Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7-Figures & Beyond podcast, host Greg Shuey interviews Chris Daley, the founder of Smart CRO, a conversion rate optimization agency. They discuss the importance of optimizing product pages for e-commerce brands and share insights on common mistakes and strategies to improve conversion rates. They emphasize the need to challenge assumptions and test different elements on product pages, such as the image carousel, sticky sections, and content display. They also highlight the significance of mobile optimization and suggest testing mobile-specific features like scrolling actions, image display, and menu navigation. The episode concludes with recommendations on A/B testing tools and starting with simple tests, such as shipping thresholds.
Key Takeaways
- Conversion Optimization Matters: Chris Dayley stresses the importance of optimizing conversion rates for e-commerce businesses. He shifted focus from just driving traffic to improving conversions, highlighting the significance of understanding user behavior and refining strategies.
- Questioning Assumptions and Testing: Chris advocates for challenging assumptions in website design and conducting rigorous testing. Even seemingly solid ideas can be overturned through experimentation, as evidenced by clients defending website elements that later proved detrimental to conversion rates.
- Understanding Customer Behavior on Product Pages: Understanding customer behavior on product pages is crucial for e-commerce success. Chris emphasizes the need to align product pages with customer expectations and motivations, cautioning against blindly copying competitor strategies and highlighting the importance of user-centric design and persuasive copywriting.
- Challenging Assumptions and Testing: Brands often get fixated on their own perceptions and fail to align with customer needs, leading to missed opportunities. Testing unconventional strategies, such as relocating product descriptions, can yield substantial conversion improvements.
- Optimizing Mobile User Experience: Mobile optimization is critical in the e-commerce landscape, where the majority of traffic originates from mobile devices. Implementing mobile-specific elements and testing content presentation and navigation can significantly enhance user experience and drive higher conversion rates.
Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Chris Dayley LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisdayley/
Smart CRO: http://www.smart-cro.com
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey:
Howdy, e-commerce brand builders. Welcome to Episode 4 of the 7-Figures & Beyond podcast. I’m stoked to be with you today. I hope everyone enjoyed last week’s episode. I feel like they’re just getting so much better every single time that we record one. So before we get started, I wanted to mention one thing totally not related to the topic that we are going to be discussing today. So today, which is February 1, 2024, Google and Yahoo are officially rolling out their new sender requirements. There’s been quite a bit of buzz around this on LinkedIn and different marketing blogs, so you’ve probably already heard or read and have taken the correct steps.
However, if you haven’t, you will need to implement a DMARC policy for your domain to be compliant. It’s pretty simple to set up. It should take you less than 10 minutes. I think I did all of my domains in about 10 minutes. So if you haven’t done this yet, stop what you’re doing right now, pause this podcast, go Google it. It’s spelled D-M-A-R-C, and go through the steps to get that set up. So every day that you sit on this could hurt your email deliverability, so get going. All right. Now that’s out of the way, let’s jump in. So as I mentioned last week on our podcast, our guest today is Chris Dayley. He is the founder of Smart CRO, a conversion rate optimization agency that specializes in working with e-commerce brands. So Chris, will you please take just a couple of minutes and introduce yourself?
Chris Dayley:
Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me on the show, excited to chat today. So in terms of background, I’ve been doing digital marketing here for about 15 years. I got my start doing search engine optimization. After my first full-time job doing SEO, this is back in the day when you could get tons of traffic really quick, so after about the first six months of me working in-house, I met with the executive team and showed them this cool graph and we were like, “Hey, we tripled our organic traffic in six months. We are getting all these visitors to the site.” Up until that point, I had just been thinking in terms of visitors, everything was about visitors, visitors. I remember the CEO asking, he was like, “Well, that’s great, Chris. So what? What did that do for our business?” I was like, “I don’t know.”
So I started digging in and realized that even though we had tripled traffic, we actually hadn’t increased conversions at all, maybe a very small uptick, but the vast majority of these people that we were getting were not converting. So, of course, when a situation like that comes up, one of two things is happening: Either you’re getting the wrong people to the site or the site’s not converting those people. Of course, being an SEO guy, I’m like, “It can’t be that I’m getting the wrong people. I know these are the right people,” so-
Greg Shuey:
That means you’re searching for the keywords.
