Reasons to Test

Just about any open question is a reason to test. Testing’s real value, however, is far more than simply settling disagreement about the color of a Buy Now button. Testing puts your customers’ experience at the center of your decision making. Rather than rely on gut intuition or the most fiercely held opinion on the team, testing allows your company to ask your customers to tell you the answer that works for them. That gives you the ability to make business decisions based on hard data from real customer experiences. Careful testing is an essential part of your ongoing optimization efforts.

Resistance to Testing

Given the granular nature of user data now available to any online company, setting up and running a test is not technically challenging. Resistance to testing is often based on a lack of will by decision makers in the company. Most reluctance to testing comes from a fear of losing revenue. Especially at the ends of quarters, or when other pressures are mounting for a company, it can be difficult to have the confidence to find your most optimized cart. Resistance can also come from a general fear of the unknown, from the attitudes of the highest paid person in the room or from previous testing experiences. Once the buy-in exists, however, the process for running a test is simple.

Testing Methodology

Strategic Goal

Todd Garcia, Senior Account Executive at cleverbridge, walked us through the process for establishing a test.

He recommends you begin the testing process by defining your strategic goal. For instance, Garcia once ran a test where the strategic goal was to raise the revenue associated with a particular product. While that goal was clear, there was more than one way to achieve it. Establishing this test required some discussion about which changes to implement. As he discussed the test with the software merchant, they began to flesh out a hypothesis for the test.

Hypothesis

Garcia noted that, “It’s important to define a hypothesis that is testable and results can easily be defined through data analysis. Meaning, your hypothesis should be based on realistic KPIs for that specific test.” In this case, the hypothesis was that they could raise the average order value of the product by removing the field to enter a coupon code in a shopping cart.

Test

In order to have meaningful results, do not simply implement your change and compare it to historical data. Garcia explained, “Customers act differently in different times of the year, different days of the week, different hours of the day, etc., … so it’s important to test your variations in real time.” Your original design becomes your control design. The control shows you how your current design performs during the same time period and under the same conditions to your test design. The test design is implemented alongside your control, and customers are diverted to one design or the other.

Assess

How did the two variations of your page perform? Did one do better? How well did your hypothesis live up to the results? In this case, it turned out the hypothesis was incorrect. Average order value did not increase or decrease in any significant way with the removal of the coupon field. This negative result did, however, have a surprising result.

At the start of the test, the conversion rate was expected to remain constant. Remarkably, the conversion rate increased by 10 percent. The results indicated something very specific about customer behavior  when presented with the option to enter a coupon code. More customers completed their purchase when they were not prompted to enter a code.

We can only guess what was happening in the minds of the customers, but it could be that some were abandoning their cart to search for coupon codes and not returning. Perhaps they did not find the code and gave up. Perhaps they found a discount from a reseller, and were not buying the product directly from the publisher. Or perhaps they were finding a different product altogether. In any case, removing the obstacle to converting kept a greater number of customers engaged with this client’s product.

Outcomes

In discussing the outcomes of the test, Garcia noted, “My hypothesis was proven wrong, which is totally fine because something even cooler came out of it. Online retailers include the coupon code option because they would rather have customers come back with a coupon than not buy at all. But based on the results of the test, they’re just not coming back. The test teaches us that if customers are in your cart, they want to buy. So don’t push them away.”

Keystone

Good business intuition is essential to any successful enterprise, but those gut feelings can sometimes prove incorrect. The potential risk of running tests is far outweighed by the value of confirming or refute your hunches with real data. Working with a solid methodology ensures your tests are meaningful, and your decisions based on the outcomes have a far better chance of helping you achieve your strategic goals.

Learn more about how to increase revenue with our Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization. 

The post A Funny Thing Happened During the A/B Test appeared first on cleverbridge.

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:

1. Test many different variables
2. Make changes quickly and easily based on data analysis
3. 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.

The post 3 Platform Capabilities for Creating Better Customer Experiences appeared first on cleverbridge.

In this post, we revisit these companies to explore their user interfaces, discuss their sign-up processes and assess the supporting communications each company sends to new users. By comparing their two approaches, we hope to show the elements that contribute to, or detract from, a positive user experience and customer experience. For any subscription company, delivering excellent experiences can mean higher customer lifetime value. Poor user and customer experiences, however, can lead to increased churn and depreciation of the brand’s value.

