E-Commerce Express: Website Optimization

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Federica. I'm the founder of tech lab commerce, a website optimization agency based in Dubai on a mission to help digital stores build and deliver their best shopping experience by leveraging world-class technologies, techniques, and strategies. Make sure you check out my YouTube channel and subscribe to the newsletter via the link in the description to receive email updates on new courses, bonus content, workshops, webinars, and more. Welcome to the first course of the e-commerce Essential series on website optimization. If you're an interpreter or digital marketer, looking to improve the performance of your e-commerce website. This course is for you. In this class, you'll learn the latest strategies and techniques for optimizing your e-commerce website and driving more sales. Why you should opt for website optimization? And you'll learn about a three-phase program that will help you boost in your e-commerce website performance and conversion without all the extra costs and risks that a whole new website redesign entails. Whether you're just starting out in e-commerce or a seasoned pro. This course is designed to help you to take your website to the next level and achieve long-term success. Let's get started. 2. Gathering Data & Problem Framing: As the annual respectable optimization process, it all starts with identifying issues and ask the right questions. You need to find out what's wrong with your current website before you can improve it. And gathering data to show you where the problems and opportunities are, as well as how much they could be worth to you. As anticipated best approach to star is to constantly ask questions and looking for patterns such as similarities. These are events that are the same to each other or happen in the same way. Differences, events that are strongly and clearly different to each other. Frequency, you want to know how often or how rarely these events happen. Sequence. These are events that follow others in a given order. Correspondence. Events that occur in relation to others and causation and event causes another to occur. And finally, once gathered possible patterns, make comparison. What can help you at this stage, especially when you have existing known and horizon problem or opportunity that needs to get enriched with data is problem framing. This process will help you with clarity on what is the problem and why it is a problem with reducing the risk of working or focusing on the wrong things. Some possible questions that you can ask yourself during this process, or what exactly is the problem? Why is it considered a problem? What is the impact on the business? And how would you know if a solution is working? 3. Website Redesign vs Website Optimization: Now that we established that the purpose of gathering data is to find actionable insights and that those insights can generate ideas about how online sales can be increased. There is one question, possibly the question. At this point, do you really need FOR new websites? And more? Have you considered the option of keeping the current website and instead invest in the budget, you would invest into a new website on optimizing it. Think about it. Nowadays the market is full of e-commerce platforms and solutions that are easy to set up, implement and customize, Shopify or WooCommerce, e.g. so the starting point of an e-commerce website today is incredibly higher compared to few years ago. This means that it can be that bad. It could sound less exciting than a brand new website, but it is definitely a risk control and budget safe approach than a radical redesign. What is a radical redesign? It is essentially a replacement of the existing website with a new one. And often it is very different from the old one. Different look and feel, different navigation, or even different functionality. This means that the whole experience is affected and it in turn can heavily affect the overall performance and conversion of the business. Now, that being said, I have to clarify that there may be times when a Radical Redesign is necessary and therefore absolutely justified. E.g. because of a severely outdated website technologies such as a site non-responsive, outdated platform, or a too frequently patched website that any updates become too slow and costly. Or if your website is hosted by a third party platform and their services are slow and expensive because at the end of the day you're part of an ecosystem where a lot of other brands and, or websites are onboarded. And technically they manage so many tasks for each website that they have that much time or capability to make everything happen at the same time. And lastly, if the overall design is very outdated, that is having a negative impact on the standing of the brand, usability and ultimately conversion. 4. Website Optimization & Benefits: Now that it's clear what a Radical Redesign is and when it is the time to actually consider it. Let's go into the optimization concept. Why would you go for the optimization for your e-commerce website in the first place? First of all, because it is a process and as very nature is a set of actions with long-term goals that take some time to validate. And indeed, it is based and structured on experimentation phases, which essentially gives you a continual improvements and increase of online sales in a controlled and consistent way versus a whole new website launch. That Besides costs and time, it gives you no guarantee of an increase. For this reason, website optimization is a smart way of making changes throughout a website cycle that involves a process of testing what works and what doesn't. With a new website launch, the cycle of redesign only happens every three to five years. But we know testing beforehand, businesses often struggle to fix conversion rates that have dropped due to redefine our website without purpose. With website optimization is that you can create a system of continuous improvement. So your website is always evolving to keep up with trends and customers needs. Website optimization in every change is measured using split tests that need to meet goals. These are A B tests. The website gets a new look, wide reaching business sales and conversions goals with ongoing testing and incremental