Chris Dayley:
Exactly.
Greg Shuey:
They’re not the wrong people.
Chris Dayley:
Yeah, right. So I started researching ways that I could turn these visitors into customers and discovered conversion rate optimization. So I thought, “What the heck? Let’s give this a try.” So I ran an AB test on one of our landing pages. I remember the design team took a look at the test that I was going to run, and I was just using some template against our landing page and just plugging in our content into the template. They were like, “Oh, you can’t test that. That doesn’t fit our brand. It doesn’t this or that.” I was like, “I know, I know. I’m just going to test it.”
Launched the test, that templated page converted 17% better than our super nicely-designed finessed landing page. So as soon as I saw that, I was like, “Holy crap. That one test that I ran generated more business than all the SEO that I did.” Not saying that SEO sucks, but saying without being able to convert those visitors, the visitors are useless to a business. So I shifted about 12 years ago to conversion rate optimization and have been running an agency since 2014. So spent the last several, several years working with primarily e-commerce companies.
Greg Shuey:
That’s awesome. Yeah, conversion rate optimization is so critical to an e-commerce business, to any business, honestly. I love the example when you said, “That’s against our brand. That doesn’t go with our brand.” It’s crazy how many brands are so stuck on that, and they’re not willing to make changes that are going to dramatically impact their business. It’s nuts.
Chris Dayley:
Yeah.
Greg Shuey:
So yeah, thank you. Thank you for being on today. So I’ve known Chris for a really long time. We’ve partnered on several projects, so I’m super excited to take some time and learn from him today. So over the next 30 to 40 minutes, we will be spending time discussing high-performing product pages. So as you already know, product pages are typically the last point before someone converts on your website. So once someone hits that product page, they’re typically trying to just gather as much information as they can to be able to make their purchase decision. There’s some really important things that you need to consider and implement to improve your conversion rate. So Chris and I have spent some time discussing potential questions, and I think we have some really good ones picked out. So are you ready to go, Chris?
Chris Dayley:
Let’s do it. Let’s go nuts.
Greg Shuey:
Awesome. Let’s go nuts. Okay. Well, the first question that we have today is, what are some of the most common mistakes people make on their product pages?
Chris Dayley:
So a couple of things that I will say, and actually, before I answer this question, I wanted to first address something that I think is pretty important. So the two most common reasons that I see that people drop off on product pages, and usually, if you look at your analytics, the product page is where you lose the vast majority of people on an e-commerce site. So there’s usually something like a 90 to 95% drop off rate, somebody that goes to a product page, doesn’t add anything to cart and doesn’t buy. So this is arguably the most important page to optimize and to get right. Before we think about the most common mistakes, one of the things that businesses need to understand is why do people drop off product pages? Why do they not add to cart, not buy? There’s obviously a large percentage of customers that go to product pages that are just window shopping. My experience is, though, that number’s usually only like 50 to 60%. So in other words, maybe half the visitors that go to a product page will never convert no matter what you do. So it’s-
Greg Shuey:
No matter how many retargeting ads you throw at them, how many emails you throw at them, they’re not going to buy.
Chris Dayley:
That’s right. Yeah. So there’s a huge chunk, probably the lion’s share of the visitors that are never going to convert. However, that still leaves you with probably about 40% of your visitors that under the right conditions with the right information, with the right motivation, they will purchase. So what is important to do is to say, “Okay, so if we’re losing 90 to 95% of our customers, what is it that’s happening with those other 30, 35%?” One of the big things that can happen is you send the customer to the wrong product page to begin with. So that can either happen by hitting somebody with an ad that takes them straight to a product page, and maybe that’s not the best product for them.
So it’s important to first make sure that you have the customer on the right product page. It may be that you want to test your ads and test a version that goes to the homepage versus a version that goes to the product page. I see a lot of my clients where the homepage is actually the best landing page because it gives the customer a less narrow-minded view of your business and your brand. So that’s one reason that a lot of people will not purchase this. Maybe they would purchase one of your products, but you took them to the wrong product page, or maybe they found the wrong product page in your navigation or your homepage or whatever.
