Without user adoption, all your efforts in web to print are wasted. User adoption requires ease of use, internal evangelism, and establishing goals and tracking them openly.
Remove the # of steps for the buyer
For every field you add to a form in an ecommerce user experience, your conversion drops 20%. The best way to grow adoption of web to print solutions is to decrease the number of steps between the user and the transaction.
If you’ve deployed a private B2B portal for a customer, walk through the workflow from your customer’s perspective. This might require that you go to their site and experience the solution from inside their network. Is there a link to your solution on the company’s intranet where employees are likely to search for printed services?
Once they find you, does your solution require the user to register with you or have you integrated (e.g. LDAP) with their authentication systems? Count the number of steps a user has to take to order from your web to print solution. What steps can you remove?
Incent your frontline employees to convert
After you’ve launched the web to print solution, some customers will continue to submit work through e-mail and FTP. Create a plan for addressing these customers in a manner that sells the value of the web to print solution to them. This requires that your team is evangelists of the technology. If they don’t believe in it, it will never get traction.
Believing in the technology starts with creating a strategy in a collaborative fashion; see recent blog post about the dangers of the “Air Sandwich.” Because web to print is a self-service alternative to manual ordering processes, don’t underestimate the common reaction, “this is going to remove the need for my job,” address this upfront and make sure employees know that embracing the web to print solution is critical to your online strategy and the health of the overall business.
Set goals and track progress openly
Partner with your customer and set goals for user adoption of the new tool. Track the metrics openly with your team and your customer. The saying, “what gets measured gets done,” couldn’t be truer for web to print solutions. If you implement the system and nobody uses it and nobody seems to care – you not only have wasted time and money but you’ve also lost face with your customer and your employees. If you build it, they will come DOES NOT apply here! You and your customer have to take an active role in driving adoption of the site in order to achieve real ROI on your investment.
Your points related to streamlining are well presented.
Can you expand or explain further the sentence: “For every field you add to a form in an ecommerce user experience, your conversion drops 20%.” ?
As I read that logic is means that a form that captures (5) pieces of information would yield a 100% failure rate when it comes to conversion I’m aware of very few commerce applications that don’t have at least that number.
Heath,
If you have a clear call to action on your site which says, Sign up for Our Free Webinar!” Lets say you ask the users for name, e-mail, and phone number (3 fields) in order to register for the free webinar. If you changed that form (removed the phone field) you would increase your conversion rate by 20%. Adding more fields would drop your conversion rate. Every step you force a user through adds “friction” to the transaction. Remove friction and increase the conversion. Personal information carries a higher friction value – so you better be giving something valuable away in exchange for the personal information.
Obviously some transactions require lots of information (credit card transactions, etc…), the key is to make sure you’re asking for only exactly what you need, in a form that is brilliantly easy, and provide all the information you can (auto fill from profile is the user is known), etc… From a web to print standpoint, can you imagine the differences in conversion rate between a solution that has authentication integration (e.g. LDAP) vs. one that requires a separate registration and login? If the addition of a single field can drop conversion rates by 20%, can you imagine what a complete extra process including remembering yet another registration and login could do to web to print user adoption?