Only 9% of websites actually follow up abandoners on the same day, and 17% within a few days (data from SeeWhy). It’s also well known that the timing of the follow up is critical: If you follow up 24 hours after a website abandonment, you’ll get 3x lower response compared with doing it immediately. Conversion rates drop to 7x lower by 36 hours. I blogged about this in my post ‘Timing is everything’

 

So why don’t more websites do follow ups?

In fact it’s clear that the majority that don’t follow up on website abandonment would like to. We ran a small survey recently (the sample size was 77 users of web analytics software, a mixture of e-marketing and ecommerce executives) and this is what it looked like. A massive 73% don’t do any followup – and almost 90% of them want to.

 

 

Most people are well aware of the value of re-marketing: it’s an easy way to recover your lost clicks and drive incremental conversions.

 

If you do it well, then you can expect about one third to re-convert as a result of your re-marketing campaign. Not only does this directly drive revenues, but your website conversion numbers get a significant impact as well.

 

You’ll be a hero because the return on investment is significant, right?

 

I’ve been digging around in this area for a while to try and learn what’s stopping ecommerce teams. It is clear that there are three main problems:

 

-It’s a bit more complicated than it first looks

 

Web analytics tools are really suited to individual marketing triggers, so while it looks possible, when the rubber hits the road there’s a lot more integration and setting up of business rules than anyone imagined.

 

-IT required

 

Automation is critical, so traditional approaches require getting my IT department involved, and that tends to make things more complex. IT resources at present are scarce, and this can slow projects significantly. If the integration is more complex that envisaged, then you can end up with a situation where the integration cost outweighs the benefit, and the project gets killed.

 

-Offers

 

Managing the complexity of multiple offers on a tight direct marketing budget can make it difficult to figure out who gets what when. Also fears about offers cannibalizing sales can erode confidence in the ROI numbers.

So what’s really needed is a fresh approach to this problem. It’s clear that there’s lots of value here, but that unlocking it can be frustrating.

 

Of course, when SeeWhy sat down to look at how to make it easy, these challenges became our requirements. The result is the first new product in this family called SeeWhy Abandonment Tracker Free service, which is now available. It’s a really cool service that does what is says on the tin: It captures website abandoners: EASY and FREE.

 

There’s more to follow, in the forthcoming Abandonment Tracker Pro, which focuses on optimizing and automating offers and follow ups.

 

Contact me if you want to find out more, and I’d be happy to open the kimono a bit.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 4:17 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.