🚀 6 Key takeaways from the ecommerce growth seminar Bit Finer co-hosted on 29 November

Last Friday Bit Finer’s UX/CRO Specialist, Gauthier Schiehlé got the chance to step on stage in Tartu at a seminar organised by the Estonian Ecommerce Association, Bit Finer, Ambientia and What Makes You Local. Gauthier talked at length about Conversion Optimization, Research and Analytics to a panel of experts from the growing Estonian Ecommerce scenery. The seminar went incredibly well and we were lucky to have full house. Around 145 ecommerce enthusiasts and entrepreneurs signed up

Here are the key takeaways from Gauthier:

Growth hack #1

Despite the countless strategies and tactics that can be applied to grow a business, growing a business ultimately boils down to three rules:

a) get more customers by converting more of your visitors into buyers
b) get them to spend more and therefore increase their Average Order Value by implementing clever up-sell/cross-sell strategies (think of complimentary products to your main offer)
c) get your customers to buy more often from you by driving repeat purchases (having a robust lifecycle marketing strategy comes in very handy!)

Growth hack #2  

Conversion optimisation is about helping businesses grow their online profits by better understanding their customers and providing a ‘customer-centric’ user experience.

Growth hack #3

Conversion research is deeply rooted in the scientific practice as there is no room for opinion or gut-feeling: a clear and repeatable research process is needed in order to gather ‘ data-informed’ insights you can act upon. As a result we will cover a 6-step process that will help you optimise your website and your business.

1) Analytics setup: your analytics tool needs to be properly configured to gather data that matters for your business. Google Analytics comes free of charge but needs work to provide quality insights. By leveraging Google Tag Manager your website can be turned into a tracking machine that will record all the important interactions for your business. Conducting an health check of your analytics tool is an absolute must before considering conducting research. Skewed data is much worse than no data!

2) Technical analysis: it doesn’t matter how persuasive your website is if it doesn’t work on specific devices or browsers! An optimiser that I hold in high regards, Craig Sullivan, built a fantastic tool (app.profitgrid.io) that will help you see where your website is leaking money, at the page-level and for all your devices. By identifying where are the biggest revenue opportunities you can also prioritise your heuristic analysis (step 3) and your qualitative research (step 4).

3) Heuristic analysis: analyse every page of your website against 6 parameters: Value proposition, Relevancy (does it match your visitors’ needs?), Clarity (How easily is the value of your product/service communicated?), Urgency (Is there any incentive to drive action?), Distraction (is something getting on the way of your page’s primary Goal?) and Anxiety (Are you creating uncertainty or doubts?)

4) Qualitative Surveys: spend time with your customer support and sales team to ask them what are the most common questions they receive and how they handle them. Set up an email campaign asking your recent customers to answer a few (open-ended) questions that will give you insights into their motivations, needs or frustrations when they purchased on your site. Offer them a coupon for their time. On-site surveys, which are conducted with visitors (not customers), are great at revealing friction areas on a page.

5) Heatmaps: the least useful step of the process but can still provide indications where people stop interacting with your page. Is your content too long, or worse boring?

6) User testing: hire 5 to 10 testers who fit your customers demographics and assign them a set of pre-defined tasks. Pay attention to what they do more than what they say about website.

Growth hack #4

Identify WHERE you have problems (and how severe they are) from the Analytics setup and the technical analysis. This will guide all the following steps where you try to understand WHY they happen.

Growth hack #5

Rinse and Repeat the process as many times as necessary, bu prioritise fixing the issue that leak the most money first

Growth hack #6

Looking for ‘done-for-you’ Analytics or Conversion Research services? Let me know how I can help!

Hats off  

Our special thanks go to Tõnu Väät from the Estonian E-commerce Association for his hospitality and for making this event happen and to all the other speakers, Brit Mesipuu, Erik Allak and Donatas Gudelis for shading some light on subjects such as social media, how to build a successful ecommerce store and how to internationalise a local business and of course to everyone who participated.

Thank you one more time and see you again soon!