Take five seconds to test your call to action and USP
You may be focused on improving the conversion rate for your website, or simply wanting to ensure that your visitors can quickly get an idea of what you do and offer.
Whatever your goals, having a clear proposition and call to action are two areas that can have a positive impact on your business performance.
In this post I will be talking about a web application that you can use to help you and your business gain invaluable insights from end users.
Traffic segmentation: humble or sliced, which pie are you having?
OK so the idea of segmenting your customers and prospects isn't breaking news. What would make for some interesting headlines would be the percentage of businesses using segmentation effectively.
With this in mind, and with the continued increase in knowledge based content around social media and the importance to businesses being published online, I've taken a step back.
Pureplay and high street fashion retailers - who values usability more?
With the continued growth of online shopping, and with new pureplay
retailers entering the market looking for new opportunities, I would
expect that the biggest players would be leading the way in terms of
customer experience.
With the upcoming Online Fashion 100 event in London that I'll be attending, I have taken a look at some of the biggest players in the fashion industry, both pureplay retailers and high street retailers.
I was particularly interested to look at key areas of their online customer experience to find out:
1) how well some of these brands are are delivering intelligent and meaningful cross-sell and up-sells to drive higher average order values, and...
2) which retailers are potentially losing sales due to a lack of focus on the full customer experience, right through to the end of the checkout process.
Amazon relying on brand credibility instead of good usability
If ever a retailer could get away with having exceptional cross-selling
and up-selling functionality, yet provide a new visitor checkout
process and web forms that break many usability rules, Amazon is certainly one of them. On the other hand one of Amazon's competitors, The Book
Depository, certainly appears to focus more on providing better
usability throughout the buying journey, especially for new customers.
Following the recent e-commerce training course I delivered for Econsultancy, the usability benchmarking that is part of the course threw up some really interesting market insights. Although many retailers are featured in the course, providing examples of good and bad e-tail usability and best practice, I purposely refrained from including Amazon.
Are retailers following best practice to improve conversion rates?
Now with our economy firmly in a recession, most retailers no longer have the types of budgets available to replatform. Instead, 2009 will be a year for improving their existing platforms, trying to increase conversion rates, average order values and returning visitor numbers.
So with this primary drive to improve performance, are retailers doing all that they can? Are retailers following best practice to help more visitors complete the buying process, and are retailers removing usability barriers to ensure that in such competitive times visitors aren’t encouraged to find reasons why they shouldn’t complete their purchase?
Usable internal software systems – just a pipedream?
Usability as a criteria for judging internal software solutions is not only overlooked but often undervalued when compared to one of its big sisters, so called ‘cost reducing features’.
With the penetration of enterprise software throughout businesses all over the world, will we as end users ever experience user friendly internal software, to the levels to which we are accustomed with the latest ‘user centered’ web applications?
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
