which run from US/Europe). https://tools.pingdom.com/
3. GTMetrix – combines Google PageSpeed and another speed tool called YSlow. The tools also gives an indicative time in seconds for a fully loaded page. Fully loaded means the page has fully loaded including all content below the fold. So this data is useful for your developer but does NOT represent real world experience, which is when a users can see and use content above the fold. (It also tests speed from Canada only on free version) – https://gtmetrix.com/
4. WebPageSpeedTest – Detailed data your developer/maintenance person can review. You can also run from various location, although we experienced problems on some pages which block the tool (403 error) http://www.webpagetest.org/

For testing real experiences that may impact the return on investment on your Paid Search, I suggest you first do a Google search for an exact product your online shop sells, so you can test the relative experience of a visitor with intent to purchase. For example we searched for AirMax shoes (see above) and then picked two eCommerce product pages to compare.

I suggest you create a table like this and share it with your developer:

Things to think about when benchmarking

1. One of the things you will notice is the impact of location where tests are performed from. So while NIKE looks better on GTMetrix, tests run on default server from Canada, the Pingdom result from Melbourne gives a 2 second faster load time to ASOS.
2. These tests are done against a random landing page only. To understand your customer’s journey better you also need to consider the site speed for the next steps, especially the Shopping Cart and Checkout. You can get more data about your client’s experience  from your Google Analytics.
3. Remember the purpose of this is not to fully diagnose the problems – most of these will be fairly technical, but to give yourself an idea of how you stand in the marketplace, and no single tool gives you a clear picture.

Testing for real experience (real user monitoring)

Once you embark on improving your eCommerce Store performance, you can use more accurate tools to test your improvements, but also to assist with analysis of where problems might lie. Real User Monitoring is an approach to web monitoring that analyses all (or a sample) of visits to your website, and requires installing some code on your site.

One of the key tools you probably already have at your disposal is Google Analytics. I’ll talk more about how you can use Google Analytics to help diagnose speed problems that may be impacting your sales, in the 3rd article in this series.

Next

In the next article I’ll provide we’ll look at specific action you can take to improve your website performance to get higher conversions.

The post How slow is your website? (part 2 – eCommerce Conversion) appeared first on LiveSwitch.

This is why should you care about site speed.

If you site speed is slow:

• It is costing you online sales (guaranteed!) through lower conversions rates. (I’ll talk about how much impact in the next article).
• Slow site speed affects your Google Search rankings, so is having a negative impact on your traffic.
• Site speed is critical to your mobile visitors, which is most cases will be more than 50% of your visitors, and if you are actively marketing on Facebook will be 75% upwards of your Facebook traffic.

Slow sites cost sales

We know that slow page speed has a direct hit on your Revenue Bottom Line, from a number of sources:

Exit surveys

You’ll find a number of substantial customer surveys on the web, where customers say straight up they have abandoned a website due to slow speed.

The most substantial survey is A QuBit survey of 60 000 customers across 80 websites used Exit Feedback popup, they were asked to comment on their experience at the point of leaving a site. Of those surveyed, 8% cited slow loading pages as the key reason for leaving the site.

And bear in mind that that this only the conscious impact. Smaller difference site speed may not even rise to the the conscious mind, instead they sub-consciously add to cart abandonment due to “general annoyance”. Visitors would rather spend excessive time browsing for the information elsewhere than waiting a few seconds for the right website to load – if you have ever jumped from a slow queue on the freeway I’m sure you know the feeling.

Correlation data

Other published studies have focussed on cross-checking page speed load time against conversions.

Glasses Direct, an online glasses retailer, measured the impact of average paid-load time a user experienced to their likelihood to convert on the site and found a significant correlation.

The conversion rate peaked at about two seconds, dropping by 6.7% for each additional second.

That means a 1 second delay in load time could be costing you 7% in sales.

You can analyse your own Google Analytics data to get an idea of the correlation between page load times, and Conversions.

Before and After Case Studies

The clearest indicator of site speed impact on Conversion, are before and after tests. These case studies look at Conversion Rates after a site has had speed performance optimisation.

