Little tweaks pay big for Skinner site Jan 1, 2008 12:00 PM
, By Ken Magill
JobZone
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One lesson to be learned from the
different test results on the department pages, Hansen notes, is that a
site operator should never assume that a technique that works on the
home page can simply be rolled out to the rest of the site without
testing.
“And
that's just within one site,” he says. “If you apply that [benchmark]
to another site, your potential margin of difference is even greater.
What works on Skinner Auctions may not work on Sotheby's at all, or
vice versa. The good news is it really wasn't that hard to run these
tests; it didn't cost that much and the results were substantial.”
Adds
Shrives: “We've had a couple of things that have been successful and
totally debunked what we thought was a given. How a customer uses a
site isn't necessarily how the site designer would expect.”
She
says Skinner currently has more than 25,000 subscribers to its e-mail
newsletter. The auctioneer uses e-mail service provider Constant
Contact to send its newsletter.
When
asked about the quality of the e-mail addresses Skinner is getting,
Shrives says the nature of the art-and-antique auction business makes
it difficult to tell.
“If
you're looking for a dining table, once you buy it, you've bought your
table,” she says. “You might be looking for something specific and may
not find it for a long time, so at this point we're happy to increase
the spread of our potential bidders and keep them informed about what
we're doing.”
She
adds that Skinner's customer demographics vary widely. “It's a real
mix,” she says. “There are people who are collectors who are looking to
buy things and keep them for themselves; there are dealers who purchase
for resale; there are institutions that are collecting.”
Skinner executives believe increasing customer engagement in the Website is crucial.
“We're
constantly looking for ways to get people to spend more time on the
site, look at more content, and hopefully to register and to bid,” says
Shrives.
Bigger is better
In
another test, Shrives and SiteSpect found that by increasing the size
of product images, they could significantly increase bidding activity
on the site.
“If you looked at it real carefully, it wasn't any more detailed, it was grainier,” says Hansen. “It was just a bigger image.”
But
by simply increasing product image sizes from 250 pixels to 350 pixels,
Skinner achieved a 429% boost in conversion-to-bid rates, says Hansen.
“Just making the image larger persuaded people to bid much more
frequently,” he adds.
Shrives
adds that the improved performance generated by enlarging images gave
her the idea to increase the size of the thumbnails on the site, as
well. But increasing the thumbnail sizes was an utter failure, says
Shrives. “It seemed to be a logical step, but it was quite the
opposite,” she says. “It caused a decrease in items people looked at.”
Though Shrives' background is in the arts, she is beginning to sound an awful lot like a direct marketer.
“We test, and if the results are statistically significant we do it,” she says. “This has been a very good process for us.”
