Improve Your Customer’s Experience

Where is Your Business’ $300 Million Button?

Companies worldwide invest heavily in improving the customer experience. New websites are launched, shops are redesigned and marketing campaigns launched with the purpose of increasing sales. There are plenty of low cost alternatives and quick fixes you can do to improve your customers’ shopping experience. And it can be fun to do!

One of the most simple and successful improvements online is “The $300 million button”. An online retail company increased the number of purchasing customers by 45%, which amounted to an extra $15 million the first month and $300 million the first year. How did they do this? By simply changing the name of a button from “Register” to “Continue” and informing customers of the value of creating an account during checkout. This is a good example because it shows how important it is to recognize what your customers want or don’t want.

As a previous post stated, listen to your customers. That is still extremely important. But the problem is that your customers may not tell you what they want, because they may not know.

It is your job to help them make their decision and make their life easier! This will not only increase your sales, but build a relationship with the customers and enforce your value proposition. I will follow up this blog with examples from IKEA and real life marketing stunts.

Web Browser Settings for People with Eyesight Disorders

If you have an eyesight disorder the Optimalprint-team want to do everything possible to improve your online experience. Various browser settings can be done in order to make your life on the Internet better and more fun - here is a quick guide. Drop me a mail if you have comments on this Browser Guide.

Hide Pictures
For some people with eyesight disabilities there exists sensitivity for light, especially blinking light. Here is how to turn these type of images off.
1. Select Tool (ALT+T) > Internet Alternatives (O) in Internet Explorer’s menu.
2. Select the Advance Settings (ALT+TAB) in the pop-up for Internet Alternatives.
3. Under Settings: Multimedia, go to Show Pictures (via keyboard use your arrow buttons.)
4. Select ”Hide Pictures” by un-selecting the checkbox (Space).
5. Click on OK (ENTER) to save your new settings.

Ignore colours, fonts or font size – Set your own formats
1. Select Tool (ALT+T) > Internet Alternatives (O) in Internet Explorer’s menu.
2. Select Tools at the bottom.
3. Click in the squares for ignoring colours on web pages, settings for font size and font types specified by the web pages.
4. You can also choose to format the web browser via your own format template.

Chose colour on text & background
To increase contrast on your computer screen you can select another colour on both text and background. If you chose to ignore colours, font size and font type as was described above you can decide text colour or background in order to facilitate for you when reading on a computer screen.

1. Select Tool (ALT+T) Internet Alternative (O) in Internet Explorer’s menu.
2. Select Color (ALT+O) under General in the pop-up.
3. Chose not to use Window’s colours (ALT+W) this will make the text and the background buttons show.
4. Select Text (T) or Background (B).
5. A colour scale will be displayed.
6. Select a colour. Use the arrow buttons to move around and view the different colours. When you find a colour you like either click on it or press ”SPACE”.
7. Press OK twice or press ENTER twice
8. Close the pop-up for Internet Alternatives by clicking OK or press ”Escape”.

Now use your settings on the web page instead of the settings made by the once that created the site. You can in addition change size and colour settings also on the graphics.

Select link colours
The Optimalprint links that you have visited can be highlighted in a special colour to easily separate them from the Optimalprint links that you have not visited, making navigation on new web sites easier.
1. Select Tool (ALT+T) > Internet Alternative (O) i Internet Explorer’s menu.
2. Select Colors (ALT+O) in the pop-up under General.
3. Select ”Usel inks” or ”Not Use Links” under Links.
4. The colour scale is now displayed.
5. Select a colour either by using your mouse or the arrow buttons. Select by
6. Select OK twice or press ENTER twice
7. Close pop-up for Internet Alternative by clicking OK or press on Escape.

This pop-up also offers the opportunities to display links in a different colour as your mouse hovers above them or points at links which help people with eye sight disabilities to quickly identify links.

