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Seton Aces Its Website Optimization

Client: Seton
Agency: Maxymiser
Objective:
Develop a testing road map that aligns with B2B buying cycles to enhance customer experience and boost sales

The Backstory: What are the options for a company like Brady Corporation and its subsidiary Seton—both of which traditionally market via catalogs—when it seems like everyone in the world is interacting across multiple online channels? The answer is simple: Optimize your website in a way that treats your B2B customers like the B2C consumers they are.

“The vast majority of our sales are driven offline through the catalog channel by phone or fax, but e-commerce is just starting to really take off for us and it’s the key to our current strategy,” says Craig Madden, senior manager of user experience at Brady Corporation.

“We’re moving from an old-school catalog company to become, we hope, a digital powerhouse; we want that multichannel combination.”

Seton, which primarily produces workplace safety signage and labels, is just one of more than 50 subsidiary domains run by Brady across the globe. With that much going on under Brady’s purview, it’s essential to be able to test and optimize quickly without having to go through multiple—as well as potentially time-consuming and costly—website redesigns.

Whether running one domain or 50, the spotlight needs to be on customer experience. And that’s exactly what Madden aims to keep as his main focus. “[Our websites are] transactional commerce sites, and we want people to have a full, engaging experience when they arrive,” he says. “There should be value in every visit, whether they’re prepared to make a purchase or they’re just looking for information; we want to solve that need or answer that question.”

Brady still mails a roughly 1,000-page catalog to its customers each year, but it’s been rapidly diversifying its spend into digital areas like SEM, SEO, pay-per-click, and more robust Web analytics.

The Solution: To ensure a positive customer experience, Brady turned to multivariate testing platform Maxymiser to support its analysis and emerging website optimization strategy across the breadth of its online presence. It’s seen particular success with Seton.

“Looking at the original [seton.com], it was incredibly busy and there was a lot of visual noise,” Madden says. “The question was, ‘How do we simplify the process for our customers to actually get to the product without having to go through cumbersome navigation?’”

Before tackling the overall optimization project, Madden observed and recorded browser sessions and tracked mouse move heat maps on seton.com using ClickTale analytics to identify key areas that needed a refresh. After conducting research on current visitor habits, Madden and his team used Maxymiser—with one-touch integration and minimal IT involvement—to design a multivariate test to evaluate how to pare down the website for the best possible conversion rate.

Currently, categories like “Labels & Decals,” “Safety & Security,” and “Custom Products” are displayed with a minimum amount of text and a clear call-to-action—but that wasn’t always the case. Previously, in an effort to give visitors as many options as possible, seton.com was plagued with a messy layout that ultimately served more as a distraction than a democratic way to display a diversity of product data. Basically, there was just too much choice.

Seton has thousands of products and more than one million customers worldwide, which means there’s a lot of potential information it could be featuring on its homepage. That’s why it needed Maxymiser to multivariate test a variety of experiences—a clean layout versus a cluttered one; product category boxes with and without explanatory copy; and buttons with and without multiple sublinks—to discover which worked best for its audience.

For example, seemingly helpful links to subcategories were actually confusing, leading some visitors to believe that what was listed on the homage was all Seton had to offer, rather than just the tip of its product iceberg.

“We learned we had to quiet down the page a little and not assume we knew exactly what customers are looking for,” Madden says. “When we tried to put links there, the assumption was that we were helping people get somewhere with less clicks, but if the subcategory they were looking for wasn’t one of those three or four links, a lot of people would think that we didn’t have what they wanted.”

The Results: Using the data gleaned from its Maxymiser tests, Madden and company moved the category name and logo to the center of the product category boxes on the seton.com homepage and removed the subcategory copy altogether. It also upgraded to a more prominently placed, forcefully phrased “View All” call-to-action button.

“People just don’t engage with anything that looks like a banner or an ad; they’re going straight for the product and the content,” Madden says. “I expected improvement, but what we saw was off the charts.”

The winning variant of the new homepage generated a 71.13% increase in clicks and an 8.7% increase in purchases in just 35 days. The bounce rate on the homepage went down by 15%.

The Takeaway: B2B websites that understand the consumer mentality—and continually iterate to serve it—will see the greatest success, says Mark Simpson, president and founder of Maxymiser.

“If a company is selling something online, whether it’s a business or a B2C company, they’re also an e-commerce company, and they need to be aligned with best practices,” Simpson says. “Companies now are just as demanding as people are.”

 

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