The 101 To Heat Maps for Your Fashion Business

How intimately do you know the activity of users who come to your site? Do you know how much time they spend on your site? Do you know which pages they visit last before they drop-off? What does it all mean and how can that information benefit you? Collecting / analyzing key customer data can help you shape your site experience and increase your sales.

For example, I am now capturing an average of 60 emails per month after running some test and changing call to actions on my website. A huge increase considering I barely captured ten emails per month prior this redesign. How was I able to increase my opt-ins? By simply using data I gathered from Heat Maps and my Google Analytics report.

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Data analytics should be your BFF as it can help increase your opt-ins and sales.

Here is how you can get started:

1) Install a Heat Map : A heat map allows you to visualize your website visitors activity. It will analyze which area of your site are getting clicked on. It will inform you of overall customers journey and drop-off areas. You can benchmark customer time on product views, additions to the cart, shopping cart abandons, conversions on cross-sells, up-sells and down-sells and more. To get started, you can install any of the following softwares: CrazyEgg, AppSumo, Inspectlet, etc.

2) Analyze key pages: You must analyze behaviors of each key page on your website.

– Homepage: The goal of your homepage is to entice your audience to shop. Your homepage must also communicate the overall tone of your brand. You should have clear call to actions and feature your top products.  When setting-up a heat map on this page, you will get a better understanding as to where you users are clicking. Test if your copy is clear or engaging enough by reviewing where website visitors are clicking. Are users clicking on your call to actions? Is your website navigation clear? Are buttons legible? How much time are your users spending above the fold? Are they scrolling down?

– Shop Main Page: Ideally, you would like your customers to spend anywhere from 4 minutes to a few hours on your e-commerce site. On average, most users spend two hours on their favorite e-commerce site. Which products are users clicking on? Are they scrolling down to view more? Your google analytics report will give you some information as to how much time users are spending on specific pages. The heat map will show which areas of your Shop Main Page have the most visibility. You can use this information to re-organize your best selling products.

– Individual Product Page: Once a user lands on the individual product page, he/she is ready to purchase. In this page, pay close attention to where your users are clicking. You might want to decide to change the location of your buy button for instance. Overall, remember that customers want beautiful, organized shopping environments. Therefore, focus on having detailed product information with enticing photography and pricing.

– Check-out Page: Cart abandonment in the check-out page is frequent. The average abandonment cart rate is between 75% to 85%. However, they are solutions to reduce your abandonment rate and increase your conversions. A heat map will help distinguish what these solutions should be. Perhaps, they are too many fields, too many steps? Not enough information about shipping costs? Ideally, you should only have two steps in your check-out funnel: shipping / payment method page followed by a confirm order page.

3) Review data:
After one week, review your heat map data to understand where the drop-offs are taking place. Look to optimize your navigation, your photography, visuals, call to actions, buttons, and overall user experience. Specify main purpose of each page on your site and ensure goals are met by reviewing data. If they are not, you will need to redesign specifics parts of your site accordingly.

4) A / B test your design
I highly recommend you re-design two different options of whichever page want to optimize. Evenly split your traffic and test which designs are performing better. There are various A/B testing tools you can integrate within your e-commerce store. Try out: Optimizely.

Conclusion:
Optimize your site before you invest more time and money acquiring new customers and bringing new traffic to your site. A heat map will help identify popular click paths and understand overall customer journey. It will allow you to re-organize your e-commerce site accordingly. You will know where visitors are navigating away from and make necessary adjustments to reduce cart abandonment.
Use data to inform your decisions and do not solely rely on your gut instincts. Evaluate which areas need work and focus on fixing them one by one.

Interested in diving deeper into the exciting world of big data? I encourage you to listen to The Global Influencer Podcast with Cortex Commerce. We discuss tips in how to build actionable updates to your e-commerce site based on the influx of analytics information.