Online retailers roll out holiday promotions this week to combat high shopping cart abandonment rates.

Two thirds of online retailers are rolling out holiday promotions this week or have already done so. 61% of holiday promotions this year will be focused around free shipping, and 29% on promotional discounts. Multi-buy and free product offers will account for only 10%.

These are the main findings from a SeeWhy online poll, conducted on October 26th, among 255 ecommerce marketers on their promotional activity in the run up to the holiday season.

When do you plan to roll out your holiday special offers?

At SeeWhy, we continually track abandonment and conversion trends. In 2009, we saw a strong trend of customers stalling purchases in anticipation of holiday offers. From Labor Day through November 15, the number of online sales fell by almost 56 percent compared with the volume for the previous month, and the shopping cart abandonment rate shot up, peaking at 83 percent.

Once holiday promotional offers were rolled out, the transaction volumes rose sharply, and the abandonment rate fell dramatically. This year so far, we’ve seen shopping cart abandonment since Labor Day averaging 79%, which is higher than the same period last year (71%), though it appears to be trending back to more seasonal norms.

With the majority of online retailers rolling out holiday offers this week, we can expect the shopping cart abandonment rate to fall sharply, as it did last year, as customers begin to take advantage of free shipping offers, which have for long been a customer favorite.

The top reasons people abandon shopping carts according to a Forrester Research study can be grouped into two main reasons; price (including the cost of shipping) and the fact that they were not ready to buy. Ecommerce marketers are trying to address the first main issue in a number of ways. Two thirds plan to minimize abandonment due to shipping costs by either offering free shipping to customers who satisfy a minimum order purchase (which is the most popular tactic with 43% of respondents) and a further 18% have calculated that they can offer free shipping on all orders.  Tying in with these findings, Shop.org’s eHoliday Study conducted by BIGresearch, found that 36.7% of retailers had an increased budget, compared to last year, for free shipping.

The second most popular strategy (with 29% of respondents selecting this) is to offer percentage discount offers. Two other tactics, which were less popular, are to offer free product (6%) and multi-buy discounts (4%).

What will be your primary holiday promotion tactic?

A notable difference this year compared to last is that many retailers have offered more discounts throughout the year rather than purely during the conventional sales periods so it will be interesting to see how this impacts on the peaks and troughs of seasonal buying. We at tracking this with interest at SeeWhy and will keep you informed of the trends as they happen.

But most buyers do not make purchases based solely on logic. This is where emotion comes in to play. Emotion is probably the single most important, and least understood, factor which makes the difference between a sale and a shopping cart abandonment.

Last week I caught up with Patrick Bultema, CEO of Codebaby, at the Conversion Conference. In the video interview below, I asked him about the ‘moments of truth’ that online visitors have when making purchases, and the critical role that emotion plays in many online purchases and shopping cart abandonment.

I’d love to hear your opinion on what role emotion plays in ecommerce. Please post your thoughts in the comments section of this blog.

Before thinking about solutions to your shopping cart abandonment problem, it’s useful to look at the reasons why customers abandon. Based on this Forrester study, you can group the top 5 reasons into:

• Price, especially shipping and handling, and shopping around for a deal
• Not ready to buy

But what all the research tends to miss are the emotional reasons for abandoning a shopping cart. In particular, confidence in the brand, service and, if your site is not a global brand, the basic worry of doing business online with an unfamiliar brand.

Holiday Season Shopping Cart Abandonment Checklist

Hopefully you’ve been working on most of these items for months, but if not, it’s not too late to implement many of these this year:

