By Brooke Larson, Account Manager
On average, businesses spend $92 to acquire a customer, but they spend only $1 optimizing that visitor’s experience and driving more sales.+
Seems like a lot of lost opportunity. In fact, companies that spend more than one quarter of their marketing budget on optimizing the customer experience realize significantly greater conversion rates than those who don’t optimize.*
Our experience bears this out. For example, we ran a recent test for one of our customers that showed that 25% off coupons yielded better overall revenue than 35% off coupons. That is, the 10% difference didn’t generate enough additional sales to make up the difference. We also showed that customers who had the opportunity to order a sample of the fabric involved in the making of the product converted at a higher rate and they had significantly higher average order values – by $200 per order (about 30% higher).
How do companies drive optimization success from site testing and optimization tools? Often times getting the tool implemented is the focus of all the planning, and the ongoing maintenance and support are not as well defined.
Let’s focus on practical steps for unlocking the power of testing to drive real results and ROI.
1. Find your trouble spots
You need to make a list of the places on your site that spell trouble for visitors. Of course, you need to know what “trouble” means. Typically this will be an exit without a conversion.
There are several ways to find these spots, but analytics data is the best place to start. If your site has structured “funnels” (purchase flows, registration processes) there are two places to look: the persuasive end of the funnel – what gets your visitor into the funnel – and the transactional end – finishing the conversion. This can be a great place to start, since your impact is immediately measurable and can feed the topline.
If you don’t have funnels, you can start with highly visited pages that also have a high exit rate; or visits that hit those high-traffic pages but don’t ultimately convert. Typically this means that you have interested visitors but can’t close the deal – at least not in a single session, or not within that channel. (Maybe they are converting elsewhere, but you can’t correlate site visitors with mobile buyers, but that’s a different topic.)
Beyond analytics, you might also have qualitative data from exit surveys or other voice of the customer mechanisms. You will see trends here that will reveal problem areas or opportunities for tests.
2. Create a prioritized test plan
Once you’ve identified your trouble spots, you need to set priorities. Be objective and business-minded in ranking. This means that trouble spots are quantified to have the greatest impact to the company overall.
Each trouble spot should have one or more hypotheses that you want to test and a description of how you will prove (or disprove) the hypotheses.
Keeping a testing plan with projected dates and testing hypothesis is important so that when issues come up you can make an informed decision to drop everything and test an urgent issue or hold stakeholders at bay by showing them the plan that you are following.
This test plan will be a major part of your communication plan to your stakeholders. Implementing a robust testing methodology requires cross-functional support and buy-in so that you find the most important areas to test on the site. This can mean that what is important to customer support to test, may not be able to be tested until after a home page test is completed. This requires both patience and coordination with a big helping of communication.
3. Document and communicate your results
When you’ve run tests and gotten your results, communicate to key stakeholders. This can be done with monthly communications that highlight “lessons learned”. Giving your organization regular updates that teach everyone something new about your customer can garner huge credibility for the marketing team.
Next Steps
Numeric consultants have extensive experience creating and running test plans. If you’d like to learn more about what we can do, contact us.
*Adobe’s Digital Marketing Optimization Survey from 2013
+Top Testing and Targeting Tips for 2013, Adobe whitepaper