User Experience

Morning Farm Reports and FarmLogs both offer freemium products. But as we saw regarding their subscription billing schemes, these two companies have vastly different approaches to their account sections.

Morning Farm Report — Account Setup

Setting up this account was pretty straightforward. Clicking on the sign-up link launches a popup where I entered my personal information and created my account.

Morning Farm Report complies with a double opt-in procedure for their accounts, and a user cannot begin using the service until they confirm their account registration by clicking on a link in a confirmation email. This is a mark in Morning Farm Report’s column because double opt-in is the industry standard for email signup. However, the extra step in the process made it feel disjointed, unlike FarmLogs’ seamless experience, which I’ll discuss below.

Morning Farm Reports — Free Features

To get started with this service, I have to tell Morning Farm Report which areas I want data for. I also want to experiment with the different features to see how valuable they are. The user experience during this process affects the decision to pay for the full service or not.

I knew that this was a freemium product, and not all features would be available. However, when I tried to use the features that were available, the experience was not intuitive and and I could not easily find helpful instructions.

For instance, let’s say I wanted to track wind conditions and see if it is safe to use a drone to observe my fields. My first thought was to select the Drone Plan service. The service correctly indicated that I had not given them any information about where my field is.

I went to select my field, but it wasn’t easy to do. After much searching, I found a button under the “field story” tab that allowed me to import existing field information from another system or to add a field by searching for it or drawing it on a map.

Instead of importing field data, I opted to draw one, but found the drawing function to be buggy. I eventually established a field and unlocked functionality from the Drone Plan and Field Forecast services.

The overall impression I got from Morning Farm Report’s user experience is that their service is not very intuitive or easy to use, but clearly includes a lot of horse power that could be unlocked with a paid subscription. As a tactic, this might make sense to encourage users to upgrade. But their approach carries a danger of turning off customers who would otherwise consider purchasing a paid subscription. If the features are as difficult to use in a paid subscription as they are in the free version, Morning Farm Report may be setting themselves up for high churn rates from the customers that do decide to purchase a paid subscription.

How does the FarmLogs user experience compare?

FarmLogs Account Setup and Free Features

My overall impression of FarmLogs’ user experience was positive. From the sign-up flow, supporting communications and direct instructions in their interface, FarmLogs is far ahead of Morning Farm Reports in terms of delivering a great user experience. Let’s examine the differences.

The first difference I encountered between FarmLogs and Morning Farm Report is that FarmLogs does not require a double opt-in process to create a user account. While this might not be best practice, it made the user experience easier.

Once I created an account, the site immediately prompted me to map a field. This is an important step because now the system knows the exact regions to display data for. Unlike Morning Farm Report, every feature displayed relevant information right away, and I did not have to waste time discovering how to map a field. If I had missed the prompt, FarmLogs also sends a welcome email that tells me I need to map my farm before I can start using the service.

The mapping process is very easy and intuitive. I could immediately see my fields on a map and even select the crop being grown there. Then, the field appears clearly on the FarmLogs user dashboard.

Customer Experience

FarmLogs

FarmLogs supplements their sign-up process with helpful emails and prompts. In addition to the welcome email they send upon signup, they also send emails that are both useful and encouraged me to sign in and continue using the service. For instance, on May 10, 2016, they sent a “rain alert” email to inform me that my fields received rainfall. The CTA suggests I log in to FarmLogs to learn more. I also received a direct communication from an account representative with the company. FarmLogs provides an outstanding customer experience by ensuring customers know how to use their service, whom to contact if they need assistance, as well as a personally engaged support email — all within a few days of signup.

Morning Farm Report

In contrast to the omnichannel, proactively helpful customer experience FarmLogs provides, the Morning Farm Report provided no proactive support in the first week. But in reviewing my work, a colleague noticed that he was receiving a regular email from Morning Farm Report.

Morning Farm Report’s email contains more information than FarmLogs’ rain report email, but with a less engaging design. Additionally, there is no way to unsubscribe within Morning Farm Report’s email. For each of the emails FarmLogs sent, they include an unsubscribe option. This is another reason why Morning Farm Report’s poor user experience also handicaps their overall customer experience. I did, eventually, locate where within Morning Farm Reports I could manage my newsletter preferences.

To be fair, we at the cleverbridge Blog do not farm and cannot judge how useful these subscriptions are in practice. That said, no matter what service a company sells subscriptions for, they put themselves at a disadvantage by not focusing on both the user experience and overall customer experience they’re providing.