1. Drive down shipping and handling costs
   The number one reason why customers abandon shopping carts is the cost of shipping and handling. While you may have seasonal free shipping promotions planned, these are tactical and it is difficult to offer free shipping more broadly. But driving down your shipping costs to rock bottom should be a priority at this time of year. This should have a measurable impact on your conversion rates.
2. Minimum order free shipping
   If you can’t offer free shipping, offer free shipping above a minimum order value. This should increase your average order value. Display prominently the minimums required for free shipping. Tell customers how much more they need to spend to get free shipping.
3. Give them valid voucher codes
   We know customers are looking for deals at this time of year, and it is important to recognize this behavior. Ecommerce sites that provide a list of valid voucher codes on their website have found that they reduce both affiliate fees as well as increase conversions. For example, Macy’s gets a 40 percent conversion on visitors to its voucher pages. An additional tactic to consider is to move the coupon code box down the checkout process to make it a bit harder to shop for voucher codes. If customers still abandon with invalid voucher codes, then trigger a real-time email with a valid voucher code.
4. ‘Email me this’ button on product detail pages
   In the run up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we know that customers change their behavior in anticipation of holiday promotions. The shopping cart abandonment rate changes dramatically as customers move into a research mode, waiting for the promotion to be rolled out. There’s been a trend toward using shopping carts as ‘shopping list reminders,’ so a permanent shopping cart is a great bonus which enables customers to store their potential purchases. But putting in a permanent shopping cart is not a 10 minute job, so an alternate that you can still get in this year is the ‘email me this’ button on the product detail page. Sending the customer an email with an item they were viewing is a great way to provide a reminder that they can keep in their in box together with an easy link back to the page. This is a very simple remarketing technique that works very well and isn’t hard to do. It also has the benefit of capturing email addresses.
5. Promote your phone number
   Particularly if your site is not a well recognized brand, promoting your telephone number is important in converting those nervous about doing business with you online. The customer may have questions or just need to believe that there is a real business and a real person behind the website. If you’re a well known brand, you should be doing this already; in many cases, simply by offering a phone number, you can recover about five percent of sales that would otherwise be lost.
6. Build trust with social media engagement
   Last year, most retailers made extensive use of social media to promote holiday season special offers. But social media should not be just about promotions. If your brand is less well known, engaging potential customers in dialogue about your company, products and services will build trust at a critical time. Remember that shopping is more about emotion and less about rational decisions to many shoppers. Positive emotions about potential purchases are countered by negative emotions about potential post-purchase dissatisfaction. There is no substitute for a direct conversation with the customer to reassure him/her that you are a company with great service.
7. Send remarketing emails
   Customers that abandon their shopping carts are customers that almost purchased. One of the most effective techniques to reducing shopping cart abandonment is to trigger recovery emails to abandoners. Most ecommerce companies that send shopping cart recovery emails recover between 10 and 30 percent, and that translates into a significant return. If you want to calculate your potential return this holiday season, you can use this revenue recovery calculator.In the run up to Black Friday, record numbers of customers will abandon. These customers are telling you what products they are interested in. This is valuable data, and used in your remarketing emails, it will make them incredibly relevant—resulting in very high open rates. Many customers are using shopping carts as wish lists, particularly during the holiday season; so even if your remarketing email doesn’t trigger an immediate purchase, there’s a strong likelihood that the email will be kept in their inbox and opened several times to use the short-cut link back to their shopping cart wish list.

Hopefully this has given you some ideas about reducing shopping cart abandonment this holiday season. Let us know how you fare!

While the federal U.S. CAN-SPAM laws apply across all states in the U.S., in Europe it is more complicated. In the European Union, individual member countries are required to craft their own local country laws based on the Europe-wide legislation. As the different countries implemented their laws, each interpreted the requirements of the European Privacy Directive slightly differently. This makes implementing a pan-European campaign more complicated.

Given this confusing landscape and our mission to simplify remarketing for all, we hired Ruth Boardman of Bird and Bird LLP, one of the world’s top privacy lawyers, to work with us and produce a definitive answer to these questions. Working with her colleagues across the U.S. and Europe, we set out to see whether there is one compliance solution that can be applied to both the U.S. and European markets, or if not, which countries could be grouped together to simplify compliance with both CAN-SPAM and the European Privacy Directive.

Ruth and I collaborated on a joint whitepaper that sets out what you need to do to comply for email remarketing campaigns in the following countries: United States, France, UK, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Sweden, Netherlands, Finland and other European countries.

Ruth has also kindly agreed to present the findings with me on an educational webcast taking place on October 12, 2010, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern time / 4:00 p.m. UK time / 5:00 p.m. Central European time. This will be a one-off opportunity to ask the experts your legal, compliance and remarketing questions in an interactive forum.

The webinar recording for this is now available on demand which you can play back by following this link: Email Remarketing and Compliance Webinar.

The accompanying White Paper can be found here: Email Remarketing and Compliance White Paper.

At SeeWhy, we track both conversions and shopping cart abandonment rates, and you can see this change in behavior in the data. Shopping cart abandonment rates normally average 70 percent, i.e. 7 out of every 10 people that place items in the shopping cart do not complete the transaction. But last year from Labor Day through November 15, the number of online sales fell by almost 56 percent compared with the volume for the previous month, and the shopping cart abandonment rate shot up, peaking at 83 percent.

