It’s not easy creating a customer experience, let alone creating the perfect one. Web developers, information architects and UX designers (you know, the people who actually build the customer experiences that grow your online revenue) all share a common challenge: How to create better customer experiences while saving time and money.
You have two options really:
You can guess and hope for the best.
Or …
You can test variables in your user interfaces (UIs) and make data-driven business decisions.
Obviously, one of those choices is better than the other (if you’re not sure which is which, we have bigger problems to discuss).The problem is that many well-meaning and ambitious organizations are hampered by in-house or third-party solutions that don’t allow them to test their UIs for maximum performance. Even if your current payment and billing solutions have some testing capabilities, those solutions aren’t very efficient, and they don’t let you make changes on the fly.
Optimizing Customer Experiences Requires a Flexible Solution
It would be so much easier if we could speak a machine and say, “Hey Robot! Optimize this UI for maximum performance,” and the machine would just automate the process of testing and updating your web pages while you sit back and watch your revenue grow.
But that’s not the reality we live in quite yet. Testing your billing and payment UIs requires proactive decision making. And making data driven decisions about optimizing your UIs is not a set-it-and-forget-it process. You have to check in on it daily.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t solutions available for making data-driven optimizations more efficient than what you’re doing today. If you want to optimize your UIs to improve conversion rates and grow online revenue, you need to a flexible solutions that helps you:
- Test many different variables
- Make changes quickly and easily based on data analysis
- Create consistent user experiences efficiently
Okay, so practically speaking, what UI elements do you have to focus on?
If you want to maximize conversion rates and average order values, it’s important to focus on common elements you’ll find in billing and payment UIs, like product and shopping cart pages. That includes things like:
- Pricing and payments
- Promotions
- Design elements
- Branding and messaging
Pricing and Payments
What if you could increase orders by pre-selecting relevant payment methods for different regions? Or conduct user tests to discover the optimal price of your product in the Japanese market?
Raising revenue through these kinds of tests depends on your ability to make consistent changes to your various UIs efficiently and effectively.
Offering Promotions
Offering a seasonal promotion takes a lot of coordinating between different UIs. If you want to offer a Black Friday promotion, for example, you will have to update your homepage, various landing pages, and other marketing material to create a consistent experience. And then when the promotion ends, you’ll need to revert those pages to their original content.
If you’re investing a ton of manual effort into displaying these promotions, it can cost you time and money.
Design Elements
Does using a breadcrumb navigation in your checkout process leads to higher conversion rates?
Maybe you want to split test your shopping cart page to see if a blue buy button converts more visitors than a red button.
The easier it is to swap out these elements in your UI, the more quickly you can make lucrative business decisions.
Consistent Branding and Messaging
When your checkout process UI is not consistent with the rest of your brand, it interrupts your customer and increases cart abandonment.
If your ecommerce solution only offers a generic looking third-party UI for your end-user that is not consistent with the rest of your brand, you are leaving money on the table.
Keystone
If you’re hosting your checkout pages in-house or cobbling several ecommerce and payment point solutions together, the user experience may not be seamless, and you won’t have the flexibility to maximize your business opportunities.
But your success depends on providing the best possible customer experience. That means not just knowing what to do, but being able to execute quickly.
Make sure that your payment and billing infrastructure is flexible enough to optimize user experiences effectively and efficiently, and implement a solution that lets you test important UI variables quickly to see what converts best.
Stephanie Milovic contributed much insight to this blog post.
