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Okay, we’ve talked about return policies, shipping policies, landing pages, improving your sales copy, and getting rid of registration pages.
By now, you might be thinking about changes, maybe even a redesign. It’s important, however, to use all the tools at your disposal to make sure your changes are right for your customer and business.
I was reading June’s Twitter feed to follow her coverage of eMetrics. I was struck by her Tweet that eBay uses qualitative data to plan a redesign and quantitative to confirm.
That got me thinking about…
Ecommerce Tip #6 - Test Your Redesigns
In a magical marketing world, we’d have all the info about what our customers want/need to purchase and ego would never be a part of the design process.
In reality, insight is imperfect and sporadic. Creative, marketing and the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) often cloud the process and lead to sub-optimal sites. Instead, I’d like to propose a new way to plan your website redesign.
I’m breaking this into 4 parts:
- Assess
- Listen
- Redesign
- Experiment
1. Assess Your Current Website
Knowing where to redesign starts with assessing your current website for weaknesses. Often, this begins with web analytics and business outcomes.
Business outcomes are straightforward: are you meeting your goals or not? If your forecasting and planning are reasonable (and that’s a big if), you can get a quick read of whether you need to reallocate budget among tactics or squeeze more performance out of your site.
Assuming you’ve already audited your acquisition tactics for areas to improve, then the gap could be in the persuasive ability of your site. Traditional web analytics can help you see, among many other things:
- Where people are dropping out in the conversion process
- How far people explore after landing pages (if at all)
- Pages with above and below average contribution to sale, lead, etc.
The goal here is to start to identify some of the major barriers in your site. That will allow you to identify key goals for the redesign.
2. Listen To Your Customers
Assessing your website will help you prioritize the areas you need to redesign, i.e. the “what”. To dig deeper into the source of the trouble, you’ll need some qualitative data. With VOC, you can help uncover the “why” behind barriers to sale. This should help you plan smarter redesigns.
Getting at this data takes time and resources. You can work from readily available local knowledge to more resource intensive external information.
There are 3 good sources of information:
- Marketing Input
- Best Practices
- Custom Qualitative Data
1. Marketing Input
Depending on how large your company is, the marketing team might have access to demographic and pyschographic data about your target customers. Any primary research, such as focus groups, can help you get into the minds of your consumer. Competitive insight, which sites are winning and why, and positioning make it easier to map out where your site is strong and weak.
2. Best Practices
If you’re short on budget and time (and who isn’t?) or your site is small, then you can often get a lot of great ideas from external best practices. Marketing Sherpa regularly publishes guides and emails newsletters with specfic examples. I also subscribe to Ad Age Digital, iMedia Connection, Harvard Business School’s newsletter, and MarketingNPV among others.
Conferences like eMetrics, ad:tech, and Search Engine Strategies can be a good crash course in a particular channel. They are, however, more time and resource consuming. For snippets of advice on a more timely basis, stock your reader with blogs (subscribe to Digital Alex). If you’re looking for recs for a specific blog on a particular topic, leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you.
3. Custom Qualitative Data
For those willing to invest a bit more time and/or money, the sky’s the limit. You can do custom usability research on your site (read this first). Site surveys can help you get at the “why” of visitors. Avinash and iPerceptions put together 4Q, a free tool worth checking out.
You might already have qualitative data at the ready. If you have call centers or regularly collect customer satisfaction data, check for website comments. It’s not always the most respresentative sample, but one complainer is probably equivalent to 5 people who were upset, but didn’t complain.
3. Redesign Your Website
Now for the fun part! Not being a creative guy, I have no tips for redesign mastery. I will say this: egos are bound to flare, opinions will differ and someone will have to make the call.
The ultimate judge of what matters is the customer, naturally. If you have different concepts or assets for particular pages, don’t kill them during the redesign process. Instead, use the qualitative data about your customers to prioritize the best ideas.
Bake your key ideas and questions into the design process. Start thinking now about the different forms, treatments, images and copy that can fuel your test. Crystallize your key questions and assumptions.
4. Launch an Experiment!
Sadly, most experimentation is conducted well after a site has launched. Webmasters start optimizing when the dust settles and all of the acquisition tactics are moving along. But, how much money could you be leaving on the table with a sub-optimal site? Isn’t it better to fail and learn faster?
A/B and multivariate testing now accessible to everyone with the free Google Website Optimizer. Granted, it has plenty of limitations. It’s better to start early and grow into more sophisticated tools.
There are some obvious pages to test:
- Checkout process
- Any registration page, such as email signu
- Promotion deals - shipping, % off, etc.
- Landing pages (focus on the channels that cost the most money)
And that’s it! Now you’re on the path to better site design focused on customers. What are your favorite tips for site redesign? Any lessons learned?
PS: Sorry for the delay in this ecommerce tip. Hopefully the clip art eases the pain :-)