But once holiday promotional offers were rolled out, the transaction volumes rose sharply, and the abandonment rate fell dramatically. You can see this in the graphs below.

Note also how the day of the week is very significant: During the weekends, customers were researching, not buying. The pattern of high shopping cart abandonment rates during the weekend is normal throughout the year as customers research online before potentially making a purchase during the week. However, this pattern was much more pronounced from mid-September through mid-November, reflected in a peak abandonment rate for the year.

What happened in mid-November, of course, was that Black Friday-specific promotions were being rolled out across the board, triggering seasonal buying—not browsing—behavior and the ramp up to the peak on Cyber Monday.

Based on last year’s pattern, we should expect that, until the big Thanksgiving promotions get rolled out in mid-November, many customers will defer purchases, having become conditioned not to purchase online but to wait.

This reinforces what we have known for decades; promotions shift the timing of revenues and may not provide significant lift overall.

We’ll be monitoring both the discounting trends and the shopping cart abandonment rates through the rest of the holiday season, and it will be interesting to see whether the Holiday 2010 will be a rerun of 2009.

•    Less clutter
•    Less text
•    Less information

Less clutter. Visual clutter kills conversion. In many cases, graphic designers, the people actually constructing your pages, can be your worst enemies because they try to do too much with the page. As a result, website visitors have no idea what to look at, or what to interact with, on the page.

If the call to action on your landing page is not obvious, you should radically strip down the page to increase online conversion rates. If there are a lot of bright but unnecessary visual elements competing for the visitor’s attention, you are advised to refocus on the page’s objective and declutter. What do you want the user to do? What’s the next step in the conversion process? Make it obvious to the user, because if it’s not obvious, you are losing money.

Less text. Too much text limits conversion. Landing pages frequently include a lot of text, especially if they are also being used for SEO purposes. Do you really expect people to read all of that information? Of course not. Putting an overbearing amount of information on a landing page basically guarantees that people will not read it. They won’t even begin.

The alternative—less text—can look pretty stark in comparison. Less text, however, makes the call to action much clearer. If you need text for SEO, you can still put it on the landing page; just put it at the bottom where it won’t interfere with a good user experience. People will have to scroll to read that text, but that’s okay. That text isn’t for your users; it’s for the search engines.

Less information. Asking for too much personal information also hinders conversion rate optimization. Marketers tend to ask for too much personal information too early, and they drive up the form and shopping cart abandonment rate in the process. Reverse that trend by collecting only information that is absolutely necessary to complete the specific transaction or form.

For example, you don’t need to ask for a user’s street, city, state, zip and country to let him or her download a PDF. So don’t ask for it. What information is needed for the download? Nothing. If you let users download a PDF without any sort of registration, downloads will increase significantly as a result. If you do want to follow up, however, as most website owners do, collect the minimum information you’ll need for the follow up, such as the user’s name and email address. Collect additional information later, when it’s appropriate—e.g. the mailing address when the user is ready to buy.

If you’d like more information, you can view a 10 minute video of Tim’s presentation (by selecting View SiteTuners presentation), or view a replay of the entire webinar (by selecting View entire presentation), under The Conversion Leaders Summit here.

Other insights are also available from myself on website conversion and recovery of abandoned shopping carts through remarketing; Danny Dover, an SEO expert from SEOmoz.org; and Loren McDonald, VP of Industry Relations at Silverpop, a leading email service provider.

Transactional emails are automated and trigger-based, driven directly by user behavior, profile or demographics. Depending on how aggressively you adopt it, the extended scope might include transactional emails related to:

• Pre-transaction emails: browse abandonment and cart abandonment
• Purchase event emails: order confirmation, order status, shipping notice, shipping confirmation, trip preparation
• Post-purchase emails: satisfaction survey, review request, review notification, recommendation, replenishment, repurchase, upgrades
• Relationship emails: bounce back, account reminder, loyalty programs, account status, purchase anniversary

For example, a post-purchase email could notify customers of stock shortages, reminding a customer who bought an item in the past that you’re about to sell out of it. This kind of transactional email not only generates revenue but actually enhances the relationship with, and adds value for, that customer.

Another post-purchase email might 1) thank the customer for posting a product review and/or 2) include product recommendations based on previous purchases. While this level of sophistication might seem difficult to achieve, most ecommerce sites are already using the web analytics, reviews and recommendation engines needed to do these transactional emails. The sites simply need to leverage their existing technologies, using established APIs and dynamic content, to generate the new emails.

