Driving Online Sales - Craig Sullivan, The future of the online marketplace 22 March 2012
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Craig Sullivan,Group Customer Experience Manager, Belron Craig is Group Customer Experience Manager at Belron (Autoglass) looking after 35 international websites using optimisation, web analytics and customer insight techniques to drive engagement and conversion. Craig has over 14 years of experience in the Industry and in the past has worked on projects for high street names such as LOVEFiLM,International, John Lewis Partnership and Waitrose.
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Driving Online Sales - Craig Sullivan, The future of the online marketplace 22 March 2012
- 1. 12 reasons your site sucks @OptimiseOrDie Craig Sullivan, Belron®
- 3. #1 – Not enough immersion
- 4. #1 – Not enough immersion
- 5. #1 – Not enough immersion
- 6. Naked promotional slide Tweet me @OptimiseOrDie • Conversion Rate Optimisation • Contact deflection and online self service • A/B and Multi-variate testing • Site search analytics • Telephony analytics & tracking • Site, Page and Campaign • User centered Design optimisation • Usability testing • Test design and execution • Customer Research & Insight • A long usable site portfolio • Web Analytics • ROI on UX improvements • Performance, browser and • Over 19 years of slow death email optimisation in really really boring meetings I do it with Millions of strangers every month Join the ‘League of Optimisers’ on Linkedin
- 7. OPTIMISATION A set of techniques, implemented in order to influence customer behaviour towards these outcomes: • Increased revenue or profit • Increasing NPS (Customer Sat) scores • Lower cost for business or contact centres • Increasing productivity or labour flexibility • Simply delighting customers We may fail with 90% of what we try. The 10% of winners let us shift behaviour hugely and measurably.
- 8. Agenda • Using your customers • Improving conversion • Finding great ideas • Beating the competition • The growth of mobile • My toolkit for optimisation • Big budget tools at pocket sized prices • It’s all about the customer • Admin : All slides and notes on Slideshare • Admin : Resource pack included
- 10. #1 – You are not the customer
- 12. #2 – You research by asking colleagues
- 13. You are not the customer! • Walk the customer journey • Paper prototyping • Cheap usability testing • Get out of the office testing • Diary studies • Surveys • Voice of customer tools (VOC) • Talk to your call centre, support, sales staff • Listen in on calls, read emails, view social • Wear the magical slippers!
- 14. Usability crowdsourcing Usertesting.com : Panel recruitment Ethnio.com : Recruit from visitors Userzoom.com : Multi-function Usabilla.com : Recruit from visitors Loop11.com : DIY There is a longer list at the end of the slides!
- 15. Voice of customer tools Several types of tools: • Onpage feedback • Exit the site questions • Behavioural trigger • Post bail email
- 17. 4 basic questions 1. Based on today’s visit, how would you rate your site experience overall? 2. Which of the following best describes the primary purpose of your visit? 3. Were you able to complete the purpose of your visit today? 4. (If yes) What do you value most about the [sitename] website? 5. (If no) Please tell us why you were not able to fully complete the purpose of your visit today?
- 18. Kampyle
- 19. Kissinsights
- 20. Userzoom
- 21. Voice of Customer tools VOC tools: Survey tools: Kampyle Surveygizmo Kissinsights Surveymonkey Userzoom Zoomerang Usersnap Opinionlab CS site manager Polldaddy
- 22. Social Management & Monitoring • Hootsuite : Free or £5.99 / mo • Socialbro : Free • Google alerts : Free • Social Mention : Free • More tools at : http://bit.ly/gpYq42
- 23. UX
- 24. Copy meaning
- 25. ACTION : U are not the customer! • Get wired into customers heads • Listen to them, ask questions, get feedback • Do usability testing, even if it’s friends & family • Run surveys • Install a VOC system on your site • If you can’t afford a VOC system, use 4Q • www.4q.iperceptions.com
- 26. Read these two books:
- 27. Nice day at the office dear?
- 31. #2 – The average lead value for this form is £30k Luke Wroblewski : www.lukew.com Caroline Jarrett : www.formsthatwork.com Ignore this stuff at your peril!
