Following up visitor abandons is very profitable business yet it is remarkable how few people actually do this.
In my Measuring Abandonment blog I referred to a Forrester Research study which used ELOAN as a case study. Forrester reports that an immediate follow up to an abandonment (within 30 minutes) of an abandonment would generate a staggering 89% open rate, and conversion of 26%.
This demonstrates what every marketer already knows: response rate is directly related to the relevance to the visitor.
As a data driven guy, I’m constantly amazed at the number of web teams that don’t know their abandonment numbers. There are lots of reasons for this of course, some emotional and some rational.
If you’re tracking conversion accurately, then it’s easy to identify what you’re abandonment rate is, but mostly it’s a big negative number that people don’t want to be reminded of. It is often helpful to think about your conversion process as a funnel, where each step of the process towards your goal is represented by a level in the funnel.
Back in the early days of ecommerce, visitor conversion was a really hot topic, and while most ecommerce teams continue to keep an eye on conversion, it’s not been a hot topic for a while. The beleaguered online marketer has been working hard to keep his or her head above water dealing with the shift of advertising dollars online, the nuances of search optimization, and distracted by A/B content testing, behavioral targeting and a hundred other wizzy approaches.
But in harder economic times, we all turn back to basics. Over the holiday period, while bricks and mortar channels suffered from poor like-for-like sales and discount induced margin erosion, online channels for many businesses showed healthy growth rates.
We all talk about website conversion, but what do we really mean? In many cases, we mean different things! Are you measuring conversion of visitors to sales, or shopping cart completions, or perhaps just successful registrations.
When I talk about Website Conversion, I think about it in broad terms: Conversion is a measure of the effectiveness in getting website visitors to do what you want them to do on your site.
