Are you a small retailer in a cold sweat about showrooming? This trend where customers browse in-store but then buy products online, began striking fear into retailers’ hearts a few years ago.

Who wants customers coming in, trying on or feeling the products you offer, and then buying them at a deep discount from Amazon or some other site?

The trend was especially unsettling for small, independent retailers. While big national chains with huge volume may be able to afford to price-match online sellers, independents are less likely to be able to do so without losing their shirts.

But a new report from Merchant Warehouse suggests that instead of stressing about showrooming, small retailers should welcome “webrooming.”

What is Webrooming?

The reverse of showrooming, webrooming is when consumers research products online, then come into a physical store to buy them.

Webrooming is even hotter than showrooming – and it’s creating new opportunities for brick-and-mortar retail stores.

What You Need to Know About Webrooming

It’s more popular than showrooming.

Some 75 percent of men and 63 percent of women webroom, compared to 53 percent of men and 40 percent of women who showroom. By other demographic measures, such as age, consumers are also more likely to webroom than to showroom.

What might surprise you is to learn that consumers aged 18 to 36 are equally avid webroomers as those aged 49 to 67. Sixty-nine percent of both groups webroom, but only 50 and 44 percent respectively showroom. And while 90 percent of showroomers have also webroomed, just 60 percent of webroomers have showroomed.

Why Do Consumers Webroom?

Particularly when they could just as easily order a product online – why add that extra step?

• 47 percent don’t want to pay for shipping. To make sure you capture the sale, try offering coupons good only for users who visit your site, then buy a product in-store. Or allow customers to order online and pick up in-store to save on shipping.
• 46 percent want to see and touch a product before buying it. This is especially important with “sensory” products like home furnishings, clothing and cosmetics. Encourage customers to test products in-store, and create displays that are tactile and inviting.
• 42 percent want to check in-store availability online - then go to the store so they don’t waste a trip. Look into an eCommerce system that has this capability for your store, and educate employees about the importance of making sure data is accurately maintained so customers aren’t disappointed.
• 37 percent want to be able to return products to a physical store. You can capture both online and in-store sales to these consumers by offering the ability to buy online and return in-store.
• 23 percent don’t want to wait for delivery. For those impatient consumers, be sure you have in-store availability information on your eCommerce site so they can check it out. Make sure that your clerks have accurate inventory info at hand in case the customers call the store as well.

By Jamie Smith

Interested in some real-life evidence of how A/B testing can generate significant lift in profit?

A/B testing is not something you do once and then forget about; it's an ongoing process to extract the maximum conversion rate for your website. It's a process that includes testing every last detail to find the optimal layout, text, and images for your site. Sometimes, even the smallest changes can yield significant results.

Let's take a look at five A/B tests with significant results.

1. Customer Testimonials

You can write copy at length about how your product or service will benefit your customers and do wonders for them, but third-party credibility is much more influential.

With that in mind, how would customers respond to impartial reviews from actual customers? Could the positive experience of previous customers help eliminate any apprehensions from the prospect about buying the product?

These were the questions asked by ecommerce store Express Watches. In their A/B test, they added a small widget below the Add to Basket button, where genuine customer reviews were displayed.

IMG testimonials visual website optimizer.png

The results were game-changing for the business. The positive customer reviews reduced buyer objections and boosted their sales by an impressive 58 percent.

The best thing about customer testimonials is they are incredibly easy to implement – just add them to your site or install something like the Trust Pilot widget.

Takeaway: Always use positive customer testimonials as social proof since third-party reviews carry much more weight than what you write about yourself.

2. Higher Prices = More Revenue (Sometimes)

Not all A/B tests require you to tweak your website's design; one of the simplest things you can test is your pricing strategy.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to determine that when you reduce your prices, you will generally make more sales, and vice versa. However, less certain is the impact the change in price will have on your bottom line – will your monthly revenue be better or worse for the pricing change?

That's where the economic concept related to elasticity of demand comes in.

To explain this further, let's take a look at a pricing A/B test Six Pack Ab Exercises ran.

Uncertain as to whether they were leaving money on the table, owner Carl Juneau tried increasing the price of his product from $19.95 to $29.95.

