Cart abandonment is an important topic to consider when working on a new eCommerce web product. Often times clients have put a lot of time, effort, and resources into an existing eCommerce website, but consumers are still dropping off at checkout. This is something our digital agency has seen time and time again. Ecommerce research agency Baymard Institute estimates that the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is nearly 70 percent. As consumers increasingly shop online with their mobile devices, brands are struggling to find ways to meet their demand for convenience, immediacy and simplicity. The good news is that a flawless user experience can win them back.

Simplicity is key

Despite the rise of abandoned shopping carts, Business Insider reports that about 63 percent of merchandise can actually be recovered by online retailers. The key is to simplify the checkout process.

A traditional checkout funnel typically consists of at least five steps:

• Checkout
• Shipping
• Billing
• Payment
• Confirmation

With so many steps, it’s easy to see why mobile consumers are getting frustrated. Consumers aren’t abandoning their online shopping carts because of product cost. They just don’t want to fill out tedious and/or time consuming forms. Nearly 40 percent of online shopping cart abandonment is due to lengthy forms prompting consumers to enter shipping and payment information. In fact, four of the top five reasons consumers drop off at checkout are related to entering information.

“The importance of mobile isn’t news anymore. For most brands and marketers, more than half of site visitors are coming from mobile marketers,” said Anthony Nicalo the VP of Platform at Mobify during a recent web payment webinar hosted by Mobify and Google.

Mobile has fractured and fragmented consumer behavior into hundreds of short, fleeting mobile moments. Customer expectations for simplicity and convenience are growing exponentially.

Improve cart abandonment

To prevent online shopping cart abandonment, you need to optimize your checkout process. Make your consumer’s needs, and the devices they frequently use, the centerpiece of your checkout design. Here are a few tips to help you:

1. Enable autofill forms. Mobify surveys revealed that 46 percent of online shoppers site checkout speed as the number one factor in whether a consumer returns to a site. The longer a checkout page takes to process a transaction, the more consumers worry an error has occurred. One easy way to speed things up is to enable auto fill forms so consumers don’t have to manually fill in shipping and payment information. Go one step further and offer to save this information for future purchases.
2. Keep everything on the checkout page. Offering a discount code? Great. Make the code accessible directly on the checkout page. Consumers won’t need to abandon their cart in search of discount codes posted on the web. Many online retailers are starting to offer a “tap it” option where consumers tap a button at the start of their shopping journey to automatically apply the discount to their online shopping cart.
3. Pay attention to visual design. Pay close attention to how color and design affect your consumer. The color red typically flags warnings to consumers, so seeing this color on your checkout page could make them cautious about processing an order.
4. Automate follow up. In a study of more than 200 brands across the country, email marketing company SaleCycle reported 46 percent of all abandoned shopping cart emails (follow up emails to consumers who left items in their cart) were opened by recipients. More than a third of email clicks led shoppers back to purchases on the retailer’s website.

Mobile dominates, so can you

In today’s connected world, it’s no secret that mobile is playing a huge role in how consumers shop. The challenge for marketers is to take their online brand experience to the next level. Marketers now must predict the needs of consumers to make brands more compelling. Simplifying the checkout process is a step in the right direction.

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Online forms are a terrific way to funnel prospects through your online sales process. As part of your larger content strategy, online forms should always facilitate conversion by guiding visitors through a specific set of actions. They can take a variety of shapes (newsletter sign up, demo sign ups, configurators, and contact forms). More importantly, they should facilitate the interaction between a brand and a potential customer.

Develop online forms to transform your prospects from listeners to active participants in the conversation about your products and services.

The Consumer Journey

One way to help visitors move painlessly through the buyer’s journey is to incorporate online forms. By adopting form content, businesses gain the advantage of extending the experience customers have with their brand, while also providing value through the journey.

Customers once had little control over the sales funnel. They had a few brands to choose from and based on what they liked or didn’t like about each, they narrowed down the options for purchase. According to McKinsey & Company, that model has been displaced by the consumer decision journey, a path defined by the active evaluation of products and services (often in real time) by consumers. Today, a brand can not only react to customers as they make purchasing decisions, but also actively shape those decision journeys.

For Outward Hound, the maker of innovative dog toys, games, gear & bowls, an online form designed as a simple questionnaire about a visitor’s dog (age, size and characteristics) helps determine a curated list of dog products suitable to the dog’s personality. The form enhances and customizes the visitor’s experience by adding convenience, and fun, to a task that can easily be frustrating and mundane. Meanwhile, Outward Hound collects valuable data about the type of dogs and products potential customers are most interested in, helping to further refine and guide marketing strategy.