AutoAnything increases sales by 13%

AutoAnything was determined to address their performance challenge. They initially had a home page load time of up to 10 seconds and a high shopping cart abandonment rate. Knowing they wanted to create a premium shopping experience with an image-rich website and fast-loading pages, AutoAnything implemented additional optimisations to cut their page load time in half. This resulted in a 9% increase in conversion rate, an 11% increase in average ticket size, and a 13% increase in sales.

Adore Beauty increase checkout sales by 16.5%

Adore (a leading beauty website) improved page speeds by 2 seconds, resulting in 16.1% increase in pageviews, 9.4% increase in product page views, 15.5% increase in checkout page views and 16.5% increase in checkout success rate.

Fusion Retail increases Conversions by 30%

A leading clothing brands retailer, implemented page speeds improvements to increase cut page load times by 46%, resulting in increased sales of 30%.

Obama’s donation page

Obama’s fundraising campaign during the 2011 Presidential Elections raised an additional $34 million when the Obama for America website reduced page load time from 5 seconds to 2 seconds – a 14% increase in donation conversion.

Google Search Results

Google has included site speed in its search rankings since 2010 when it announced:

As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

It might not be a major factor and we still see varying impact of site speed based on user intent. But for transactional eCommerce sites (which Google can identify!) there are indicators that site speed is more important than for other non-transactional sites.

The impact on ranking isn’t just Google directly measuring site speed, but the flow on that slower site speed has on other metrics that Google uses to assess what Moz Search Ranking Factors (a leading SEO data survey) calls:

User Usage & Traffic/Query: Data SERP engagement metrics, clickstream data, Visitor traffic/usage signals, quantity/diversity/CTR of queries, both on the domain and page level

Mobile Experiences

As we usually experience our own website from the desktop, it’s only natural to forget how much traffic actually comes from mobile devices. If you actively marketing on Facebook, expect 75%+ of your traffic to be mobile.

Like most eCommerce site owner’s you’ve probably notice big differences between your desktop and mobile conversion rates, and put it down to different user intent.

But don’t discount the impact of site speed on your mobile visitors – they will be far less tolerant of load times, particularly as they are already dealing with a slower 4G connection.

What you can do

In the next article in this series we answer the question of How slow is slow? And show you how to quickly benchmark your site speed against competitors.

The post Why eCommerce owners should care about site speed (part 1 – eCommerce Conversion) appeared first on LiveSwitch.

10 ways to boost sales by improving your lead capture form

What would your business be like if you were to get 10% or even 20% more leads? What if you were to able to do this without actually paying for more traffic to your site? We often see businesses investing a significant amount of time, effort and budget into attracting visitors to their site, only to lose them at the final hurdle – the contact form.

The point is, getting people to visit your site is an expensive exercise. And the more engaged your visitors are with your website the more valuable they are to you. Think about it this way – a first time visitor who has just landed on your website is worth the cost of the click – what’s that, between $3 – $30? But what about the visitor who has spent 5 minutes on your site, read all about your services, and decided to get in contact – what are they worth now – $30 – $300? So, it’s safe to assume you are actively engaging your time and energy to ensure your forms are performing at their peak, right? …

Well this article will challenge you to put aside your “get more traffic” mantra and instead help you to create more leads with the traffic you already have.

There are three main components to consider when improving the power of your lead generation form.

1. Fix the layout of your forms – make them simple and easy to use.
2. Cut the fat – get rid of stuff you don’t need!
3. Finally, reduce confusion and anticipate any concerns your visitors have.

Here’s 10 easy tips you can implement today to improve the performance of your contact form.

Fix the layout of your forms

1. Remove anything that has the potential to distract the user

Up until this point, you will have tried to make the user’s journey to this destination as attractive and accessible as possible – simple copy, creative design, clear messaging, easy click-through, low commitment actions… so it’s important at this critical stage to KISS (KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID). Remove anything that has the potential to distract or detract from your call-to-action. Things like banners, icons, links or product messages are all distractions from the main goal.

SimCity saw phenomenal results after A/B testing removing product banner at point of purchase. After removing the banner, which communicated a special offer, the conversion rate spiked by 43% as result of the simplified layout and clear CTA. And when you think about it, it makes sense, giving users less choice to click, means more chance to convert to a lead.