Takeaways

In the end, our assessment of FarmLogs’ and Morning Farm Report’s user and customer experience is lopsided to say the least. There are good and bad aspects to both companies’ account signup. While FarmLogs immediately launches into how to set up a user account, omitting the double-opt in process might cause issues for them down the line. Double opt-in aside, FarmLogs was superior at every turn from the perspective of their digital user experience. In overall customer experience, Morning Farm Report receives one check for omnichannel communications. Even this, however, was not intuitive or accessible in the way FarmLogs’ communications are. FarmLogs clearly takes more care to ensure their subscribers know how to use their product and whom to ask if they have questions.

Keystone

As we noted last week, user experience and customer experience are closely related, but don’t always line up. Regardless of the robustness of a company’s platform, if a subscriber cannot easily use the service, they will churn away. If customers feel welcomed and can easily set up their account, they will become loyal users who renew.

Download our complimentary e-book Attracting & Acquiring New Subscribers today

Update

After we published this piece, Morning Farm Report finally sent me a well designed welcome email. While it would have been more helpful to receive this when I was actually setting up my account, I’m glad to see Morning Farm Report putting more emphasis on customer experience. This email includes an image of the page where one can add a field which would have made it easier to find. The email also promotes another method for mapping a field by selecting a highlighted field, which I did not find on my own. The bottom of the email also includes contact information for a customer service representative.

The post Monetizing AgTech — Account Setup User Experience appeared first on cleverbridge.

What Is User Experience?

It’s best to start off explaining user experience because it’s more product-specific. User experience refers to the experience of a user, or customer, when interacting with a specific product or service. Some of the metrics used for measuring user experience (UX) include abandonment rate, success rate, clicks to completion, error rate, and time taken to complete task.

For example, image you’re running a subscription company and a customer visits your website to purchase something. The page loads and they conduct a search using the search bar because they’re looking for a specific item. They find a product of their interest and click on it to find more information. Once they’re satisfied with the product description, they go ahead to the sign-up page, enter their payment information, and then become a paying subscriber.

This particular interaction during the sign-up process can be called your website user experience. Factors like whether the page loads quickly or slowly and whether or not they were able to find the product easily will play a role in user experience.

Below is the User Experience Honeycomb created by Peter Morville to depict the various factors affecting UX.

What Is Customer Experience?

When comparing customer experience and user experience, customer experience is a much broader concept. It points towards the overall experience of a customer in their interaction with your brand or company. Therefore, customer experience covers all interactions a user has with your brand, but isn’t limited to the experience a customer has when interacting with a specific product or service. It can be measured using metrics like likelihood to recommend to others, likelihood to continue using the product or service, and overall experience.

For instance, a customer visits your website, conducts a search for a product, and then completes their purchase. They call up your customer service department to inquire about the delivery date and later receive the product. Maybe they receive it early or way after the promised date of delivery. Perhaps they even find some defect in the product or have some trouble using it and then come back to your customer service staff for assistance. Their experience, whether positive or negative, during this entire interaction is termed customer experience.

What Is the Difference Between User Experience and Customer Experience?

Since customer experience and user experience are so closely related, it’s quite easy to mix them up. To gain a better understanding about their differences, let’s take a look at the features of good UX and good CX.

A good digital user experience provides customers with the following benefits:

• They can quickly locate relevant information on the website.
• They can easily complete a desired task without much confusion.
• They can navigate web pages with ease.

Graze is an excellent example of a subscription business with good user experience. As shown in the image below, the website makes subscribing simple by giving three options. With too many options, customers can easily get frustrated because they might not know what to choose. Also, the website assures customers that even if they’re confused about which option to choose, they can always change it again later.

A good customer experience provides customers with the following benefits:

• They have a professional and helpful interaction with company representatives.
• They have a generally positive attitude about everything associated with that particular brand or organization.

A great example of good customer experience is the following interaction between a Netflix employee and a subscriber who’s encountering a problem. As you can see, the employee went out of his way to interact with the subscriber in a friendly manner, even pretending to be a Star Trek officer. This correlates well with the brand’s customer base.

User Experience and Customer Experience in Practice

Good user experience with bad customer experience

Let’s say you’re going on a trip and want to book a flight. Since it’s more convenient, you download an app from a certain airline and purchase your ticket through the app. Although it’s your first time using the app, you manage to use it efficiently with the easy navigation and self-explanatory interface. You eventually manage to complete the task within minutes.