Purchase review emails can actually lead to significant incremental revenue. One Silverpop client reports that 14 percent of the people that click on the “review” link actually make another purchase. For that client, purchase reviews hold the second highest conversion rate next to their abandoned cart program. Follow-up, review notification transactional emails—thanking the customer for the review and offering a discount or other incentive on the next purchase—encourage 12 percent of the people who click on them to make another purchase.

When it comes to this new breed of transactional email, the keys to success include the following checklist of items:

1.   Leverage existing technology. As mentioned above, this technology already powers your website, so it can also be tied into these new transactional email opportunities.
2.    Time the emails appropriately. For instance, you might wait a month to email a review request to a book customer but only wait a week to send it to a toner cartridge customer.
3.    Design for all devices. In particular, make sure your emails work in a mobile environment, in preview panes, with image blocking on, etc.
4.    Create compelling content. Beyond making recommendations, superior content leverages customers’ non-purchase behavior, uses the right tone and makes compelling offers.
5.    Test, test, test. Test everything, from timing to layout to offers, copy style, and the level of personalization.

In any case, these automated, trigger-based transactional emails can supplement more traditional, broadcast email campaigns to increase online conversion rates and revenue, which is what we really care about.

If you’d like more information, you can view a 10 minute video of Loren’s presentation (by selecting View Silverpop presentation), or view a replay of the entire webinar (by selecting View entire presentation), under The Conversion Leaders Summit here.

Other insights are also available from myself on website conversion and shopping cart abandonment rates; Danny Dover, an SEO expert from SEOmoz.org; and Tim Ash, president and CEO of SiteTuners, a thought leader in website conversion and landing page optimization.

Whatever your particular goal, getting visitors to engage and follow a path to conversion is at the heart of driving value from your website. While most web teams track website conversion, the diversity of potential factors that affect conversion (and its evil twin, abandonment) makes this a very hard process to manage.

The biggest of these factors is promotions, which can cause massive changes to your website conversion rate. Equally, your competitors’ promotions can also have a big impact on your website conversion rate. Seasonally, customers have become conditioned to expect promotions at certain times of the year; as a result, looking at your conversion rates without considering these factors is a bit like stumbling around in the dark looking for the light switch.

In the early days of the web, we focused first on page views and bounce rates, and finally on the website conversion rate, which has become a core method of measuring site success.

Website conversion is usually defined as a percentage as follows:

Desired Actions / Unique Visitors * 100

Of course, there isn’t just one website conversion rate. There are several, and this is one of the challenges when it comes to comparing your website conversion with other sites’ website conversion rates.

Here are the three most common website conversion rates:

Visitor-to-Sale / Visitor-to-Goal

The visitor-to-sale website conversion rate currently averages 2-3 percent for most ecommerce sites. It’s a simple measure of the percentage of visitors that land on your website and purchase in the same session. Divide the total number of sales/goals by the total unique visitors. By contrast, top-converting websites currently convert 23 percent of visitors to sale, and what they do differently is worth understanding. SeeWhy recently published a free eBook titled “Lessons Learned from the Top 10 Converting Websites,” and this is well worth reading. The visitor-to-sale/goal website conversion is the easiest to compare with other sites.

Funnel Conversion Rate

The funnel website conversion rate looks at the proportion of visitors that complete your conversion process. If it’s a shopping cart, then the start of the conversion funnel is usually when a visitor places an item in the shopping cart. In a web form, this would be arriving at the first page of the form itself. The funnel conversion rate is probably the most widely used rate when people are talking about their ‘website conversion rate.’ It’s a simple percentage: divide the number of sales/goals achieved by the number of visitors that started the process. SeeWhy tracks conversion rates across approximately 9,000 ecommerce sites. This data shows that website conversion rates can vary wildly, but the average funnel conversion rate is 29 percent, meaning that more than 7 in every 10 visitors that start conversion processes do not complete them. The average abandonment rate is 71 percent (i.e. 1 minus the conversion rate).

Page Level Conversion Rate

The page level conversion rate is the proportion of visitors that arrive on one page and subsequently progress to the next stage of the conversion funnel. It’s typically used to examine the performance of each step in the conversion funnel itself to ensure each step is performing well and to eliminate bottlenecks.

