ReplaceDirect is one of the biggest parts and accessories retailers for notebooks and other mobile equipment in the Netherlands.

A Forrester study found out that shipping costs rank as the number one reason for shopping cart abandonment. ReplaceDirect decided to conduct A/B split testing on the checkout process to remove this barrier, and it slashed shopping cart abandonment by 25%.

ReplaceDirect tested their second step of the checkout procedure. It’s the page where customers are asked to fill out their personal information and shipping address. ReplaceDirect made several changes to the page, including adding an order overview, comprising the products, total costs and delivery date.

They also mention several benefits at this page that matched this step in the order process. Finally the page layout and form were redesigned with a cleaner look. Several fields, which were not absolutely necessary, were removed.

The new version performed significantly better, slashing shopping cart abandonments by 25%, and increasing sales by 14%.

The lesson learned is, in their own words, “Try to give the customers exactly the information they need at that particular page or section and leave out the redundant. Always put yourself in the customer’s shoes. This may not be easy so: test it!”

Are you continually testing your shopping cart to reduce its abandonment rate?

Full story at Visual Website Optimizer »

Need to sell more of a product or service?

Try this: Offer your customers a similar, but inferior product, at about the same price. While it’s unlikely that they will actually buy the less attractive offer, you may actually see a jump in sales of what you are trying to sell. This is known as the ‘decoy effect’ or decoy marketing.

In Predictably Irrational, author Dan Ariely describes an experiment whereby two groups of subjects saw one or the other of these offers to subscribe to The Economist.

Offer A:

• $59 – Internet Only Subscription (68 chose); or
• $125 – Internet and Print Subscription (32 chose).

Predicted revenue – $8,012.

Offer B:

• $59 – Internet Only Subscription (16 chose);
• $125 – Print Only Subscription (0 chose); or
• $125 – Internet and Print Subscription (84 chose).

Predicted revenue – $11,444.

Not a single person chose Print Only Subscription for $125. Yet by adding a decoy product, the Internet and Print Subscription offer jumped from 32% to 84% of respondents.

The print-only offer was the decoy, and served to give the combined offer a higher perceived value. While it’s true that Dan’s test had the subjects make the choice without actually consummating the deal with a credit card, it’s clear that introducing the decoy made the combined offer look more attractive.

According to Dan, decoys change behavior when a subject is choosing between alternatives that are more or less equally attractive.

Have you tried adding a decoy offer to increase the perceived value of the offer you want customers to buy?

Full story at Neuroscience Marketing »

Sunshine.co.uk are a UK-based travel agency offering cheap holidays. Within six months of working with Conversion Rate Experts, their conversion rate and sales almost doubled from £17 million to £31 million.

This was achieved despite the fact that the rest of the UK travel industry was in crisis: the country was in the grips of a recession, airlines were collapsing, and the number of holidays booked was falling. During this period the travel industry lost over £2.1 billion in profit.

Here are the takeaways from the case-study.

• In surveys, open-text responses are more valuable than multiple-choice questions;
• They recommend SurveyMonkey and KISSinsights for surveys;
• Give customers an incentive to fill out the survey;
• The covering email is just as important as the survey and incentive;
• They conducted usability testing with remote testers from UserTesting.com and WhatUsersDo;
• Don’t just test your site’s usability – test your competitors’ sites too;
• It took just six split tests to almost double revenue;
• Discover your product/company’s main benefits through customer research;
• Uncovering and overcoming common objections and misunderstandings increased the conversion rate by 19% and added £4 million to annual revenue;
• Turn negatives into positives: Visitors and usability testers commented about the lack of a customer phone number. Instead of brushing it off, they explained that by not offering phone support, customers save money;
• Sunshine.co.uk’s biggest affiliate noticed that the pay-per-click (PPC) traffic he sent to sunshine.co.uk was converting twice the rate as the traffic he sent to competitors, so his earnings doubled; and
• The higher conversion rate has allowed sunshine.co.uk to tap into huge volumes of PPC traffic, which was too expensive before.

Can you apply some of the conversion rate optimization techniques to improve your website’s conversion rate and sales?

Full story at Conversion Rate Experts »

Events company LiveNation wanted to get more out of the hundreds of millions of e-mails it was sending out to customers.

An internal survey of unsubscribers revealed that the main reason customers opted out of LiveNation e-mails was that too many messages were about artists they didn’t enjoy.

So LiveNation integrated the music recommendation algorithms from the social networking music site Last.fm into its e-mail targeting. Drawing on data from customers’ previous ticket orders, LiveNation was able to segment its consumers.

It further customized e-mails to include a local calendar and venue search so that if a particular show did not interest the recipient, a few others resulted as options.

Results:

• Emails sent out decreased by 24%, from 863 million to 657 million;
• Open rates jumped to 18.04%, up 5.13%;
• Total click-throughs increased 18.17%;
• Unique click rate was up 29.88%; and
• Conversion rate of actual orders per click increased 35.86% to 4.13%.

Are you segmenting your email messages based on consumer interests?

Full story at DMNews »

This MarketingSherpa case study shows how Makana Solutions, a Software as a Service company that helps organizations perform sales compensation planning, increased website traffic 200 percent, tripled the lead generation rate, and doubled the lead conversion rate within 3 months.

Its’ biggest hurdle was that their online service was a new category for most prospects, who set sales compensation goals and plan for those expenses using manual processes. Since few prospects knew the software-as-a-service solution was available, they weren’t actively looking for it.

Makana Solutions revamped their website as an online destination for sales compensation planning best practices and practical advice. They captured leads through online registration forms and using targeted email follow-ups, they moved those prospects into free trials that could be monitored by the sales team for possible subscription conversion.

Here are the seven steps they used to create and manage the strategy:

1. Create content for planning best practices;
2. Optimize website around high-value search terms;
3. Boost inbound links to improve search rankings;
4. Paid search advertising to supplement SEO efforts;
5. Follow up on Web leads;
6. Add lead information to CRM system for sales calls; and
7. Continually monitor keyword and outbound campaign results.

Results

Three months after adopting the strategy:

• Website traffic increased 200%;
• Lead generation rate tripled; and
• Lead conversion rate doubled.

SEO efforts have been a major reason for the boost, and paid search has dropped from 75 percent to 30 percent of traffic.

Could these SEO and lead capture strategies improve your website traffic, lead generation and lead conversion rates?

Full story at MarketingSherpa »