What can you do when your order path is eight pages long and “corporate headquarters” has strict policies that essentially tie your Web marketing hands behind your back?
Fighting the system, or sulking around the office out and aggravating your co-workers would get you nowhere. Your only option is to accept the parameters you have to work within and find a solution that gets results.
The MarketingExperiments research team was recently confronted with this situation (not the first or last time). One of our research partners had very limited options with their order process. All of our best practices pointed to removing several steps, eliminating unnecessary fields, and reducing friction and anxiety. But none of the strategies we initially proposed were acceptable.
Now what? How could we break out of the constraints to improve results?
Every online marketing professional is familiar with the idea of the order process as a funnel. From the start of the process, say your landing page, the number of prospective buyers gradually erodes with each ensuing page.
With that in mind, we took the path element with the highest impact on abandonment and moved it to the last possible step. The objective was to get prospects as deep into the funnel as possible before they ran into the most anxiety-inducing part of the process: facing a decision to submit sensitive information.
The results? Even we were surprised by the impact of this change: Our partner achieved an 86% increase in conversions compared to the original order process. Look for more details on our tests with this partner in our upcoming Web Clinics.