UX, UI, usability, accessibility, user experience… They may sound like abstract concepts, and many may even think they are empty buzzwords, but they are undoubtedly key concepts when it comes to raising the level of a website.
I do not want to spend ages explaining the differences between each of these terms (that is what Wikipedia) is for, but to give a real example of how beneficial it can be to focus on these often-forgotten aspects. We have the case of an eCommerce that, over a given period, generated approximately €330,000 in revenue:
As we can see, to achieve this it needed 153000 visits, which generated 4800 transactions, resulting in a conversion rate of 3.14% (4800 * 100 / 153000). This is undoubtedly a fairly good figure, as we can see from these studies:
The problem comes when this eCommerce is the clear market leader, has been growing far above the growth rate of a market that is stagnating, and acquiring new users involves an extremely high CPA that is unjustified in most cases. On top of this, the business targets set for that period expected revenue close to 380000€.
Had we anticipated it, this situation could have been solved in two ways:
- The typical one, the usual one: increasing customer acquisition spend until reaching the number of customers needed to get to those 380000. How many would we have needed for that? Let’s do the maths:
- 4800 transactions generated 330000€, so 330000 / 4800 = Customers spend an average of €68.75 per transaction.
- 380000 / 68.75 = 5527 transactions would have been needed to reach the expected revenue results.
- Now let’s work out how many visits we would have needed to reach this figure with a 3.14% conversion rate: 5527 * 100 / 3.14 = 176020 visits would have been needed.
- With a standard CPC of €0.50, the 176020 – 153000 = 23020 extra visits would have meant an investment of 23020 * 0.5 = €11510. Not bad, right?
- Let’s now move on to the second one, the difficult one, the sniper formula, which consists of achieving the same revenue not by increasing acquisition traffic but by increasing the conversion rate:
- If, as we have just seen, we need 5527 transactions with 153000 visits, that means our conversion rate has to rise to 5527 * 100 / 153000 = 3.6%, which is 0.45% higher than the original. Many of you will tell me that this is not easy at all, and I will answer that this is true… halfway. Why? Because this is where the usability, UX, UI, etc. factors we mentioned at the beginning come into play, and each website has them at a different level of development. Apart from the most obvious ones focused on design and ease of navigation through the site, we can add a few more:
- Site optimization and speed. This article brings us hard-to-argue-with data.
- Not leaving users with disabilities behind such as color blindness or dyslexia (10% of the population) or blindness (0.1%), adapting the design to offer the smoothest possible navigation with the fewest obstacles.
- Basing our designs on data and not on heuristics (the classic “I think that…”). That is what A/B tests are for: they show us which formulas, designs and navigation flows work better on our site and help convert better. I am not saying it, Google says it.
- Intelligent recommendation tools that analyse the user’s navigation and offer products that may interest them even before they look for them themselves.
- Offering real-time discounts in order to close a transaction that is slipping away, or to win over someone who is undecided.
- Different pricing strategy depending on where the user comes from: if we know that people arriving from Facebook almost never buy from us, maybe it is time to offer them a small incentive…
- Lastly, more linked to online marketing than to usability, email marketing: beyond traditional “push” contact with unsegmented newsletters, you can (and should) create personalized, predefined messages based on the user’s purchasing behaviour, and enter all this data into their CRM record. Email remarketing campaigns also work very well: sending a reminder to customers who have visited our website
Do you really think we would not have managed to increase the conversion rate with practices like these in this eCommerce? Because if we add to this an optimized and targeted pricing strategy, the results would surely be even better. Besides, these improvements will be felt now and in the long term, while the traffic “push” is a short-term tactic with no obvious benefits beyond the possible recurrence of those “extra” users. And then, if this seems so obvious, why is it not done? In my opinion, for one very simple reason: because it is harder to “sell” and guarantee the success of these good practices than to pay more to attract more people. As simple as that.
Fortunately, I think things have been changing lately and there is increasing awareness of how important every user who visits our page is. Let’s make their visit pleasant and give them a reason to come back!
Finally, here are a few links of interest:
See you soon!
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