Enticing the Customer to the Order Page
October 25, 1999
In previous articles, we've discussed several steps of the
buying process, from the standpoint of an online merchant or
an online marketer. In this one, we're going to look at the
final step - actually placing an order. For the purposes of
this discussion, we'll assume that you are selling some sort
of a tangible product, taking orders on your Web site and
delivering the product by mail. Obviously, many of the
issues are the same even if you're selling a service, or if
you're not taking orders online.
Making sales is analogous to catching fish. You have to go
someplace where you expect fish to be, then you have to
prepare your bait and try to put it in front of the fish. If
you do all this well enough, and often enough, sooner or
later, you'll hook a fish. Getting that fish to bite is like
getting a customer to place an order. Getting the fish into
the boat, and finally onto your grill, is analogous to
processing an order, for just as many fish escape after being
hooked, many customers cancel an order, return the goods, or
otherwise escape your grasp.
Unlike fishing, with electronic commerce it is theoretically
possible to measure and quantify every step of this process,
which theoretically allows you to identify the stronger and
weaker links of your sales process, which, very theoretically,
allows you to sell more stuff. The name of the game is to
consider every step in the sales process, and set things up
so that you can measure what's going on at every step. Then
you experiment, making changes at a particular step to see if
it improves performance.
Obviously, for all this to work, your measurement process
must be as accurate as possible. A customer may first learn
of your product in one of several ways. A banner ad or a link
on another site may lead them to your online store, or
they may find your site directly through a search engine. Or
they may have heard of it through some offline medium such
as a print ad or word of mouth. One good thing about banner
ads is that it's pretty easy to measure their effectiveness,
as all banner ad delivery systems can provide reports on the
clickthrough rate (the percentage of viewers who click on a
banner) for each individual banner. For hard-coded links,
things are a little harder to measure. Your log files can
tell you how many visitors are coming from a particular site,
but unless you have access to their log files, you have no
idea what percentage of visitors who saw your link clicked on
it. Your log files can also tell you how many visitors
each search engine is sending you, and even what keywords
they clicked on to find your site. See my previous article,
There's Gold in Them Thar Log Files,
to learn how to mine such wisdom from your server logs.
Once a person reaches your site, there are two more steps to
consider - enticing them to your order page, and enticing
them to place an order. Of course, you could break it down
into more steps, such as helping them choose the best version
of your product, convincing them that you're better than the
competitors, etc. A couple of previous articles,
Navigation 101 and
Build Traffic Through Site
Design,
discuss how to guide people to your order page. In this
article, we're considering just the final stage of the
process. They're looking at your order page - now how do you
make them finalize an order?
The percentage of inquiries that result in orders is called
the "conversion rate." That is, the percentage of people who
are converted into customers. When someone speaks of the
conversion rate for a Web site, they probably mean the
percentage of Web site visitors who place an order. But the
more detail we can get about the ordering process, the better.
It's possible to break things down a step further, and
measure: (1) what percentage of site visitors make it to the
order page, and (2) what percentage of people who visit the
order page place an order. As regards step one, it's possible
to comb through your log reports, and agonize endlessly over
the "paths" that visitors take through your site. At the
moment we're just concerned with step two, and this figure is
easily calculated. Any decent log analysis software can tell
you the number of page views for a particular page, so find
this figure for your order page(s), and your total number of
orders for the same period, and there's the conversion rate
for the order page. Of course, if your site uses a dynamic
system like ASP or ColdFusion, or perhaps even Merchant Server
or one of the "all-in-one" e-commerce "solutions," then you
shouldn't even have to go to that much trouble.
They're lookin, but they ain't buyin!
They're lookin, but they ain't buyin!
A Separate Order Page
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