Nuance’s E-Commerce Revenues Soar 30% with Fireclick
The Situation
Like many software companies, Nuance Communications does a brisk online business fueled in large part by e-mail, paid search and affiliate campaigns. With well-known imaging and speech recognition products ranging from the OmniPage document conversion program to the Dragon NaturallySpeaking solution for turning speech into computer text, the company is constantly reevaluating its Internet strategy to squeeze maximum revenues from the channel.
Beyond the need to generate Web traffic, Nuance’s major challenge is to maximize the number of shoppers who make the final click at checkout. In recent years, these tasks have been complicated by a significant shrinkage in the company’s e-mail marketing list caused primarily by anti-spam-related list cleansing. This in turn has added the extra burden of needing to produce more sales from fewer prospects.
The Solution
To help the company hit its online sales goals in the U.S., Nuance’s e-commerce team in Massachusetts turned to the Fireclick suite of Web analytics tools from Digital River’s Fireclick subsidiary. The Fireclick analysis immediately revealed two user navigation patterns that proved the Nuance Web site could do a better job of encouraging shoppers to buy.
First, the Fireclick data showed that 75% of Nuance’s home page visitors were looking for product information rather than the corporate news that dominated the page, indicating that the real estate could be used to better advantage. Second, nearly three out of every four shoppers abandoned the shopping cart before checkout, suggesting a weakness in the cart design.
Other Fireclick metrics alerted Nuance to other areas of concern. The site’s main products page was the main destination from the home page, for example, but was also the exit point for nearly 70% of visitors. Microsite product pages created for paid search promotions also had unusually high exit rates. Many of the most commonly sought paid search keywords related to Nuance’s products were not on the company’s bidding list. The 1024 x 768 screen resolution used by the average site visitor didn’t match the resolution for which the site was optimized, making it difficult for many users to see the whole shopping cart page.
These and other metrics provided a clear roadmap for improvement.
“Fireclick’s Web analytics were a real wakeup call,” said Ed McGuiggan, Nuance vice president of global e-commerce. “We could see that we had to make changes, and we knew that those changes would likely have an impact on sales.”
The Results
Armed with Fireclick’s metrics, Nuance began attacking each problem at its source.
To improve site usability, the company redesigned its home page to dedicate two-thirds of the space to product rather than corporate information. Box shots were added to the home page on a rotating basis to highlight whatever product was being promoted by e-mail at any given time. The main product page was expanded from a dropdown product list to a full layout spotlighting featured products with box shots and “Buy Now” buttons. Many pages were modified to ensure full-page display at users’ preferred 1024 x 768 screen resolution.
To improve shopping cart completion, Nuance first removed an unnecessary “Confirm Order” page that accounted for a 25% abandonment rate between the credit card authorization and thank you pages. Then the remaining shopping cart and credit card authorization pages were merged to create a one-page “Quick Buy” checkout, based on an A/B test that showed a 50% increase in basket close ratios when the purchase process was reduced from two pages to one.
To improve paid search results, Nuance used Fireclick’s findings on commonly searched keywords to bid on new terms on products it was already promoting as well as to expand its paid search program to other products frequently sought through search engines.
With these and other changes, Nuance has achieved striking gains in e-commerce revenues despite its shrinking e-mail marketing list. Highlights have included:
- A 30% increase in overall e-commerce revenues over a two-year period.
- A 30% increase in the basket close ratio during that same timeframe.
- A 50% increase in sales generated through paid search ads in the first six months.
The changes prompted by Fireclick’s insights have also yielded major increases in e-mail conversion rates on individual campaigns. The company saw a 20% sales increase for Dragon NaturallySpeaking when a box shot was added to the Nuance home page during an e-mail promotion, for example, and a 58% sales increase for the launch of its ScanSoft PaperPort 11 document organization application in mid-2006 compared to PaperPort 10 a year earlier.
Based on these successes, Nuance is now beginning to apply the strategies used in the U.S. to its nine global websites.
“The biggest advantage in using Fireclick is understanding the traffic flows on our site and optimizing those to generate maximum revenues from our e-mail campaigns, keyword ad purchases and affiliate programs,” McGuiggan said. “Over time, these small adjustments reap big results." |