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For the last couple of months there has been a frenzy here in our web marketing department about A/B testing and Conversion Rates. Why the frenzy? Basically because all elements came into place: we developed a high performance A/B testing module within the eCommerce platform, we finished rolling out Omniture Site Catalyst on the shopping carts and we improved the template editing areas for all the accounts so it’s easier than ever to start testing templates.

We have finished quite some tests so far, some with better results than others, so we are pretty confident on making some bold statements on the 3 factors that impact conversion rate in our experiences.

Do you have good quality traffic?

Among our clients we have vendors who have chosen to use the default and still have very high funnel conversion rates (more than 60% of the visitors entering the cart finish a transaction) and some with highly customized shopping carts that don’t even come close to 1% funnel conversion rate. Yes, the main factor that impacts the conversion rate is the quality of traffic.

When sending the visitor from your website or software product to the shopping cart make sure this is what he expects. Even better, let him know that he is going to be taken to a third party shopping cart on a secure environment. Maybe they would buy your product, but trying to force them to do it will most likely get them away from your website. So quality traffic means visitors that when getting to the shopping cart this is where they expect to be (they know the price, selected products, and additional options are not pre-selected).

Forcing users to the shopping cart just ain’t the right strategy. Most of them don’t return to your website but rather exit for good and you lose any chance in persuading them to engage with your website or your products.

Customized beats default

We’ve been working hard on making improvements to the default shopping cart provided by Avangate and we are continuously getting stuff rolled out in order to increase the conversion rate. Whenever we did an A/B testing between the default shopping and a customized one, the latter always won by around 2 or 3 percentage points at least. Sometimes all we did was to change the header of the cart and place the client logo and even that did much better than the default shopping cart.

Going deeper into the process got us even better results.  The fact is that customizing the cart in a way that the user feels he is still in the same website always rocked the conversion rate. We are dealing with tests on 3 clients right now on which we worked on making the cart as similar to the website as possible and we have great results on all of them. Checkout the before and after for the above cart. Which one do you think is winning?

Well done Cross Selling

Well done cross selling will most likely decrease the conversion rate of a shopping cart. Yeah, you heard me right. However, well done cross selling will increase the average order value, therefore the revenue. Checkout the following charts and see how cross selling has impacted the sales of one of our clients.

What do I mean when I say well done cross selling? Check out the following implementations for 2 other clients of ours.

We will keep you posted with future developments, but till then I would appreciate if you would let us know what your testing ideas are.

You know that we don’t like to brag about how the Avangate eCommerce platform is the best in the Universe ;) , but a recent survey of eCommerce providers for software vendors shows that, well… we are the best! Hurraaay!

It turned out that out of 14 major eCommerce providers rated by 192 software vendors on Andy Brice’s blog, Avangate was rated highest!

The survey covered important aspects that software vendors need to keep in mind when choosing an eCommerce provider: features, ease of use, reliability, support, fraud protection, ethics, value for money.

A big thank you to all our clients (some of them listed here) that took part in the survey and we promise to do our best to be better every day:).

Although even Andy warns that the survey should not be taken as official statistical data, we can’t help but feel proud of the outcome.

Selling software over the Internet with Google AdWords has a lot of traps that we should learn to avoid as good as possible, so that our ads reach more targeted prospects every day. One of the trickiest aspects we should be in control of is the use of negative keywords, because they are the toughest candidate for wasting our money and for getting on the nerves of Google users, as it was eloquently explained by Linda Bustos on Get Elastic blog.

Negative keywords in your AdWords keyword list are those for which your ads will not show in search queries containing them.  You can get the general information about negative keywords directly from the AdWords blog.

When you’re trying to sell software through PPC campaigns, your goal is to obtain qualified leads to your software selling business, not to get as much and as untargeted traffic as possible. And that’s when negative keywords come in. Or out, actually:).

Don’t Lose Users on the First Screen!

This is part 4 of a 5-part series: How to convert more software trials to purchases.

Nothing’s worse than opening new software and staring at a vast white screen with millions of toolbar buttons.  Now what?

1. Most users don’t care enough to find out.
   They want to solve a problem, not root around in your menus.  They don’t care about your “project” paradigm or your innovative new work flow concepts.
2. Of course you also have to satisfy your power users.
   They probably don’t want paperclips popping up every five minutes distracting them from real work.  Power users are the ones who are going to spread the word about you, tell all their friends to download your software, and Tweet and blog about how awesome you are, so you have to keep them happy too.

Hammers Sell Better Than Software

Back in April my friend and fellow microISV Andy Brice conducted a software vendor survey that highlighted something that doesn’t get the attention it should: while about a third of the people that visit your site download your trial version, only 1% end up buying.

Why is that? Now maybe the 92 respondents to the survey were atypical, but I don’t think so: I’ve heard that “only 1% buy” adage for years.

Here’s a related factoid Andy’s survey unearthed: the average Mac product conversion ratio is more than 4 times higher than the Windows product conversion ratio.

Now maybe Mac owners are four times richer than Windows users, or maybe because there’s four times less software to choose from. But as a Windows developer who switched two years ago, I haven’t noticed four times more money in my bank account or not found a decent range of software to accessorize my MacBook Pro with. In fact, I’ve noticed – and so has my spouse – I’m much more likely to buy a Mac app I trial than I was likely to buy as a Windows guy.

Use a “Tips” Newsletter to Follow Up on a Trial

Photo credit: blue out

This is part 3 of a 5-part series: How to convert more software trials to purchases.

What do you do with customer’s email addresses during their trial?

• If the answer is “nothing“, then you’re wasting data.
• If the answer is “follow up with ‘account management‘ stuff and ‘do you need anything‘ questions“, then you’re bothering most users.  Even at best, you’re not thrilling anyone.

You should be using it for a special, 3-emails-only “Tips Newsletter“. There are several goals of the newsletter.