Did you read the recent story in WebProNews about the Sleep Better Store? According to the article, the store increased sales by 74% and saved 42% in acquisition costs by making simple changes in their sales funnel—removing certain graphics, adding a red text box that listed reasons to shop there, and moving navigation to the left side of the page.
Did the company base these changes on intuition? No—in fact, some of the changes were counterintuitive, and they never would have isolated those with the most impact without conducting tests.
Yet many online retailers—while spending lots of time and money designing their ecommerce sites—still neglect testing the elements that go into that site. Instead, they base the combination of site elements on what they think will work.
Here's a pop-quiz: Which tasks does your commerce group do regularly?
A ) Buy traffic
B ) Review sales numbers
C ) Send emails
D ) Conduct tests
All of these have value, but we're betting A - C were more common answers than D. You probably know you should be testing, but getting the changes through IT is hard, inconclusive tests have taken the wind out of your sails, or you lack the tools.
So where do you begin? Start with a simple hypothesis: where do you think you're losing conversions? Perhaps your scroll-over navigation moves too quickly, and you suspect visitors are bailing because of it, or maybe you believe your product descriptions take up too much space.
Once you've targeted a single area for improvement, pick out different treatments to test—for example, the speed of the scroll-over navigation or making navigation clickable.
Then run a series of simple tests to see what small parts of the navigational whole yield changes.
Remember that only a small number of changes will yield any significant results—and only a few of those will actually improve conversions. It's not about finding one or two big winners; you want to find the right combination of small improvements that yield big results.
Finding that combination doesn't have to be difficult. In the coming months, we'll help you understand how to use tests (whether on ecommerce pages, landing pages, or email campaigns) to let your customers vote on your ideas with their dollars. Think of it as scientific selling.