Simplify, simplify, and simplify some more
Sometimes a fancy tool is the opposite of what you need to increase your CVR.
Have you ever heard of the term ‘via negativa’?
It’s a concept coined by Nassim Taleb that means improving something by removing elements, not adding.
A good metaphor is getting healthy. Many people buy some greens drink, start baking salmon for lunch, and get a personal trainer. In reality, they could keep things much simpler and probably have better results if they stopped eating ice cream, drinking soda smoking cigarettes, you get the point.
You’re probably doing the same thing when it comes to improving your website.
I’m guilty of this too. My first instinct when trying to improve our conversion rate(CVR) is often to do more. Add an announcement bar, insert a new section of content, or install some hip new app that’s going to add some scarcity and motivate people to buy.
In today’s post I want to show you an example of how you can get better results by doing less.
Enter the Cosi site
I recently did a video audit for Cosi, a restaurant with famous bread that everybody who tries it loves. When COVID hit, they had a great idea to start selling their dough so their customers could bake it themselves. The recipe for the dough is a secret, but how to make it is simple.
Things have changed, but if you went to Cosi’s site and hit their primary CTA “Shop Now” you would see this:
They have 12 product offerings (for those that may not see the images):
Bake at Home Multigrain flatbread
Bake at Home Original flatbread
Deluxe Multigrain box
Deluxe Original Box
Multigrain Baking Box
Original Baking Box
Variety Baking Box
Pastry Oil Brush
Xando Coffee (Coming Soon)
Gift Card
Olive Oil Pouches
Kosher Salt
Imagine you wanted their bake-at-home bread. Which box do you choose? Not only do you have to sift through the random products like the oil brush, oils, etc, but you have to decide between 7 different boxes!
It took me 10 minutes to even figure out what the differences were between the boxes. I’ll break it down for you.
The “bake at home flatbread” is available in both flavors, and includes dough for 3 loaves..
The “Baking Box” is available in both flavors and includes dough for 3 loaves, olive oil and the salt.
The “Deluxe box” is available in both flavors and includes dough for 3 loaves, olive oil, the brush, and salt.
The “Variety Box” includes dough for 6 loaves, 3 in each flavor, and the olive oil, and the salt…. but no brush.
Now think, how can we simplify this?
1) Remove products that don’t need to be there
First, we’ll remove the salt, olive oil, gift card, and brush from the collection page. These are just getting in the way. Now the page looks like this:
2) Shrink product offerings using variants
Each box (aside from the variety box) has a separate product for original and multigrain. We’ll make these each one product with an option on the PDP to choose between multigrain or original.
Now the page looks like this:
This is much simpler, but the product offerings are still confusing. Let’s rethink these product bundles quickly.
3) Rethink your product bundles
There’s something off with these product offerings. The bake at home box is the same thing as the deluxe box except for one thing: the pastry brush.
This is where you have to start asking yourself some questions:
Do we need to sell the pastry brush at all?
Should we include the pastry brush with all boxes?
Can we offer the pastry brush to all customers after they choose a box?
This last one seems like the best path forward. By removing the pastry brush from the box, we’re able to combine the ‘deluxe’ box and the ‘standard’ box.
Now the products people see on the collection page are:
The “bake at home flatbread” that only includes the dough for 3 loaves.. ($24.99)
The “Baking Box” that includes dough for 3 loaves, olive oil and the salt. ($29.99)
The “Variety Box” includes dough for 6 loaves, 3 in each flavor, and the olive oil, and the salt. ($45.00)
With those changes, this is our new collection page:
How much easier is it to decide which box is right for you? It’s also so much easier to see the value in buying the more expensive box.
“Oh, I basically get 2 bake-at-home boxes for $45 instead of $60. I’ll go with that one!”
Wrapping This Up and Adding Complexity
So, we’ve seen how simplifying your product offerings can reduce friction and make it much easier for your customers to choose what they want. Doing this is almost guaranteed to boost your conversions.
But… I know some of you are like “what about the brush!?!?” I know, this is a post about simplifying, but I’ll cheat since it’s my first post. I recommended that they add the brush as an in-cart up-sell for all of the product offerings. By simplifying the product offerings and doing this, now every customer has an opportunity to buy the brush.
Not to mention, it is a Cosi-branded brush for only $5. Why wouldn’t you add that to your cart when you’re checking out. If they wanted to get crazy they could sell a 3-pack of brushes for $15 and offer free shipping to anyone who buys it.
As you can imagine, there’s so much you can do to get more out of your current website traffic. But instead of adding things at the beginning, first look to simplify.
Alright, that’s it for issue #1 folks. Hope you enjoyed. As always, if you learned anything I’d love if you shared it with someone who might get some value out of it.
This post is unofficially brought to you by Civitas. Civitas is latin for community – and that’s the essence of what Matt Lady is trying to build by creating graphic tee’s for the DTC community. I recently picked up the ‘just keep scaling’ shirt and it’s SUPER comfortable. Go get yourself a shirt!
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