If you were to ask me what skills should I concentrate on once I have set up my online store and am starting to get a steady flow of traffic, I would with no hesitation explain that if you really want to be successful you need to start developing an “Always Be Testing” mindset.
Adopting an “Always Be Testing” mindset requires you to challenge the notion that once all of your products have been loaded up that your site is finished. It requires you to develop a testing framework that allows you to critically look at different elements of your site and start making small, incremental improvements that are focused on improving customer engagement and increasing leads, sales and profit.
Optimising and testing certain elements of your site sounds very technical and right now you’re probably worried that it may be well above your experience level… don’t worry it’s not, and when you see the impact that it could have on your bottom line you will quickly realise that this is a big weapon, a weapon that I would guarantee nearly all your competitors are not using.
Consider this very simplified example:
Your best selling product sells for $100, Google AdWords is sending 500 visitors per week to this product page at $.50 per click ($250). Your conversion rate on Google AdWords traffic for this product is 10% which equals 50 sales per week.
Essentially you are spending $250 to bring in $5000 with a Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) of $4750. Pretty healthy and good dollars if you can get them.
Most store owners may be happy with this, however imagine if you have an Always Be Testing mindset and you decide to write a your own product description and test it against your current product description which was just a copy and paste from the manufacturer’s website.
Now let’s say that after testing is complete you find that your new product description resonates more with your customers and has a conversion rate of 20%.
Product price: Still $100
Google AdWords $250
Visitors: 500
Conversion rate 20%
Revenue: 100 sales x $100 = $10,000
ROAS: $10,000 – $250 = $9750
As you can see without spending any more money on traffic this store owner was able generate a further $5000 worth of sales on this product.
Now if this online store owner didn’t have a testing mindset they may have concentrated on generating more traffic from Google AdWords (which is a purely logical move). Let’s say they double their Google AdWords budget to $500 and still use the existing product description provided by the manufacturer.
Product Price: $100
Google AdWords: $500
Visitors: 1000
Conversion rate: 10%
Revenue: 100 sales x $100 = $10,000
ROAS: $10,000 – $500 = $9,500
This looks pretty good and I am sure that this particular store owner would be happy with the result, however consider if they were also able to double their conversion rate by testing a better written product description. They would then be looking at a very healthy $20,000 in sales with a ROAS of $19,500.
While the above example is very simple, I hope that it highlights that in developing a testing mindset you will be able to significantly optimise your site performance. Your results may not always be as dramatic as the above example (they might be better), but you won’t know until you start testing. The important thing is to realise that the compound effect of incremental improvements in your conversion rate provides a massive boost to your bottom line profits.
How do you start testing your site?
Fortunately most e-commerce applications are now providing simple integration with a wonderful free tool that Google provides called the Google Website Optimizer.
I also encourage you to check out a great book by Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar that is surprisingly called… Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer
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