Greg Shuey:
Or it was ranking, the wrong page was ranking in Google for a keyword.
Chris Dayley:
Absolutely. The second reason, and I think this is the one that you can influence the most, and this is the one that when we get to the most common mistakes, the second reason is you didn’t do enough to sell the product to the customer. In other words, you didn’t give them the right reasons to buy. So it could be, and I’ve seen this a ton of times, and I think the first most common mistake businesses make is just going with the Shopify template. You just set up your website, you use one of Shopify’s themes, and you just say… I have a lot of businesses that’ll say, “Well, Shopify does a bunch of testing, so I know that their templates work.”
Greg Shuey:
But Chris, they know. They know, Chris.
Chris Dayley:
“They’ve already done all of this testing, so I’m just going to use it and it’s the best practice. It’s the best case scenario, so it’s going to work.”
The problem with this is usually by default, Shopify will set up your product page so that if you’re on desktop, you see the image on the left column. You’ve got your image carousel, and then on the right column you launch immediately into color selection, size selection, quantity selector and then Add to Cart. In other words, most of your content and value propositions are going to be buried down on the product page. So the most common mistake that I see brands making is just assuming that the template works. Assumptions in general, I think, are what most brands’ conversion rates, because we make assumptions, and you have to when you’re building a new website, you have to make some assumptions like, “Well, I think this site design’s going to work, and I think that we should put these products on the homepage. I think we should push people to these pages from our homepage,” et cetera. You have to start somewhere, but-
Greg Shuey:
That’s because you have no data, too. Right?
Chris Dayley:
You have no data. Yeah.
Greg Shuey:
There’s no data. You don’t know what the customer journey looks like yet. You have to start somewhere.
Chris Dayley:
That’s right, but the problem happens, and especially if you start having a little bit of success, if you start selling product on your site, you just start to assume that everything you’ve been doing is working. When a lot of times if you open up the hood, it’s like, it’s like, “Okay. Well, hey, maybe these few things are working. Maybe we’ve got great imagery. Maybe we do have great content. Maybe it’s in the wrong place, though.” So I think that’s one big problem that I see with brands is they don’t challenge the assumptions and the status quo of the given template or, and this is related to the first reason, the second-biggest mistake people will make is they will just find their biggest competitor and copy them. So you go and find, if you are whatever, if you’re selling shoes, you copy Nike’s website. If you are anybody, you’re copying Apple’s website ’cause everybody thinks that Apple is the golden standard of websites.
Greg Shuey:
They’ve got it figured out.
Chris Dayley:
Or you copy Amazon, whatever it is. The problem with this is I have worked with at this point, hundreds of e-commerce brands. I’ve worked with dozens of companies in the same industry with theoretically the same exact target demographic and run the same exact tests and seen completely different results. I’ve seen some brands where free shipping is the most important thing that you can have on a product page, and I’ve seen some brands where adding free shipping doesn’t move the needle at all for conversion rates. I’ve seen some brands where their customers want video and some brands where the customers hate video.
So again, if what you’re doing is trying to find a good starting point, it’s fine to go and copy a competitor. But you don’t want to, again, put all of your eggs in that basket and assume that whatever your competitor is doing is going to work for you, because a lot of times it doesn’t. Then the last thing I think here is there’s a lot of, and this, again, is related to my first couple of points here, there’s a lot of things that we assume customers want. So one of those things that’s really popular right now is, buy now, pay later stuff. So you have Shop Pay, you’ve got, the names are escaping right now. You’ve got dozens of-
Greg Shuey:
There’s millions of them.
Chris Dayley:
Yeah. Yeah, all of those kinds of buy now, pay later solutions, and they’re pretty popular. They’re hot. There’s all sorts of studies and research that are coming out right now about how many customers use it when it’s on your site, and they are very aggressive in their marketing and their sales pitches. I have clients that come to me all the time, and they’ll be like, “Hey, we’re getting hit up real hard by Afterpay. They say it increases conversion rates by 1%. Do you think we should add it?” It’s like, okay, first of all, maybe that is true. Maybe it will improve your conversion rate by 1%, but you don’t want to just do it because Afterpay says to do it, right?
