Conversion rate doesn’t go up by applying a pile of tactics across your whole site. It goes up when you find the one stage that’s driving people away. This piece covers how to find that stage, how to work out why people are dropping out there, and then fix only that one.
Why don’t lists of tactics work?
When you take a generic list of fixes and apply all of them, you’re assuming your drop-off is spread evenly everywhere. One shop’s problem might be that people never reach the product page at all, while another has an excellent product page but customers give up at payment. The fix that works for the first makes no difference to the second. Until you know where your drop-off is, every change you make is a guess.
Which stage has the biggest drop-off?
To find out where the problem is, break the buying path into consecutive stages and put a number on each step, meaning out of every hundred people who enter a stage, how many reach the next one. The step with the biggest drop-off is the one to fix first. I explained the same logic for the whole customer path in the sales funnel, and here we get to fixing it.
Picture an online kitchenware shop that gets 50,000 visitors a month. Of those 50,000, five thousand put an item in the basket, and in the end 500 complete payment. Now you have two conversion rates. From visit to basket it’s 10 percent, and from basket to payment it’s also 10 percent. Until you put those two numbers side by side you only knew you had 500 sales a month, but now you can see that of every 10 people who put an item in the basket, 9 leave without paying, and that’s your biggest drop-off.
Where is the biggest drop-off usually, and why?
For a lot of shops, the biggest drop-off is exactly where the customer has put an item in the basket but hasn’t finished paying. The Baymard Institute, which has pulled together more than 50 international studies, reports the average cart abandonment rate at around 70 percent. These people aren’t uninterested, because someone who brought an item as far as the basket had more or less decided, and something at the last step changed their mind.
The same report says the leading reason for that change of mind, at around 40 percent, is unexpected extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees the customer didn’t see until the last moment. So the biggest reason for not buying usually isn’t the price of the item or a bad product, it’s an extra number that appears in front of the customer at the payment screen and makes them feel they’re being taken advantage of. You’ve seen the Iranian version plenty of times. Some restaurants on Snappfood charge you a sizeable tax right before payment, or the shipping cost on most online shops, which on small orders is often more than 10 percent of the whole order.
What’s the fix for that particular drop-off?
Once you know where the biggest drop-off is, it becomes clear which fix is the one you need, because every drop-off has its own remedy:
- If the drop-off is at payment and the reason is a hidden cost, show the shipping cost on the product page, offer free shipping on orders above a certain amount, and shorten the payment steps so the customer doesn’t change their mind halfway.
- If the drop-off is between visit and basket, the problem is usually the product page, meaning the photos, description and price someone needs in order to choose the product, and this is where reviews from past customers and real photos of the item help.
- If the drop-off is right at the start, between being seen and arriving on the site, the problem is neither the product page nor payment, it’s the offer and the message people see first, which isn’t drawing them in.
All of these are correct, but only one of them works for your business, the one that matches the stage where you lose the most people. Generic lists don’t tell you which, they put all of them in front of you at once.
Where do you start, and how do you know it worked?
The starting rule is always the same. Go to the biggest drop-off, change one thing, and after a while measure that same number again to see whether it moved. If you change ten things at once, even if the conversion rate improves you’ll never know which change did the work and which was pointless.
However much you reduce the drop-off at one stage, that reduction applies to everyone who arrives each month. That’s why you don’t need to be a big shop for this to be worth it. In that same kitchenware shop, if you only take the basket-to-payment drop-off from 9 people to 7, your monthly sales go from 500 to 1,500, without a rial more on advertising.
Wrapping up
Conversion rate goes up when you stop treating the whole site and go after the one stage that most people drop out of. Until you know where your drop-off is, any tactic is just a guess, but once you’ve found the right stage and its reason, one simple change brings you more sales than ten scattered ones.