Metal and aluminum distributor Future Alloys uses a highly interactive online form to help customers get custom price quotes based on specific project needs. Unlike Outward Hound, which supported customers through the awareness stage, Future Alloys guides them through the product selection and customization stage. Aluminum plates or rods with specific dimensions from an extensive inventory may be purchased online. The dynamic online form considers metal type, shape, resistance, width, length and thickness and the entire process is simplified for easy online purchasing. The online form gives potential customers value by showcasing various product specifications necessary for making a purchase. Once a customer gets to the checkout, Future Alloys has secured the user’s contact information to grow the relationship further based on previous purchases.

Strategic Online Forms

The process of creating an effective online form for your brand begins with outlining specific objectives, a goal and an intuitive process to meet that goal. Use your understanding of the four capabilities to determine what kinds of forms will be useful throughout each stage of the buyer journey as it relates to your brand. Outward Hound’s online form illustrates an example of journey innovation through product curation based on a user’s pet personality. Future Alloys’ advanced online form allows for extensive interaction and automation to customize a product selection and specification. These two strategies are among the four outlined by Harvard Business Review to enhance the customer journey and make that journey more impactful. Understanding these strategies will help guide you towards creating online forms that serve customers in powerful ways. The four strategies are defined as:

• Automation – brands digitize and streamline steps to replace manual processes.
• Contextual Interaction – brands develop an understanding of the customer’s physical or virtual location to attract them to the next set of actions in the customer journey.
• Journey Innovation – brands identify new sources of value through experimentation and customer analysis.
• Proactive Personalization – brands analyze past interactions with a customer to customize their experience.

Be Efficient

Developing an effective online form requires an understanding of your target audience and how much they know about your brand at each stage of their journey. Simplicity in both design and content is important. Ideally you want to gather only what is necessary and avoid excessive options, data fields, menus and copy that can potentially distract customers from engaging with your content. The goal is to collect essential information that will support your sales and marketing strategies.

Below are some tips on making forms more efficient:

• Incorporate Conditional Logic – incorporate functionality that automatically shows or hides form fields, sections, or pages based on the customer’s previous selections.
• Use Field Labels – add static field labels so the customer stays focused on the information they’re supplying, unlike placeholders which can disappear as the customer begins typing.
• Give Hints – provide examples that help customers understand how data should be formatted, i.e. dates.

Online forms are a great way to facilitate the interaction between brand and potential customer. Some forms even go a bit further by providing value to the user throughout the process. But when it comes to lead generation, an online form can be a powerful tool that converts and qualifies leads quickly.  It’s also a great way for brands to learn more about engaged participants.

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Brands are seizing the opportunity to improve conversion with an interactive business grade website. Are current landing pages doing enough to capture and convert leads online? According to Statistic Brain, the average length of our attention span is just a paltry eight seconds — and it’s steadily decreasing. Developing interactive website pages is a great way to harness the fleeting attention of your visitors and drive them to complete a specific behavior. Interactive websites have the power to draw people in and work to improve critical online metrics. They can make those eight seconds turn a first-time visitor into a first time subscriber, or better yet a long-term partner.

Interactive Website Pages

The function of any website page is to drive visitors to a specific course of action – an objective. Whether you’re asking visitors to sign up for emails, follow you on LinkedIn or purchase a product online, your conversion rates improve when business websites feature interactive landing pages that are relevant, clear and engaging. Relevancy is key. Understanding what brought visitors to your landing page, how much they know about your business and how you can serve them is central to creating an interactive landing page that drives results. Users expect to see meaningful user experiences each time they interact with your brand online.

According to Forrester Research,

Digital touch points can drive revenue, lower costs, build brands and engender customer loyalty. But to achieve these potential benefits, companies must deliver digital interactions that meet customer needs in an easy and enjoyable way

Ideas for Interactivity

The typical structure of a landing page consists of a headline, sub-headline, copy and a call-to-action. With interactive websites, visitors expect much more. Here are a few ideas to take your landing page from basic to indispensable.

1. Use compelling media

Using videos on landing pages can increase conversions by 86%. Include custom videos that are more personable and interesting. Featuring messages from key employees or even your CEO is another great way to showcase brand culture and expertise. High quality photography is another strong suggestion for adding impact to landing pages. It breaks up the monotony of text and add visual interest. Professional grade photography (as opposed to simple stock images) connect better with people. Curating images that are relevant to your goal is extremely important, so don’t add images haphazardly. Think about what visitors need to see in their decision making process.

Other compelling media assets that should be utilized are customer testimonials, case studies, white papers or PDF downloads that serve specific visitor needs.