Automatic complement
For some people, using the keyboard can be a difficult task. You can then select Complement Automatically filling out personal information such as name, e-mail address, address and so on automatically.
1. Select Tool (ALT+T) > Internet Alternative (O) i Internet Explorer’s menu.
2. Select Content (CTRL+TAB).
3. Once on ”Content” Select Complement Automatically under Personal Information (ALT+U).
4. You can select Complement Automatically for web-addresses by selecting in the pop-up or close the function by deleting the pre-inserted information. You can turn web-addresses on and of by clicking on (A).
5. Close the pop-up for Internet Alternative by pressing OK or click on Escape.

Microsoft Help Files
Microsoft offers help files that show how to change the different settings. In addition Microsoft also offers a help files as text only versions for mouse and keyboard usage. Go to Microsoft Office Support and access text files.

Good luck!

Increase conversion rate – input from Optimalprint’s Customers

Leverage on Optimalprint's Customer Focus Groups & Increase Your Website's Conversion Rate

We have spoken to some of our customers on how to improve usability and simplify the order process with the main purpose of increasing conversion rate. Here is a short summary - 12 Steps to Increase your site's conversion rate The action points arising from these customer focus groups have not all been implemented, since we either are working on it or they're are postponed until we can free the necessary resources. Nevertheless they provide some usefull input to more online companies besides just Optimalprint.

1. Let customers review the shipment costs without logging in. Provide your customers with a visible link to shipment cost from your price tables, Cart and shipment page.
2. Registration forms shuold use common names for fields so that they're recognized by toolbars that have an auto fill function, easing the pain on techno-stressed customers.
3. Review your payment alternatives. As Optimalprint now has expanded into the UK, France and Belgium we should include PayPal as payment alternative. However PayPal charge a high commission, 3,9% to be correct, which is more than other payment alternatives. Anyone with different experience please contact me.
4. No Registration should be required for completing a purchase. Many of our products at least are only ordered once or at least have a long time between the next order, wedding, baptism and so on. Demanding customer registration clearly lowers our conversion.
5. We launched a new site in the beginning of June on which we removed links directly into our products. Do not remove direct links on your front page to your products. This required the customer to click at least 3 times before arriving to the product in mind. These are cumbersome steps and it definitely hurts our conversion rate.
6. We used a box on the front page displaying product characteristics that are provided for free. Text specifiying the benefits are godd on the front page but the deeper into the site your customer comes the more important it is to display "HOW TO". Applying this to Optimalprint means that when our customer have selected a category – "Private" or "Company" then the "HOW TO" information should be displayed - How do you order, How do you upload images and so on.
7. On the new site we also added a search function. Now experience tells us that a search function on your site should actually be removed until the search results impress the customers with it’s accuracy and relevance. We launched the search function to early.
8. Getting a DHL-logo or UPS-logo or another international shipment company up on the front page definitely build trust and credibility. In addition our customers felt that just seeing a DHL or UPS logo signals flexibility in terms of shipment and makes the site look more international.
9. Translate text on conversion-oriented pages to the local language. This is very interesting – we launched Denmark but without translating the site into Danish. We thought that Norwegian or English would be enough to build trust. Since launch there have been thousands of visitors from Denmark, reviewing 5-15 pages per session but almost no sales. Translating your site to the local language is more important than we expected. You most likely do not have to translate everything but the main pages and especially the pages related to ordering.
10. Be very clear on which countries you ship to. Customers that do not understand that instantly might either leave the site despite the fact that they are a potential customer or enter into a purchase process only to find out that we cannot ship to them.
11. Get the tracking system supervising the funnelling of your customers to work 100%. Track this information and you will be surprised on what you can learn. Pick your number on exit page and add a “Back” button, improve the button for next step – make it more intuitive. Small changes at close to zero cost can significantly improve retentation and conversion.
12. Think through how you treat people with eyesight disorders. We were surprised over the estimated number of customers with slight to severe eyesight disability. I do not want to state a figure here otherwise you will just come back to me with another number. Main conclusion is that there are many potential customers with eyesight disorders. Helping this community can have many positive side effects besides increased conversion.