In today’s world, digital is everything. You talk to your friends and family online, you learn online, and you even do a lot of your shopping online.
But there’s just one problem with an online-first society: trust.
Especially as an ecommerce business, it’s more difficult to build a trustworthy, credible relationship with customers compared to the traditional brick-and-mortar shopping experience. One of the best things you can do to bridge this gap is to have a high-quality website design and user experience.
Essentially, just because your products are offered in retail locations doesn’t mean customers aren’t looking you up online. When they do, they should feel like there’s a clear connection between the product they’re looking at in the store and what they’re seeing online.
This is exactly why Jimmy Zona, the head of digital marketing and ecommerce at Turbie Twist, decided to take on the challenge of updating the Turbie Twist website with an elevated user experience (UX) and user interface (UI).
There were so many things that needed fixing and so many pain points, and the user flow wasn't really easy to get around the site to discover more of our products…
I think every brand today could benefit from a really well-thought-out, well-designed website.
— Jimmy Zona, Head of Digital Marketing and Ecommerce at Turbie Twist
As a retail-first brand, Jimmy’s role has been to bring the company into the direct-to-consumer world. So far, the results have been great:
- A 112% increase in overall conversion rate compared to pre-launch
- A 122% increase in the add-to-cart rate
- A 70% increase in Shopify speed score
Let’s look at how Turbie Twist and Fuel Made partnered together to achieve these results, why strong UX/UI design was vital in their success, and how you can apply these best practices to your brand.
P.s. If you're looking for an agency to help you elevate your UX design, chat with our team here to see how we can help!
How to get started with improving your web design
Here’s a statistic to remember: 94% of first impressions from customers are related to your site’s web design. Additionally, everyone is shopping from their phones these days, and Google research shows that 73% of consumers will switch from a poorly designed mobile site to one that makes purchasing easier.
Considering Turbie Twist’s mobile conversion rate increased 82% after improving the UI/UX, we’d say this stat is definitely true. (Not to mention, the website also saw a 200% increase in its desktop conversion rate.)
In Jimmy’s opinion, brands should focus on improving two experiences with a new web design:
- Make sure the site looks great and works great on mobile devices.
- Make sure the purchasing process is simple enough that customers can find and buy what they need in just a few clicks.
Before making any changes to your existing website design, start with bridging data with your goals.
Diving into data
Before diving into any new project, the Fuel Made team surveys each client about their pain points, inspirations, and goals for redesigning their website.
From there, our strategist marries the information from the client on their project goals (from the survey) with quantitative information on how users interact with the existing site (website data and heatmaps, for example) to create a high-level roadmap for where the biggest opportunities for optimization are.
For example, in the case of Turbie Twist, the heatmap data showed that there were a lot of dead clicks on the top corners of the screen on their mobile site, so we recommended updating the mobile menu placement to a more intuitive place.
After going through all of the data, we identified these main areas of opportunity:
- Update the navigation to follow a UI pattern that customers expect—one that allows them to quickly see the scope of the product offerings.
- Elevate the UI to compete with new-coming competitors in the space while maintaining the fun and friendly aesthetic of Turbie Twist that customers already love.
- Communicate the brand story better across various landing pages.
- Educate customers about the different product offerings and benefits of each.
- Create more branded content sections with lifestyle interstitials to act as entry points into the conversion funnel.
“It's really all about those little details that create a good experience for the customer. And we've seen our conversion rate skyrocket since implementing that. When you go to a website, you want to trust it; you want it to feel like this is our brand, this is Turbie Twist.”
- Jimmy Zona
The importance of a good web design—even for retail-first brands
Remember, even if you have a heavier retail presence compared to your ecommerce one, that doesn’t mean you should forgo optimizing your ecommerce experience. Again, customers may look you up online to learn more.
“Even when people are shopping, say at Walmart or Target, a lot of the time they’ll pull out their phone to price check or see more options,” explained Jimmy. “You need to have this seamless experience for the consumer, so everything jives with itself. And that just really creates customer confidence.”
The goal? Mesh the brand awareness from the brick-and-mortar experience with the improved UX/UI website design to maintain the spirit of Turbie Twist.
Having this consistency between all of your selling channels helps establish trust, which we’ll get into next.
Key tips for building trust on your website
You don’t want customers visiting a website where it’s more difficult to shop than it would be for them to visit an in-person store.
AKA, the experience of shopping online needs to be just as easy and seamless.
…Talk about a quick way to lose potential customers.
So what can we learn from Jimmy’s experience to build more trust between a brand and its consumers on a website? Here’s some advice:
1. Make sure your website is designed well, with all functions working seamlessly
“if the site has glaring issues… For example, if a customer lands on a 404 page or modals aren’t working, it makes them feel like maybe the product also isn’t going to live up to my expectations,” explained Jimmy.
His advice is to invest in your website, especially if you’re building out your digital experiences and driving traffic toward your ecommerce site.
Key takeaway: Essentially, just because you’re selling products in retail stores doesn’t mean your website isn’t important.
2. Prioritize product education—without compromising attention spans
Turbie Twist has been around since the nineties. With a name so well-known, a lot of customers associated it with the first product ever released, not realizing how many new products and variations of the original product are now available.
For example, many customers were purchasing the microfiber towel and expecting cotton, while other customers were purchasing cotton and expecting microfiber. Jimmy quickly realized that the site needed to do a better job of educating customers about the different products and their unique qualities.
“There's nowhere you can go to feel it and see which one you want. We had to find a way to get people to the right place, and that was through product education. We added little modules of ‘here's what the microfiber one does’ and ‘here's what the cotton one does,’ so they can make an educated choice,” said Jimmy.
When educating customers, it’s important to do it in a quick and concise way. Remember, attention spans are short and people’s patience online tends to be thin. Here’s what you should do when educating customers about your products:
- Understand the hierarchy of information that’s most important. No matter what, a lot of shoppers won’t make it to the end of a description, which is why you should present the most important information first.
- Break the information down into snippets to make it digestible; don’t cluster all of it together in one section. If you have a lot of product information, that’s not a bad thing. But, if it’s difficult to read because it looks long and complicated, customers aren’t going to read it.
- Build comparison models if you need to educate between two similar products that have small differences. When you have various products that look similar, it’s easy for customers to get mixed up and purchase the wrong thing. Comparison models can help detail those differences easily.
Since making these improvements, Turbie Twist’s product page conversion rate is up 66%!
Key takeaway: Help customers find what they need, give them all the information necessary to build confidence about purchasing your products, and make the experience from discovery to conversion a simple and straightforward path.
Now that you’ve read Jimmy’s story and about his experience with redesigning the Turbie Twist website, what are the key takeaways you should know? Jimmy shares three, next.
Jimmy’s critical advice before redesigning your website
Now that he’s gone through the experience himself, Jimmy has this advice for other marketers who are thinking about redesigning their ecommerce website:
- Be collaborative with a service partner that you trust. The best websites are done in partnership between marketers at the brand and the service partner.
- Understand the full scope of what you want and need. Know where your gaps are, what your customers need, and what your data is telling you. Make sure to communicate this well with your agency.
- Make sure you know how to work your website on your own. After going through a redesign, it’s really easy to go and “junk up your website” afterward with app installs and new designs. Have a good handle on your site before and after.
“Understand the full scope. When we started, we were thinking, ‘why are people on this site?’ and ‘what are they gonna be interested in?’ Have an idea of that because you really have to be able to give something for a company to go on. You can't just say, ‘I want a new website, do it for me.’”
- Jimmy Zona
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