- 32. Example : Lovefilm postcode lookup: CRO 1XA CR0 1XA SE!£ ^DH CR0 lXA CR0-1XA SE% $RL CRO1XA CR01XA CT^&EF CR0lXA CR01XA EC!A 1DF CRO 1XA CR0 1XA SE£ (SH CR0 lXA CR0 1XA SE3 9SH. Strip spaces. Fix transposed characters (0/1/L/O). Transform shifted characters. Trim if front part matches post office codes. Clean it. Auto fix = 2.5% increase in conversion for one field. Outcodes and Incodes : bit.ly/yhR9Oy
- 33. Reduce email bounce by 50%
- 34. ACTION : Stop being a robot! • Stop thinking about data, and start watching customers try to fill in your forms • Optimising forms is one of the highest return activities I do • Find out why customers leave • Watch using a session replay product • Design emotion into your product • Answer customer questions – delivery charges, returns policy, common queries.
- 35. ACTION : Forms design resources I’ve compiled you a nice handy guide of all the stuff I’ve read and used to optimise stuff. Whether it’s a newsletter signup or an insurance quote system, you need to read this stuff: bit.ly/GCq2w0
- 36. #4 – Your copywriting isn’t optimal Comprehension Clarity Simplicity Persuasion Scanning
- 37. Copy meaning
- 38. • Use their voice • Front loaded copy • Use text decoration • Bullets, styling, titles , key information -> make them scannable • Think of the meaning in the customer mind • Less words always • Employ a copywriter! • Further reading…
- 39. ACTION : Read these books
- 44. ACTION : Use a recording tool • Clicktale : www.clicktale.com • Mouseflow : www.mouseflow.com • Ghostrec : www.ghostrec.com • Userfly : www.userfly.com “These tools are a brilliant way to use customers to improve your site usage or conversion. Most of them are free, especially if you have lower traffic”
- 45. #6 – Performance looked OK at our office? • Google Site Speed • Webpagetest.org • Mobile is vital!
- 46. #7 – You’re not testing (enough)
- 47. A/B test Control Version A Version B
- 48. Multi variate Pizza Ingredients Experiment Recipes =
- 49. What’s our testing mix? • A/B testing – Homepage, Landing pages, Funnels • MVT testing – High traffic landing or Home pages – Mini (less than 8 variables) – Midi (8-32) – Maxi (>32 variables) And 6 types of specialised testing: • Funnel testing – bedding in new funnels • Landing page optimisation • Cross channel and telephony testing • Iterative feature and product testing • Video tests • Micro testing
- 50. 6 years of testing on one slide Less is more – simplicity, comprehension, clarity in design, visibility, space, LESS WORDS Copy works – Call to action wording, title, headline, strapline, framing – contribute 50-70% of our test uplift. Pay someone to do this properly, like Sticky Content. Really big buttony button : Large, prominent, visible, button like CTA Use goal, verb or action oriented keywords (Fix my glass!, Download now, Get started) Use text decoration on key persuasive copy (don’t overdo it) CTA above fold, especially on landing pages, key steps Click here (Haz clic aqu, cliquez ici) is one of the top 3 button wordings, always. Let me explain. Do not split attention on CTA unless necessary. Deprecate other buttons or functions (Save, Cancel, Print, Back, Help, Buy) Emotional states : Using emotion, reflecting or mirroring the customer are just as important as how the checkout form works. If you don’t know what the worries and fears are from the visitors coming through the funnel, you’re missing a trick. Show me the value proposition : The what’s in it for me test. (PPC example) Maintain a scent trail – PPC advert, Organic title and snippet, Landing page, Funnel, Reflect the user, Maintain the scent, Make use of the gifts you’re given Think about emotional states and make use of them Badging : Use badging, testimonials, social proofing and trust symbols Badging : Be careful about security seals and when you use them. Same with promotion or visibility of card information – always test. Images : See next slide Guidelines are good but every page and site will vary
- 51. People images that suck…
- 52. Photo Guidelines • Groups, vans, stores, head • Arms with prop instead – hold a office, corporate guff = NO clipboard, rag, tool – I’m working for *you* • Single person – not groups or even • Female images work best in almost every person + customer (ignoring you) country – they slay the guys • Open, Friendly, Natural, Smiling, Engaged, • Natural, authentic and not ‘model’ or Alert = YES ‘stock’ image types work best for people • Smile best with eye crinkles • Some of our best performing images would • Uniform – has huge effect, even wearing be rejected by advertisers as ‘too ugly. branded hat improves conversion • Want to know more? Contact me or check • Look straight at viewer or slightly towards out the @brainlady Call to Action button • Oh, and we also know that genital framing • Plain backgrounds only doesn’t work… • No folded arms, arms on hips, pointing, scowling, cheesy smiles, hands behind back, hanging useless by the side, clasped by groin, fiddling with hand • Pay attention to the visitor, not something else (e.g. Groups of people)
- 53. SPAIN +31% over control 99% confidence
- 54. FRANCE +8% over control 99% confidence
- 55. GERMANY +12% over control 99% confidence
- 56. SWEDEN +14% over control 90% confidence
- 58. Make sure you use real, authentic, smiling, friendly, approachable people. Don’t use stock images for testing or on your site. Low Q video and images are also fine – they reinforce authenticity.