While this shows an example of a good user experience, you might have a different customer experience altogether when you get to the airport. Maybe the airline has an understaffed check-in booth with an unnecessarily long line or the attendants are abrasive and impolite. You might even experience a similarly bad service on the flight itself.

This example clearly demonstrates how one can have a good user experience with one aspect of the brand like their mobile app without getting much satisfaction on other aspects. Regardless of how good your app or website UX is, other aspects of your service can damage the overall customer experience. Customer experience and user experience don’t always correlate.

Good customer experience with bad user experience

It’s also possible for a brand to maintain good CX despite delivering bad UX in other areas. Let’s say you download an app that lets you record sounds. However, when you start using the app you’re confused with the interface and are unable to find what you’re looking for. You might have trouble recording even the simplest of voice memos.

So, you call up the helpline and are attended to by a friendly, supportive representative. The rep clearly gives you a step-by-step explanation on how to find the feature you need. Now you can finally complete your task. Additionally, they’ll also give you a $20 store credit as a form of apology. This shows there are still ways to deliver excellent customer experience even if your product delivers unsatisfactory UX.

Tips for Good User Experience and Customer Experience

To truly align your customer experience and user experience, it’s important that you come up with a strategy combining the two factors. Here I’ve outlined a few basic tips to get started:

• Whatever you do, always try to gain an in-depth understanding of your customer base, including what they want and need. This will help you in designing a plan that will focus on your customer preferences.
• Use customer feedback to find out exactly what they’re looking for. What are their biggest issues with your product or brand? Answering this will help you understand what challenges you must address for developing better user experience and customer experience.
• Create awareness across the organization about the importance of delivering good customer experience and good user experience. I suggest coming up with an incentive plan that rewards employees who have successfully delivered exceptional service. This is a great way to motivate more staff members towards reaching your CX or UX goals.

Keystone

Many brands make the unfortunate mistake of only focusing on providing a good user experience while completely ignoring customer experience. Other brands deliver exceptional customer experience without trying to improve on the user experience of their website or other services. For complete customer satisfaction, it’s important that you properly understand the relationship between these two factors. Maintaining consistency between customer experience and user experience is key for long-term customer relationships.

Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant that specializes in sales funnels, targeted traffic and website conversions. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, Influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities. Continue the conversation with him on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and LinkedIn.

The post What Is the Difference Between User Experience and Customer Experience? appeared first on cleverbridge.

Subscription Commerce Guides

We wanted to highlight three important subscription commerce guides we published in 2015. The first gives you a peek into the subscription commerce solutions landscape, while the second discusses the subscriber’s journey and its attendant KPIs.

Navigating the Subscription Solutions Landscape

What kinds of subscription billing platforms exist? What are the best ways for your company to establish a subscription model for your products or services? Let our guide orient you to the ever evolving subscription market in our complimentary Navigating the Subscription Solutions Landscape White Paper.

Mapping and Measuring the Subscriber Journey

Once you’ve implemented a subscription solution, how do you measure success? Are you thinking about your customers’ experiences? Seeing the subscriber journey through their eyes is the best way to begin building a profitable relationship with them. Download our complimentary guide, Mapping and Measuring the Subscriber Journey, to be sure you understand all the stages of the subscriber journey and subscription KPIs.

Attracting and Acquiring New Subscribers

Our third guide, Attracting and Acquiring New Subscribers, addresses a major challenge faced by all subscription businesses. This guide takes you through the basics of attracting new visitors to your website, acquiring free trial and freemium users, and converting free users to paying subscribers.

Popular 2015 Ecommerce Blog Posts

Customer Experience

Your customers’ experiences with your website, your service and with your customer support team are all opportunities for your business to increase customers satisfaction. Positive customer interactions burnish your brand and increase customers’ confidence in your ability to deliver on your promises. Three posts on this topic were very popular in 2015. They explore ways to improve your user experience, specific KPIs to reduce your customer contact rate, and confirmation pages that leave your customers satisfied.

• Fifteen Effortless Ways to Improve User Experience
• Customer Service KPIs: Reducing Contact Rates
• World Class Customer Service — Enhancing Your Confirmation Page

Popular Ecommerce Tips

Earning online revenue has become more complex than simply maintaining an online store (traditional ecommerce), so it’s no surprise that blog posts explaining the ins and outs of maximizing your online store continued to rank high with readers in 2015. Below are three important tips about encouraging timely payments by customers, maintaining an ecommerce site with effective features, and navigating Google policies that can potentially kill your business.

