Marketing is only as good as your weakest link

Awesome product

We have this awesome new product – the wireless temperature sensor. Everyone that we show it to absolutely loves it. It’s incredibly inexpensive and could potentially make half my products obsolete. It’s a marketing dream.

And conversion rates are looking good

So we create its own web site and move much of our supplier’s material across. It’s too geeky and focuses on the technology, not on the potential benefits.

We create a landing page and really focus on the benefits. It’s a good landing page. I’m happy.

We then bring traffic to the site via Facebook. We are looking at a reasonably good conversion rate on our Facebook ads and the price is reasonably good. We’ve done better, but overall we are happy. We are doing our split testing and the smiling chef is a winner.

Then we look at the landing page. Split testing shows a bit of variation and we are pleased with how easy it is to see the impact of various changes.

But where are the sales?

Our problem, however, is despite all that advertising, we haven’t seen a single sale.

So we go back to the process and find that people are making it all the way to the store and stopping there. No one has even made it to the checkout. One screen has a 0% conversion rate.

Our weakest link

We now know that the store is our weakest link, but are none the wiser as to why. It is the same as on all of our other sites, so why is it doing so poorly?

Facebook has the answer

Facebook had the answer. We ran their reports and looked at who was viewing the product. What really stood out was that 97% of visitors were on mobile devices.

97%

Which makes sense because these are idle people on buses or trains, or in a queue, or just idly sitting on the lounge. They are happy to browse through Facebook and wander off to an interesting site.

We then visited the site on a mobile device. The landing page looked surprisingly good. The shop, however, was a total disaster. Yes it was “responsive” but thanks to a photo of the product in a column we now had
one
word
per
line
in
the
description.

And given the awesome descriptions we were giving our products, that mean they scrolled on and on.

Our weakest link was our shop on a mobile device

So it wasn’t the shop that was the issue, but the shop on a mobile device. And given that 97% of people were on mobile devices, we didn’t stand a chance.

Lessons learnt

The three big lessons this taught me are:
1. Look at every step of the process and look at the conversion rate – how many people viewed it and how many people moved onto the next step.
2. It is often easier to fix a poor conversion rate than improve a good conversion rate. So start with the weakest link.
3. Test everything on your phone

So now I’m going over all my sites to test them as a mobile user.