- 59. ACTION : Get testing! Google Optimizer : Free bit.ly/4jaImN Optimizely : Free trial - £30 per month www.optimizely.com Visual Website Optimizer : From £19 per month http://bit.ly/7hjm5A “You have no excuse not to start testing things on your site, given that free or cheap tools are available to everyone”
- 61. Left turns mean more time and fuel waiting at stop lights. By changing satnav to turn right more, UPS saved 28,541,472 miles travel and 3 Million gallons of fuel. Belron stick and carrot example.
- 62. Mobile #9 – You don’t have a mobile site yet!
- 63. Growth in Worldwide Mobile traffic % of all unique visitors 20.1% 17.6% 16.9% 16.3% 15.6% 15.8% 15.3% 15.0% 14.3% 13.7% 11.4% 8.8% 7.2% 7.0% 7.4% 6.3% 6.4% 5.7% 5.0% 3.7% 3.2% 3.2% 2.9% 3.1%
- 64. 40 Growth in Worldwide 35 34.2 Mobile traffic % of all unique visitors 29.9 30.1 30 Feb-12 25.8 25.3 Nov-11 24.7 25 23.9 Jul-11 22.1 20.9 May-10 20 19.3 18.1 17.6 16.8 15 13.8 13.5 13.6 13.1 13 13.2 12.8 12.1 11.7 10.4 9.7 10 6.2 6.5 5.1 5 3.6 3.4 3.2 2.5 2.7 2 2.3 2.3 2.3 0 UK Australia USA Sweden Ireland Netherlands Denmark Spain Canada France Germany Italy
- 65. Device Mix Computer Smartphone Tablet Old phone Media Player Console UK 65.8% 67.3% 15.5% 1.4% 15.5% 0.1% USA 74.5% 83.9% 11.1% 2.1% 1.8% 0.0% NL 79.0% 64.0% 32.3% 1.6% 1.9% 0.0% FR 86.4% 82.7% 14.0% 2.0% 0.8% 0.1% DE 86.6% 78.2% 16.7% 2.6% 1.5% 0.1% AUS 69.8% 85.8% 12.2% 0.9% 0.9% 0.0% IE 77.9% 85.7% 9.6% 1.3% 3.0% 0.1% SE 75.3% 81.6% 15.6% 2.5% 0.2% 0.0%
- 66. ACTION : Get building? • Read my article on Econsultancy • Assess if it’s worth your while • If your cost of build is < 20% revenue, YES • Measure what comes in now – ‘door knockers’ • Use your analytics package or www.bango.com • You will have to build one sometime! • Prioritise this but don’t ignore • We now get over 25% of revenue from mobile • Our mobile site takes £5m per month
- 67. ACTION : Read or give these books
- 68. #10 – Some of your money is missing!
