CRO News Roundup: Is Your Navigation Menu Harming Conversion Rates?

Richard Chapman rounds up the latest in CRO advice, including how navigation menus can influence your conversion rates, top tips for customer engagement and how to tackle cart abandonment.

Is Your Navigation Menu Harming Conversion Rates?

Navigation is crucial to your visitors’ on-site experience. While you can play around with CTAs, colour themes, image selections and other components to keep your visitors on their toes, the navigation menu is something that should remain set in stone.

Crazy Egg’s Eggspert Nathan James Oulman writes:

Visitors need to know where it is at all times in order to orient themselves and find their way around your site. You need to be sure that whatever you choose to do is the most effective at putting your visitors at ease while trying to get around your site and actually improves their experience.

The Eggsperts recommend A/B testing to really decipher how well your ideas for navigation menus work.

Testing out alternatives is a sure-fire way to home in on the specifics, because anything slightly out of the ordinary from what visitors expect could potentially harm your conversion rates.

Stop Getting On Your Customers’ Nerves

Knowing when and how to engage with your customers is very important – particularly in this day and age with all the advances in digital marketing.

It can be tough trying to appear authentic across digital platforms, especially given the amount of sales material that spams email inboxes and websites on a daily basis.

Which is why Kissmetrics writer Shayla Price says:

It’s definitely possible to irk your customers with unfavourable marketing habits. Engagement is a better method for connecting with your audience. Start by learning and prioritizing your customers’ needs. Deliver different messages based on the customer journey. Also, don’t surprise your customers with hidden charges. Treat your customers well. Start engaging with them.

Marketers tread a very fine line between making good connections with customers and becoming an annoyance. Being personable, intriguing and still managing to get across your company’s values and raise brand awareness is a challenge. But the key is to make your customers’ needs a priority with any endeavour.

Don’t Give Up And Redesign

In his guest post for UserTesting, Jon MacDonald asks why most businesses think a website redesign is the solution for low site performance and poor conversion rates. Jon states that companies shouldn’t be blowing all their money on starting again each time a bad report comes in – instead, all it takes is the altering of a few key areas.

He comments:

Find out what it’s like to buy from you by conducting user testing. Why user testing? No matter how many times you redesign your site, it’s never going to boost sales until you understand your customers and align with their goals. User testing will show you, from a real person’s point of view, what it’s like to use your website.

Conducting site analytics will help you directly address different components. Perhaps a lot of user feedback focused on too much text and not enough imagery? Maybe visitors aren’t reaching a certain piece of content or CTA because your directional cues are off?

You should be monitoring your traffic, views, click rates, top-of-funnel content and conversion rates to make sure your site is constantly delivering what your customers need – it’ll also help you avoid having to do a complete re-vamp.

How To Tackle Cart Abandonment

The Baymard Institute recently concluded that 67.91% is the average rate for Cart Abandonment, which could increase depending on your marketing vertical.

More often than not, all it takes to improve on your cart abandonment figures is to optimise the fluidity of your checkout process and its design. Users like easy, well-executed processes, particularly when it comes to parting with their money.

According to The Baymard Institute, reasons for card abandonment during online checkout could be one of the following:

• Complicated process
• Website errors
• Shipping/tax/fee cost too high
• Slow delivery
• Site wanted user to create account

To ensure your Cart Abandonment Rate (CAR) decreases or stays at a minimum, Omniconvert’s Raluca Popescu writes:

For every reason that hinders a prospective buyer away, there are multiple solutions… you can reduce cart abandonment and increase your sales using tools such as surveys, A/B testing or web personalisation.

Thinking about how you can turn more of your website’s visitors into paying customers? Contact our conversion optimisation experts for more advice on converting traffic into sales.