Chris Dayley:
So you always want to be willing to test for your audience, for your demographic and see if it works. So I have now tested buy now, pay later solutions. Again, whether it’s Sezzle or Afterpay or Shop Pay or whatever it is, I’ve tested whether or not those should display on the product pages for at least 30 different companies, and only one of them performed better having that buy now, pay later solution display on the product page. In other words, 29 out of the 30 companies had a higher conversion rate by not displaying the buy now, pay later on the product page.
Greg Shuey:
That’s insane.
Chris Dayley:
It’s crazy. A lot of my clients will say, “Yeah, but we have a lot of people that use it, so they obviously want it.” But what I see a lot of times is, and this is where you really get into the product page mindset, you think about what is happening inside of a customer’s brain when they’re on a product page. They’re still trying to figure out, “Is this the right product for me? Is this going to meet my needs? Is this-
Greg Shuey:
“Do I trust this brand?”
Chris Dayley:
“Do I trust this brand?” Absolutely, all of those things. What happens is when you see one of those buy now, pay later things where even if you’re a super expensive product, even if it’s like a $3,000 product, and it’s like, “Well, you can either pay $3,000, or you can pay $400 to us a month for the rest of your life,” or whatever. What it does is it gets a customer in a checkout mindset, because now instead of thinking about whether or not they want the product, now they’re thinking about how they’re going to pay for the product.
You don’t want a customer thinking about how they’re going to pay for your product when they haven’t even decided they want it. So that’s one example of giving a customer something that in your mind makes sense to show them ’cause you think they want it, but in reality, it’s the totally wrong thing to be showing them on a product page.
Greg Shuey:
Fascinating. Cool. Well, those are some awesome examples and some really great mistakes that we need to be thinking about. So the next question that I have is, what are some of the things that you’ve seen improve conversion rates that you didn’t think was going to work?
Chris Dayley:
Yeah. So I had a client that came to me and they had a brand that had gotten started on Kickstarter. So most of their product pages were very Kickstarter-esque, very long-form product pages, tons of really nice-looking, heavily-stylized content sections, videos-
Yep, and so basically what they did is they’re like, “Well, we had a ton of success on Kickstarter. Obviously, Kickstarter’s product page works, so let’s just copy it.” So one of the first things that I do when I go in and work with clients is I run what I call an existence test. When we run existence tests, what we do is we take the product page or whatever page we’re testing, but we take the product page and we create four or five different copies of the product page. On each different variation we’re going to test, we remove something from the product page. So this could be the buy now, pay later display. This could be your video. This could be a value proposition section. Maybe it’s your shipping policy or your shipping estimator call out or your social media links or whatever.
Greg Shuey:
Did we run one for one of our clients of pulling even reviews? I think we did.
Chris Dayley:
We did, yep.
Yeah, removing reviews. So the reason that I run these tests is two reasons: Number one, out of the hundreds of clients I’ve worked with, every single one of them has at least one thing on their product page that’s actually herding conversion rates. So there’s an obvious opportunity there to figure out, “We probably have something that’s getting in our customers way, let’s figure out what it is.” But the other benefit of running this type of test where you remove things is you also want to know, “What’s the most important thing on our product page?” So if you test removing reviews and conversion rates drop by 2%, then it’s like, “Okay, it’s not that important.” But if you remove reviews and conversion rates drop by 75%, it’s like, “Holy crap, the reviews are probably the most important thing on our product page.”
Now that you know that, now that you know the reviews are the most important, now there’s a bunch of tests that you’re going to want to run. Should we add user-generated content? Should we make the reviews more prominent? Should we add reviews summaries? Should we make it possible to search reviews, et cetera? There’s lots of things that you may want to do with reviews once you know that information’s there. But anyways, going back to this client that got started on Kickstarter. They have these long form pages, and as I started asking, I was like, “Okay, why do you have this on there? Why do you have this on there?”