- 69. Killer Tip : Call tracking How it works: • Rent a bank of numbers • Add a dynamic ‘tag’ to your page • Phone number appears automatically • Customer calls this number • Captures the keywords, landing page, converting page, traffic source • Geo mapping captures customer location • When the call is hung up, optionally record the outcome code (sale, loss) • Have a special number for Facebook, SEO, Adwords traffic etc. • Lets you analyse from web -> phone call -> wait time -> answer - >outcome • Builds a link between web and call, finallly
- 70. Why use call tracking? • Claim your conversions! • You can’t work out your advertising effectiveness, if you don’t include phone • If you don’t measure phone, your A/B tests may be wrong • You can capture all your web AND phone, in one easy interface • Allows you a multi-channel view of all your contact sources • Lets you record offline campaigns as well with specific numbers (print, TV etc.) • You can experiment with routing, messages, on hold music – much more easily • If you can’t afford lots of phone numbers, this is an easy way to get tracking • Puts this in the hands of small businesses
- 71. Company Website Coverage Who? Mongoose Metrics* www.mongoosemetrics.com UK, USA, Canada Ifbyphone* www.ifbyphone.com USA TheCallR* www.thecallr.com USA, Canada, UK, IT, FR, BE, ES, NL Call tracking metrics www.calltrackingmetrics.com USA Hosted Numbers www.hostednumbers.com USA Callcap www.callcap.com USA UK, SE, FI, NO, DK, LT, PL, IE, CZ, Freespee* www.freespee.com SI, AT, NL, DE Adinsight* www.adinsight.co.uk UK Infinity tracking* www.infinity-tracking.com UK Optilead* www.optilead.co.uk UK Switchboard free www.switchboardfree.co.uk UK Freshegg www.freshegg.co.uk UK Avanser www.avanser.com.au AUS Jet Interactive* www.jetinteractive.com.au AUS * I read up on these or talked to them. These are my picks .
- 72. Don’t give up!
- 73. If you read these books, you’ll look much smarter at work. (+ follow @OptimiseOrDie)
- 74. Don’t give up! • Start with the customer at the heart of everything • It’s liberating • Use low budget solutions, cheap or free tools to get business cases made • Money talks so even micro testing will illustrate ROI • Invest in people who care about customers, as well as conversion • Invest in analytics talent or CRO expertise • If you can make a 10% shift in online revenue, just from smart thinking, then what would a team of 5 be like? • If you’re finding it hard to hire people, mail me for advice. • We don’t do anything special – we just work on customer problems to make the product better, and we love what we do.
- 76. Autoglass UK – Putting it together • 12.4% from User centred Design • 12.5% increase from Multi Variate Testing • 3.5% increase in downstream conversion rate • 4% increase in online conversion from mobile optimised site • Reduced call time (1 second = > 10k per year) • Faster online booking time • 5.5% increase in NPS (Customer sat) score • Customer delight – feedback. Less questions and worries • Expected increase in conversion = 32% • Actual increase in conversion = 41% • NO additional marketing spend needed • Web Channel : ROI positive within 2 weeks • Worldwide ROI : 15% increase in conversion during 2011
- 77. Email : sullivac@gmail.com Twitter : @OptimiseOrDie LinkedIn : linkd.in/pvrg14 Slideshare : slidesha.re/phpa45
Editor's Notes
- My favourites are the small boxes that people designed and carried around – that have a drawstring like this one. You can see some cool Netsuke at the V&A if you’re interested. So – what’s the connection? My team is about optimising experiences - NOT in some ‘huggy warm and fuzzy’ £2000 a day charge out rate kinda way. We build stuff that looks good, works with customers and converts more people this month than last month. We also sweat *everything* that comes up, including all the tiny little details. Our mantra is “Everything makes a difference to the overall experience” These little marvels remind me of the work that my team puts in on every field, form, page and widget. I hope that during today you feel some of this customer love ANNND our ruthless use of psychological trickery on unwitting visitors.
- And as for my talk today, a wee bit of background. I actually grew up in Stranraer – not far as the crow flies. Eighties disco, bad fashion and terrible haircuts, all experienced at Stranraer Academy.
- And this is the house where I grew up. What a stunning example of 1970’s architecture eh? But one thing I learned growing up in a mixed rural economy, is that small and medium businesses are the lifeblood of my homeland – and I’d guess the same holds true here. Not much point telling you about my cool stuff, if you folks can’t implement or afford it.
- In Galloway, a shed in the garden is what passes for a ‘Cutting edge full service digital agency’ So – today I’m going to focus on stuff the most advanced companies use, that are easy to install and cheap or free to run. I want everyone to use my techniques, tips and toolkits that I’ll be showing you today. I only recommend what I use myself. It doesn’t matter how big your shed, your company or your budget is - I’ve got solutions for you.
