Introduction
When an e-commerce website visitor adds a product to their shopping cart, it doesn’t mean that the actual purchase will happen. Even the start of the check-out is no guarantee for a conversion. Every e-commerce website has to deal with a significant percentage of cart abandoners. But is there something you do about this? Together with Envoker, a Dutch performance agency, we provided detailed insights on the check-out process of INNO. We particularly quantified the missed conversion opportunity on the last check-out step. As there were no UI/UX issues, the solution focussed on applying motivational widgets: smart, data-driven tooltips to nudge a visitor to complete the online purchase. By testing with three different creatives against a control group, the winner made the check-out completion rate grow by 10.2%.
The case
INNO is the largest luxury retailer in Belgium, with 16 physical department stores and an online presence at www.inno.be. It’s a well-known and established store brand, as they are celebrating their 125th anniversary this year. The e-commerce team of INNO partners with Envoker on performance marketing, dedicated to improving conversions supported by SEO, SEA and display campaigns. Envoker collaborates with Exatom on webforms and check-out optimisation.
The initial objective was to provide more insights into how website users behave onsite, from shopping cart to check-out and conversion. INNO has a three-step check-out process, and Google Analytics shows clearly how many users continue to the next step and ultimately convert. However, what happens within each step (i.e. how users behave on the data input fields), was a blind spot for INNO. No existing tools are helping out here. These insights are crucial to understanding why users drop off and abandon the check-out. The project scope included analysis of the insights, providing recommendations, and doing an A/B test.
Exatom’s solution
One of the outcomes of the analysis relates to the final step of the check-out. Here, a user only needs to review all order details and the products ordered and tick the box to agree with the terms and conditions. However, 30% of the users that land on this final step still abandoned the check-out. With no technical or UX cause, this has more of a motivational cause than a functional cause. Therefore the solution focussed on level 3 of the optimisation pyramid principle: applying motivational smart tooltips.
Exatom & Envoker implemented a motivational widget campaign to nudge the visitor to complete the check-out. A motivational widget is a smart tooltip with microcopy that shows up next to a field, triggered by the user’s behavior. In this case, the trigger used was ‘deviant hesitation’. In other words, the platform calculates an expected hesitation time for that check-box and triggers the tooltip as soon as the hesitation deviates significantly from the expected. Auto-close was also applied, showing a countdown of 12 sec, which closes the tooltip automatically.
– Group B: copy in red, light grey background “One more check and you’re done”
– Group C: copy in white, black background “One more check and you’re done”
– Group D: copy in white, black background “Our Crazy Days promotion is ending. Still benefit from it today”
The results
All versions delivered incremental conversions in INNO’s e-commerce store. However, the differences were significant. The two versions with a black background and white copy showed a 3-4% conversion uplift, whereas the white version with a red copy delivered more than 10% more successful check-outs in their online store, reducing the check-out abandonment on the last step by more than 30%.
The learnings were not just that nudging a visitor on a webform or check-out with a motivational widget is an effective e-commerce tactic. It also shows that A/B testing of multiple versions is crucial, as none of the stakeholders expected the red copy version to be the winner.
Next steps
The motivational widgets campaigns are ongoing experiments, to further improve the check-out and account creation webforms of INNO. In addition, with Envoker, we have focussed on users that have abandoned the check-out and tested a new retargeting strategy on this group. More details in the next case study, which will come out soon.
Keen to understand how motivational widgets could benefit your e-commerce conversions? Let’s connect.
Team Exatom
