Traffic increase traced to AmericanGreetings.com’s site redesign
In mid-2006 AmericanGreetings.com identified a fundamental shortcoming on its web site: visitors and subscribers had to wade through too many pages and too many steps to view online greeting cards. Customer satisfaction surveys and web analytics drove home the point. In particular, shoppers wanted to see multiple card options at one time, rather than having to watch each card from start to finish.
“Our primary goal was to help shoppers find cards faster,” says Sally Babcock, senior vice president of AG Interactive, which operates AmericanGreetings.com for American Greetings Corp., No. 150 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. “A secondary goal was to incorporate new technology to help customers find things and avoid so many page views -- to get to cards faster and send more. Technology was a big piece of the project and we hadn’t done any major technology overhauls in five years.”
At about the same time, AmericanGreetings.com needed to adopt corporate brand and style guidelines set down by the parent organization. The guidelines included a new color palate, text fonts and logo.
One navigation hindrance was a three-page sign-in process. “We looked at what technology could solve the problem and decided on an Ajax-based tool that provided sign-in on each page,” Babcock says. Ajax, short for asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications.
Those factors, combined with dated web technology, triggered a site redesign project that began in September 2006 and culminated in a May 2007 relaunch.
Results show that the new site is doing its job. Traffic is up about 20% and that meshes well with the 30% decline in shoppers abandoning the site before making a purchase, Babcock says. Shoppers are finding what they want faster, too: search time is down 5% to 6%. Subscriptions are up about 10% since the redesign, she adds.
Babcock will be speaking at the Internet Retailer Web Design ’08 Conference, Jan. 30-Feb. 1 in Miami, in a session titled How to keep a design fresh.
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