Although the number of conversions fell by 9 percent, this was more than offset by the additional 50 percent revenue he was receiving per conversion. In time, this simple price change would allow him to bank 36.48 percent more revenue.

Now, increasing your price won't positively affect your bottom line in every case – in some cases alower price will yield a higher profit – but it does highlight the importance of finding your profit maximizing price.

Takeaway: Pricing strategy is part of A/B testing. Test higher and lower prices to see what brings in the most revenue and profit.

3. Trust Symbols Boost Conversions

With all the scam reports out there, online shoppers are understandably cautious about handing over their credit card details willy-nilly. You need to find a way to put their minds at ease. After all, would you buy something from a website you don't trust?

Credibility and trust is something that you develop over time, just like in a dating relationship. But, there are ways to increase the trust level of your website, even if you're new to the Internet.

Bag Servant identified lack of trust as a primary reason for low conversion rates and small order values on their site, and set about implementing an A/B test to improve performance.

Initially, Bag Servant was dependent on social proof, and prominently displayed a badge highlighting their 4,000+ strong Twitter following in an attempt to establish trust.

This wasn't working.

For their A/B test, they replaced the Twitter followers badge with a WOW award badge they had received.

Because this badge was a relatively well-respected symbol in the industry, this improved the site's credibility and helped removed buyer's doubt.

The result? Conversion skyrocketed more than 72 percent.

Takeaway: Always look for ways to increase credibility on your site. This can be with awards, social followers, testimonials, or SSL trust symbols like Verisign, Hacker Safe, or McAfee.

4. Know Your Audience

You might think you understand what your audience wants, but just how well do you really know them?

Product quality, guarantees, offers, price, and shipping fees matter to all consumers. The bigger question is what matters most to your customers.

Smiley Cookie, a niche e-store, sells fresh, customized cookies as gifts for special occasions.

On their website, they wanted to add a new value proposition to help boost sales. They ran an A/B test to help them choose from the following:

• Next-day shipping.
• Discounted price.
• Free shipping on orders above a certain value.
• Fixed rate shipping for any order value.
• High quality, handmade cookies.

Smiley Cookie had expected that customers would be most responsive to the value propositions on price (discounts) and quality (handmade cookies).

But guess what? There was a surprise winner: next-day shipping.

How did that happen?

Because most customers tend to purchase cookies as a gift (and gifts are almost always last-minute things), making sure it arrives on time is imperative. Throw in the fact that cookies are perishable and need to arrive fresh, and perhaps the results aren't so surprising after all.

That's not to say that next-day delivery is the most important factor to your audience. It does show, however, that understanding what your audience really wants is vital for getting results with your A/B tests.

Takeaway: You need to find out what matters most to your customers and highlight that aspect of your product on the landing page or in the offer.

5. Accepted Best Practices Don't Work Every Time

Although a bit of logical thinking can often predict the outcome of an A/B test, ignorant Internet surfers love nothing more than throwing up anomalies that defy the conventional wisdom.

Here are four testing tips used to generate more revenue.

Remember, just because something works on one site – or even the vast majority of sites – doesn't necessarily mean it will work with you.

Let's look at an example to highlight this point: the Vendio signup form.

Now, any guide to CRO will tell you that an embedded signup form on the homepage will boost conversions; after all, if it takes fewer clicks for a user to register, they ought to be more likely to do so.

Sensibly, this was the approach Vendio took when first designing their layout.

Just to ensure they were taking the right approach, though, Vendio A/B tested their embedded form against an unconventional alternative: users would have to click an extra button to reach the signup form.

Surprisingly, this worked! With one extra step added to their conversion funnel, signups per visitor increased by 60 percent.

Takeaway: Don't blindly accept best practices. Find out what works best for you with independent testing.

Wrapping Up

Conversion rate optimization isn't an easy technique to master, particularly when there is such a wide range of variables and factors that go into testing.

And just because you've managed to increase your conversion rate doesn't mean you get to rest, especially if there are any major aspects of your site that haven't been tested. If you only focus on one page, you will be leaving money on the table.

Most importantly, the cost-per-click (CPC) to bring a visitor to your website is increasing and if you don't improve your conversion rate, your cost to acquire a customer (CPA) will continue to rise. Therefore, never stop testing, because even the smallest lift can yield big-time changes to your bottom line.