- So a bit about me. I started doing UX in 1999 and launched all the first John Lewis, Waitrose and Ocado websites. I’ve since been working for a range of companies, including taking Lovefilm from 16,000 to 1M customers.There are only 3 bits of information to mention – I’ve been in boring meetings for over 19 years now, you can tweet me or follow me @Optimiseordie and my car bumper sticker says “I do it with millions of strangers a month’If you want to learn from about 300 website optimisers, there’s a group we run on Linkedin – called the ‘League of Optimisers’ – just visit and ask to join – we’ll do the rest.
- So – what about some definitions? I’ll be mentioning optimisation today, so just in case, let me explain what I mean by that.[read slides] And optimisation refers to a whole range of techniques, like usability, customer feedback or search engine optimisation. It’s basically all about improving this stuff on the list, regardless of what tools we use to achieve this.
- This is what I’m going to cover today.
- And just to show it’s not all fluffy kittens in the world of user experience:
- So, today I’m going to talk about all the problem areas in conversion. The bad stuff. I’m not going to show you 25 A/B test results and ask you to guess the winner. I want to show you the places where conversion goes to suck – and suggest ways to help here.PROBLEM 1 : Not enough immersionWhen these guys designed this parking meter, they made everyone put in their registration number. It’s so badly designed, the queues take ages and all because they were too mean to let you share or give a parking ticket to someone else. The emotional message is – “Screw you, people”. I’ve seen these parking meters being slapped, kicked, booted, defaced or even indeed ripped out of the ground.I spent 6 hours observing people using them and it was horrible – long queues, frustrating experiences, a long walk back to the card to find out what your license plate says! I contacted them and they weren’t interested “Nobody complains – so don’t know what you’re on about. Go away, you annoying scots git”This is the lesson – get in the shoes for the journey of the customers. These magic slippers of customer experience will take you to new places – but you have to wear them first. There isn’t a chauffeured customer experience limo here. Tesco makes its IT managers go and work in the departments that use their software. Belron people go out with the van drivers, listen in the call centre, talk to customers and everyone involved. Get immersed.
- So – to do this, you should be a mystery shopper of your whole product or service that you want to optimise. You should be disruptive, difficult and demanding - make things happen and see what shakes out:Order 12 pairs of shoes and send eleven back.If you make flatpack furniture, order it and put it together, with small children in the room.Make a serious complaint – what happens – does anyone listen?Buy 3 products by mistake. Try to get the order changed.Call your company phoneline and see if it’s annoying – how long do you wait?Add a £1000 order to your basket on mobile and then switch to a desktop site to finish it. What happens?Send an email or ‘contact us’ message on the site – what’s the response likeIs the company on a social network – can you reach them there?
- If you want ideas of levers to use on people, persuasive tactics to set up or just what might be preventing them bailing on you, then do some testing. All you need is a £40 bit of software, a laptop and two people with a pulse. It’s not expensive or hard.
- Walk the customer journey - use the primary links, search, landing pages that customers doPaper prototyping – Take your new page, site or design on paper out to customers – supermarkets, bookshops – get some early feedback before you even pay someone to make it.Cheap usability testing - £40 software, laptop with webcam – PORTABLE LAB!Get out of the office testing : Got to a book shop, cafe, libraryDiary studies : Pay or ask your customers to keep a lifecycle diarySurveys : Regularly surveying people allows you to build up valuable data and feedbackTalk to your call centre, support or sales people – We don’t do projects without these people. Their input is GOLDListen in on calls : Get a second headset and listen inRead emails : Get copies for 2-3 days on emails coming in. Read them and categorise themWear the magical slippers of CX
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- You just need to shake yourself up and see your product or service from a different angle – from the customer or visitor viewpoint.And lastly...
- If you have kids, you know that it’s hard to like much of what they listen to. Some of that is down to changes in our hearing, as we age, as well as taste – but it simply means that what I like and what my daughter likes rarely overlap.That makes me the wrong person to ask about Justin Bieber. I’m with the guy in the back – it’s just not my cup of tea. Repeat after me. I am not my customer. I am not the target audience. I am the wrong person to ask.
