Conversion Rate Optimization
The online customer journey begins with the discovery stage, and it’s an important stage that directly affects their decisions.
Affiliates bring in a crucial amount of sales to the business. When I was mapping out the user journey, I realized there is a huge opportunity to improve the conversion rate – by optimizing the user experience on affiliates’ webpages.
Users discover, compare, evaluate and may even make their purchase decision within affiliates’ webpages. What are users’ pain points? How might we improve this part of the journey and improve the conversion?
Main goals of this project is to optimize the experience for customers who use this affiliate (TechRadar) to learn about their VPN options and ExpressVPN, in particular. And to increase the conversion rate from TechRadar affiliate links to our product purchase.
Optimization process
Research – Understanding our users and problems
01
Talking to our affiliates
After getting approval from the design and affiliate team, I started with understanding how their webpages perform, understanding their business’ pain points and expectations, and what they can or cannot do when it comes to development.
02
User research
After talking to our affiliate, I realized that they focus a lot on content creation but neglect the user experience.
In order to get an understanding of visitors’ intentions and behaviors on the affiliate webpage, I decided to conduct user interviews with our UX researcher. Respondents were required to navigate through links and verbalize their thoughts as they move through the user interface (Think-Aloud).
We interviewed 6 non-ExpressVPN customers who are aware of VPNs, that they can name at least 1 use case for VPNs.
INSIGHT 1
INSIGHT 2
03
Heuristic Evaluation
To further identify usability problems, I gathered a couple UX designers and hosted an evaluation session. We particularly focused on CRO heuristics as our main goal is to improve the conversion rate. This helped to create hypotheses as well.
Design – Optimizing the current interface
Based on our findings, I narrowed down the focus into the following 2 areas for potential improvements that can increase conversion rate.
01
Improve information hierarchy
An effective information hierarchy guides our eyes to the most important elements on the page. It can help readers to locate information quickly and effectively.
02
Increase trust
As a reader, relying on expert opinion is an effective decision-making shortcut. According to the Authority Principle, users attribute more importance and trust to the opinion of an authority figure. Hence, increasing trust can help readers make decisions more effectively.
Test – Validating the designs
After creating the mockups, I conducted quick user preference tests on the recommended designs to try to gauge and predict how the designs might perform in the wild. Although these tests might not be able to replicate the condition precisely, they could act as supporting data to give stakeholders a quick idea on what users might think and find useful when making their buying decision.
Challenges and Compromises
One of the main challenges is the lack of transparency and control over their website. With this challenge, I have to make sure all design optimization should only require minimal development while creating a positive impact to the conversion rate so the affiliate is willing to implement the design changes.
For example, in one version, I wanted to use a table to list out key information of different VPN options for easy comparison. Instead of requiring their development team to create a table, I suggested using an image, which can have the same function.
Another challenge was to give a persuasive presentation that all stakeholders are convinced that the proposed design is worth implementing. Prior to the presentation, I conducted user testing to validate the design recommendation and quoted some UX psychology/marketing research as supporting evidence.
Key Result and Next Steps
The optimized design has been implemented by the affiliate and recorded a 8.59% uplift in conversion rate one month after the implementation. This project has also strengthened our relationship with the affiliate and proven that optimizing affiliates’ web pages can have a direct positive impact on our business.
We also had a deeper insight on our potential customers, knowing that their intentions are when they start searching for the product, which would later help inform further parts of our website design as we constantly strive to improve our user experience.