Here at The Obsidian Design Lab, we’re obsessed with design that delivers growth for businesses. We work with e-commerce brands to expand their business through better user-experience design. To do that, we focus on optimizing the customer journey through an online store, and the communications that surround the purchase experience.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website, through experimentation. For most e-commerce brands, that means a sale of a product. The conversion is the moment you’ve turned a site visitor, into a real customer. Of course, it doesn’t have to be a purchase. Any desired action can be considered a conversion… newsletter signups, reading an article...or any other metric important to your business. You might have a number of different metrics, each with their own goal.
What makes UX-led Conversion Rate Optimization different?
UX, or User Experience, is about understanding the needs and behaviours of your customer, and applying those learnings to the design of your product. Metrics are often forgotten in the world of design, because beauty often takes precedence. Here at The Obsidian Lab, we believe design is worthless if it isn’t either supporting your business or your customer. Ideally, we increase revenue, by delivering value for customers. By applying UX principles, and e-commerce expertise to the design of your site, we find ways to give customers the tools they need, which drives better results for your business.
Can you give me an example?
Say you were a fashion brand launching a new clothing line for Skiing. You current site might be set up to search for your standard clothing attributes - size, color, category etc. But customers in search of ski gear might have much more specific needs. Perhaps they only want jackets with the highest quality waterproofing, or plenty of insulation. Once you identify those needs, you can start to tailor your site in ways to meet them. That insight around waterproofing might show up in a number of ways across the site. Content on the product pages…pre-defined category pages…quick filters on the search results page. As a brand, it’s in your best interest to design, test, and launch all of these ideas, and analyse how each one impacts your business, for better or worse.
The point is, we work to make your site as easy to use for customers, so there is as little friction as possible on the journey towards a purchase. We want as many visitors as possible to turn into repeat customers.
Why does it matter?
If you want to sell more product, one way is to advertise more to get more customers visiting your store. But, as most brands know, acquiring customers is getting increasingly expensive. Even worse, if the conversion rate is low for your store, you're paying to introduce more people to a poor experience. It’s a waste of money. Instead, it’s better to turn more of your existing visitors into actual customers.
Most importantly, an increase in conversion rate is a double win. It directly increases your revenue, and reduces your customer acquisition cost too.