- All the work I’m doing these days is designed to avoid this : A ceaseless, never yielding robotic response to an experience that’s all too human. And that’s enough slagging off my IT people for one day. [PAUSE] but here’s a confession – we don’t actually have an IT department in the mix, which is another story entirely! I have some examples:Responding more to different levels of urgency (stranded with kids -> not bothered at the other end)People wanted to leave their keys with a neighbour (sorted)15% of visitors don’t know their registration number (reassure them, ask them to get paperwork, we call back) – popular misconception here – it’s mainly guys, lol.We explain everything we do about the work, right down to how we hoover and clean up (very important emotionally)Forms – we can completely change the way people view requests for information through copy, help, framing, naming.Copy – we write to specifically respond to worries, fears, barriers, lack of comprehension.
- And just to show we’re not immune. I found this on our Australian website and it’s a lead gen form.The average order value for each converted job on this form is 10’s of thousands of pounds. So by turning them away at the door here – no, kicking them in the teeth and throwing them in the gutter – we lose huge money.We don’t see the loss because we only compare the part of the pie we get, not the missing chunk. Without the frame of reference – without knowing what the art of the possible is – we don’t know the size of the opportunity we’re missing. The only way to find out is to optimise and test.If we reduce this form to 3 fields and then manage to convert more people, the ROI on the work could be hundreds of times. Yet this form may not have been considered as a priority by many companies – by talking to the business managers, we can see a huge MASSIVE opportunity going begging.I’ll keep you posted on the results – it won’t be my hardest test to turn around!
- Aha – hard to explain this without being there.I spent 2 days once optimising a postcode lookup field for Lovefilm.OK – let’s say you get no problems – everyone finds their addresses, orders their stuff and is happy. Birds tweet. Plinky music plays. SkreeeeEEET. Wait a minute – what if it’s not.So I looked at the postcode rules (use the link at the bottom) and studied these in detail. Worked out how they are made and validated etc.I then looked at the website and found tons of stuff in the FAILED postcode lookups.Apart from the odd person putting in things like DICK and laughing alone whilst they do it, what did we find?People transpose the Letter ‘L’ and the number ‘1’People also transpose the Letter ‘O’ and the number ‘0’People put 1,2 or 3 spaces in the middle or the end of the postcodeSome people use CAPS – majority use lower case.Why do they do those then? Well the transposition is cause they write it like an envelope. It’s in CAPS (it’s probably an older demographic?) on the envelope so it gets typed in as CAPS. And people confuse their own postcode or use the wrong letter.We can autocorrect this – so we just fix the transpositions (cause we know what the customer meant anyway, based on the post office rules – all these codes in the two columns can be inferred) We then remove spaces or anything else that doesn’t look relevant (full stops on the end, but the rest is a valid postcode).Now – here’s the really clever bit. What the hell is that stuff in the right hand column? Rubbish? No – perfectly serviceable postcodes. Why are people shifting characters. Well, they’re not touch typists so they’re looking at the keyboard, right? And they’re typing in CAPS, so they’re shifting each character. SO when they do the numbers, they get £ and % signs. We can auto convert these.We applied many small techniques like this to ONE FIELD in a checkout process. This resulted in a 2.5% increase in conversion. Sadly they’ve now lost this ‘feature’ which is pretty silly.
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- ***
- The problem here is that people don’t read the web the way you want them to. Many companies are not taking advantage of the scan/peck/hunt way of content consumption and the behaviours that go with it. Optimising words, using text decoration, simplifying meanings, removing company terms or viewpoints, Having a visual hierarchy for text, bullet points and paying someone who isn’t from the Muppets to write your words all helps (Sticky Content). All this stuff really works on conversion and micro tests we’ve done show it’s true. With shrinking screen sizes, copy expertise is vital for mobile sites and apps too. Every word and every syllable and how they are laid out – it all counts. In our multivariate tests – copy is usually 50-70% of the total lift. Invest in words and the emotions they create, the questions they solve. A neglected area and big opportunity. We’re experimenting with long form pages now – where we carry a design at the head of the page focused on one conversion possibility. We also create some genuinely useful copy, some for SEO purposes (in collapsed sections) and work hard on the scannability, sectioning and trigger words to have several further bites at converting them. The reading behaviour I’m talking about doesn’t mean using less words for customers – just knowing where and when to use short, persuasive copy, linking and calls to actions. And most importantly, where you can use copy that draws attention in the customers mind, in a highly visible place, in a highly visible way.So – my advice? Write your copy for conversion paths but support customer utility and SEO. Harder than it sounds - like herding weasels on speed.
