CIPS is the world’s largest organisation dedicated to the procurement profession, championing best practice and helping organisations and individuals achieve all-round excellence around the globe.
Serving 66k members, and a wider community of 160k professionals, its website supports users in both mature and developing markets, and is the ‘go-to’ place to find the latest news and information, as well as enrol on training courses, conferences and events, purchase publications, and – most importantly – register or renew CIPS membership.
But back in 2016, four years after a redesign that had undertaken significant content additions and amendments, the CIPS website wasn’t performing optimally. User feedback focused on the difficulty in finding relevant content and resources, and the Institute identified the need for change. CIPS issued a brief for a new, fully responsive website with a redesigned structure and navigation that would make it quicker and easier for users to find what they need, and ensure routes to online purchasing were obvious and clear.
As the agency already responsible for CIPS’ media and events programme, Wonderly brought a wealth of industry insight to the project, along with the skills of our dedicated UX design and product development team. And it was during their initial ‘Discovery’ phase (that’s research and insight to the uninitiated), that an astonishing statistic emerged.
On average, 81% of the users who started a purchase process* at cips.org were not ultimately completing it.
(*That could mean joining as a member, renewing membership, exam registration, booking onto events and training, or purchasing CIPS publications.)
The abandonment rate was found to be higher for those people using mobile devices. And it was calculated that reducing the abandonment rate by just 1% across all products would lead to a significant increase in revenue.
Our recommendations
True to the Wonderly Way, our insight-driven approach – including workshops, user interviews, persona creation and customer journeys – led to the following recommendations for the online purchasing functionality of the new CIPS website:
- A ‘light’ registration process – less onerous and time-consuming than the existing data entry requirements
- Handholding and reassurance throughout to enhance conversions
- Minimal input making it easier to purchase CIPS products
- A new shopping basket to allow users to buy multiple items in one go, with the addition of five new currencies to meet the needs of global customers
- Animated forms to enable the playback of input
- Clear confirmation of payment
Through this we committed to achieve increased membership numbers, reduced churn rates, an uplift in unique users, and more page views.
The results
Five months after the launch (1 August-31 December 2018), CIPS was experiencing exciting year-on-year results, compared to the same period in 2017.
Improved revenue
- A 17% increase in online revenue year on year. The site recovered its full investment within 2 months of launch and so far shows a 270% ROI.
- Giving users the ability to ‘add to basket’ has changed their shopping behaviour, with 24% of all transactions now including more than one item.
- Five new currencies have contributed additional revenue amounting to +5% (year-on-year), with US$ and Euros accounting for the biggest change.
- Conversion rates for all products have improved, and CIPS overall site ecommerce rate (percentage of visits that result in purchase) has improved by 24% to 1.82%.
Improved user experience
- Dramatically reducing the number of pages and the amount of information users have to fill in – from 8 pages and 40 fields down to 4 pages and 27 fields for joiners, for example – has resulted in an average 54% reduction in abandonment rates across all journeys.
Met mobile demand
- The new responsive design has made browsing and purchasing easier for users on-the-go, and has started to shift users from desktop to mobile browsing. Traffic from mobile and tablet now represents 32% of traffic (previously 29%), and continues to grow.
Improved user engagement
- User engagement on the site has increased significantly: they’re “bouncing” less (-7.2%), staying longer (session duration +17%), returning more often (visits per user +7%), viewing more pages (pages per session +11.3%), and are more active (sessions with transactions +20%). CIPS also improved the site’s analytics, and 36% of all sessions now result in a tracked action. A hotjar survey of 1,600 users showed that 95.6% found what they were looking for and 97% would return.
A global look and feel
- New imagery reflects the Institute’s global membership base and the fact that nearly 60% of users are outside the UK, with a quarter of traffic from Africa.
Wonderly is also delighted that the new CIPS website has been shortlisted for the ‘Best website’ in this Memcom’s 2019 Membership Excellence Awards.
Read more about our work with CIPS here.