Meeting customers’ expectations, from the moment they land on your website to when they place an order and receive it, has long been a crucial part of a successful digital marketing strategy. Since both digital¹ and mobile commerce² have been on the rise, it’s even more critical to ensure that every interaction your customer has with your brand is seamless.
For two direct-to-consumer brands—the nutritious, keto-friendly cereal company Magic Spoon and the wild-caught, sustainable seafood membership service Wild Alaskan—removing website friction required continual testing and experimenting, and close cross-functional collaboration.
“For us, the whole customer journey matters,” says Jae Noh, acquisition marketing manager at Magic Spoon. “It’s very important for every potential customer to have all the information they need about our product throughout their entire journey.”
By implementing the strategies described below and partnering with the customer growth consulting team at Meta, Magic Spoon saw a 25.2% decrease in year-over-year (YoY) bounce rate from Facebook ad traffic, and Wild Alaskan increased its YoY conversion rate by 30% while decreasing cost per conversion (CPC) by 30%.³
1. Maintain consistency between ads and landing pages
After tapping on an ad, customers expect to see the next logical step. Magic Spoon increased conversions by ensuring visual and product detail consistency between ads and the website. For example, Magic Spoon linked flavor-specific products in carousel ads to the corresponding page for that flavor, driving high intent-to-purchase audiences to detailed product pages.
2. Frequently monitor customer insights and community engagement
Magic Spoon closely reviewed the comments and direct messages on its social media accounts, and also conducted regular customer surveys to uncover and fix user-interface issues quickly. Through this strategy, the team learned about live promotional code errors, an issue that its own pre-launch tests didn’t catch.
As for Wild Alaskan, its member experience team learned that customers wanted to see more information about plans and pricing options within the signup flow before sharing their email addresses. Wild Alaskan ended up reordering its funnel to surface information that answers customers’ top-of-mind questions before asking them to provide their email addresses. They found that this approach brought in higher quality leads and increased conversion rates.
To further support the reordered flow, Wild Alaskan paired exclusive content with additional opportunities to capture email addresses from other areas of their website, such as recipe pages.
3. Conduct A/B testing to understand what resonates with your audience
User experience elements—such as the text on a call-to-action button or the layout of product information on a product details page—can have a major impact. By embracing regular A/B testing, Magic Spoon and Wild Alaskan determined which changes resulted in improvements to crucial business metrics.
Incorporating testing practices into the business takes time; Arron Kallenberg, founder and CEO, explains Wild Alaskan’s approach: “Businesses, especially smaller ones, don’t always have the luxury of developing a costly testing framework. The good news is that, in the early days, there’s typically a ton of low-hanging fruit. You simply need to get into the habit of regularly improving your flow. Make one or two small, manageable bets, every single week and you’ll eventually cultivate the resources and performance baselines to begin layering in an increasingly robust testing framework.”
4. Invest in cross-team communication and collaboration
When Magic Spoon strengthened communications between internal teams, the company found that it could identify points of friction across its site much faster. For example, by ensuring constant communication between paid social media teams and social media users, Magic Spoon was able to find out quickly when a checkout page wasn’t working, a coupon wasn’t loading or another issue was getting in the way of a customer having a seamless website experience.
Similarly, Wild Alaskan created a cross-functional task force to identify and solve areas of friction on its website. Product, engineering, member experience, performance marketing, lifecycle and creative teams initially met daily to discuss performance data and product site improvements. They now meet on a weekly basis.
5. Assess and design for site speed
Make sure your website loads in 3 seconds or less because that’s how long 40% of e-commerce customers wait for a site to load before leaving it.⁴ Wild Alaskan audited its site for performance and found room for speed improvement. This prompted the team to better optimize image sizes based on device, implement lazy load images on scroll activity and remove unused code blocks with consistent third-party tag/site snippet reviews, ensuring that only necessary ones remained.
According to Carlos Cabrera, Wild Alaskan's executive VP, “The regular site speed evaluations and subsequent improvements have led to some of the best gains we’ve made on conversion.”
By anticipating, meeting and even surpassing customers’ expectations, other brands can succeed in guiding customers to conversion and improving key business metrics along the way.
Sources:
¹ “U.S. ecommerce sales rise 9.3% in Q2 2021,” Digital Commerce 360, August 2021.
² “Mobile retail commerce sales as a percentage of retail e-commerce sales worldwide from 2016-2021,” Statista, Nov 2020.
³ Advertiser-reported outcomes; Magic Spoon Q1-Q3 2021 versus Q1-Q3 2020; Wild Alaskan YoY decrease in CPC July-August 2021 versus March-June 2021; Wild Alaskan YoY conversion rate increase June–August 2020 versus Jun–August 2021.
⁴ “A Beginner’s Guide to Website Speed Optimization,” Kinsta, May 2021.