Increase sales by 70%

Few weeks ago, during a meeting with a long time client, I have received an "Indecent Proposal", just like in the movie. The client wanted me to double the number of sales triggered by the site, and said he would pay big money for it. I considered it indecent just because how the client proposed it, not because what he was asking. That was perfectly fine with me.

So I studied the website for a whole day, I also did user testing with 15 friends, which also took about an hour. After 9 hours of brainstorming work and testing, I had some figures in front of my eyes. More than 60% of the subjects said that they liked the site and the products. However, they didn't see any price for none of the products so when they came upon the "order now" button, they felt like they were about to buy something without knowing how much they will be invoiced.

Careful with your call to action buttons

I decided to change only that little aspect which took not more than 5 minutes of coding. I changed the "order now" button with a "Find out more" button. No search engine optimizing, no marketing campaigns, no advertising were required to improve targeted traffic. After more than a month since I made that change, here's how the figures look. The conversion rate was improved by almost 3 times. The conversion rate is now 2.88% while the previous one was around 1.13%. The overall traffic of the website has however hit a peak point in May this year, and has reduced by 40% since then. Doing some math will provide us with an extraordinary answer. Even with traffic going down by almost 50%, the sales numbers went up by around 70%. Those are 2 words which were changed that packed such a big punch into it. What is even more important is that the client now wants search engine optimization and advertising to increase targeted traffic to his website.

Published on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 10:31 pm in usability.