improvements. Website optimization is nothing but the way for award for e-commerce websites. No matter how big or small your business is, allow your website to create a digital experience that will impress customers, generate leads, and convert sales. I never say this enough. Website optimization is highly recommended for any e-commerce website regardless of their size. And in addition, this is also the current practice of the big ones like Facebook, Google, Amazon continually evolving their current design and functionality without revolutionizing the websites look and feel the experience and the perception visitors have during their online journey. To wrap it up, the following are the many benefits that adopting website optimization can bring to your business. First of all, you still get the new look and feel and lift conversion. At the same time, you get real-time feedback on whether a change is delivering the desired impact or not. You can focus on key business metrics rather than a design. The me look aesthetically pleasing but does not perform or offer a good user experience. You can avoid the financial risks and loss of competitiveness associated to the whole new redesign approach, you can reduce the risk that your existing customers will be confused, but the new redesign and start spending less. And you can offer your customers and visitors a website that is continually evolving, rather than waiting for the typical three to five-year gaps between redesign. Well, by this point, I hope I made clear how beneficial and valuable can be optimization for your website and your business growth. And therefore, we can go over the actual process of a website optimization. 5. 3-Phase Optimization Program: A website optimization program is typically made of three phases. Build your case. Sudden test, go live. Which phase is different and may present different pitfalls, however, and this is exactly why experimentation is highly beneficial. There are concrete actions you can take in every phase to protect your existing performance and conversion rates and make sure the new changes perform as well as or better than the current ones. This means that there is basically no risk into an optimization program because it's all about testing until it's right and preventing to go live if it's not resolution for your website yet. Walking into phase one, here is when there's an awareness that the website is becoming out-of-date while other websites offer exciting features. And it is also the moment when you're considering whether to go for a new website or for optimizing your current one. This early stage may be your best opportunity to gain a high performance new website at a fraction of the cost of a republic warming or redesign. And as a consequence, optimizing should be given serious consideration. Now the question may be, how do I decide? Best approach is to conduct a full review of your websites, weaknesses, and issues. Let's have a look on how you can conduct your review. Today, there are several techniques and tools that can help you to run a full website evaluation. And these are conversion funnels, heatmaps, session replay, usability tests, Voc tools, and benchmarks. Conversion funnels show you where visitors are jumping off. Basically, you can see how visitors move through the steps and where they drop out so that you can identify the major leagues. They also show you where visitors are entering the steps and where they go next. Heatmaps, they show you what exactly your visitors click on, what they don't and how they really navigate your pages. Heatmaps are a more visual representation of user activity. And because of this, they're very effective in discussions and presentations as they are easy to understand. Or they show you our mouse movements or finger movements and how visitors interact with your pages, where they click, scroll, or tap. And therefore, it's easy to identify which elements on a page generate the most interest. Some tools useful for this purpose are hot jar and click tail, session replay. Session replay show you a video of actual visitors using your website. Basically is a recorded session of mouse and finger movements from when users start a session to work, they leave the site. Compared to an image like a heatmap. Videos show you how they move, where they click, were they hesitate and backtrack. You see the entire sequence of events plus how your website respond to the interactions and reveal issues and errors on the spots. Tools useful for this purpose are usually the same as per the heatmaps. So basically, if you use e.g. Hot Jar, they provide both maps and session replay services and much more actually, usability testing. These are real users experiencing your website and commenting simultaneously. And we'll show you how visitors really browse your current website. In practice, a usability test is observing users interacting with your website while verbalizing their thoughts. So telling you was showing you How's the experience, what's good, and what needs improvement so you can address effectiveness, satisfaction, and efficiency in relation to the site. Some tools useful for this purpose, our user testing, maze and look back Voc, which means voice of the customer. And this is basically asking directly to your visitors or customers feedback via online service, onset balls, live chats, social media, Net Promoter Score, and e-mail dedicated feedback forms. Some tools useful for this purpose are Survey Monkey and Google service. And lastly, we have benchmarking, which is basically comparing your website against your competitors website in terms of strengths and weaknesses of your value proposition versus theirs. Having completed your website evaluation through all or some of the techniques listed, you should be far more informed about how the current website can be optimized without the need to invest in a new website. Jumping into phase two, this is the phase when your evaluation has been conducted and completed, your case has been made and the decision or investment has been agreed. The whole process has been set. Partners and stakeholders have been appointed and budget plan has been finalized. As the weeks pass by project as started, and each and every task has been reviewed and signed off, was ready to go onto the next one. And this is how you move on our