2. Experiment with Long Form Design

More than 68% of U.S. adults own smartphones and an increasing number of young people are accessing the internet exclusively through mobile devices. The use of smaller computer screens is actually encouraging long form design — longer web pages with more in-depth content. Long form design enables visitors to easily scroll up and down pages without clicking and to find more information with less navigation. Interactive websites also utilize engaging design features such as parallax scrolling to keep visitors on a relevant path through long content. Parallax plays with background & foreground content, where background images or content move slower than foreground images or content. The result is a creative and animated way to tell stories and keep visitors engaged with messaging. Parallax scrolling creates a truly unique user experience, and if done correctly can be quite effective.

3. Enhance conversion paths

Every landing page must have purpose, and a call-to-action such as a feature button like “buy now”, “learn more” or “download here” is a great way to go. But taking a closer look at your conversion paths and strengthening them with interactive features will boost engagement dramatically. Freshen up your landing page with surveys, quizzes, eBooks, or assessments that connect with your visitors and drive interaction. Transform what would normally be static content into meaningful touch points of interaction between brand and potential customers. We have found that a little creativity along conversion paths can go a long way. Whatever your call-to-action, sprinkle in an interactive feature along the way and watch both conversion and brand perception transform.

4. Implement dynamic contact forms

Interactive landing pages can boost your average click rates by 50% and increase conversion rates by 40%. Adding a dynamic contact form extends the interaction visitors have with your business at one of the most crucial stages of the decision making process. A dynamic form combines static input with dynamic values, and will actually auto populate the remaining questions and/or options based on a user’s prior selection. It’s a terrific way to customize the experience to that specific user’s needs. And the more customized and enjoyable the experience, the more we see conversion improve.

Landing pages play an important role within interactive websites. They support the creative features and functionality that incentivize your customers, improve your web search-ability and drive important online interaction. Adding dynamic and interactive elements to your landing pages can make that brief, but crucial, interaction last long-term.

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Keep content fresh

Most websites receive the majority of online traffic from new visitors, not returning visitors. To most of your site’s visitors the content looks and feels brand new. Still, there are areas that visitors expect to change frequently. Blogs, news, webinars, videos, press releases and other social media content must be updated frequently and on a consistent basis to keep from seeming abandoned.

But don’t embark on a content-creating crusade without having a content strategy in place. What specific types of content and visuals will be created and with what frequency? What specific groups within the target audience will receive this content. Or where in the purchase cycle will specific content be most meaningful? How will your brand capture important marketing and even demographic information from visitors through the unique content offered? Also make sure the content on your website is relevant and up-to-date. Combing through the static content on a regular basis to make updates ensures nothing is too old. If you discontinue any products or services, you don’t want any mentions of them leftover throughout the website.

Regularly checking through your site for broken links is also a good habit. Since you have no control over other website changes or even stay up or go down, any link pointing externally is at risk of breaking or no longer providing value. There are tools that can be used to crawl your website and output a report of broken links across your website.

Monitor website performance

Website maintenance and monitoring overall performance is an ongoing job. How can you tell if your website is providing visitors with a strong user experience? Digital strategists consider updating customer facing technology (such as a website) as very important. In addition the customer experience is a top factor CMO’s and marketing leaders consider when evaluating a website. Beyond tallying up the number of page views your website receives, their is a myriad of tools and analytics available to evaluate the true health of a business website. Key performance indicators must be established within your website’s audience, acquisition, behavior and conversion. And it’s equally important to be able to interpret the data in order to decide on the best course of action for improvement. What exactly does that specific visitor interaction tell us? For example, visitors who spend a long time on an interior page might be gaining valuable information, while those who spend too long on a contact form might feel confused or inconvenienced. Maybe you’d like to know where visitors are actually clicking on a page, or spending the most time? Some other high level areas to pay attention to includes:

• Bounce rate – The percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. We want to make certain this figure remains low.
• Entrance page – The first page a visitor sees on your site during a session. This may be your home page, if they manually type in your URL, or an interior page, if they are referred (linked) by a different website.
• Exit page – The last page a visitor sees on your site before closing their browser or visiting a different website.
• Device and Browser – Indicates which browser (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, etc.) and device (Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy, desktop, etc.) a visitor used to view your site.
• Conversion rate – The percentage of visitors who take a desired action, like buying a product, downloading a white paper, or submitting a contact form on your website.

Identify opportunities for improvement

Whether refreshing your home page with new photos, adding new features and functionality to improve the users’ experience, or embarking on an e-mail marketing campaign to attract new customers, there are always improvements that can be achieved to help optimize your website and drive results. These results can come in the form of improved engagement, stronger conversion, an increase in revenue or all of the above. And there are a variety of ways these primary objectives may be achieved.

