How Online Optimization Has Become a Must-Have for Online Retailers

By Kim Ann King

Chances are you're spending a lot of time, money and effort driving traffic to your online store. More and more, online retailers are realizing that the way to stand out from the crowd, and increase the return on investment of their reach and acquisition initiatives, is to optimize their site so that they're giving visitors exactly the experience they're looking for.

Increasingly, online optimization is becoming a must have for retailers in order for them to discover the following:

the content their visitors prefer;
which offers, discounts and incentives work best;
how different audience segments behave online;
what kind of content and functionality consumers prefer on their mobile devices;
how to make their site work better, not just look better; and
how speeding up page load times improves online conversions.

Personalize the Online Experience
For example, personalization is a key ingredient in successful online marketing. By optimizing their site, online retailers can do the following:

target and personalize an experience based on a visitor's actions;
use the recency, frequency and monetary value of customers to target them with customized offers;
personalize the experience based on the referring URL;
personalize the experience based on the day of the week, time of day or date ranges;
personalize a page or site based on location (as broad as country or as granular as U.S. ZIP codes), as well as preferred language;
personalize for a wide array of device types;
use data to define criteria for personalization and targeting opportunities;
personalize experiences based on browser type; and
personalize the experience for new vs. returning visitors.

Optimize Mobile Channels
Online optimization extends to the mobile web and mobile apps, as consumers are increasingly shopping in these channels. In fact, mobile is the future of how people will discover your site, interact with your brand and purchase your products. As a result, it's important to test and optimize your mobile channels so visitors get the best experience possible.

Optimize Functionality
Certain online optimization approaches enable retailers to quantify the impact of every back-end application change for every individual user. For example:

New feature releases: Soft launch new features on a subset of users and learn how they respond in real time.
Feature segmentation: Present different features to different audiences based on customer value, device, geography, new vs. existing customers, etc., to optimize key performance indicators.
Search algorithm optimization: Make head-to-head comparisons of the effectiveness of different versions of your search algorithms.
Pricing experiments: Test your "free shipping" threshold or offer different price promotions to distinct sets of targeted users.
Complete site redesigns: Enable the testing of radical changes to your site experience targeted to specific users.
Checkout flow and functionality: Optimize your checkout flow through experimentation — e.g., if you want to test making your five-step checkout process only three steps for logged-in users.

Speed it Up
In addition, online retailers can use optimization to accelerate the delivery and rendering of both web and mobile content, translating into big improvements across a range of business metrics such as bounce rate, conversion rate and revenue.

Finding the Right Tool for the Job
This will save your organization time and money. Look for a tool that will allow you to create, deploy, manage and analyze tests without changing any HTML or programming code that drives your website. This approach eliminates the need for ongoing IT involvement before, during and after running tests, allowing you to focus on achieving website optimization and greater business goals as opposed to spending time overcoming technical hurdles.

Kim Ann King is the chief marketing officer of web and mobile optimization firm SiteSpect.