How Office Depot Boosted Conversions By 10 Percent
By Anna Johnson on September 9th, 2009Recently, MarketingSherpa published a case study about how Office Depot was able to boost conversions by 10 percent and reduce cart abandonment by 18 percent after overhauling its website.
One the Office Depot team’s most crucial changes was to redesign the look and feel of the Office Depot website, and their insights are instructive to all Internet marketers.
Firstly, Office Depot commenced their redesign only after analyzing their visitors and typical visitor behavior on the website. Among other things, a key insight was that 95 percent of visitors were repeat-visitors (only 5 percent were new to the site). This in itself should indicate that a different kind of design would be called for than if, for example, the vast majority of visitors were first-timers.
In the case of Office Depot, the web design team also recognized that a typical visitor’s eye-path generally followed a ‘Z’ pattern for all content ‘above the fold’ (i.e. the content visible in the browser window without having to scroll).
Consequently, Office Depot needed to redesign the home page to take into account this Z pattern, with the understanding that the most prominent above-the-fold locations should be devoted to elements of most value to repeat visitors.
For example, the top of the homepage, which, as on many websites, displayed the navigation bar was redesigned to give the most prominence – i.e. the top left space, beside the logo – to a store locater. This let customers know they could shop online and fulfill their orders in a store if they wished.
Also prominent was a ‘shop by catalog’ option which would allow regular customers who knew their item numbers to open a window up and start a shopping list. The Office Depot web team also added a pervasive shopping cart in the top navigation bar to let shoppers know how many items they had in their shopping carts as they navigated the site.
Drop-down menus based on ‘product categories’ and a search box were also each added to the navigation bar.
When it came to the middle of the ‘Z’ Office Depot created a rotating image of four products and/or offers, usually the website’s core products.
The bottom of the ‘Z’ was redesigned to include links to Office Depot’s consistent sellers: ink and paper, design, print and technology. Drop-down menus were used for each product segment to reduce webpage clutter.
If you operate an online store, you might want to take a similar approach to that of Office Depot: find out who your visitors are, and what they will respond to, and address those wants in terms of the ‘Z’ pattern above the fold on, not just your home page and typical entry pages, but all your web pages.