If you’ve got a problem with one of the pages in your conversion funnel, it will show up on your page conversion rate. Running a split test (using Google Website Optimizer or similar) will enable you to test two different versions of the same page and see which one works better.

Of these three website conversion rates, the most useful is the funnel conversion rate. This tells you what proportion of the traffic that demonstrates intent to buy, actually go on to buy in the same session. In many ways, it is one of the most important measures of a site’s effectiveness.

If you are interested in learning more about this topic, I recently discussed conversion strategies with a panel of industry experts—Danny Dover of SEOMoz.org, Tim Ash of SiteTuners.com, and Loren McDonald of Silverpop. You can view the webinar recording here; select ‘View’ under ‘The Conversion Leaders Summit.’

This is a great question, and it’s worth considering in more depth. Recent research shows that coupon redemption is at an all time high, and at the same time, Ben Bernanke warns that the economic recovery is fragile and taxes will inevitably have to rise. It’s no wonder that customers are nervous and cautious.

This is evidenced in a recent Forrester Research report that found that some 136 million people abandoned shopping carts in the U.S. last year, a full 88 percent of the online shopping population. The number one reason why people abandon shopping carts is price, specifically the cost of shipping and handling (44 percent), rapidly followed by ‘Not yet ready to buy’ (41 percent) and ‘Looking for a better deal’ (27 percent).

These numbers would suggest that many, but not all, customers are deal hungry—scouring the internet for the best price, free shipping offers and voucher codes.

So, it was with some interest that I read ExactTarget’s latest installment in their Subscribers, Friends and Followers series. Their most recent research paper, ‘The Social Profile,’ looks at the different online personalities and identifies 12 specific personas:

1.    Inner Circle: 47% of online consumers

Inner Circle consumers are interested in maintaining and deepening existing relationships with family and close friends, not necessarily developing new online relationships.

2.    Cautious: 33% of online consumers

Very selective about with whom they communicate and the types of information they’re willing to share online.

3.    Info Seeker: 33% of online consumers

Info Seekers go online to find and consume information. They aren’t interested in creating new content or in commenting on the experiences of others, though they do seek out others’ opinions.

4.   Enthusiast: 32% of online consumers

When Enthusiasts go online, they’re motivated by offline interests and hobbies.

5.    Deal Seeker: 30% of online consumers

Deal Seekers have a huge appetite for promotional content across all online channels. They see email, Facebook and Twitter as opportunities to obtain exclusive deals, freebies, discounts, coupons, and sale notifications.

6.    Shopper: 24% of online consumers

As their name suggests, Shoppers are most interested in the topic of shopping when they’re interacting online. But their interests aren’t limited to online transactions—they spend a lot of time researching and preparing for in-store shopping trips at their favorite local stores. In contrast to their Deal Seeker counterparts, Shoppers tend to be more focused on quality, as opposed to savings, though both are important to these consumers.

7.    News Junkie: 21% of online consumers

Consumers who are motivated by the quest for real-time breaking news and current events. News Junkies use the internet as either their primary source of information for news-related content or as a secondary source to supplement the information they get on cable news networks. These consumers are active social media contributors, especially when it comes to posting articles on sites, commenting on news stories, and submitting ratings and reviews to retailer websites.

8.   Gamer: 19% of online consumers

Gamers are motivated by the latest and greatest in gaming software, and can be split into two sub categories—Casual vs. Serious.

9.    Social Butterfly: 13% of online consumers

Making and maintaining a lot of online friendships is a Social Butterfly’s #1 priority. And to do so, they use a wide variety of social media tools. Social Butterflies use Facebook to maintain their social lives, and their Friends are personal contacts, not work colleagues. In addition to becoming Fans of brands on Facebook, these consumers are also interested in promotions and sale notifications across email, Facebook and Twitter.

10.   Business First: 8% of online consumers

Business First Consumers use the internet for business purposes, keeping up with the latest trends, communicating with business contacts, and making new connections through sites like LinkedIn. In short, they’re actively engaged in promoting their companies and personal careers online.

11.    Megaphone: 7% of online consumers

Megaphones want to connect, educate, and share resources and information online with others. These consumers clearly fall into the “influencer” category—meaning they can impact a brand’s bottom line—but Megaphones represent an especially elite group that takes their online interactions very seriously.

12.   Open Book: 6% of online consumers

Open Books are uninhibited consumers who freely express their likes, dislikes, experiences and opinions with the online world.