2. Avoid horizontal form layouts at all cost

Research shows that users are far more accustomed to scrolling vertically to fill out fields, as opposed to tracking across the page. A horizontal form layout will present a higher barrier to completion so keep it simple – avoid horizontal forms, or at least A/B test them! Arenaturist.com, a leading hotel booking and resort chain in Croatia, A/B tested this theory and found their conversion rate was 52% higher with a vertical form layout.

3. Keep multi-column layouts to a minimum

It’s also best to keep your form to just one column. Why? Research shows that multi-column layouts significantly increase the completion time of the form, which in turn can lead to a higher drop-off rate. This increased completion time is as a result of users inconsistently interpreting the layout of the fields; if you think about it, this makes perfect sense! It is far easier to simply navigate down the page, rather than taking the time to connect the fields with corresponding information. Again, it’s all about making the contact form as simple as possible to ensure we are maximising our conversion rate.

Just look at this example of a real Customer Journey Video from one of our clients. You can sense the frustration of the user, jumping around trying to get this form completed. Perseverence required.

Get rid of stuff you don’t need

4. Keep your required fields to a minimum

Well this is an obvious one, but often overlooked! The less amount of information you require on your contact form makes it easier and less invasive for your user to complete. Essentially, you are removing barriers to completion with every field you exclude from your contact form. Consider including only the critical information you need in order to achieve the objective of the form itself.

An airport carpark service in Edinburgh, Flying Scot, did just that and the results spoke for themselves – 45.45% increase in users moving to the next stage of the booking process, and a staggering 35% increase in overall conversions.

These results make it clear that not only was the business requesting unnecessary information that was not actively contributing to the objective of the form (securing a booking), but in fact these required fields were creating a significant barrier to completion and hindering sales.

So ask yourself, do you really need all the fields on your lead capture form? Can any of this information be moved off the form, and captured by your sales staff?

5. Consider changing standard form elements to visual

Remember, users are time poor and filling out a lengthy contact form is often a challenging step to overcome. If something is unclear or not easily understood within seconds, a higher drop-off is likely to occur. Put simply, your form is moved to the visitors “‘too hard basket” within milli-seconds.

The good news is, humans typically find it a lot easier to comprehend visual communication. Well “a picture can say a thousand words” – quite literally, the human brain can comprehend an image, icon or button, quicker than they can read, digest and action a body of text.

Soccerloco put this theory to the test, replacing text and radio buttons with visual button icons. After split testing, they confirmed a 26% increase in conversions using a more visual contact form.

6. No CAPTCHA’s, ever!

Do you really want to make it harder for your customers to get in contact with you? While it’s easy to see the value in a CAPTCHA from a business point of view, it’s also important to consider the disadvantage of this field from a consumer’s point of view. A CAPTCHA can imply a risk of software viruses, creating an immediate barrier to completion for the user.

And they’re actually hard to complete! In one study 38% of people failed to complete a CAPTCHA first time. And from there things get even worse. 80% of second attempts fail!

There is plenty of evidence that removing CAPTCHAs increases conversions.

• When Reddit removed CAPTCHA from its signup process they saw an 8% increase in sign-ups.
• Animoto – a video creation app, A/B tested removing the CAPTCHA and saw a 33% increase in conversion rate.

So unless you have a sign-up service where SPAM is a seriouis problem, it’s best to avoid using CAPTCHAs. Or at the very least, taking the time to evaluate the risk vs. gain ratio, and consider alternative methods for spam reduction.

Reduce confusion and anticipate concerns

7. Use micro-copy to alleviate concerns and reduce risk

A great way to alleviate concerns for your user is to use micro-copy. Micro-copy is small instructions, or notes next to your form fields to help explain certain elements to users. It’s a simple process of anticipating your users’ concerns and alleviating them with a pre-empted explanation that resolves the issue. This is a great way to reduce the concern associated with providing personal information on the contact form, allowing the site to explain why it is required and how it will be used. Providing the user with this sense of security at point of conversion is a powerful tool to getting them over that final hurdle.

