How do you make sure that your website’s user experience is on par with your visitors’ expectations?
There is a very close relationship with a website’s user experience and the conversions you generate from it. Getting traffic to your website is only the first step; from that point on, you need to provide a good enough user experience to make your visitors want to hang around for longer and even more so, convert.
But how do you make sure that your website’s user experience is on par with your visitors’ expectations?
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In this blog post, I’m going…
Compilation of abandonment rates and follow-up email conversion rates in retail, fashion, travel, finance and not-for profit
We recommend retargeting as an essential activity in our RACE framework customer lifecycle activities. That's because it can help boost both conversion to lead and conversion to sale conversion rates. This pair of charts focusing on email retargeting show it's worthwhile putting a range of retargeting tactics in place, regardless of the type of business.
Cart abandonment rates
This data is based on abandonment rates from Salecycle customers. It shows that the average cart abandonment rate is 75.4% with rates in some sectors such as travel and finance being even higher.
Following up on this interest with a reminder email (if you have collected it, which you should) is one way of increasing conversion, using a simple reminder or a more persuasive discount. It's worth testing which discounts…
An increase of touchpoints has made it harder to tell what drives customers to purchase
Digital advertising used to be so simple. Marketers would place an ad in a premium spot on an affiliate platform, leading the customer to see the ad, click the ad, and be converted. The well-known click-based attribution model let marketers accurately track that short and sweet customer journey with ease. However, a recent survey by Qualtrics and AdRoll shows that while 65 percent of marketing professionals still use single-click attribution, 57 percent want to toss that model out the window.
Their reasoning is simple: The digital world has gotten more complex, and so has the customer journey. Customers don’t just search for a product, click an ad that comes up, and convert, so relying on the old single-click attribution model is a good way to lose customers and market share.
Digital platforms that marketers use to engage…
While you may have thorough buyer personas sketched out for your customers, there may be one piece of the puzzle that you’re missing: behavioural psychology.
Behavioural psychology often dictates how people make choices, whether it’s what to order at a restaurant or whether to subscribe to a company’s email newsletter. Within your digital channels, you can incorporate certain principles of behavioural psychology into your strategy in order to keep your marketing customer-centered, engaging, and conversion-driven. This will help turn your website visitors into conversions.
Anchoring
This is a principle of behavioural psychology that guides people towards context clues when making decisions. Oftentimes, your audience is unsure about how much time or money they should spend on a certain product or service, and when that’s the case, they turn to context clues to help them decide and usually settle on a middle ground. Incorporate anchoring into your digital marketing strategy by adding an “extreme”…
Web users are becoming paralysed by the psychology of indecision as a result of being faced with too many options to choose from
I believe digital marketers are offering too many choices to their website visitors. Visit almost any web page these days and you will be faced with a myriad of choices. You can choose to read something, or sign up for follow-ups, or perhaps watch a video. Alternatively, you could choose something else to click on, look at an advert or go to the menu and choose something else. What are you expected to do? There are just too many things to think about.
The situation is worse in e-commerce stores. You are faced with row upon row of products to choose from, probably from a selection of a dozen or more different categories.
Website owners and digital marketers appear to…
Does your website have a clean bill of health?
Unless you are lucky enough to have an external agency, it can be difficult to know where to place your resources and prioritise your efforts to ensure your website is optimised; which statistics to review for engagement, how to check if your visitors can use your navigation and the list goes on. This infographic from Mediavision is a good basic top-level checklist to help you with reviewing your website, though you will need to delve further into each area. It's not an exhaustive list since there are other ideas to include usability research testing, (eye-tracking) heat mapping tools, and we are sure more can be added to this planning list.
For more advanced marketers, you can check out our Digital Marketing Strategy Audit tools for Expert Members.…
Our 7 key questions to ask yourself and your team
This post is the second in a short series looking to help give a focus to improve digital marketing effectiveness. In the first I defined 7 strategic questions to increase site traffic as part of a customer acquisition strategy. In the final post I review customer retention and engagement strategy, while in this post, I look at 7 key questions to increase conversion.
Naturally, all site owners want to increase conversion, but it's really tough to do this in practice for a mature site. Yes, there are some great examples of using testing to improve conversion, like those we see on Marketing Experiments, WhichTestWon or the $300 million button.
To achieve these improvements almost certainly means you've already made the case for working on conversion rate optimisation and have the people, process and tools in place to help make these…
ACT Webcasts from the Smart Insights Digital Marketing Priorities 2013 summit
The two webinars from our summit focusing on interacting with new audiences using different digital channels were:
1. Mobile marketing priorities for 2013 with Rob Thurner of Burner Mobile
The agenda for this talk covered how to build mobile into your business strategy, plus more practical advice on weaving mobile into your customer journey and discovery/promotion of the mobile channels.
Related Ebook: Mobile Marketing Briefing by Rob Thurner
2. B2B Digital marketing priorities for 2013 with Rene Power of B2B Marketing
This webcast covered covered the key…
Look to your site first, or opportunities will go down the plughole
Digital marketing strategies vary wildly from business to business as well they should. Not every website has the same business/ sales goals and they most certainly don’t use the same marketing or technical platforms. To a certain degree, before starting to develop strategies for new clients you never know quite what challenges are going to be "thrown your way"!
However, there are some fundamentals to consider in advance of setting or spending budget. The website that you want to digitally market should always be assessed or audited to identify if the best use is being made of the additional traffic that digital marketing will invariably drive.
Let me break this down into an analogy that I like to use with my clients: think of your website as a bath, and your…
Three paths to digital marketing optimisation
Today, many companies are working on conversion improvement, but without an overall strategy which joins the different approaches together as part of an overall conversion strategy. The tools available in our toolbox break down into three, often used individually, but increasingly used together:
Classic site analytics - Uses web analytics tools, site feedback tools and analysis of behaviour to find problems and suggest fixes
A/B and MV Testing - AB and multivariate testing which test multiple experiences including both pages and paths to see which is best
Personalisation - Providing relevant recommendations through targeting rules or algorithms (overlaps with email sequences)
I see these three approaches as paths on the journey to site optimisation often intersect and are complementary. Each can facilitate the more effective use of the others. But while these three paths to optimization should be complementary, they are mostly deployed in a siloed manner that…