What’s interesting about these profiles is that only 30 percent are Deal Seekers. It’s very easy to forget that the deal-focused consumer is in fact a minority. The ExactTarget research also points at Shoppers (24 percent) and Social Butterflies (13 percent) as being interested in promotions, and connecting with brands by both social networks and by becoming email subscribers. But these consumers are not driven towards deal-seeking as their primary motivation online, rather they are focused on shopping research and the social aspects of shopping, respectively.

These online personas are interesting reminders to us to not treat website visitors as a homogeneous mass—it’s all too easy when we use language like Unique Visitors, Page Views and the like as part of our daily web analytics language.

Unfortunately, these types of online personas cannot easily be used to personalize our online marketing strategies but do contribute to our understanding of all the different types of online consumers.

This is echoed in some of the remarketing campaigns that our customers run (see Q&As with Rockler and Eat N’ Park). Some of the most successful abandoned shopping cart recovery email programs that SeeWhy powers—generating millions of dollars each year for the brands—do so with any form of promotion.

Rockler is generating spectacular results, measured in recovered revenues, from their shopping cart abandonment remarketing program.

A few months ago, Rockler Woodworking and Hardware rolled out a new email campaign to recover abandoned shopping carts and drive website conversion.

Rockler Woodworking and Hardware is the nation’s premier supplier of specialty hardware, tools, lumber, and exceptional quality woodworking products. Founded in 1954 and on the web since 1996, Rockler has become one of the top destination sites on the web and an Internet Retailer 500 site. Products are sold through catalogs, the company’s direct-to-consumer website at www.rockler.com and 30 stores.

We recently caught up with Jason Bernloehr, e-commerce manager at Rockler, to find out about their new shopping cart abandonment campaign.

Website Conversion: Why did Rockler choose to focus on shopping cart abandonment?

JB: We already knew from testing that following up on abandoned shopping carts is very effective. In fact, it had been a home run every time we tested it. We wanted a way to put it into the hands of the marketers, make it quicker, and a more automated process. 

Website Conversion: How well has the program worked?

JB: Open rates are more than double the rates we get from our house list. We’ve found that the shopping cart reminder emails spur customers on to go back to a previous promotion that they’ve seen and then complete the purchase. So it’s helping drive conversions of those email sales additionally. 

Website Conversion: Have you been able to measure sales impact?

JB: Yes, it’s worked really well – right out of the gate we’re generating 2% of sales from this one email. We believe that it will probably increase over time as we get more tactical with the program by tying in promotions and with the addition of second and third follow-up messages. I can’t disclose an exact dollar figure for sales generated, but it is a significant number. 

Website Conversion: Many marketers think that trigger marketing, including shopping cart recovery, is hard. Did you find it as difficult as you expected?

JB: When you open it up, it’s really pretty simple. Put yourself in the eyes of the consumer, and it gets a whole lot easier to design the campaign. Just think of what you would want to see from a reminder type email, as a first time user that has put something in the cart, and it is easy. What would they want? We try to accomplish a sense of warmth and professionalism which reassures and reinforces the brand.

Website Conversion: If you were giving advice to other emarketers, what would you say about shopping cart recovery programs?

JB: Shopping cart recovery programs are very important: this is a key segment of your audience that you are going to want to focus on. These customers represent your best prospects. Of course, they’re going to be interested in the email and are two or three times more likely to open it. You’ve already gotten them interested; why not do a better job of helping them with the sale? It’s your best chance to put your best foot forward to get website conversions. 

Website Conversion: If you were starting over, what would you do differently?

JB: If we were to do it again, we’d build an entire creative tactical plan in advance – so planning out the first, second and third email details before getting into the technical details. It’s easier to make tweaks if you have a good plan from the outset. But overall, it’s gone pretty well.

Website Conversion: How long did it take to get up and running?

JB: Total time to get up and running was about three weeks, including the email creative, though it probably took us a bit longer than it would for others because we were the first to do this with Blue Hornet. Overall, this was about what I expected.

Website Conversion: Why did you choose to work with SeeWhy?

JB: We were aware of the company some months prior because there’s been a good deal of chatter on blogs about what they are doing. Rockler is a member of the Blue Hornet advisory board, and when Blue Hornet told us that they had a development partnership with SeeWhy, it seemed like a very good fit for us. 

Website Conversion: What has been your experience of working with the SeeWhy team?

JB: Great – they are upfront and tell it like it is. They always had the right people available and put our developer at ease. It’s nice to have the tech folk communicate effectively, and this worked very well.