How a simple design element boosts online sales by 100%

What retailers learn about customers offline can dramatically impact online sales, as Sears Optical found when working on a CRM initiative with technology and e-business consultants Brulant Inc. By altering its web site home page based on customer feedback gathered in offline focus groups, Sears Optical increased its online sale of contact lenses – the only product sold on the site – by 100-200% within a few weeks.

Guide to E-Commerce Technology

In the focus groups, geared to mine information that could be used to improve customer service, Sears Optical learned that a significant number of Sears Optical’s customer audience, women aged 30-45, preferred to order replacement prescription contact lenses online rather than going back to a store. Sears Optical then looked at its web site with the goal of making online re-ordering easier. “The biggest thing we did was to apply some traditional merchandising principals to the web site,” says Len Pagon, Brulant`s CEO. “We put certain offers in the upper right hand corner of the page so customers would see them first thing, similar to the way that most people turn right on entering a physical store.”

The home page redesign also put some business intelligence behind reorganizing how it presented various features, based on focus group input about what customers would be most interested in seeing when they visited the site “It was all about how to enhance customer service so as to sell more, so it started with how to use CRM to do that,” Pagon says. “There was a dramatic impact just by vectoring in what the highest points of leverage were and using them.”