• Are Your Customers Missing Payments?
• Five Features of Effective Ecommerce Sites
• Beware Badware: Google’s Policy on Unwanted Software

Legal Compliance and Fraud Prevention

Source: GIPHY

Common challenges surrounding credit card processing were also top of mind among ecommerce professionals. A popular post from June challenges the idea of friendly fraud. Tim Russo points out that the concept is not friendly at all and increases costs for all parties involved in credit card processing.

In addition to friendly fraud, retailers also take on considerable risks just taking credit card information from customers. Are the basic compliance standards enough? Should your operation consider PCI certification? What other measures can your team take to ensure you not only meet the minimum standards, but exceed them?

• Friendly Fraud Is a Lie
• Data Security: Why PCI DSS Alone Doesn’t Cut It

Ecommerce Eye Candy

Our weekly Ecommerce Eye Candy series also made it into the most popular posts. This one from March of 2015 explores the state of the Indian Ecommerce Market, its exponential growth and largely untapped potential.

No matter which market customers were in, though, retailers had to become more savvy in their metrics to accurately gauge Customer Acquisition Vs. Retention Costs. Careful measuring of your costs per customer acquisition compared to your customer retention costs help focus your customer communication efforts to increase revenue and reduce costs.

Check out all our Ecommerce Infographics.

“Don’t protect your cash cow if there’s a risk of being disrupted. You may as well disrupt yourself before somebody else does it to you.” — Craig Vodnik

Meanwhile, on the Internet

2015 was also an amazing year for cleverbridge across the Internet. What follows is a selection of popular articles and interviews that appeared here and there over the year.

This very blog was featured by Digital Marketer in their list of the Eight Best Conversion Rate Optimization Blogs. Experts at cleverbridge were also important contributors to other publications, including these two gems from CIO and CreditCards.com.

• CIO | 7 simple, low-cost ways to acquire new customers
• CreditCards.com | 8 steps to fighting chargeback fraud

cleverbridge co-founder Craig Vodnik was very busy this year. He was featured on the 2X Ecommerce Podcast in April of 2015, discussing the current state of subscription commerce, and he penned How to Select the Right Subscription Commerce Solution for Website Magazine. You can also watch him featured on Bootstrapping In America over at tastytrade.

Finally, The Paypers featured an interview with cleverbridge co-founder and CEO, Christian Blume: Subscription commerce is about understanding the customer life cycle value.

Keystone

Join us in raising a glass to the year that was, and have a happy New Year!

Start 2016 off right by downloading our Six Guides on Ecommerce Essentials today. 

The post 2015 Year in Review appeared first on cleverbridge.

While most lists of trends simply itemize whichever styles happen to be the most popular at the time, the folks from The Deep End web design studio went above and beyond. They searched through the most popular trends and identified the ones that have been proven to boost conversion.

Their infographic not only tells you which design aspects are the ones you need to implement now for your site to look great. It also tells you why these particular trends actually work.

Read on to find out more about why aspects like monochromatic color schemes and single column CTAs are not only cool to look at but how they work to increase revenue and customer engagement.

And for more on improving conversion rates, download our Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization today.

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy — 2016 Web Design Trends to Boost Conversions [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

It’s easy to make decisions centered on these influences, however, it’s not smart because it’s not driven by real data. We know you are in a hurry, but if you take the time to do some A/B testing, you will end up with results that can put you on the road to increased revenue.

With testing you will gather actual real information about your specific issue/problem/change/design, and be able to use that data to make factually based decisions, just like the scientists do.

Be a scientist, not a follower. Check out this amusing infographic from Wingify that will help you determine in which scenarios you should A/B test instead of deciding by other methods.

Download our Six Guides on Ecommerce Essentials today.

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy — 14 Times in Business You Should A/B Test [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

Visual Website Optimizer, who brought us many gems of content like the ecommerce survey, now bring us this infographic about the perfect checkout page. It lists the four strategic areas addressed by the perfect checkout process: functionality, usability, security and design. They are explored in helpful detail and accompanied by tactical suggestions.

For example, do your customers have to create an account if they want to complete a purchase? You better think twice about this requirement. You can harm conversion rates by adding a few extra buttons to click or forms to complete.

Did you know that 30 percent of card declines can be saved by offering additional payment methods in your checkout page? Do not leave your customers hanging there with their pockets out. Include regional alternative payment methods to capture even more customers.