 

In our latest ebook, “A Marketer’s Guide to UX: The ‘Invisible Elements That Fuel Success,” we explored how a website’s design, form and function affect the number of visitors who stick around to complete goals. What makes UX such an important subject is that it’s recently become more complex.

Twenty years ago, futurists were already trying to figure out what life in an online world would be like. Some of them, like author Michael Heim, assumed we’d all be living in a digital matrix, but their concerns about frames of reference, content and choice are now strikingly relevant.

Already, in the electric element, the need for stable channels of content and reliable processes of choice grows urgent. [...] Cyberspace without carefully laid channels of choice may become a waste of space.

The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality — Michael Heim

We don’t live in an immersive online reality yet (although Google Glass gives us a hint of where tech companies would like to go), but even though we’ve managed to confine cyberspace to screens on our desks or in the palms of our hands, some of the challenges futurologists worried about have come to pass.

The modern web needs to follow physical rules of design, information architecture and usability, just like a virtual world might. But there’s also the issue of choice. In both an immersive digital reality and today’s internet, how will you ever be able to make a choice if you can do anything, click anywhere and look at it all? This is an important hidden element of UX, and one that will impact all content marketing campaigns.

Marketing in the Matrix

The question of choice in marketing has its roots in the offline world. Susan Broniarczyk, a professor of marketing at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, first identified the phenomenon in her 2005 paper, “The deleterious effects of living in consumer hyperchoice.” She identified purchasing paralysis as the consequence of:

• Consumers making more purchases each year
• People are choosing in a market with more new products than ever before
• Individuals are subject to more demands for their attention
• Buyers have less free time than in the past

When faced with this reality, many consumers simply stop shopping for items altogether. But don’t customers say, time and again, that choice and variety are one of the most important attributes a business can have?

Maximize & satisfy

Part of the issue may come down to a principle researcher Barry Schwartz describes in “The Tyranny of Choice.” He breaks down most consumers into two groups:

1. Maximizers, who are determined to find the best product or service for the best value, and they won’t give up until they’ve found it. They value money over time. 
2. Satisfiers, who will only spend so much time researching before they make a purchase. These customers are more concerned with time than money.

Part of the problem may lie in the fact that people don’t want to admit that they’re Satisfiers. The internet supposedly empowers people to make smart buying choices, so when asked, of course they’re going to say they’re skilled shoppers. But it may be true that ecommerce and online marketing are at their best when they save people time, rather than money.

You can’t choose your way out of a jam

Columbia University conducted a study of consumer choice by offering customers at a supermarket free samples. One set included 24 different flavors of jam, while another was only comprised of six types. While 60 percent of shoppers tasted from the 24-variety group, only 3 percent of them made purchases. Conversely, 40 percent of shoppers tried from the six flavors in the second group, but 30 percent of them bought jam.

With fewer choices and more design clarity, your traffic might be lighter, but it would lead to more purchases.

Think about these figures in terms of web traffic and goal completion. With fewer choices and more design clarity, your traffic might be lighter, but it would lead to more purchases.

UX: When not choosing is a chore

So what can marketers do? Here are some ways to carefully curate a web page to ensure it isn’t so open-ended that customers flee en masse.

• Design: Don’t offer too many options

Websites should be visually clean, meaning that colors don’t clash, text is easy to read and all elements follow a clear optical hierarchy.

Don’t include a link to every part of a site from the homepage, or a landing page for that matter. It’s estimated that modern humans in industrialized society make more than 70 important choices every day – so try not to give customers too many more of them. Make it obvious where they should click, and limit the number of elements that are actually hyperlinks.

• Information architecture: Front-load choices

According to a study by Stanford University, the closer people are to the conclusion of a task, the more choices will derail them. If there are options on a website, they should appear earlier in the purchasing or goal-completion process. For instance, don’t make consumers fill out half a dozen forms on separate pages just before a transaction is complete.

• Usability: Set default options

A study of workplace retirement plans found that when employees were asked to make choices before plans took effect, only 9 percent ended up participating. However, when workers were allowed to opt-in with default settings in place, participation shot up to 24 percent.

