Conversion Optimization: Don’t Wait on a Website Redesign

In the competitive world of e-commerce, it’s not enough to have a website that showcases products or services. What matters more is serving up great digital experiences. With companies spending increasing amounts of money attracting lower quality visitors, it’s critical that once those visitors get to a website, the experience leads them further along the customer journey and to a conversion. 

Measuring conversions, in the form of booking a meeting, signing up for a subscription or checking out a cart full of products is a common way companies determine if a website is earning its keep. But that only reflects one small part of the success story. 

So much changes rapidly in digital retail that it can be really challenging to keep up with market trends, competitor offers, and customer preferences. Looking to improve metrics through a website redesign strategy is not a bad start, but it won’t solve the challenge of dealing with the many dynamic variables influencing conversions and website performance.

Why Improving Digital Experiences Matters

Despite many constantly changing variables, the one thing that customers are consistently looking for is better digital experiences. E-commerce market leaders have spoiled customers with personalization, frictionless customer journey’s, easy checkout options and more, and now that’s the benchmark that all digital experiences are being compared to. 

It was predicted that by 2020 customer experience (CX) would overtake price and product as a key brand differentiator and this has certainly been the case for e-commerce. Today, 74% of customers are more likely to buy based on experience alone. 

If a website isn’t performing, a redesign on its own won’t solve the underlying issues that result in poor CX. It’s like taking a mediocre gift and placing it in a fancy gift box in the hope that the person you’re giving it to will like the gift just because it’s beautifully wrapped. 

By contrast, improving the digital customer experience can have a much bigger impact. Not only on the look and feel of the website but also in understanding what customers are responding to and what elements of the digital experience impact conversions and other e-commerce metrics such as average order value (AOV) or customer lifetime value (CLV). To go back to the gift analogy, don’t start with a fancy gift box, start with understanding what customers really want inside the box as a gift instead.

Website Redesign and Prioritizing CX

Some companies may feel that a website redesign is necessary because their current testing tools are showing little to no improvement on the ideas being tested. It’s quite likely that current testing isn’t keeping pace with changing market dynamics and customer preferences.  Traditional CX testing isn’t able to scale to accommodate many different variables and increasing complexity in customer journeys. 

What’s needed is the ability to experiment more broadly and this is only possible with a modern experimentation platform capable of AI-driven optimizations. AI-driven optimization focuses on experimenting with thousands of ideas and combinations for a single page and draws insights from actual website visitor responses. And this works equally well to address the different needs of visitors using desktop or mobile devices. Once the top performers emerge, these ideas can be added to or changed to generate even better performance. Because responses are gained from actual visitors, companies gain more accurate and useful insights. They can easily identify what elements of the website are working and which aren’t, to make informed changes more easily than having to redesign the entire website in a vacuum. This approach results in a significant  impact on CX strategy and enables a more targeted approach to improving digital experiences.

But even if a redesign is still in the cards, AI-driven optimization can highlight areas of improvement and showcase what visitors are responding to that’s leading them further along the customer journey. There’s no need to redesign what’s already working, instead these elements can simply be improved upon. More importantly, experimentation can also identify points of friction that may be resulting in cart abandonment or visitors leaving the site. 

Collecting the right data before starting to redesign enables companies to learn what’s important to their customers and then be able to redesign with this in mind. It facilitates a more efficient and accurate redesign process that’s more likely to have a bigger impact on CX and contribute more to achieving company e-commerce goals.