Maximize ROI: Conversion Funnel Design & A/B Testing

One thing I learned this holiday season is that order tracking is an absolute must. It seems pretty common on most web sites these days, but one of my friend’s websites doesn’t have it. You know, it is that little web form you out your order number into and it shows whether it has been shipped or not. Maybe it was the additional UPS or FedEx charges (if there are any) that made them not set up the order tracking portion of their ecommerce platform. I am not sure of the reasons why they didn’t set it up, but it was a mistake.

I am not going to link to this site, as I don’t want to call them out on a negative issue. So here is the situation... this new website was created about 6 months (May 05) to sell a lot of merchandise during this Christmas. So we ramped up the site... optimized the PPC, doubled the natural search engine traffic from improved rankings and customized the shopping cart experience for a high conversion rate. So it performed very well the last 4 weeks during the online holiday season. I know, I received all the emails of all the orders that went through. Each day 5, 10, 20 web orders. The new site was doing very well and they were very happy.

Now it is the week of xmas and all the confirmation emails have changed to "Where is my order" emails. The orders are "probably" already shipped and on their way, but the customer doest know that. So now all the nervous customers are worried they are not going to have their gifts they purchased for xmas in 5 days. Each email that comes through is pretty much the same.…

"I ordered my merchandise 7 days ago and I am wondering if it will make it to me in time for Christmas. Please let me know or call me if there are any problems. Is there a way to track my order? Please send me a tracking code? I know I purchased it, my credit card was charged!"

They are getting these emails and call because there is no order tracking on their website. Even if the orders do arrive on time, they have automatically created a negative mind set for the customer. More than likely this customer is not going to return and purchase again. With all purchases I tend to ensure there is order tracking on a website before I make a purchase, even though I rarely track my order unless there is a problem.

In the end... they found that you can't spend all of your time upfront on the conversion rate and web marketing. In order to build your online business for the long term, you need to win over customers better. This will then result in the most important metric: life time value ( LTV ). Order tracking is one piece of the puzzle to improve the LTV of your website customers. Get order tracking, it’s worth the ROI.