- The tennis story - explained
- I meet a lot of people who live in their cylinder of excellence in their company and all is good and wonderful. What they never do is get together and actually look at the entire customer journey. Optimisers often talk about scent trails and in Belron – we like to walk the adverts, links to your site, organic search results, landing pages and forms– as the user, with them in mind and always on the lookout for gaps.If you have a retail store you might have one or more main entrances. Not hard to keep an eye on blockages, rubbish and bad signposting there. But on a website, we have hundreds of doors, paths, landing pages, microsites – all different experiences that could be fucked up and nobody notices. If you’re looking, you’ll find them but nobody will come and tell you.There are many ways to improve journeys that we advise – but the one thing that sometimes gets missed is the relevance of the whole experience, never mind just one part of it. And don’t sweat all 10,000 journeys on your site – you should know the primary paths. Take your friends or family through these paths sometime and ask them to talk out loud what they’re thinking. Even better, do it with your customers. Start them at Google and take it from there. Shut the fuck up and listen.Aside from techniques like using scent trails, mirroring the customer, repeating their search phrase or word and doing testing and optimisation work – what’s the big learning for me? Use clicktale NOW! TODAY!
- The important thing about this graph is the 99.2% figure. In the UK, customers have an average of 2.2 toolbars installed. Most of us designing websites have one or maybe two – but usually in a short header strip. When I visit friends and work on their computers, I say to them – look, this is like surfing the web with a fucking empty toilet roll over your eye. You’ve got such a tiny viewport, it’s horrendous!Still, the toolbars are around and my point is this – Clicktale measures where the ‘region’ of fold is on the page. And not in a precise way like 1024x768 either – it’s actually telling me whether that green freaking button is on the page or not.I know that when I screw up and put a new line of text in, that button drops off the page for some people and my conversion drops. Clicktale tells me where I’m ‘broadly OK’ and where I’m damaging conversion. It isn’t a fold line – it’s a fold zone. Get to know where yours is, from a CUSTOMER perspective, not how it looks on your Google Chrome with no crappy toolbars on it. Resolution is not viewport.(Authors note – this stands for short form pages but those with multiple calls to action or longer lengths clearly work differently as a scroll is involved. However, we know we can hit conversion because screen sizes are dropping – even on our desktop site – down to smaller notebooks but also tablets).
- This is another basic clicktale report but done really well. It tells me the click map so I can see where the hell people are clicking that ISN’T active.Hey – a scotsman abhors an unmonetised click, so we can find out things about where controls, links, content, calls to action aren’t working.On this page, I’ve actually spotted a small strip that for some browsers isn’t working (along the top of the two middle lozenges).It’s these kind of details that Clicktale helps you smash out of the product.
- Clicktale will even show you form analytics.This tells you what parts of your form people are struggling with, where they waste time or get errors and what’s holding them back from getting to the next page. You can use this to optimise your forms.This example shows insight about one field on our French website that was taking people ages to fill in (make of car). Now that this is replaced with a lookup, it will shave a good 10 seconds off or so.
- If you’re not using one of these, some of your vital data is missing.
- Two banana slugs fighting (or having sex – not sure). Does it remind you of your mobile site?I’ve done A/B split tests on sites with and without performance enhancements or content delivery networks. Performance is HUGE on mobile – some retailers have 500K product pages, which is just stupid.Get this fixed, and you’ll make lots of money. But where do you start?Use google site speed tags. They measure actual customer load time, not a synthetic measurement. You now know what pages suck.Create a suck index = pageviews * load time. Sort the column in descending order. Start working on it from the top. Worth lots of money.Also – selectively tidy parts of your store – like streamlining the checkouts whilst you wait for new tills. Enhance the performance of key landing pages, site functions, funnels or tipping point pages and you’ve front loaded all the conversion benefit whilst you work on the less important stuff. Prioritise around the customer/conversion and you’ll do alright.Use Webpagetest.org – super, awesome, really useful and detailed analysis tool. It actually tells you how to fix all the problems it finds. So, not like a usability consultant then eh?
- Doesn’t matter if you’re rolling the slickest, sexiest looking dice around – you’re still guessing if you’re not testing stuff.We even do micro testing now, where we vary a line of copy, a button somewhere. We’re pretty excited because this stuff is good – one small test (copy + button) was worth 300K Euros a year on one site. If we did 100 micro tests instead of 10 big tests, we’d make more money faster and the product improves incrementally every time.
