Summary of Jam Session:
In this session we did 5 critiques. Hemapriya Natesan – Baby Food/Recipes. Rafel Mayol – Beauty. Hilawe – Sports/Educational. Josh Willis – Coffee/Herbals. Brad Owen – Anime/Movies Apparel. Additional topics covered: Distraction, Scarcity Timers, Descriptions and Increasing Prices.
Critiques:
Critique 1
0:15:00 – Critique number 1 is for Hemapriya Natesan’s store, www.mylittlemoppet.com. This is a blog that drives traffic to articles and recipes for babies. Hemapriya then sells baby food to this traffic.
Tanner speaks about distraction. Conversions will always be lower than you want if you distract them with other advertisements that will take them elsewhere. Ensure everything is relevant to what you are showing your customers. Also splitting up copy on the page by colored boxes to separate all the text will improve readability.
Critique 2
0:25:25 – Critique number 2 is for Rafel Mayol store, http://wiohair.com/. This is a beauty store that specializes in hair treatments. Rafel needed advice on how can improve his CR. Currently sending traffic from landing page to a product page, Tanner share his thoughts on this.
The team discusses how important it is so to keep the color scheme from the lander to your site the same, you want to make it a similar transition from page to page and be as congruent as possible. Also being weary of false bottoms on your site and walls of text being center aligned, descriptions should always read from left to right. A recurring issue with this site was the icons and images with text are too small and almost impossible to read on mobile.
The product page shared the same issues as the lander. Images and key icons were near impossible to read on mobile.
Critique 3
1:03:26 – Critique number 3 is for Hilawe’s store, shop.tenniselbow.com. This store caters for people who suffer from tennis elbow. The store provides digital educational products as well as braces and other exercise products.
Homepage: There was no value proposition in the banner, it was taking up majority of the space above the fold but was not clickable or provided any information. Also, only put links in the navigation that make you money, do not give them a link that takes them off the site to blogs or socials.
Product page: Product Image sizes were much too big, pushing everything too far down the page. Looking at the description it went from the left, all the way to right hand side of the page. This is a readability issue, it needs to be broken up and not run so wide.
Cart: Scarcity timers are contextual with every site. They will work much better on some then others so they should always be tested, never just throw it up. If you do have scarcity timers, ensure you are letting them know what will happen when the timer runs out, will your cart expire? Also ensure you have given them enough time to fill out the forms. 2 minutes is not long enough!
Digital Product: This part of the critique was focused on the long form copy. In depth tips on how you can improve readability. It covers font size, colors, headers, images, layout and more!
Critique 4
1:43:25 – Critique number 4 is for Josh Willis’s store, http://www.arbucklecoffee.com/. This store sells coffee, tea and herbals, as well as some collectibles. Start the call off with price elasticity, Josh has been under pressure to raise his prices but fears he will lose customers. Tanner gives some great advice on how can he combat this.
Homepage: Do not address business problems as customer problem. Such as free shipping from particular States only, customers then have to think are going to get free shipping or not, this causes friction. Also the top bar is a great place to list Free Shipping, or another objection a lot of customers may have
Product Page: Unnecessary contact apps, there were two apps that allowed customers to contact the store on the product page alone. The product description needed cleaning up, odd spacing etc. We then discussed testing adding ‘Our Story’ as a product tab, since this store has such a great story and could benefit the customers experience.
Critique 5
2:33:30 – Critique number 5 is for Brad Owen‘s store, http://forbiddengeek.com/. This store sells a broad range of apparel, from anime to movies and music. Brad asked for a general critique as he as just installed BGS theme and has been implementing tips and tricks from different Jam Sessions.
Homepage: No value proposition in the banner, it’s better not use one if you aren’t going to present it properly as it takes up a lot of prime real estate on your site. We also talked about how you can improve testimonials so they don’t take up as much space.
Product Page: Using payment icons at the wrong time under the ATC button. Customers don’t care about what payments you accept when they haven’t shown any interest in purchasing yet.
Checkout: Removing Express Checkout Payments from the first page of checkout and putting them on the payment page only.
Noteworthy Topics:
0:11:00 – Distraction – Tanner touches on the impact of distracting your customers.
1:23:00 – Scarcity Timers – These are contextual with each site and should be tested. Make sure you are giving them enough time on the timer and clearly describe what happens when the timer runs out.
1:25:00 – Descriptions – Team runs through long copy description and critiques spacing, headers and font size/colors.
1:43:25 – Increasing Price – How you can increase your price without upsetting customers.