PRESENTED BY
20 CRO EXPERTS SHARE THEIR
FOR eCOMMERCE

Justin Rondeau
@whichtestwon
Chief Editor & Testing Evangelist of WhichTestWon
Test your Thank You Pages!
The Thank You/Receipt page is one of the most underutilized pages.
Your customer is at their most excited right when they purchase a
product, take advantage of this.
Another major perk for testing Thank You/Receipt pages is you are
not adding extra friction to the cart. Checking out is one of the most
anxiety-inducing processes a customer goes through. Yes, cross-sells
and up-sells in a cart work well, but they can become a distraction.
Get the purchase, then push for more with dynamically produced
content that is relevant to the purchased product.

Neil Patel
@neilpatel
Co-founder of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics
One of your biggest conversion leaks as an ecommerce site is going
to be your cart. People will abandon it.
So when you get these users to come back to your site through re-
marketing and email marketing, consider redirecting them back to
their cart. From what I’ve tested, this simple trick can typically pro-
vide a double-digit conversion lift.

Joanna Wiebe
@copyhackers
Conversion Copywriter at Copy Hackers
Focus on the people who will buy. That might seem obvious, but I'm
amazed by how many businesses are trying to convert 100% of their
traffic. They see that they've got massive numbers of visitors coming
from Pinterest, they see most of those visitors bounce, and they
think, "Crap, we have to do something to get those Pinterest people
to stick around!"
But, in the meantime, legitimate prospective customers are arriving
at their sites in much smaller numbers—let's say 10% of visitors—but
the site owner doesn't focus on them because "there aren't that
many of them." Focus first on the people who are likely to buy. Even
if it's a small slice of your traffic pie.

Lance Jones
@copyhackers
CRO Consultant & Co-founder of Copy Hackers
If you’re A/B testing (and you should be!), choose a single metric
on which to base the success of your test. Just because you have
the ability to choose multiple success metrics doesn’t mean it’s the
right thing to do. In fact, it’s common to get mixed signals from
multiple metrics across your test variations, and then making a
‘clean’ decision becomes difficult (i.e., “Which metric should I pay
attention to?!?”).
If you’re in the e-commerce space, Revenue Per Visitor is typically
that single metric. It may feel uncomfortable to use just one metric
in your tests, but doing so will make your optimization decisions so
much easier!

Peep Laja
@peeplaja
Chief Conversion Architect at Markitekt / ConversionXL
Start optimizing closer to the money—your actual gains in terms of
revenue are going to be way bigger. Get your checkout flow to rock
first, then cart page, then the product pages—so you slowly move
further from the money.
Leave your home page last: 20% up lift on your checkout page vs
20% uplift in your home page: checkout page win is gonna be way
more absolute dollars.

Tommy Walker
@tommyismyname
Editor of ConversionXL.com
I don't really have any top "tips" because I don't think it can be
boiled down so simply.
What I can say is that I think more businesses should be looking at
the overall customer experience, both on a page-by-page basis, but
also as a whole experience. This means the journey from PPC click to
landing page, this means the trip from landing page to product page,
product page to cart, etc.
But this also means what happens after? What are the retargeting
ads like? What are the reminder emails like? How do all of the pieces
fit together to tell a larger narrative that is both personal & reward-
ing? So, if I were to give a "tip" it would be to always be asking, "how
can we make this a better experience?" Take nothing for granted, and
always strive to make everything better.

Brian Massey
@bmassey
Conversion Scientist at Conversion Sciences LLC
Everyone's doing CRO. Everyone who has a site, is running an ad, or
is executing an email campaign is optimizing. All of these activities
are done with the SOLE intention of getting someone out there to
buy from us.
The winners have one advantage: they are using more information
for their day-to-day decisions. It's a considerable advantage. What is
this "information" they have access to? It's talking to lots of custom-
ers and noticing patterns. It's watching lots more customers through
analytics. It's doing a test to see if an idea is good for the business.
CRO is really about generating data—information—that tells a busi-
ness owner what they should be doing. He who has the best data
wins. How much data did you generate today?

Jeffrey Eisenberg
@JeffreyGroks
CEO of BuyerLegends.com
Test more and test less—it's not a paradox. Most companies don't
test nearly enough and those that test a lot often test lots of varia-
tions. Test for impact first. Isolate the variables that matter by test-
ing. Lots of traffic gets wasted on testing many variations of vari-
ables that don't move the needle. Find out what does move the
needle then test for variations.
How do you know what matters? Develop your hypotheses using
personas and buyer scenarios. Can you tell a story from your custom-
ers' point of view where the variable seems to truly matter? Then
test that! When you get good at this then test a whole lot more.
The more smart tests you do the more you'll learn and the more
you'll improve.

Oli Gardner
@oligardner
Co-founder of Unbounce
If you’re an ecommerce site bidding on terms like “next day delivery,”
please stop pushing me to your generic homepage.
Instead send me to a landing page that confirms my search intent
(next day delivery), and then—and *only* then—asks me to self-seg-
ment by flower/chocolate/apology type. That would be a delightful
wind of change.

