Website Conversion Blog
Over the weekend the New York Times ran a story about SeeWhy’s new approach to website abandonment and remarketing. It’s a bit controversial, and today the argument heated up by my fellow bloggers.
Done well, abandonment follow up by email or even phone can be great customer service, and a significant benefit to customers. The ultimate proof of this is in the numbers: up to 50% of customers that receive abandonment remarketing offers subsequently convert and become customers as a direct result of the program. Clearly they are getting benefit from the program and voting for it with their $.
Of course, like anything, the devil is in the detail of how you use this new technology, and you can get it wrong. So here are the top 6 best practices you should be thinking about when
1. Service tone
Adopt a service, not sales orientation. Something may have gone wrong in the process, and you’d like to help. You need to genuinely care about the customer, their success, and delivering superior service to them through this remarketing approach. Don’t try to sell them, it will not win you friends, and will just drive unsubscribes from your program. Make sure that there’s a key customer benefit in each communication; for example a free shipping offer (by way of apology) can be very welcome and is a clear benefit to the customer of being in the remarketing program.
2. Make it relevant
Generic follow up emails that are not directly relevant are just plain annoying, and none of us want to receive them. The key is to give the customer a very high degree of service directly related to their abandoned purchase. Use the detail about what they were looking at prior to the abandonment help them find what they need, perhaps with links relevant to the products or services they were considering purchasing. Provide details about alternative channels so that if they want to speak to someone, or purchase by phone or in store, they know how to.
3. Act immediately
Many independent studies have concluded that an immediate follow up is best practice. It’s obvious why: it’s more relevant to the customer. Some vendors suggest best practice is to wait 3 days before contacting them, but generally you are much more likely to annoy them. 72 hours is a long time on the internet: Our attention span, as consumers, is incredibly short, and a lot can happen in three days, including purchasing an alternate product, switching channel, loosing interest and so on. A 5 – 10 minute delay after the abandonment is typically optimal, but like all things, test it out and see what works best.
4. Automate the process
Unless you run a very small site, where you can give personal service to individual customers, you’re going to need to automate the process. Here’s why: there’s great danger in remarketing of getting out of synch with what the customer is doing. If you have a delay in processing the data after the abandonment, you run the risk that the customer comes back onto the site in their own accord. So continuous real time analysis and intelligent handling of repeat visitors is essential to make sure you stay in step. If you get out of step, your marketing is just plan irrelevant and annoying.
And these are a no-brainer:
5. Easy and prominent opt-out
All marketers dread customers unsubscribing, but it’s really important that you make opting out of abandonment remarketing really easy. We often recommend that the opt-out is prominently displayed at both the top and the bottom of a remarketing email, to make it easy. If people want to opt out, it’s in your interests that they do, otherwise you’re intruding where you’re not wanted.
6. Provide a ‘finish up’ link…great service in action.
If at all possible, provide a personal link that enables the customer to pick up where they left off. This addresses one of the most frustrating experiences in buying and registering online: for one reason or another you have to stop part way through the process, only to have to restart the process again from scratch. Make it easy to complete the process with a link that doesn’t take them back to the start. This is a huge benefit, and one which customers love.
To find out about SeeWhy’s Abandonment Tracker go to www.seewhy.com/atfree; For more on best practices, and webinar replays, visit us at www.seewhy.com.
