Get More Conversions

Aaron Montgomery Ward mailed the first catalog in 1872, and catalogers have been working to perfect the art of selling from the printed page ever since. By now, savvy catalogers understand the factors needed for effective print design, including cover imagery, page count, product density, copy, typography, color, paper, trim, etc.

The Web, in contrast, is in its infancy. The graphical Internet dates back only to 1991. Leading online firms (e.g., Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Google) are no more than 10 years old.

It isn’t surprising, then, that many catalogers have more experience creating strong print pages than Web pages. This article offers four suggestions for improving your online presentation for human visitors. (We’ll address optimizing your site for Web spiders and bots in a later column.)

FOCUS: What’s the Primary Purpose of the Page?

The most common problem with catalogers’ Web pages is a lack of focus — that is, pages designed to do too much. An informal analysis of several leading e-commerce Web sites revealed that a typical product detail page averages more than 100 links. Think about that: Visitors face 100 choices on where to click next. Seth Godin discusses this in “The Big Red Fez: How to Make Any Web Site Better” (a book I highly recommend). When everything is marked important, nothing is seen as important.

Here’s a recipe to increase your Web site’s focus: Consider every page as a direct-response ad with a single primary objective. Typical objectives include compelling visitors to go deeper into your site, request a catalog, add to a cart and complete an order.

Different pages can have different objectives, of course. And one objective may correspond with multiple links (e.g., a home page would have several “go deeper” links). But each page must have only one primary objective.

The hard part is deciding which objective is most important for each page. Different constituencies within your company will lobby hard for their objectives. “The home page must stress catalog requests,” some will argue. “The product category pages must pitch service subscriptions,” others will say. “Make sure product detail pages promote cross-sells,” others note.

These are all reasonable and important objectives — appropriate primary goals for appropriate pages. When a visitor reaches your catalog request page, for example, “get the catalog request” is the correct objective, and secondary marketing objectives shouldn’t distract from that. But the primary goal of a home page typically isn’t catalog requests. Rather, it’s to go deeper into the site. Similarly, the primary goal of the product detail page typically isn’t to cross-sell; it’s to “add to cart.”

Once you’ve determined a page’s primary objective, use clear Web design, such as a distinctive color, size, shape and position, to emphasize that goal.

Takeaway tip: Rather than increase the emphasis on the important, de-emphasize the less important. A page’s primary objective needn’t be marked up with garish red or (yikes!) blink tags. Instead, select a softer color palette for the entire site, and reserve strong primary colors for the key action you want visitors to take. Surrounding the key element with additional white space also increases its emphasis.

Here’s a quick check to evaluate if a page’s primary objective is visually obvious. Print the first screen of the Web page in color. (The primary objective link must be above the fold, as only committed visitors will scroll down.) Have non-design folks view the color printout from several feet away, where text becomes illegible, but design and color still are clear.

Viewers should be able to identify the primary objective instantly: “I can’t read too well from back here, but I’d bet you want visitors to click that red rectangle on the far left.”

In short, to increase sales, increase your page focus. Make it clear where you want visitors to click.

OPERATIONS: Emphasize Your Strengths

As a catalog company, your staff knows how to take calls, answer questions, ship products, handle returns and solve customers’ problems. These are tremendous strengths — and your pages should ensure that shoppers know of them.

Provide your 800 number clearly atop every page. On your “About Us” page, describe your friendly and skilled phone staff and short hold times. Promote your fast e-mail response and shipping rates. Offer customer testimonials, and emphasize your high level of customer satisfaction. Takeaway tip: Don’t tout your own excellent service; use objective third-party scores such as BizRate.

SPEED: Faster Is Better

Fast-loading pages get used more often. Consider Google: It offers excellent search results, but an equally important key to its success is its blindingly fast speed. (To see what I mean, run the same query on Alexa, MSN, Yahoo! and Google, and note response times.)

Over the next quarter, establish concrete targets for reducing your site’s load times. Monitor the speed of the home page, and a typical page for each product category, product detail and on-site-search query. Make sure your timing tool uses sampling to get fair estimates, as response times vary by Internet, server and database loads. Benchmark load times for key competitor sites, too.

To speed up your site, first analyze where the time is being spent. If your database-driven pages are slow, optimize queries, add indexes or cache common results. If that still isn’t enough, upgrade software and hardware, and distribute database work across multiple servers. If the whole site is slow, consider faster Web-server software, hardware upgrades and investing in additional servers. Be sure your server has multiple fast connections to the Internet, and consider caching services such as Akamai or Savvis.

Gain speed by transmitting fewer bytes. Use smaller images where you can, optimizing image resolution for Web presentation. Use cascading style sheets (CSS) to reduce html bloat. Move common CSS and client-side scripts off the page into their own files, so browsers can cache them. Make sure all image tags include height and width tags, so browsers needn’t wait for images to begin rendering. Use http content compression to shrink your pages. While this technology is common at dot-coms, a recent study by port80 indicated that only 4 percent of Fortune 1,000 Web sites use this effective technology.

Insist that your designers, service reps and management team spend time using your site through an AOL dialup. Though DSL is increasingly common, your site must be responsive at dial-up speeds — and your broadband users also will appreciate the faster load times.

USABILITY: Follow Norms

Jakob Nielsen’s Law of Web User Experience observes that your visitors spend most of their time on other Web sites. Accordingly, deviating too far from Web norms confuses them and may harm your sales.

Stay abreast of current Web norms by keeping notes as you surf and shop online. Monitor leading Web sites and your competitors. If you see many sites using a certain visual or navigation convention, consider using the same. For example, the following are becoming e-commerce norms:

- Place the site search button in the upper left side of the screen.
- Use “tabbed” displays to simplify pages.
- Use homepage thumbnails to promote categories (vs. products).
- Use standard link decoration.
- Design for 800-by-600 pixels.

We could extend Nielsen’s law to note that most of your Web visitors spend far less time thinking about your products than you do, and are far less fluent in your terminology. Be kind to these visitors. Avoid industry jargon (or at least offer a link to definitions). Explain important concepts, and provide information layers for both the novice and expert shopper.

Establish a program of periodic usability tests to watch how typical visitors use and comprehend your site. Such tests need not be elaborate or expensive, and can reveal common stumbling blocks in your page design.

Conclusion

These four suggestions will help improve your Web page design. Here’s hoping your pages have

a clear focus, emphasize your strengths, load quickly and make sense to your visitors.

If they do, you should enjoy great conversion rates this holiday season.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Ph.D., runs the Rimm-Kaufman Group LLC, which provides Web marketing services and consulting to leading catalogers.