“Oh, you have this thing that breaks apart the various aspects of your product, and they can click through these really neat interactive elements on the page,” and they had a great reason for everything on there, like, “Oh, well, our customers have told us that they have to do X amount of research before they’re willing to buy our product. We’ve had five people in the last month that have told us they bought because of that video, or they’ve told us X, Y and Z. “They had all these airtight, bulletproof reasons for everything that was on their product page. Anytime I hear an airtight bulletproof rationale for having something on a site, I immediately want to test getting rid of it, ’cause it’s like, “You guys-
Yeah, “You guys think that this is the end all, be all of your product page. Let’s see if that’s the case.”
So we ran a test. We had five or six different versions. Each one was removing a section. On our first test, every single variation we tested performed significantly better than the original product page. In other words, every variation that removed something performed… and this wasn’t just a little bit better, we’re talking like 60, 70% increases in conversion rates-
Greg Shuey:
Wow.
Chris Dayley:
… by removing a video section, an interactive element section, a value proposition section. So we immediately learned, “Okay, our customers actually don’t want as much content as we have. In fact, we’re probably distracting them or they’re probably getting lost in the weeds with all this cool content we have.” We also learned that the Kickstarter approach doesn’t work on our website. So we started testing, we started testing, and anytime I have a test like that where all of the variations perform better, of course, step two of that is now let’s try combining them.
Let’s see. It usually doesn’t mean you should remove everything from your product page. It usually means we have way too much, so now let’s combine removing the video and the interactive section. Let’s combine removing the video and the People Magazine quote that we put on our page or whatever it is, and let’s test combining some of these variations. So that was one where when all was said and done, we had more than doubled the conversion rate of the product page just by removing unnecessary content that we had, and that was pretty crazy. I had another-
Greg Shuey:
Did you ever have that client scratch their head and admit they were wrong?
Chris Dayley:
No way. In fact, they fought me tooth and nail on these results. They had their designers jump on the call and they were like, “There’s no way that this can possibly be the case. We’ve done all sorts of research, and we’ve done our customer profiles. We know exactly what they want. There’s no way this data is accurate.” So we ran the test for extra long. We made sure that we had a very high amount of statistical significance. Even after all of that, when the client stopped working with me, they put a lot of that content back.
Greg Shuey:
I was going to ask, did they put it back?
Chris Dayley:
It’s amazing how often this happens. This goes back to the first question of, most common mistake I think that brands make is they fall in love with their own idea of what the brand is.
They completely fall in love with their own website and to the point where they can’t see what their customers want because they’re so wrapped up in what they think their customers want.
So that was one thing that was really surprising, removing a ton of content, especially with a brand that got started on Kickstarter, you would think that the Kickstarter approach would work. That was surprising. I’ve had the opposite happen, though. So I had another client where they had some very high-end products, lots of content on this product page. The description section was paragraphs and paragraphs of content and bulleted lists with 16 bullets. I look at that, and of course, I make my gut intuition calls, but I never implement those. I always say, “Okay, I think there’s way too much content here,” and they were using the Shopify template. So they had all of the content was down below the fold. When I suggested to them, I know this description content’s super long, but what if we move that up above the Add to Cart button? Because right now, you actually don’t even see the content until you’ve already been asked whether or not you want to add it to the cart, so the customer has to do a bunch of work right now to find that content.”
So we had a variation where we tested removing the content, and then we had another variation where we actually moved the description up, not in a collapsible dropdown. We moved the entire description up, which on desktop moved the Add to Cart button below the fold. So you couldn’t even see the Add to Cart button. Again, this is very unconventional. The client hated it when they were looking at it, they’re like, “There’s no way. We’ve got to have that Add to Cart button up above the fold,” yada, yada. Long story short, moving that content up higher on the page significantly increased conversion rates. It was close to a 50% gain in conversion rates by moving the content up above the Add to Cart. In other words, by bumping that call to action button way down on the product page, we improved conversion rates because we were giving the customer content that they wanted and we were giving it to them without making them do the work to find it.
This is one of the things I love about my job is I have conflicting results with clients all the time where one brand will see getting rid of something is helpful, another brand will see making it more prominent is helpful. This is why I’m so bought in, obviously, to this idea of AB testing and challenging your assumptions.
