Remove header & footer from checkout

I'm going for a different post style in a bid to post more frequently. I'm going to tell you what I'm testing and the test result. That's it....

We have an online checkout (basket etc). We tested removing the header with the primary navigation and the footer with its various site links. Why? Because these areas represent leakage points for customers and can also be distracting. Removing these escape points helps focus the user on the task at hand, ie, checking out!

Result = 22.7% conversion versus 10.29% conversion rate.

Amazon cross-selling

This is clever. Well I think so anyway. Amazon are cross-selling their new Mastercard credit card via the medium of your actual shopping basket. They give you a £10 credit if you apply for the card but take this one step further by applying this credit in a hypothetic, yet obvious way to your current check-out total. Automatically your eyes are drawn to the discounted price of your purchase. Nothing seems unusual as we're now finely accustomed to the concept of discount codes et al. Personally I think this is fairly slick marketing example.

How to increase average spend - The 97p Shop

Cross selling and add-on sales are nothing new. If you visit Amazon often enough you'll be more than aware of the best in class method of cross selling, they are the masters. Wish lists, gift lists, recommends, you name it, they have it. Anyway something caught my eye the other day when I was visiting wilkinsonplus.com. They've introduced the 97p shop which essentially offers a range of items for, yes you've guessed it 97p. They promote this shop right across the customer journey.

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By the time you've selected an item from their main range and you are at the checkout your already primed to top-up your purchase with an item from the seemingly low cost range. Most people wont blink at spending an extra 97p on the average transaction and this particular price promotion will easily fly under most shoppers cost radar. The growth and success of retailers like Pound Stretcher on the UK highstreet during this economic downturn also adds weight to this particular promotion. We've already adjusted our psychological perceptions of the value of a £1 and how far it should go. Wilkinsons are effectively taking on these established budget shops by playing them at their own game. A similar approach can be seen if you visit your local Tescos where they've introduced budget ranges that compete directly with the likes of Lidl and Aldi. If Wilkinson.com make a success of this campaign (as I suspect they might) they could end up effectively owning the 97p value in customers minds and will be an endemic part of their brand

Our 1st multivariate test - Killer Questions

We have an application form that is used for various products, in this case we focused on the one used for an online current account.
The first page of this app form is what we call the 'Killer Questions' page. This is where you set the scene for the applicant in terms of the criteria they have to meet to continue with their application and what bits of information they're going to need to have to hand to complete the application process.
Typically we could expect around a 35-40% drop-off rate for this page. This could of course be because people simply dont meet the criteria and depart the app process. Alternatively it could be that the page design, which was by nature quite weighty in terms of the volume of info needed to be conveyed to the user at that time. Based upon the hypothesis that the content may be at fault we decided this was the best candidate for hosting our first multivariate test. Here we would test different content on the killer questions page to see if an uplift in number of people commencing the application could be acheived. We looked to gain a 5% uplift overall.
The Killer Questions page looked rather like this.
The 2 boxes are 'MaxyBoxes'.
To effectively carry out multivariate testing on your website you're going to need a tool to host & serve the alternative page content you want to test and additionally a means of reporting the progress and outcome of your test. We opted for Maxymiser to acheive all this. The MaxyBoxes you see there represent the areas of the page that will have variant content served to the visitor.
So basically in this particular test we wanted to see what would happen when we served different security images in the top-right of the page and different page content or layout in the second MaxyBox on the page (the larger box).
We split the traffic 50-50. Half being served the default content, the other half a combination of new test variants we'd come up with. Coming up with alternative content is a whole new learning experience in itself as no one in our Optimization team is a copywriter or creative type but I'll go into this in more detail in a later post.
After several weeks of multivariate testing we ended up with a winner...

You may notice that this has a different security image to the original, has simplified page copy, all the heavy and intimidating legal wording was removed to a pop-up link.
This page design resulted in 8% more people passing through the killer questions page compared to the default design. It also resulted in 5% more people going on to submit the application. When accept rate* was taken into account the new page design resulted in a 20% increase in productivity over the default design.
This test, although it's our first ever, will probably turn out to be our most important. This is because it was at the very last point in the visitors journey that we can influence whether they buy into the product or not. It's make or break time when they're on the doorstep of the application form, the point at which they choose to purchase or run away.
* note: You can apply for current account - but you might not necessarily be accepted as a customer, hence an accept rate.