If you want or need to make options available, you don’t have to make it a requirement. Instead, let the Maximizers make additional decisions while the Satisfiers simply click ‘OK.’

Digital UX: Only on screens…for now

We’re still a long way off from spending all of our time in an immersive digital simulation, Google Glass and the Oculus Rift notwithstanding. But even if we lived in a cyberpunk dystopia where it was impossible to tell when existence begins and virtual reality ends, the same rules would still apply: Visual design has to make sense, information needs to be organized and functions must work.

And too much choice is no choice at all.

By Alex Butzbach Marketing Writer at Brafton.

A wise person would have taken my mother’s advice the first time.

Alas, when it comes to shopping online there are hurdles and derailments in every corner, waiting to sabotage your efforts. And my mother finds them all.

Why does that matter?

Because my mother is retired and she has a laptop that goes everywhere with her, from home to vacation home. She’s not very tech-savvy but she’s quick with a mouse and has a disposable income. In other words, she’s your customer.

Or she could be, if you didn’t screw the whole thing up so badly!

It’s been three years since my mother and I began our phone ritual of her complaining about a website and me writing it down.

She’s had a lot to say about customer service along the way and plenty on the subject of websites that don’t work.

She may be just one person but where there’s one there are more. They visit your website and silently leave, never to be seen or heard from again. They may not vocalize their frustrations but they’re certainly acting on them – or failing to act, by refusing to buy from you.

If you’re not convinced, just listen to my mother…

Mother Says: What The Heck Is It?

“People should try to shop on their own sites,” she says. “Do you think they’d buy something if they had no idea what it was?”

She’s talking about the shower curtain.

She wants a new one for the guest bathroom in her vacation home. Her vacation home is strictly beach-themed. And the shower curtain she wants has a pattern of small… somethings… that may or may not fit with the theme.

“Is it a duck? Maybe it’s a seahorse. I have no idea.”

Maybe you’ve been there. Maybe you’ve tried to shop for anything from home décor to clothing and been unable to discern polka dots from plaid, or in this case, ducks from seahorses.

“Sites need a zoom feature. You can’t just look at something that small and say, ‘Oh, ok, I guess it’s fine…’ You have to know what you’re buying. Do you know what I did? I got a magnifying glass.”

She says this with a mix of disgust and triumph – how dare “they” make her resort to such stupid tactics, but kudos to her for thinking of it.

“You know what it was? A seagull! A big, fat, ugly seagull!”

If there’s one thing my mother hates it’s birds of any sort. If there’s another thing that pulls in at a close second it’s being forced to interpret some aspect of a product that should have been clearly identified by the “click to zoom” function or mentioned somewhere in the product description.

And my mother may hate birds but she is really pissed by the effort involved in discovering the birds. The birds have come to represent the entire site. And she’s totally gone.

“And do you know what else?”

The thing about crummy websites is that there is usually a “what else”.

“Half the time the alternate colors don’t work. So when you see a color called ‘majestic’ how the heck are you supposed to know what that looks like? What the heck color is ‘majestic’?”

I have to admit, I have no idea.

If You Want Her To Buy, You’d Better Show Her What It Is

I don’t think this is an issue that needs belaboring. If you haven’t figured out by now that your product photos matter then you can go back and read her previous complaints to the same effect.

Or you can try shopping your own site and looking objectively at your seahorse/duck/bird patterns to be sure another human being – perhaps one with imperfect eyesight – can tell what they are.

And for the sake of overburdened brains everywhere, avoid cute marketing-y sounding descriptions in favor of real ones. If you need help crafting product descriptions, go read this post.

No matter how you slice it, “majestic” is not a color.

Lesson Learned: Details Matter

It could be the indecipherable photos or indescribable colors. Or maybe even the lack of photos and color details. If you’re not paying attention to how your products appear to your customers you just may not have any customers to worry about.

It’s definitely tough to be objective about your own inventory so do yourself and your sales a favor and find an outsider to give you honest feedback.

It could be as simple as recruiting your mother.

 

 

A colleague, cousin or Twitter acquaintance will do just as nicely – as long as they are dead honest and maybe even a little nitpicky. Because trust me, your customers will be.
by Carol Lynn Rivera

DealerNet Services