- These are examples of counter intuitive photography.All these people completely beat other images of people that were more beautiful. An ad agency wouldn’t have picked this one, or some of the others I’m going to show you, but it makes my point. It’s about the authenticity of the image.First of all, in our tests – a real smile is important. This is one where the eyes crinkle and the upper face muscles are involved around the cheekbones.We also find body language and expression to be important. People focus on the face a great deal so what we want is totally genuine expressions from real people. We don’t use actors and so these are all people that work for the company and volunteer. We keep them posted on the test results and they’re really competitive! The customers decide in this contest though!This lady is the winner in spain against a raft of what look like subjectively better people. But I’m the wrong person to judge and most senior people can’t pick this stuff for toffee (I know – I’ve tested them). Ironic that they often make the final call on creatives, rather than the frigging customers.She’s posting a 31% lift over her nearest rival in a test, with 99% confidence.
- And this guy is from France and again – wasn’t the most classically beautiful but looks pretty relaxed and natural. He’s doing well in test too, as you can see.
- This lady beat the original control in a test by over 12%. She’s my favourite test winner image. She looks natural, is friendly, approachable, interested, ready for notetaking/helping you (the clipboard has been tested and works) and the logo on the uniform also helps. Imagine this scenario in your mind “You’re in France – in a department store. You don’t speak french and have ten minutes before you go to the airport. You need help now and are scanning the floor, looking for staff with a uniform or staying still. As you look, your eyes find a face and this person looks friendly. You think – yes – they’ll be able to help. Think about what that person looks like. Keep that image in your mind.”That’s the photographs I want to take – what’s in your head there.No call centre hotties are used here (www.headsethotties.com).
- And from Sweden – again beating off blondes like nobodys business. She looks really good to me and I’m not surprised – another good image test.If you look on slideshare, I have made guidelines of everything I’ve tested in photography. We’ve done over 28M of these and know that, for example, adding a baseball cap increases conversion, as long as it has a company logo on it. Seriously. If you’re using people images – read my stuff.
- And if this feels like your CRO effort – look for something easier to test or simpler to get results from. Find really bad things to fix that could be tested out quickly. And if you’re still stuck – look to customers or other sources to get disruptive ideas.
- UPS saved all this money by turning right to arrive at their destination. This avoided stop signs and so optimised the rest of the business.The conversation was – Is that an urban myth? Dunno – let’s find out (curiousity). Nope – it’s actually true. Wonder if we can tweak the sat nav in all the trucks? OK – let’s do a test.They saved 3 Million gallons of fuel by doing it. Remember – optimisation as a discipline isn’t about the website – it’s about the optimising the business, the processes, the offline stuff, the crappy on hold messages – all of it.
- And if this feels like your CRO effort – look for something easier to test or simpler to get results from. Find really bad things to fix that could be tested out quickly. And if you’re still stuck – look to customers or other sources to get disruptive ideas.
- And if you do one thing from this presentation, it’s this. Invest in a call tracking solution.What we learned from playing with this is that the entire stats for search/PPC/advertising are just bullshit, built on a house of cards.That’s because the phone traffic that results from all this online and offline activity, isn’t tied in with the web. What looks like a bad PPC campaign for web conversions looks like a winner when you ADD THE PHONE. We do this with all our contact channels (phone, email, tap2call etc.) so we can segment results that include telephony.We’re the first company in the world to hire a multi-variate tester to work solely on phone systems. All your marketing data is wrong in some way, if you can tie it to knowing what page you were called from, what the keywords were, if it was PPC or SEO or Direct or Referrer. You can also claim you conversions away from the phone guys. They’ve been busy picking up all the credit for a lot of online activity and it’s time the pie came back.
- And please don’t give up.
- There’s always a Kevin somewhere – if you’re not optimising then your downstream and upstream competitors might be. If you take 1M visitors a year and Kevin gets 15 out of 100 whilst you get twelve – what happens after a year. Yes – Kevin is smiling his ass off – because he has 30,000 more customers than you, without spending a penny more on marketing. And if he does spend more than you, he’ll convert more of those too. You should imagine you have a Kevin working in your competitors. If he exists, you’re gonna try and kick his ass. If he doesn’t, you’ve just made your company more money anyway.