Years ago we bought Steve Krug’s great book on website usability and design, ‘Don’t Make Me Think’. It’s a great book and its central message applies to many aspects of Internet marketing. It certainly applies when it comes to trying to get prospects to take specific actions on your website, such as clicking on a link, filling in a form (including opting in to a list), commenting on an article or blog post, ordering a product or service, and so on.

Essentially, the less you make people think before they take the action you want them to take, the more likely they will take the action.

You can see this phenomenon in everyday life, not just on the Internet. Observe other people. Observe yourself. In a world where we face a constant barrage of information and choices to make, it’s just natural for us to look for the path of least resistance in any given situation. We will even choose the path of least resistance when it’s NOT to our long-term advantage. (Well, of course we will – just consider how many people choose fast food over a home-cooked meal or watching TV over getting fit!)

Since thinking – i.e. the kind that involves analyzing information and making a decision – also requires effort, the path of least resistance is often that course of action that doesn’t require us to do much or any thinking.

That’s why, when it comes to the Internet, people abandon surveys, shopping carts and ‘busy’ web pages. Give people too much information to process or too many things to consider, and many, if not most, people will choose the easier, non-thinking path of leaving your site over the harder, thinking path of having to work out what to do.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should dumb-down your site or even that you should cater to the majority of visitors. You need to balance the desire of most people not to think, with the desire of that smaller number of hot prospects who WANT to consume your content, want different options, and are the ones who will actually pay for what you have to offer.

At the same time, however, you definitely want to remove any obstacles that are hampering your hot prospects from doing what you want them to do. As a rule of thumb, anything that requires a hot prospect to think before they take a desired action is an obstacle that you should consider removing.

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Website usability expert Luke Wroblewski has written a great article explaining how changing a single button – yes, a button – led one online store to increase its per annum sales by $300 million.

I encourage you to read Luke’s article (link below) for a number of reasons – to see just how critical certain webpage elements are to your conversions, sales and income, but also to reassure you that even the biggest, most experienced websites can get it wrong.

We ALL make mistakes. And if you think you are leaving – or have left – money on the table because of a dumb mistake or two… how about leaving $300 million on the table? All because of some little button on a webpage?

Firstly, let’s agree that some ‘minor’ items – such as buttons on a webpage – are not minor at all. Indeed, out of all the components of a sales page, the buttons you want visitors and customers to click on are among the most important.

Simply put, buttons can have a huge impact on conversions and sales. How they look, where they are located, when and how they are presented during a transaction, etc will all affect the extent to which they are clicked.

In Luke Wroblewski’s case, he was working on the website of a major online retailer when he discovered that the order form used by customers – a form consisting of two fields, two buttons and one link – was inhibiting people from buying. So much so that it was costing the ecommerce store some $300 million in sales each year.

To be clear, we’re not talking about people who were browsing the website – we’re talking about customers who placing orders for goods… and then abandoning their shopping carts because of the order form.

So what was the problem?

The form itself consisted of two fields – ‘Email Address’ and ‘Password’ – two buttons – ‘Login’ and ‘Register – and one link, ‘Forgot Password’. The problem wasn’t so much with the content of the form as its location, or more correctly, it’s appearance in the shopping sequence. Customers would encounter the form after they’d selected their products and clicked ‘Checkout’ but before they could enter their payment information.

Apparently, the idea behind this sequencing was to enable previous customers to login and complete their purchase more quickly, whilst enticing new customers to register with the site so they could complete purchases more quickly in the future.

However, Luke’s usability tests revealed that the online retailer had totally misunderstood the mentality of both its first time and repeat shoppers.

First time shoppers just wanted to make a purchase; they did not want to enter into relationship with the retailer, as the requirement to register with the site suggested. Repeat customers tended not to remember their login information, so they were just frustrated by the form.

All in all, the form became a huge obstacle to people wanting to complete their purchases. So much so, that nearly half of them – along with their $300 million worth of items – simply abandoned their orders and didn’t buy at all.

When Luke and the team identified the problem and modified the form so that people had the OPTION of either registering or simply proceeding to the checkout, the number of customers who completed purchases on the site rose by 45 percent and, in the next 12 months, sales grew by $300 million.

Now, that’s the power of testing, understanding your customers… and a button!

Source: Jared M. Spool, “The $300 Million Button,” User Interface Engineering, January 14, 2009

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If you’re looking for one of the more sophisticated multivariate split-testing tools for optimizing your website conversions, take a look at Autonomy Optimost’s Multivariable Testing (MVT) solution.

According to its makers, Autonomy Optimost lets you create, test and optimize virtually limitless combinations of web copy, offers, and layouts.

It also aims to optimize virtually every online marketing element in your online marketing campaigns – landing pages, registration pages, shopping carts, credit card pages, banner ads, email creatives, and web applications as well as every content type within them, including headlines, copy, forms, images, and rich media.

At least one Autonomy Optimost customer has used the tool to great effect. Insurance comparison site Gocompare.com was able to boost the number of visitors to its car insurance landing page using the Autonomy Optimost solution.

Additionally, after running the tool to identify the most compelling combination of content and layout, the company saw a significant increase in its click-through rate (CTR).

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Recently, 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.

Source: MarketingSherpa, “Office Depot Site Overhaul Lifts Conversions 10 percent: 7 Tactics to Target High-Impact Improvements,” MarketingSherpa, August 26, 2009

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SeeWhy is a tool that targets web visitors who abandon shopping carts and other website ‘conversion devices’ in an effort to entice them back to return and complete the conversion.

Essentially, SeeWhy’s free Abandonment Tracker captures the unique IDs of abandoners and then emails those IDs to the website owner who can follow up such abandoners.

For example, if someone abandons an online shopping cart, SeeWhy will record the abandonment along with the abandoner’s details, such as email address, shopping cart items and amount, and stage in the conversion process at which the visitor abandoned.

Check out SeeWhy here.

Source: Robin Wauters, “SeeWhy Raises $4.5 Million, Improves Website Conversion By Closely Tracking Abandoners,” TechCrunch, May 5, 2009

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