Greg Shuey:
Yeah, you’re a scientist is what you are.
Chris Dayley:
Yeah.
And a scientist in a world where gravity doesn’t always work the same way.
Greg Shuey:
That’s funny. All right, cool. Those were some fantastic examples. Thanks for sharing those. So this last question that we have for today is probably the best, in my opinion, because mobile is just becoming so hot and so important. The last stat that I saw for 2023 is that about 60% of all conversions, all orders done on e-commerce websites was about 60%. It’s a humongous percentage. So the question is, what should be different on your mobile website or your mobile product page versus your desktop product page?
Chris Dayley:
Yep, you’re spot on. With e-commerce, it’s way more than 60%. A lot of times, it’s usually 90 to 95% of your traffic will be mobile. Now, again, before I answer the question of what should be different on the pages, one thing I will say is, going back to the assumptions thing, I can’t tell you how many businesses I’ve talked to where I will look at the traffic and it’ll be 90% mobile, 10% desktop, but then the revenue is 50% mobile, 50% desktop. I’ll say, “Well, what’s going on here?”
Immediately, the assumption is people are coming and researching on desktop, sorry, they’re researching on mobile and then they’re buying on desktop, to which I always say, “BS,” because nobody wants to come back on another device. That’s never the best case scenario. So what it either means that you caught them at the wrong time, which could very well happen, but it’s definitely not happening with half of your visitors, or it means your mobile site sucks and they felt like they had to come back and buy on desktop. So unless they’re 75 years old, they’re probably not buying only on desktop devices, because especially anybody that’s under the age of probably 40 is so comfortable with mobile devices and with shopping on mobile
Greg Shuey:
Well, I am 40, and I hate shopping on mobile, so I guess I act like a 70-year-old.
Chris Dayley:
It’s probably the gray in your beard, man.
Greg Shuey:
It is, and being bald. Yeah.
Chris Dayley:
So the first thing that I will say is that if that’s you, if you are the kind of company that’s saying, “Well, I think that people are researching on mobile and then buying on desktop,” flush that assumption down the toilet, because I’ve seen a lot of brands where with some testing and finessing of the mobile site, if you create a good delightful mobile product page, people will buy. If any of your sales are happening on mobile, that tells you that your customers are willing to buy on mobile.
Unless you have no sales on mobile and everything is desktop, and for e-commerce especially, it’s not the case. I have some B2B companies that I know people are only browsing their site while they’re at work and they only sign up for webinars on desktop, whatever it is, but that’s not the case with e-commerce. So that all out of the way, what should be different between a mobile and a desktop product page? The first thing that I will say is probably a lot more than you want to do. Again, if you just go with the normal Shopify template, Shopify doesn’t really do anything very different on mobile and desktop. Shopify just scrunches it all down and instead of having two columns with imagery on one side and content on the other, it’s all stacked in a single column. But other than that, everything else is identical to desktop, and so you know that Shopify is not going to do this job for you. The first thing that I always look at when I’m looking at a mobile product page is I look at how long the page is. So there’s some people who claim that mobile customers hate scrolling. I don’t believe that’s the case. I’ve seen all sorts of data that suggests that mobile customers, they’re pretty comfortable with scrolling. However, the real question is how much work do you want the customer to have to do? So one of the first things that I will test with my clients is whether or not we should have an easy to engage with sticky section on mobile. You’ve been to sites like this before.
You’ve shopped on apps like this before where as you scroll down the product page, there’s a bar at the bottom that will scroll up and down with you. Sometimes it’ll have an Add to Cart Button with reviews next to it, just something that’s easy to engage with. Sometimes it’ll give you the ability to have a quantity selector down there or color selector down there or something that will scroll you back up to the top or whatever it is. These types of mobile specific elements, again, this isn’t like universal, but they tend to work really well for mobile customers because if you think about, for example, where your reviews are, they’re probably at the very bottom of your product page. So in other words, if someone is reading your reviews, they have scrolled all the way to the bottom of the site. Now as they’re reading reviews, if they want to add your product to the cart, they have to scroll all the way back up to the top of the product page.
