012 Improving Conversion Rates: Improve your Homepage, Navigation & Category Pages with Mogens Møller
by April Buencamino-dyMogens Møller is the CEO and co-founder at Sleeknote where they help us turn visitors into subscribers. He’s been in eCommerce for over 10 years and is just a little bit obsessed by user experience and conversion optimisation. In fact, he’s just spent 3 months conducting more than 240 usability tests on the world’s biggest online stores, across both mobile and desktop.
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About Mogens
15 years ago, Mogens worked at a web agency where he unintentionally came across a usability test.
He was so excited about what he saw, he shifted his career to understand web design as seen through the eyes of the customer. Usability testing continues to be a primary aspect of Mogen’s career.
240 tests is a massive effort and Mogens says that he wanted to take the time in an effort to build really valuable content for the marketing efforts of his company Sleeknote.
Content remains important for the company’s marketing efforts, and he says that they still update their blog regularly and have a podcast. The tests were a way to generate fresh content for the site.
Mogens felt that he needed to make the study very in-depth so that it would represent an authentic sample—not just glean information from dominant sites like Amazon.
Key CRO Tips from the Research:
Home Page
The homepage is a big area—Mogens says there are three things to focus on.
- Quick access to navigation and search. Pay attention to links and navigation on mobile. Make sure that your navigation works and is user friendly
- Separate major segments—Men, Women, Kids and B2B from B2C etc.
- Inform about Current Campaigns, sales or special projects.
Design Elements: Include a Hero Image that fits well with your brand. Despite recent conversations about carousels, Mogen says that carousels are great on Desktop, but hopeless for mobile.
Friendly Navigation Site Wide
Making your navigation friendly! Mogens recommends staying away from very large drop down menus (see the Ladies tab on the H&M website for reference.)
A simple way to fix this is to put a hover delay on menu items, like Cosco does on their site.
For sites using vertical menus, ensuring that there is a delay is critical. With no delay (See Walmarts site) the vertical navigation can cause user frustration because of the need for extreme mouse precision.
Adding a delay to a vertical menu (see Kohl’s website) makes this experience much better.
Bread Crumbs
For Mogen, using bread crumbs is a no brainer and especially crucial on mobile design.
When a user finds and enters your site through a sub page, bread crumbs are by far the easiest way to immediately calibrate and navigate your site.
Filtering
Filters are generally good. If you’re wondering if you can have too many filters, Mogen says simply — no.
Filters you don’t use won’t hurt you and the good ones are especially valuable. Be wary of clogging up the menu and index too with the indiscriminate use of filters.
Filter Tips
- Be sure you don’t have mistakes and errors
- Make sure it’s easy to jump back and forth—don’t use toggling
- Show matches for the filters
- SHOW colors, don’t write out the descriptor only
- Let the user decide when the list is getting updated. If you submit on every filter, it’s not good UI
Category Pages and Filters
Show active filters on your category page for a better user experience. Typically if you want to deactivate a filter, you have to go through the mobile filter list.
Allowing users to deactivate filters from the category page (zappos.com and H&M) is a much better user experience.
Category Page Insights from Eye Tracking
Mogens used eye tracking equipment while he was doing the usability test.
He noticed that when people were looking at category pages, items that had small badges like “Amazon’s choice”, “limited availability” etc. will result in a click/tap.
Don’t over do it though!
Insider Tips
If we’ve inspired someone to take their first step with Improving Conversion Rates Marketing – what do they need to know to give themselves the best chance of success?
Improving conversion rates is a big topic. One thing that works well for everyone is doing your own usability test. Get a handful of people who haven’t used your website to do the test. It’s such a simple thing and Mogens says you’ll have so much valuable insight. When you do the usability test, make sure you start people at Google and make them search generally for your industry keywords. Let them take a look at your competitors websites before they enter your site.
It’s impossible to improve our marketing unless we’re monitoring the performance – but the list of stuff we could monitor can be overwhelming. So what, for you is the number one Improving Conversion Rates marketing KPI?
Conversion rate. Crucially—converting visitors to buy
Crystal ball time – what’s coming up in the next 6-12 months that we should be getting ready for in Improving Conversion Rates marketing?
Usability testing is getting easier and the technolgy around eye tracking is improving but remains tricky on mobile. Mogens thinks that in the next 12 months, eye tracking technology is going to get significantly better than it’s ever been.
Interview Links
Mogens on Social media:
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