How Customers Who Click Increased Groove Pillows AOV By 23%
Mar 19, 2024
Published by: Lucky Orange
Using a combination of smart process, concise strategy and proper tools, the e-commerce CRO agency Customers Who Click is making client websites perform at a high level over and over again. This post will breakdown everything the team is doing to deliver reliably winning results.
If you’re looking for actionable systems and ideas to improve your online store, you’re in the right spot.
In this post, you’ll be hearing from Customers Who Click’s CEO and Lead CRO Consultant, Will Laurenson.
What are some typical issues websites are dealing with these days?
“The main problems clients face are either they’re not happy with their existing conversion rates or average order value, OR, they’re happy with their existing numbers as a baseline, but they’re confident that if they can lift them as it’ll help them unlock better scale with their paid ads.”
These two situations require slightly different approaches when it comes to optimization.
If you fall into the first bucket, this process figures out what’s wrong, why traffic isn’t converting or why people aren’t spending much on your store.
In the other situation, research focuses on what elements are working, how they can be better leveraged and what other opportunities the brand hasn’t explored yet.
How do teams usually try to fix these issues on their own before deciding they need an agency?
“In most cases we see brands trying to do a bit of CRO themselves, and normally describing it as “a bit of CRO…” which just isn’t a thing really.”
From Will’s perspective, for a CRO program to succeed, it needs a full team dedicated to the effort.
“We have a strategist, analyst, project manager, designer and developer working on every program and we sometimes bring in other specialists depending on what we’re trying to achieve.”
If you’ve been “doing CRO” on your own it might look something like this:
Attempting a few A/B tests based on gut feeling rather than research—with results not showing much of an impact.
Installing a few apps and hoping they generate the promised improvement, but not spending enough time implementing the apps properly.
Copying ideas directly from other websites, particularly bigger competitors. “The two big problems with this are firstly you don’t know if your audience will respond positively to this, and secondly you don’t even know if their audience responded positively to it,” says Will.
Relying on discounting to improve your metrics. Discounts can improve conversion rate and bring in some revenue, but it’s a dangerous game and can quickly destroy profit margin.
“Research is the key to any CRO program. If you’re not spending 50-60% of hours in your CRO program researching, you’re going to struggle,” said Will.
How do you start the process of identifying where a website can improve?
When Customers Who Click begins a new client relationship, they’ve already gotten buy-in on the process—which involves a lot of research:
Website audit
Analytics review
Study behavioral analytics using tools like heatmaps and session recordings
Speak to the client’s customers to get to the truth
“This is how we unlock the real opportunities for our clients. At a high level, opinion doesn’t mean much. Sometimes clients think that abandoned carts are their biggest problem and so the cart is what needs to be cleaned up and optimized, but this often isn’t the case.”
Instead of relying on opinions, data and research are what shows what’s actually the biggest issue—which is oftentimes the product page leading up to the shopping cart.
“If customers haven’t had all their questions and concerns dealt with, and if they’re not motivated and excited by the prospect of buying your products, that’s why they drop off.
The top-level data will tell you the drop-off is at the cart. But the real insights tell us the problem occurs before they get to the cart.”
Once you’ve identified the specific problems you’re aiming to solve, what steps do you take to fix them?
“So let’s say we’ve figured out that our biggest drop off is from the product description page (PDP) to Cart, this is our problem area to fix.
If we’ve done our research correctly we’ll have identified several reasons for why customers aren’t progressing. Normally this is unanswered questions, concerns about the product, a lack of trust in the brand or they don’t just feel the wow factor.”
With research completed and data collected, it’s time to build a hypothesis.
In the case of improving a product page this might look something like:
“Displaying key product benefits early in the image gallery will increase conversion rates since more visitors will see them.”
Once the idea exists, it’s time to come up with solutions that fit with the hypothesis.
Will says, “We aim for three solutions for every test since it forces us to think a bit deeper about the problem. An easy solution to the image gallery hypothesis would be to create a product image with 3-4 benefit icons directly on the image.
Or maybe we could use customer reviews or testimonials to explain key selling points, while a third solution would be to use an explainer video.”
Another important point is to remember how much effort and work will be required to build the test solution.
A video could take a couple of weeks and require extra expenses, while customer testimonials is something more easily obtained if the product is already getting consistent reviews.
Tip from Will: “Because we don’t know the impact a test will have, it’s best to keep things simple and run the test. If we see a positive impact then we can explore testing something more complex.”
Let’s get specific. What are some real-world examples of this approach?
Here are three clients where the Customers Who Click research process shown above led to a clear and concise hypothesis with great potential solutions. Notice how simple the story gets once you fully understand what’s happening on the website and what drives customers specific to this brand to convert.
Groove Pillows
“With Groove Pillows we had an inkling that their free shipping threshold at $70 was too high. Their AOV was about $35, but their actual modal order value (most common) was only $28. So their free shipping threshold was just so far out of reach, customers didn’t feel motivated to try to reach it.”
The team tested a lower $60 free shipping threshold, then $50 and saw a significant increase in conversion rate and average order value. Then they added bundles priced over $50 to make the decision even simpler for customers.
“Overall, we saw a 53% increase in conversion rate and 23% in AOV in under 6 months with Groove,” said Will.
MOD Lighting
“With MOD Lighting, we suspected that a shipping timer in their checkout was actually negatively impacting conversion rates. This is a classic example of where brands are sold a “magical app that will double your conversion rates” and there’s no consideration for the audience and the market.
This isn’t the clients' fault, you don’t know what you don’t know, but in a lot of cases we find that apps make some pretty big claims, and do nothing to help clients achieve the results.”
In this case, the team tested removing the timer which said, “Your basket will be held for 14:59 …” and saw a meaningful 13.8% increase in conversion rate and a 16% improvement in average order value.
OZARKE
A recent win with a current client of theirs involved simply making the search bar more visible.
“We knew customers were having a problem finding the right product, and that users who searched converted at about 3.5x better than those who didn’t use it. So the task was simple - get more customers using it.”
The team tried two different solutions in this case:
Display the search bar open and centrally across the header
Expand the search box in its current position next to the cart button and add “Search Products” as placeholder text in the box.
According to Will, “Both variants had a positive impact for the brand, but it was the more subtle version, leaving the search box in its existing location, that generated a whopping 10.56% increase in conversion rate.”
Any general advice for teams trying to improve their site?
“If you’re going to do it, do it properly.
Speak to your customers and find out
What questions do they have about your products
What concerns do they have about buying from you
What are their pain points
What are their desired outcomes
This information will not only help you optimise your website, but also your advertising, email marketing, customer service, product, pretty much any touchpoint customers have with your business.”
Learn more about Customers Who Click: https://www.customerswhoclick.com/
