Redesign your site to boost sales
Take a critical look at these areas to determine which changes will have the greatest impact.
In Summary
| • | Before you decide to make changes to your Web site, make sure you understand which elements are performing well or poorly. |
| • | Strategic keyword combinations can optimize your site to score higher on search engines and draw the right target market to your site. |
| • | Customer-centric navigation tools can drive shoppers directly to the products they want to buy before they lose interest. |
When Atlanta-based Atlantic Consulting and Sales launched its Wedding Favors to Go site in 2003, it faced stiff competition from already established Web sites like The Knot and Wedding Channel. Tom Bianco, chief executive officer of the 65-employee retail and e-commerce marketing company, knew that it would take more than pretty pictures to grow the business.
Over the past year, Bianco has systematically redesigned the site by optimizing keywords, changing the copy and placement of design elements, adding trusted business partner logos, and rotating promotional links. He hopes the effort will help the site generate $1 million in sales by the close of this year, and boost conversion rates closer to his niche market's average of 1 to 1.25 percent. So far, the fine-tuning has:
| • | Increased customer visits to 70,000 a month |
| • | Increased the average number of page views per visit to 7 |
| • | Increased conversion to nearly 0.7 percent |
Knowing when the time is right for a makeover
Experts cite a variety of reasons driving companies to redesign their e-commerce sites, including slow response times due to inadequate infrastructure, information technology (IT) support difficulties, lack of integration with business systems for customer data analysis, and competitive or marketplace changes. Thomas Obrey, chief operating officer of PixelMEDIA, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based Internet consultancy, advises taking a hard look at metrics for usability, accessibility, conversion rates and shopping cart abandonment to determine where strategic changes will have the greatest impact. A wide variety of Web vendors and portals offer robust and frequently free research that can help you measure traffic to your site and more. Most hosting providers include Web analytics (log file analysis) that track the progress of shoppers through the pages of your site and even identify the points where visitors are abandoning the purchasing process.
Remove obstacles that derail the sale
Just like a physical store, a Web site has to be an inviting place to shop. Raphi Salem, CEO and president of SalemGlobal Internet, a New York City-based e-commerce development company, recommends placing more than one product "above the fold" (the upper portion of the Web page) and including a call to action. Typical online shoppers are too impatient to scroll and click into a site if the landing page fails to spark their interest.
For Wedding Favors to Go, Bianco estimates he has approximately seven seconds to make an impression on visitors before they decide to leave the site. To persuade them to browse longer, he shrank the header on the home page and placed more content above the fold. He also added a flash section to rotate the pictures continuously, showcasing more products. Site testing proved the strategy was successful in converting more visitors into buyers. Bianco also recommends working with your IT department to ensure that your site presents a consistent user experience for multiple Web browsers.
Make the path to your products more direct
Monitor how visitors are using your search tools. If more than 20 percent of visitors are using your search feature instead of site navigation to find products, that is a red flag, according to Prudence Runyan, account director for the interactive agency Refinery, based in Hatboro, Pennsylvania. She suggests analyzing the terms that customers enter in your search box to help you redesign site navigation and perhaps identify merchandising opportunities. She worked with one online retail manager who consistently saw searches for "petites." In response, he decided to test a small selection of petite dresses, and the unit sales for those styles grew by 33 percent.
Optimize your site for search engines
With more consumers using Web portals like MSN to find the products and services they want, make sure you reference products the way your customers do. Free keyword tracking and ranking tools from companies like Digital Point Solutions are a good place to start. Or, if your budget allows, you might want to hire a search engine optimization specialist.
The goal is to raise your ranking on the search engine, since 80 percent of all traffic from search queries goes to companies listed in the top half of the first page of results. Aside from keywords, you can improve your ranking by developing high-quality, relevant content on the Web pages you serve, and investing in strategic online marketing techniques like pay-for-clicks campaigns, which can build up quality inbound links to your site.
Give your Web site the ongoing attention it needs
Redesigning your site for sales success is a never-ending process. Regularly updating content and integrating customer-community tools like blogs and live chat will help develop loyal customers. No matter what you change, be sure to measure and monitor the impact of those changes on the bottom line. This will help with decisions about future updates to your site. Bianco spent a year testing and tracking hundreds of changes and their impact on traffic and conversion rates. Each change was keyed to a revision number; Web analytics helped him determine whether the changed element adversely or positively affected the conversion rate.
Take time to learn what captivates your customers and what disenchants them about your site. If you want to grab a greater share of online dollars, your site needs to make the shopping experience even more welcoming and convenient than walking into a physical store.
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Key metrics that reveal site performance Pedro Sostre, president and creative director of Sostre & Associates, a Miami, Florida-based Internet consulting firm, suggests four top metrics to track Web site performance: | • | Average number of page views per user. More is usually better, but high average page views combined with a low conversion rate could mean a poor shopping cart design or the wrong product mix. | | • | Average amount of time visitors spend on the site. If visitors are staying longer than 20 seconds (the minimum threshold you want) but still not buying, you are failing to provide enough information or incentive to make a decision. | | • | Shopping cart abandonment rate. A high abandonment rate could mean your checkout process is too complicated or you charge too much for shipping. | | • | Conversion rate. Conversion rates for e-commerce sites generally fall anywhere between 0.75 and 7 percent, depending on the price point and the market. |
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 | Debby Young is a freelance writer based in Framingham, Massachusetts, specializing in the use of technology in business. Young has 25 years of experience writing for CIO, Electronic Business, Enterprise Leadership, CDW Biz Tech and other business publications. |