roadmap. Now, ideally, you're quite close to the go-live date. And this means that soon enough developed and will be completed and signed off. Together with the look and feel of the pages and the user flow through the checkout. This is the moment when you want to get ready in view of the Go-live face. And that's when you want to test, check, and review before the launch of the new website. So these are the things you want to make sure to do before the launch. First of all, does the frameworks and the mocked-up pages check the copy and make sure that it's professionally written, consumer centric and not only SEO driven. Review the wording and tone of voice around the value proposition of the new website. This means that the preposition itself should remain the same, but there may be a more compelling way of expressing it and communicate it to your visitors and customers. Analyze performance of dynamic elements, such as navigation and filters. Ensure funnels are correctly configured so that the customer journey can be analyzed and easily compared to the previous version. And in terms of funnels configuration, useful metrics to include our revenue per visitor, bus rate for Killen and pages, exit rate, basket, abandonment rate, etiquette rate for your bestsellers and conversion rate. One very important thing that I wanted to mention it is, don't forget the power of segmentation within your analysis or reports. Segmentation and comparison is how you learn about your visitor's behavior. Is segmented view is always more meaningful than just looking at overall data or numbers. Just remember that the most interesting insights are usually hidden in segmentation. And that's why it's highly recommend it to segment your metrics, at least by new and returning visitors, by your three to five most popular traffic sources and by device type. Now remember that during this phase where everything is being produced, developed, designed, and now everybody is in full immersion mode. There may be few key points. You want to make sure to check regularly with all the professionals involved before you're too close to go-live date in order not to panic and run for cover was officially out. Starting with the first one. Often it happens that with a strict deadline, many decisions different from the initial plan may be taken in order to simply deliver without considering the users. And as a result, there is a website that looks good but not built to convert. Well. So make sure you communicate regularly and clearly with appointed for those tasks and everybody is aligned. Another common issue you may face for the same reason of the previous one, which is strict deadline, is regarding categories and subcategories hierarchy within the navigation menu. This happened to me so many times and this is typical of navigations that are not headless, meaning independent from the website platform. So reality check is that either they're not in the right order and you can move them anymore until the next release or there is an issue related to their visibility or readability within the navigation, e.g. a. Name too long or that became long for the new font or size or poorly readable because of the new colors, shape, or anything that has been changed within the navigation. And this can happen simply because those roles don't work directly with these elements of the website and therefore they assume it's easy to change or adjust. And last but not least, another underestimated part of the project then needs to be on fleet and respect the roadmap as much as all the other tasks is copy. Copy is often been left until last minute. And once again, often treated as not as important to the customer journey as any other elements of the website. Please make sure you send the copy to the agency to be properly written and or translated. If you have multiple version or languages available on your website, on time, and make sure you have the time to check it either yourself or internally before uploading it and go live. And yes, we landed on the last phase, the Go-live, the new website is live. If conversion and sales are going up, you can celebrate. That's definitely a successful launch of your new website. And everybody is outward is definitely paid off. If instead your conversion rate and says are jumping at this point, which may happen, especially if something in the process hasn't been analyze, tested, or implemented in a correct way. Thanks to all the previous phases and steps, you should be able to know exactly where your customers are dropping out compared to the old version of your site. How e.g. with conversion funnels mentioned in phase one, they will tell you where the problems exist between the new and the old site. In addition, if you need to deep dive a little more, maybe on the reason why a particular problem exists. Thing that a funnel can't tell you. You can always use surveys and in general, VOC tool, voice of the customer to come up with valid hypothesis and test to fix. In other words, if your Go-live phase didn't behave as expected, this could be your recovery phase. So don't panic fibers and follow all the steps and techniques we covered in this course. The right approach at this point is to have a plan and to stick to it. Well, we are at the end of the course and so far we've seen the gathering data and problem framing processes. How to evaluate if you actually need a new website or if you should decide for an optimization strategy. We've seen what website optimization is about, why generally it's the most recommended tactic to adopt whenever you want to make effective changes to your website and what are the benefits that it entails. We've also been through the three-phase program and what should be done during each phase. With this course, I've shared it everything you need to put your own optimization program in place, follow the mission phases and techniques, and enjoy the exciting journey ahead. 6. Closing: Before saying goodbye, make sure you subscribe to the newsletter via the link in the description to receive email updates on new courses, bonus content, workshops, webinars, and more. Feel free to connect with me and leave a comment. It is useful to know how you found the course in order to create even better content in the future. Thank you for taking this course and hope to connect with you soon.