The Need
At Nabler, we offer a variety of retainer-based engagements to our clients, and one of our most demanding retainer-based engagements by the small and mid-sized retailers and brands is the Conversion Audit of their online businesses. Recently, we were approached by a pure-play Home Furnishing store in Illinois, United States to conduct a Conversion Audit of its website, and find the root cause for the consistent decline in the revenue and conversion rate.
About Client
Nabler helped a US-based apparel brand optimize its investment on Adobe SiteCatalyst with a well-investigated re-implementation strategy and user training through our unique Digital Analytics Evangelization Program. This helped all the client’s teams get better and more relevant results and insights from SiteCatalyst, thereby increasing the tool usage and website effectiveness.
The Approach
To help the client in determining the possible root causes, we followed our standard Conversion Audit Process, which comprises of the following set of core activities that our Consulting Team performed:
An end-to-end Conversion Audit Process by our Consulting Team can take anywhere between three to four weeks depending on the complexity of the website, nature of the client’s business, frequency of site upgrades, type of consumer segments, the current optimization process and most importantly, the participation from the client’s Business and IT Teams.
During the Conversion Audit of the client, we got active participation from Marketing, Content, Merchandising, IT and Process Teams, and because of their timely inputs, we were able to nail down the potential root causes for the consistent decline in the revenue and conversion rate.
Here are the seven reasons we identified out of which, the top three were the major contributors to the consistent decline in the revenue on the website:
- During the Checkout Process, the client was asking the potential customers to review their Privacy Policy along with Terms & Conditions, and made it mandatory to opt-in before clicking the “Place Order” button. This was resulting in a fall-out rate of 42% from the Order Review page.
- During the Checkout Process, the client was not transparent about the Shipping Policy, Shipping Carrier, and Delivery Timelines for all three Shipping Methods, as a result of which, they were experiencing a significantly higher fall-out rate from the Shipping Methods page.
- The Computation of Shipping Charge, Taxes and Promotional Discounts on the Shopping Cart page was quite confusing. It was forcing the online visitors to do their math before proceeding ahead. Also, there was no transparency about the Shipping Cost until the visitor reached the Shipping Methods page.
- The Product Page Template was quite cluttered and the client was trying to squeeze in lot of content on the page with too many call-to-actions distracting the visitor.
- The Category and Search Results Pages were among the Top 2 Landing Pages and resulting in an Exit Rate of over 52%. The major reasons behind this were: Poor Merchandise Assortment, Lack of Refinement Filters, and Small Image Sizes.
- Home Page was redesigned recently with no clarity on Value Proposition. Also, the frequent changes in the Site Header were confusing the Returning Visitors.
- Throughout the website, the Trust Factor was missing because of no transparency around Return Policy, Shipping Policy, Privacy Policy, and most importantly, the Security Badges were not placed throughout the checkout process.
The Results
The entire optimization process took three months, and all the changes were made in a consecutive fashion on the website with an average gap of two weeks between each optimization. We saw a lift of 14% in the revenue after 60 days once the top 3 items were taken care off. The remaining lift of 9% came after 45 days.
Download the Case Study