SEO optimization is another critical area of website maintenance that provides enormous online benefits from consistent updates and improvements. Off-page optimization is an ongoing task and a great way to ensure specific website pages show up higher in search rankings. Your business website is dynamic and should evolve. Business grade websites work best when they benefit from regular website maintenance and optimization. Ongoing monthly support plans offered through ID Fuel are ideal for businesses looking for high-level service and peace of mind from the experts. In addition, ID Fuel may be enhanced so that it’s tailored to your brand’s specific website. With such a program you receive a robust range of ongoing professional solutions (such as search engine optimization, online marketing strategies, social media publishing, graphic design and even back-end development) that immediately address your company’s primary objectives.

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The benefits of a responsive website are numerous. Imagine a website with responsive web design that adjusts to the device that your customers are using to view your business online. Imagine the content, the text, titles and the images actually moving so that they fit within the size of that specific screen. Whether it’s a tablet or an iPhone or an iMac or a PC desktop! You can literally see the adjustments happen as the browser size shifts from one size to another. Now I have to admit, the first time I saw this I was blown away! My immediate reaction to watching such a complex feature in action was WOW – this is awesome! What could be more incredible than this? Even today after having seen hundreds of websites with responsive design I still can’t help but smile every time I see the functionality in action; the “cool factor” is just that good every time. It’s no wonder responsive web design continues to receive so much attention – it really is state of the art and very convenient to have. But aside from aesthetics there are some very important benefits that responsive design provides that you should be aware of. So let’s dive into some of those benefits in this blog post! When it comes to responsive web design we want to give you the tools to make an informed and intelligent decision especially if you are creating a new business website.

Effortless Multi-Device Adaptation
The main benefit of responsive web design is the flexibility to adapt a website to different screens. Your website becomes easily accessible on all types of devices. Imagine your handcrafted website adjusting and optimizing (for your customer’s viewing pleasure) automaticall. Effortlessly adapting to the various screen sizes in existence – that my friends, is the true power of responsive web design. And it’s changing the web design industry and competitive landscape of business websites as we know it! Based on the size of the screen, your website will move, content will relocate, images will resize, font sizes may shift, the layout will change and even the navigation will adjust to deliver an exceptional user experience no matter what devise your customers are using to view your business!

Easy to Maintain
Creating multiple versions of your website is costly and cumbersome. Considering just a desktop, iPad and iPhone for example, means that you will need to triple your efforts when looking to make an update to your web page. With Responsive web design you’ll avoid this extra effort completely. Your website will work seamlessly on different devices and so when you need to update your website you only update one platform through your content management system. In the long run this will save you time and help avoid headaches with having to work on multiple versions of your website.

Improves your SEO
The benefit here is in the fact that you will only need to optimize content for one link. The URL structure remains constant for all devices. With Responsive design you have one URL that is easy to update and optimize your content which in turn optimizes your content for all devices. Whether it’s a Samsung phone, iPad or desktop responsive web design makes it easy for the Google crawlers to index your website pages.

Higher Conversion
If you are selling more of your goods and services online then you are converting more. If your customers are finding your business and making purchases through the use of tablets and mobile devices then your conversion is increasing. If one of your many conversion metrics happens to be sales then you’ll see an upward shift in your top line as well!

Increases Mobile Sales
It’s no secret that the mobile revolution has been in full force for quite some time now. Over $7.7 Billion in mobile sales expected for 2013 alone and that figure will continue to increase for several years to come. People are buying online and they are using their tablets and smart phones to make those purchases. To get them even more comfortable in doing so responsive design is a must.

Seamless User Experience
Imagine your incredible looking website looking less than incredible on an iPhone or iPad? Imagine parts of your website not working correctly or having certain images look stretched or content out of place. Is this sloppy looking? You betcha. Will your potential customers notice the distractions? Absolutely! Is this a credibility killer – you better believe it!

Keep Your Website Relevant For Longer
No doubt about it – having a business website that looks great on all mediums is the way to go in terms of longevity. When you use state of the art technology to build your business website it goes without saying that the final product is going to be of higher quality and remain relevant for much longer. Check out these quick stats courtesy of eMarketer that highlight the potential behind responsive web design.

• B2C eCommerce is expected to hit almost $400 Billion for 2013.
• Mobile Ad spending will reach $7.7 Billion this year alone.
• Expect 246 Million US mobile phone users this year – that’s 78% of the nation’s population.
• More than 58% of all US mobile phone users will access the internet via a mobile device, with smartphone adoption driving this. By 2017, this number will grow to 80.7%!

At Isadora Design we recommend that all our clients consider the benefits of a responsive website for any new handcrafted website we build. Having your business website detect the type of device each website visitor is using, is not only best practices but also beneficial for conversion and attracting more customers.

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