It's hard times on the Internet a day.
Consumers spend less money.
The economy is fragile.
And still, the income targets are increasing.
The e-commerce market expects to achieve better results; without to increase the marketing budget.
The solution to this?
Optimization- What?
Optimize Google Ads the campaigns, what you post in social media, the electronic mail marketing and your website.
Not just take my word on it;
Digiday, in partnership with Claviyo, asked 154 e-commerce operators to figure out what the greatest growth potential for 2024 was.
More than 70% of the response was related to: improve what they do today
(Enhancing/optimizing. Same thing)
What You need to optimize first?
I INEVO We focus on helping online shops increase sales.
Here are 3 tips we help you optimize your online store and increase sales.
How to optimize a online store?
These 3 optimization tips are based on our own experience. Here you will get insights into the results of the experiments and see the screenshots.
Let's go into the matter.
1. Move CTA buttons higher on the page
The more products on the website have the same layout and design.
Product images on the left, product name, description and CTA on the right.
The problem with this layout is that the most important element for getting on in the purchase order (CTA) often comes down a long way and becomes the last one the potential customer sees.
What if it was one of the first elements you saw? Would it increase the conversion?
We tested it!
Katerina and Niclas, two of our e-commerce experts had a hypothesis; more sales by moving the “put into shopping basket” button higher up on the side. This makes the CTA more visible, and you don't scroll.
We A/B tested our hypothesis for 2 months. All traffic was divided 50/50 on both sides. The test was done on both mobile and desktop.
More than 57,000 users participated in the test.
After 2 months, the change on the “Add to shopping basket” led to:
- 50% increase in conversion rate
- 31 more orders for this product
- An increase in sales of NOK 30 000
This was the result of making this change on a single product.
What would happen if the change was made on 100 products?
2. Remove distractions for a simpler payment process
Amazon is known for its simple payment process.
It is subtle, but the few options you have during the Amazon payment process are to continue to pay or exit the page by clicking on their logo. There is no navigation menu or footer. It's simple.
Using a Methodology Unsolved Based On PIE framework (potential, importance and simplicity), we analysed that traffic and the value on the e-commerce page and identified that the ‘trade basket’ page gave the best income potential for an A/B test.
The handle curve is the side that ALL keys on.
It essentially asks:
"Are you sure you want to spend your money on this item?"
And with an exit rate of 31%, this side gave us a great opportunity to help customers answer that question by saying, "I want it!".
Our goal was to reduce the number of users who left the shopping basket. It was cutting down the number of buttons/clicks from 9 to 1.
The original shopping cart had 9 CTAs, including you on newsletters, social media icons and “go back to the website” (rare).
In the new varriant we added up to just a CTA - “Go to the box” (Thanks to Amazon for inspiration).
Here we used VWO and left the test for 45 days.
The winning variant was the variant of a simplified box with an 11 % increase in conversion rate and a 99% statistical significance level. We estimate that monthly sales increased by more than NOK 85000, which is equivalent to increased sales of NOK 1 million per year.
This test showed us that if you minimize distractions, more will complete the purchase. Are you ready to clean up your payment process?
3 Layer “urgency” with countdown
A sense of urgency can be created in many different ways.
Just think about Booking.com with its "Only 3 rooms left at this price".
Or an online store that shows "Get items back in stock".
Another tactics is... countdown.
What happens when you see a clock that counts down the seconds?
In most cases we feel a need to do something.
Quick!
That's where Katerina and Niclas got their idea.
They introduced a countdown on the product side that tells us how long it is left of the sale.
It was strategically placed high on the side--in red to draw attention. The countdown was exposed to more than 3000 users.
The hypothesis was that by showing the hours, more would buy the product than those who did not see the hours.
So, does it work to create a sense of urgency?
In this case-- YES!
- More than 14 more orders
- An increase of 30% in conversion
- NOK 50000 in increased income
Some optimisation tactics will never fail.
Like showing your customers a quote today and telling them that the offer is gone tomorrow.
Are you ready to test A/B?
Hurry up, the countdown is starting now.
4-3-2-1...
Conclusion
It's 1,000 things to test on your website.
But start by focusing on areas and pages that have a higher impact, where 10-20% improvements can have a major impact on performance as:
- Handrail / Box
- Top Visited Pages
- Top products
We found the bragging products and tested locations of CTAs and a sense of urgency. We also tested a cleaner, more conversion-focused payment page. All 3 tests worked well and resulted in more than NOK 1 million in increased sales.
No extra budgets. Everything through optimization.
Do you need help setting up your own A/B tests? Or are you looking for new ways to increase sales through optimization?
Contact us today to meet one of our e-commerce experts.
I also recommend you read:
15 e-commerce tips for 2024 to help you increase traffic, sales and revenue
How INEVO used content and SEO to increase customer turnover by 22 million