How we went from 10% to 14% conversion rates on our landing page, plus 5 must-haves for your e-commerce strategy

We weren’t seeing the results we wanted with our original Simtek landing page.

Our email signup conversion was around 10% on an average week. With a few small changes, we consistently saw over 14% and sometimes as high as 20%.

It was frustrating to see poor performance and wonder what was happening.

Check out some tools that we used to analyze our performance and understand what was going on.

It’s easy to lose track of what’s important when you’re developing an e-commerce brand. Everything from having the right products, to managing ads and acquisition, to providing customer service or social media. It’s easy to build your site, and then leave things the way they are for a while without taking the time to figure out what’s working and what’s not.

These recommendations are a must-have to uplevel your site performance and conversions. These aren’t silver bullets - these are tools to help you better understand your websites performance and make necessary changes. They certainly helped us achieve our goals.

Google Analytics

Google analytics is a no-brainer. Add the tracking code to your site’s head html section for each page you want to track, and boom - you have instant data and stats. Create goals based on what you are trying to achieve (ie sales, checkouts, conversions) etc. so you’ll be able to optimize and monitor this metric. Google analytics is a powerful tool to help you understand who’s doing what on your site, when and where!

HotJar

Hotjar is another easy to install tool (add the code snippet) and it allows you to see hot spots showing where people are clicking, moving and engaging. It’s really helpful to analyze content and where people are dropping off. And it’s totally visual, so unlike Google Analytics which can be dry and mostly numbers and rows of content - hotjar is a visual overlay of your site that has heatmaps of where people drop-off and where people are engaging.

Intercom (or other messaging app)

Intercom is a messaging popup platform that allows customers to engage with you or your team members directly on top of your webpages. Why is this useful? More sales. I don’t have any specific numbers, but it can help people who are on the fence about your product. Plus, it’s useful in other ways - to get feedback and provide support. Best of all, they can leave messages and you don’t have to be present for the tool to provide value. It’s not cheap, and it might not be for simple e-commerce websites. But if you have more expensive products that customers can shop around for, which might have lots of features and integrations - it might be right for you and your customers.

Popups (exit intent, and upsell)

Popups can be a useful tool in helping to capture more people as they leave, or upsell the ones who’ve already purchased. Imagine you’re buying a cast iron skillet - maybe you’d want a silicone pot holder as well. Amazon is the best example of this, with their ‘people also purchased’ items. Exit popups can be helpful in capturing an email, retaining someone leaving or just offering a coupon for the next time.

Site speed analyzer

Improving your sites’ performance is also equally or more important than all of the preceding recommendations. There are some stats that say you can boost your CR by 2% for every second that you shave off the load time. This is probably true - nothing is more frustrating in a user experience than trying to load a page only to sit there waiting, and waiting. Attention spans are 5 seconds these days so if you aren’t loaded and already showing compelling content, people will bounce. There are a number of good analyzers, but you have to use solid web development skills to make sure your site has great performance. There’s also no silver bullet here and there’s no one thing you should be doing.

Interested to know what got us from 10% to over 14% consistently? Branding, color scheme and content was one of the problems.

We used a combination of these tools to recognize that people were dropping off at specific points of the page, weren’t engaging with specific images and content.

It wasn’t easy to recognize that the color scheme and branding was a major problem, either. At first we made changes after reviewing hotjar, and google analytics thinking better content and images would help. After we made a bunch of string changes on the content, and switched around some images it didn’t help as much as it should have. That’s when we decided to do a branding and color scheme redesign, but use a lot of the same content. This was an immediate bump that was real and measurable. And as the previous image shows, it led to our average CR increasing, and we were on our way towards achieving the magic 20% CR landing page goal. We didn't get everything right - we made lots of changes that didn't help. But we were able to analyze, iterate and improve. And if we kept at it, we could have achieved that 20% number.

 

In summary: Track people so you know what they’re doing and how your site is performing. Use a visual analyzer like hotjar so you can see the hotspots and make changes.. Test different popups (exit, upsell) but be careful to watch the numbers as they can have a negative effect. And finally, make sure your site is super fast and speedy so people who are interested can do the thing you want them to do!

Did we leave any major tips out? Do you agree or disagree with any of these recs? We’d love to hear it.

 

Curious to see the before/after? 

 

Before

After

Apologies for the on-screen text and edits in the first image. I could not find a blank image on the first design that wasn't all marked up - which is telling in itself. The original design was heavy on purple/blues and on 'tech' feel. This didn't match our story, or the target demographic and use-cases we were tackling. For the redesign, we went much more aggressive and security focused, which helped give us better direction and resonate with our audience more. 

Initially we didn't want to polarize too many people by being too aggressive, so that's why we went more broad and more tech focused. It didn't work as well as we'd liked, so we made the change that we had been thinking about originally and it worked well.