Do not underestimate the impact a confirmation page has on usability. It is an essential reference guide for your customers, so make sure it goes to the right email address, and include contact information in case your customer needs to get in touch.

This infographic also comes with excellent sources listed at the bottom. Dig through them to find useful information about conversion optimization from reputable sources like the esteemed Baymard Institute and conversion rate optimization expert Justin Rondeau.

What have you done lately to create the perfect checkout page? Share your tips in the comment section below.

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy — Anatomy of a Perfect Checkout Page [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

Let’s set the stage. You see an email from one of your favorite stores with a discount in the subject line. The discount is reiterated in the headline and body of the email. It is accessed with a click on a link in the email. The page that loads next is the landing page.

But landing pages are not found only after emails. They appear after clicking on paid search advertisements and organic search results too. Woe to the company that doesn’t take you on a seamless journey all the way from the subject line, to the email, to the landing page, and then through to the payment page.

This leads us straight to the infographic’s first tip: Make the purpose of your site clear. When you strive for clarity, you don’t send an email announcing a new product and then use your home page as the landing page. And you make sure that the keywords you bid on in a PPC campaign are found in the content of the ad’s landing page and in its meta descriptions.

Another noteworthy aspect of this infogrpahic is the fourth tip, in that it agrees with what we said in our earlier post that CTAs and content are the keys to better landing pages.

The sixth tip is part of our dogma: Test, test again, and then keep testing.

Also, responsive emails and pages are key as well. In fact, if the pages of your website that appear on SERPs need to be mobile friendly lest you incur the wrath of Google, and they penalize your site for poor UX. You can try out this nifty tool to help you get on board the mobile-friendly train.

Tell us about your landing page tips in the comment section.

Brought to you by GetResponse Email Marketing

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy — Eight UX Tips to Boost Your Landing Page Conversion Rate [infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

Our Ecommerce Digest dips its toe into the problem of monetizing the Internet of Things, facilitating mobile purchases, using video in search engine marketing, and changing our mindset on the role of channel partners.

Internet of Things

The IoT Monetization Problem | Re/code

As more sensors become embedded into all kinds of devices, the growing Internet of Things (IoT) turns manufacturers into software vendors and disrupts virtually every market you can imagine. According this article from Re/code, the challenge for vendors is turning innovative technologies and large amounts of data into financial gain. More and more companies will find ways to connect devices with information about how those devices are used. Vendors of IoT products and services have to figure out how to manage licenses and collect revenue. Without these abilities, they lose out on a lot of potential revenue.

Mobile Design and User Experience

PayPal’s One Touch Checkout Service Now Available Across Europe and Australia | VentureBeat

Global Internet use continues to rise. According to one study from We Are Social, a little over three billion people, about 42 percent of Earth’s population, have Internet access. Additionally, 62 percent of web pages are visited through desktops and laptops while 39 percent go through through phones and tablets. We all know from personal experience how frustrating it is to fill out form fields from a mobile keyboard, so with all these mobile users, vendors must create more fluid payment submission processes.

Similar to Amazon’s 1-click shopping technique, PayPal now has One Touch for mobile users. This seems like an excellent way to facilitate conversions, but it is also a double-edged sword: When all it takes is a single action to make a purchase, accidental orders are inevitably going to rise.

Video and Paid Search

‘A Gusher of Money’: Google Testing Video Ads in Search Results, Industry Sources Say | Digiday

We all intuitively understand the power of video content, and marketing to YouTube users through AdWords for Video has been popular for a while now. According to this article from Digiday, Google is testing out the display of video ads on search engine results pages (SERPs). This feels like an inevitable evolution. Over the years, we’ve seen rich snippets added to results. And who doesn’t find their googling enhanced by the Knowledge Graph? The main question is, will video on SERPs work? It seems that it goes a long way towards increasing brand awareness, but does it generate revenue? And will video advertisements interrupt our searches and create a less user-friendly experience?

Channel Partners

Through-Channel Marketing: The Channel Is More Than a Sales Channel | Forrester Research

According to the author, Tim Harmon of Forrester Research, the relationship between vendor and channel partner has become more complicated in recent years. In the past, manufacturers or vendors created a product, found a market, and relied on channel partners to find and sell to customers. Now, companies have to view their channel partners almost as an extension of their brand, with the ability to enhance or damage it. Vendors would do well to actively support their channel partners and work closely with them to build the right kind of relationship with customers.

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