So having an Add to Cart button that has followed them all the way down there can be really helpful to just let them add to cart whenever they’re ready. I’ve tested this approach on desktop as well, and it doesn’t tend to work very well having this a sticky Add to Cart on desktop. Part of it, though, is that more content fits in the screen, so you don’t usually have to scroll as far on a desktop device. But so sticky elements in general, things that will follow the mobile customer up and down are things that are totally worth testing. When they work, they usually will have a 15, 20, 20 5% increase in conversion rates, just by making it easier to add to cart. So that’s something that every business probably wants to do, make it as easy as possible to add a product to the cart.
The second thing, and this is the first thing that customers will usually see is your image carousel on a product page. You want to really think about what that mobile experience is like, ’cause on desktop, there’s tons of different ways to engage. You can usually click on the image carousel on desktop and it’ll blow it up and make it full screen and then you can click between. You can see all of the thumbnails on desktop at the same time, and so it’s easier to go between. On mobile, you either have to pick full screen images or let them see the carousel and make the images smaller. You usually can’t have both. A lot of businesses that I’ve talked to won’t even have the swipe functionality built in. So some themes will have inside of that image carousel on mobile, they’ll have the ability to swipe between the images instead of having to push the arrow button to change the images.
You definitely want to have swipe functionality, but you also want to make sure that it’s a fairly intuitive experience. You’ll also want to think about your customer demographic here, because older demographics, they look for those arrows. So sometimes you want to have both swipe and arrows to switch back and forth. But again, going back to my original suggestion, you want to test this. Test different ways of presenting images to your customers. Test different treatments of the carousel, swipe only, swipe plus arrows, full screen versus part screen with the thumbnails, et cetera. There’s lots of different ways that you can do it, but that’s something that’s pretty important to test. On the subject of images as well, one other thing that you’ll want to test is what should be the hero image, like the default image that customers see.
I’ve seen all kinds of different approaches here. Usually, brands will start out with some kind of a studio shot of their product, so it’s just like your product against a white background. The reason for that is, well, there’s all kinds of reasons, “That’s just what people do.” “It looks the cleanest,” blah, blah, blah. But what I usually will recommend to my clients is to test at least the following variations: Have a studio shot with just the product, a studio shot plus, if it’s possible, having a model. If you have a backpack, for example, you could have just the backpack, the backpack on a person in a studio. The third thing that you’ll probably want to test is some sort of a lifestyle shot, if you can, your product, even if you sell something that you can’t put on a person, like if you sell bulldozers, the first big thing that came to mind, but having something that shows your product out of the studio.
Then the last thing that I recommend is testing a video as a default. Videos are really, really polarizing. Customers either love them or they hate them, but it can be helpful to test. With the video, you’ll probably also want to test whether or not it auto plays and loops or whether you click Play on that video. But so image carousel, there’s tons of stuff you want to do. The image carousel itself is really important to test because, again, it’s the first thing that the customer sees when they come to your product page. So two things that we talked about so far. We talked about scrolling actions for your audience, which maybe it’s just as simple as a sticky Add to Cart button or something else. Testing your image carousel, both how the image carousel behaves and what images are featured in that image carousel. The last thing that you’ll really want to think about and test is how much content a mobile customer wants to see at a time.
So there’s different ways that you can display your description content. Depending on what you sell, you may have a description, you may have specs. You may have different use cases that are in different content sections. You can either have all of that information displayed and open by default, or you can condense those under collapsible, whatever, accordion expanders. So on mobile specifically, customers are really sensitive to how much information they’re going to be seeing at a given time. You’re going to want to test this on both mobile and desktop, but especially on mobile, you want to run a test where one version with the description expanded, one version with the description collapsed. One version maybe with multiple dropdowns where maybe you have a dropdown for description. You have one for reviews. Maybe you have one that has size charts or whatever other thing you have to have on your product page, but testing how much of that information. My experience is that the mobile customer usually wants all that information, but they usually don’t want it all displayed at once.