And interestingly, even explanations that “state the obvious” can increase conversions. For example a Harvard University experiment showed that people are more compliant when given a “reason” even if the reasons are self-evident. In that experiment, psychologist Ellen Langer asked three different variations of a single request to people using a photocopier. First, she asked “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” 60% allowed her to go ahead of them. When Langer was more specific and asked, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” the rate of compliance jumped up to 94%. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. What may is the third request: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?”

The take-home, don’t be afraid to state the obvious when asking people for information!

8. Avoid using ‘Text in field’

While this is a great idea from a design point-of-view, and certainly a means of keeping the form ‘clear and clutter-free’ (best intentions assumed), this is actually creating more of a barrier than most of us realise. The problem is the text normally disappears from the moment you put your cursor in the field, leaving the user trying to remember what information they were supposed to input here. This can easily create confusion and deter the user from completing the field.

9. Make your form validation work for you (not against you)

To make the final stages of your conversion funnel work harder, it is best practice to validate the data in line with the fields and in real-time, as soon as the user tabs or clicks out of the field. Ultimately, this will mean a quick and easy process for the user to comply with formatting and mandatory information requests.

Think about it, there is nothing worse than having to re-input information over and over again as result of data entry errors. Remember to be clear when communicating the error to make it as easy as possible to user to amend and submit.

And think carefully about what validation formats you are using. One common error is validating phone numbers, requiring people to only insert numbers and no dashes or spaces.

What a pain for your customers!

10. Check mobile compatibility

Last but not least – make your form mobile responsive! Check your own Google Analytics and you’ll find that 40-60% of your traffic is mobile! So consider the small-screen experience for your user, allowing for touch-screen compatibility means an improved customer experience for those on the go!

The post Are you in bad form? appeared first on LiveSwitch.

AIM is Australia’s leading music college with campuses in Sydney and Melbourne. They offer qualifications in music composition, production, acting and audio engineering.

The college wanted to increase the leads generated from their Paid search campaigns. With a healthy Adwords budget the college had reached the maximum search impression share for their highly relevant keywords. To increase their leads it required a focus on getting more results from the traffic they were already getting.

There was also a belief it took on average 3 months from the time a student initially checked AIM out on the web to the time it took for them to actually make up their mind and apply.

Hypothesis

 We suspected that we could get more potential students to enquire and in a shorter time frame than was the current norm. To test this hypothesis we narrowed our testing down to one department and one targeted AdWords campaigns. We focused in on potential students that were interested in studying audio engineering.

Below is a screenshot of the original landing page  vs the New Landing page.

       v       

The results

The new landing page increased the conversion rate by a staggering 360%. A substantial increase to say the least.

I was blown away….

AIM has ambitious growth targets so I was sceptical and wanted to trial on specific campaigns first. But I was blown away by the increase in conversion rates – for some Campaigns we are getting 3 times the student leads. I didn’t think it was possible.

Richard and his team know what they are doing, and I’ll be rolling out additional landing pages, as well as conversion optimisation on the main site for next term.

Adam

Marketing Manager, Australian Institute of Music

Analysis of why the campaign was so successful

The problem

AIM offers several Audio engineering courses: Diplomas, Degrees, Postgraduate and short courses.  It was difficult to  identify the users intent with a lot of the search terms that users used to find the page eg. “study audio engineering” and “audio engineering courses”.

As such the original landing page was an all encompassing gateway page where users could navigate to the course level that they were interested in.

I’m just Browsing thanks.

People use websites because they don’t want to talk to people. The same reason why many of us queue at the self service checkouts in the supermarket even when there is no queue at a staffed checkout.

People love buying clothes at Westfield. But they hate talking to the salesperson. I don’t know about you but I try to avoid interaction with the salesperson and often walk in the opposite direction from them in the store so that I can be left alone. No meaningless small talk, thank you!

Bearing this in mind visitors on your site want to gain information but often are reluctant to complete a form because that inherently means they will have to deal with a salesperson via phone call or email.

As a business you want them to contact your sales teams so that you can demonstrate how your service will meet their needs and help them overcome any objections they may have.

This is where you need to hit the Persuasion Sweet Spot

To hit the sweet spot you need to give enough to your visitors to build trust and desire. But not too much that they don’t reach out and and engage with your sales team.  Below are some examples of how we achieved this for the AIM paid search campaign.