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Linda Bustos
@getelastic
Director of ecommerce research at Elastic Path / GetElastic.com
My top tip is to apply segmentation to your CRO, either before you
run the test (exclude/include segments) or after when you analyze.
The reason being that geography, referral source, referring keyword,
new/returning visitor, device type, etc. can all have different conver-
sion responses to a test, which may be more effective to target
differently (depending on the test hypothesis).
If you take the average lift and apply it to all segments, you may ac-
tually be reducing results in one or more cohorts.

Keith Hagen
@conversionIQ
Co-Founder & Vice President Conversion at ConversionIQ
People shopping online have no attention span, and compulsively
(now habitually) skim and scan pages for cues to move forward."
If you want to get their attention, you need to get in their way, not
try to take them where you want them to go. Develop a new persona,
call him Ferris the Ferret.

Bryan Eisenberg
@TheGrok
The Godfather of “CRO”
Scott Cook, founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee of
the Board of Intuit, is a former Procter & Gamble veteran with exten-
sive background in traditional product development, marketing and
market research. He often shares how he has shifted his company to
be more agile to deal with ever changing complexity that today's in-
creasingly high paced and chaotic marketplace demands.
He reminds executives that "the job of today's leader is to remove
the barriers to experimentation." Work with your organization's team
to come up with "leap of faith assumptions" and find "the evidence
to support those assumptions with tests and experiments." If some-
one so strongly rooted in traditional marketing methods can work
hard to change their corporate metabolism and culture then there is
still hope for every company out there, if they work at it.

Tiffany da Silva
@bellastone
Conversion rate optimization at Shopify
Ask questions, listen to your customer and do things that don't scale.
When I started my first affiliate site I was 9 years old and knew nothing
about business. When I first started receiving sales I didn't stop to try
to think why it was happening I immediately started emailing my cus-
tomers and asking them why they chose my product. I didn't try to au-
tomate it, I didn't take any shortcuts, I wrote each email personally.
I learned that day that my site though tailored for women was being
visited by men. I immediately changed the look and feel, tone and
content to fit my market. Without taking the time to ask questions and
talk to my customers I would have never gotten that product/market
fit early on.

Andrew Youderian
@youderian
eCommerceFuel.com Founder & Store Owner
It's easy to think that gorgeous design alone can help conver-
sion—which isn't the case. Design is, of course, an important trust
signal but understanding your customers and presenting them with a
compelling offer / call to action is much more important.
I've often made the mistake of thinking a pretty face lift will increase
conversion when ultimately it was a clean, no-frills design and
compelling message that was needed.

Michael Aargaard
@contentverve
Senior Optimization Consultant at ContentVerve.com / Atcore ApS
Start with the end in mind and make sure your checkout experience
is seamless.
Every single visitor on your website has to go through your checkout
flow in order to become a paying customer. At this point in the
conversion process, every little lift equals more money in the bank.

Chris Goward
@chrisgoward
Founder & CEO of WiderFunnel
For eCommerce retailers, a continuous testing strategy is critical for
making great website decisions. If you’re just chasing after the
so-called “best practices” from blogs, seminars and consultants, you
could be making big mistakes that hurt your profit.
For example, in testing the product page template for WineEx-
press.com, we found layout and design changes that lifted revenue
per visitor by 41%. In other words, before that test, they were missing
that 41% revenue!

Rich Page
@richpage
Founder and CEO of Website Optimizer
Don't just focus on improving the obvious ecommerce things like
your shopping cart and product page, or copy case studies. Take a
step back and really figure out your unique value proposition, in par-
ticular the reasons why someone should use your site instead of your
many competitor's sites, and then make sure you are clearly promot-
ing this (never just presume your visitors know what it is!) This
should be shown on your homepage in the form of short bullet
points, and ideally a small version in your header or sidebar, so visi-
tors will see and understand it no matter what page they arrive on.
Another way to 'think outside of the box' is to ramp up your efforts
to collect visitor emails and send autoresponders to bring them back
to purchase. This works very well for service driven websites, but can
also work well for ecommerce stores.

Angie Schottmuller
@aschottmuller
Director of Optimization, Three Deep Marketing
Always accompany "what" with "why."
From headlines to call-to-action (CTA) buttons to analytics reports,
people generally care little about the "what" if the "why" remains
unclear. Transform your features to benefits, your CTAs to specific
value, and your data to actionable insights.
"What" paired with "why" naturally paves a story that facilitates de-
cision making for your customer and your business.

Karl Blanks
Chairman and Co-Founder at Conversion Rate Experts
Declutter. Not everything on your site will be helping conversions.
Identify page elements that might be hurting conversions—or simply
wasting visitors' attention—then test removing them, either with A/B
split-tests or multivariate tests. "Decluttering tests" are easy to run
because you don't need to create anything new.

Paras Chopra
CEO of @Wingify
Process, not Tactics!
Working with hundreds of eCommerce customers on their A/B test-
ing and optimization efforts, I have realised that having a process for
increasing conversions gives a sustained competitive advantage.
Many companies start with tactical A/B testing where they have cer-
tain ideas of their own (say let's try adding a trust widget on check-
out page, changing colors, shifting nav bar, etc.). They test these low
hanging fruits in a few months and then they struggle to come up
with more ideas. On the other hand, some companies start with a
goal to increase conversions and then develop a process around it
that involves user survey, analytics research, ideation, prioritisation,
and execution. These are the companies that execute new tests every
week and are able to optimize conversions effectively.
@paraschopra

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