Web Design And Marketing

Good ecommerce retailers are constantly trying to figure out ways to increase their conversion rate. If you are wondering what the bad ones do, well they just focus on getting traffic to the site. Understanding your conversion rate, and testing ways to increase it is a core fundamental of eccommerce success. So I always look at case studies and articles that experiment with conversion rates.

Recently Marketing Sherpa, released a case study “Shopping Cart Design Tests - Color & Size Lift Results 44.11%” that looks at how color and size changes impact conversion rates. The test site was an office supply site and its shopping cart buttons were all light blue and the same size and shape. The site heavily used cross sell pages between the “add cart” action and the payment page. So the site really needed to test its entire process.

What did they find? They found that a red “Buy Now” button increased conversions by 4.03%. The found that a “Select quantity” button in green easily beat the current light blue color. And interestingly enough, they found that the existing light blue button was the best version of the shopping cart button on the cross sell page.

The most interesting item in the case study, is the eye popping 44.11% increase in conversion rate when they used “Proceed to Checkout” instead of “Add to Cart”, and “Proceed to Cart” out performed “Add to Cart” by 21.8%. I would never have guessed these results. In fact, I can see myself fighting these changes. However, the data is there, and you can’t fight the data.

The biggest take away, different colors had different impacts at different stages. So the same color may not produce the same result across all stages of the sales funnel.

So what do you do with this information? Form your own tests. DO NOT just run out and change everything to red. If you are tight on resources, just A/B test one thing at a time. Try switching out the “Buy Now” button with a different color and compare the results. It sounds tedious, but proper testing is important when trying to optimize your conversion rate.

Have you had similar experiences with color changes, or simple button changes?

Filed by admin at 8:38 am under Conversion Rates
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OK, so how can you increase your conversion rate? Here is one example of how I was able to increase conversion rates by .5% (this was a 50% increase in sales for this particular website) with this simple test method.

AS an FYI, I always take Monday morning’s to evaluate conversion rates. I do this because any significant decreases will now be my priority for the week to fix. If you can, try and set aside an hour every Monday AM (first thing) to evaluate your web sites metrics. Things like visits, visitor paths, referrers , conversion rates, etc. This one habit helped increase my success rate significantly because it provided the focus that I need. Ok that being said, try this simple and easy tip.

In this example, our client was using a graphic button that stated “Buy” (this is quite common) for customers to add products to shopping carts. We changed the “buy” button to state “Add to Cart”. If you use a graphic on your website for customers to use to buy things, this is a really easy test to implement. In this case, we just changed the “Buy” graphic to state “Add to Cart”, and then tracked the results. That’s all we did! We just swapped graphic. And guess what, our conversion rate increased by .5%!

Here is the testing (always test and track!) implementation that I recommend (more…)

Filed by admin at 11:09 am under Conversion Rates
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