The Paradox of choice

The original landing page had too many choices. The paradox of choice is a concept by American Psychologist Barry Schwartz. If you give people too many options they often do nothing. The original landing page had a plethora of links for a user to get lost in.

The winning landing page removed all navigation and provided a couple of key points on each course, without overloading the user with too much info.

Key Questions: Do you have too much happening on your key pages? Can users easily find the information relevant to them without getting lost in too many options? 

Displaying the  unique selling points of AIM

The original landing page actually had some great unique points of difference. The only problem that they were hidden in a video tucked to the side.

The winning landing page addressed this by making this video more prominent and adding a few bullet points alongside it.

Key Questions: What is your college’s unique selling point? Why should someone choose you instead of all other options available to them? (including the option of doing nothing at all).
Hint: If your answer is “because we are the best” or  something similar then you need to dig deeper. How are you the best? Can you prove to a user you are the best?  Consumers inherently ignore such claims as they have heard it all before.

Reducing the ask of the visitor

The original landing page’s goal was to get a user to Apply Now. This is a big emotional commitment for someone who has just landed on the page for the first time. It implies that they have made their mind up on what course they want to do and that they have decided to do it with AIM.

As it turns out, the the potential student still has to be interviewed and auditioned to see if they will be accepted. Bearing this in mind we changed the wording from Apply Now  to Check Your Eligibility.

The psychological implication of Checking Your Eligibility is that a visitor hasn’t necessarily committed to this course nor have they committed to studying with AIM. It is a less scary commitment. In short, don’t ask someone to marry you before you have asked them out on the first date. In practice the visitor still provides the same information as they did before and quality of the lead is still high.

Key Questions: What are you asking your visitors to do on your site? Is it too high an ask? Are there smaller commitments you can ask from them that will still get them in the sales pipeline and guide them through the journey quicker?

Micro commitments

In Robert Cialdini’s book “Influence” he talks about commitments. Once we take a small step to a goal we are more likely to take the second step. Sales people know this. This is why they try and get you to say Yes several times before they attempt to close the sale.

It is why car salespeople try to get you to say Yes to a test drive before they try to get you to say Yes to a sale.

On the AIM landing page we implemented this concept through the use of a two step form. The form fields in the first step were non threatening questions with no personally identifiable questions that tied in with the Call to Action (CTA) of Check Your Eligibility.

Once the visitor submits their answers in the first step they are taken to Step Two which asks for their personal details. Because they have already committed to filling in the first part of the form they were much more likely to complete the second part.

Key Questions: What small commitment can you get a visitor to take before you ask them to provide their personal details? How can you break down your main goal into smaller steps?

Scarcity/Urgency

All of us love to delay a decision. Especially a big life altering decision. So imagine how easy it must be for a teenage school leaver to delay their application for university. People need to be given a recent to act now.

• Groupon know this: Buy this super deal now as it is gone tomorrow.
• Amazon knows this. Buy now as there is only 1 left in stock.

Unfortunately many education providers don’t implement this. For AIM we gave visitors a reason as to why they need to Act Now. We used a countdown timer that was set to the cut off time for application. Visitors were given a real reason as to why they had to take action right then before it was too late.

Surprisingly enough as the date drew closer there wasn’t an exponential increase in conversion rate. Implying that having the countdown timer on the page even if the closing date is still a considerable time away was still generated enough FOMO (fear of missing out) to get people to action then and there.

In Addition we added urgency to the main call to action button,  Check if I Qualify Now. Telling people that they need to act now has consistently shown an increase in conversions for our clients in A/B split tests.

Key Questions: How can you imply a sense of urgency to your visitors? Does the copy and call to actions on your site communicate a need for a visitor to act now?

What you need to do now

For a lot of marketing managers It can be difficult to tie all these concepts together into a process that leads to more sales for your university or college. That’s why we’ve made it easy for you. For a cheatsheet visual guide to creating an effective landing page click on the button below.

The post Case Study: How the Australian Institute of Music increased their sales leads while reducing their costs. appeared first on LiveSwitch.