Again, it also creates this experience where if they want to read your reviews, they have to scroll past all of your content in order to get down there. The third thing that I usually think about specifically for mobile is how much information should we display at a time to a mobile customer? Zooming out for a second from the product page just to mobile in general on your website, one of the things that I’ve seen that has really changed over the last little bit for e-commerce for mobile is how you should display your menu in general.
So this can really affect your product page performance because the way that they get off of your product page can either help or hurt your conversion rates. Especially if you’re sending ad traffic straight to product pages, they need to be able to get out of your product page easily and in a way that makes sense. So figuring out A, where’s your menu? Usually, it’s a hamburger menu in the top left-hand side of the site and you click on it and it opens up all of your navigation options. But figuring out what should be in that hamburger menu is really important. I’ve seen brands that basically take their mega menu from desktop and just shove it into a hamburger menu and you’ve got just this giant list of options. I’ve seen brands that hardly have anything in their hamburger menu, and there’s not really any way for a customer to find what they’re really looking for. So testing, how many options should we have in our menu? Should we display images of our collections in the menu for our mobile customers? Just really figuring out, again, for those 50 to 60% of people that aren’t going to buy that product and probably the other 20 to 30% that don’t want the product they came to, you want to make sure that the navigation experience for that mobile customer is nice and isn’t just whatever the Shopify template had.
Greg Shuey:
Well, that’s one of the big a-has for me from our whole conversation today is the mobile navigation. I don’t think people think of that. They’re thinking of, what is the experience of the page? Not, how do I help them actually get to the right page? Cool. Well, as we’re starting to wrap up here, Chris, do you have any other final thoughts or words of wisdom about how our listeners can get started?
Chris Dayley:
So there’s lots of A/B testing tools out there that you can use to run these tests. If you’re on a Shopify site, it’s super easy to install these tools. I use a tool called Convert, Convert.com for most of my clients. Convert is just one of many tools like Optimizely, VWO, there’s lots of A/B testing tools out there that you can use that are not that hard to install and not that hard to start testing. One of the things that I will say is, again, if you’re on Shopify, there are some tools that you can use to just run some simple tests. So for example, there’s a tool called ShipScout that will allow you to test what your free shipping threshold should be. So we didn’t even mention this. This is more like site-wide, but if you’re going to offer free shipping to customers, there’s always a big question of, should we offer free shipping to everybody?
Should we require them to buy a certain amount before we offer free shipping? If you do require them to buy a certain amount, how much? Do you have them add, is it free shipping after $40, $80, $120, $1,000, whatever? So this tool ShipScout will allow you to really easily set up four or five different versions that just displays different shipping thresholds to your customers. That can be a really easy and effective test to run right out the door, and it might also help you with profitability. So it’ll help you understand what is our total revenue? What’s our conversion rate? What’s our average order value when we have these different shipping thresholds?
If you have some shipping threshold that you’re using now with your customers, let’s say it’s a $50 free shipping threshold, I always recommend to my clients have at least a free shipping variation. That’s free shipping for everybody. Have one variation that is a lower shipping threshold than you have now. So if you’re currently at a $50 threshold, test $40, and then you want to test one that’s higher, so maybe $75. You might be surprised at the reaction from your audience. A lot of times my clients are like, “Oh, if we raise it too much, then they will just bail,” and a lot of times that doesn’t happen. So that’s something that if you feel threatened by the idea of trying to test a sticky Add to Cart button on your product page or something else, testing with a few of those built-in A/B tests in Shopify can be an excellent place to get started.
Greg Shuey:
I like that. Thank you for sharing that. All right, Chris, well, thanks so much for taking some time out of your very busy schedule to be with us today. I really appreciate it.
Chris Dayley:
Thanks for having me on.
Greg Shuey:
I hope that you’ve been able to get some good ideas of some things you can take and start implementing and testing on your website this week. We’ve learned a lot today. So in our next episode, it’s going to be a solo cast featuring yours truly, and I’ll be discussing using qualitative data to double the effectiveness of your marketing. So as always, take what you’ve learned here, make a plan, take massive action. Until next time, this is Greg Shuey and Chris Dayley signing off.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
