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Nothing annoys a customer quite as much as being made a fool of. Yet this is exactly what happens when one of your promotions backfires by getting out of step with their actions. That sick-to-the-core-feeling that every marketer gets the moment they know of the gaffe will only grow until the problem gets fixed.

Sending promotions to customers that have already bought betrays your brand. And the customer will let you, and the world, know just how they feel. It’s just happened to me, so with the benefit of an insider’s knowledge I’ll share how it happens, how it feels to be on the receiving end , and how to prevent it. (…)

Analyzing abandoned shopping cart data from one of our customers last week made me sit up and take notice: Optimizations to their remarketing campaign and the introduction of a promotional discount for the first time caused their recovery rate to jump from 18% to 46%.

Wow. Clearly promotions can make a big impact.

There’s lots of academic research which shows that while promotions have limited affect on long-term sales, they enable marketers to grab market share by incentivizing consumers to stock up on their product at the expense of a competitor’s share. (…)

In this video blog, SeeWhy Founder Charles Nicholls reviews the CPO Milwaukee power tools ecommerce website, from a remarketing standpoint.

There’s no substitute for testing when it comes to optimizing shopping carts. But once you’ve have tested and tuned, and your conversion rate has improved, what do you do when your shopping cart abandonment is still frustratingly high?

If this is where you’ve got to then it’s time you looked beyond the shopping cart conversion rate, and looked at remarketing. Remarketing takes those visitors that leave the site without buying, and markets to them again using either advertising, email or social media. These are your best prospects – visitors that almost purchased – so it’s no surprise that a sequence of nudges brings customers back in to buy.

The most cost effective way to recover abandoned shopping carts is by using email remarketing. The cost of recovering an abandoned shopping cart by email is 100 times less than by advertising. Of course retargeted advertising has an important role higher up the funnel, where you haven’t captured an email address, and would like to bring them back to the site.

One of the subjects that comes up early in a discussion about email remarketing is how and where to capture email addresses. So in this walkthrough, we suggest simple shopping cart design and email capture tips to maximize both onsite conversions and your recovery rates.

This walk through essentially covers three core subjects:

• Conversion enhancements to the site
• Email address capture; opportunities to capture more email addresses without impacting conversion rates
• What type of remarketing email creative can be built for the site using this kind of information.

Hopefully you’ll find the tips and approach useful. Let me know what you think using the comments below.

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Remarketing emails, when done well, provide good service to customers. These emails are often kept and used as a reminder, or quick path back to items in their shopping cart. In the case of a web form, being able to pick up where you left off on a long form is really appreciated, and can save the customer significant time and effort.

There is a significant opportunity for emarketers here. On average 70% of shopping carts, and 62% of web forms are abandoned before completion. Yet email remarketing should recover on average between 10% and 30% of abandoners. That translates into significant dollars.

Several global brands have asked us about the compliance requirements for remarketing, especially in Europe. So we engaged Ruth Boardman, a partner at Bird and Bird LLP, and one of the world’s leading electronic data privacy experts. Ruth and I co-authored a white paper on email remarketing compliance which covers this subject in more depth, and additionally we recorded a webcast titled Email Remarketing and Compliance (in the US and European Union).

In a previous blog, we looked into what marketers have to do in order to comply with CAN-SPAM in the US for email remarketing – this week, I’m looking into The European Privacy Directive in Europe, which is slightly more complicated. (…)

Recovering abandoned shopping carts and web forms is a lucrative business. On average 70 percent of shopping carts and 56 percent of web forms are abandoned before completion. In an effort to win these customers back, retailers employ email remarketing campaigns that should recover on average between 10 and 30 percent of abandoners. That translates directly into significant incremental revenues.

When it comes to email remarketing, one question that I get asked fairly regularly is about what is needed to ensure compliance with CAN-SPAM in the U.S. and the European Privacy Directive in Europe when setting up a remarketing campaign. The situation is really straightforward in the U.S. (it comes down to little more than checking your privacy policy), but it is slightly more complicated in Europe.

As a result, we engaged Ruth Boardman, a partner at Bird and Bird LLP, and one of the world’s leading electronic data privacy experts. Ruth and I co-authored a white paper on email remarketing compliance that covers this subject in more depth, and additionally, we recorded a webcast titled Email Remarketing and Compliance (in the U.S. and European Union).

For this blog, we’ll focus exclusively on the U.S., and I’ll write about compliance in the European Union separately. (…)

So what can you do, during the crazy holiday season, to reduce shopping cart abandonment? We thought we’d put together a holiday season checklist to help you keep your customers in the shopping cart this Christmas. (…)

I get asked regularly about how CAN-SPAM and European Privacy Directive laws affect remarketing. In principle, compliance is very straightforward and often just requires a simple check of your website privacy policy to ensure that you’ve covered remarketing. Most companies can implement email-based remarketing campaigns without changes to their website or privacy policies. But it all depends on what your privacy policy says, on your opt-in and opt-out capabilities in your shopping cart, and in which countries you want to remarket. (…)

On July 27, SeeWhy conducted an online poll among 221 eMarketers. The results reveal some potential shifts in focus over the next 12 months: shopping cart recovery, reducing landing page clutter, link building, and transactional email all emerge as top priorities.

The poll also looked in detail at four key areas of conversion to determine their priorities. The four areas examined were as follows:

•    SEO
•    Landing page optimization
•    Email marketing
•    Web conversion/shopping cart recovery techniques

Each respondent was allowed to pick only one response in each category, forcing them to choose their top priority.

SEO Priorities

Marketers plan to focus on link building as their top priority in the next 12 months, with 42 percent stating that it is their top SEO focus. Changes to website pages to ensure they are more SEO friendly were the highest priority for 22 percent, while 21 percent plan to focus on social media integration. Site-based optimization (such as sitemaps and navigation) was the main focus for only 15 percent. There are two notable conclusions that you draw about these findings:

1)    Marketers have taken on board the changes made over recent months by Google to prioritize quality and diversity of links in search results over the content itself.

2)    Social media integration is unexpectedly high. While social media is hot for marketers, in SEO terms this is really cutting edge stuff, and it signals that marketers have recognized the importance of social media in driving traffic. In particular, Facebook’s social plugins, including the easy to implement ‘Like’ button, are beginning to be viewed as a simple ‘social SEO toolkit.’

Website and Landing Page Optimization

Marketers are taking the ‘less is more’ philosophy to heart when it comes to landing page optimization. Just over half (51 percent) stated that reducing clutter was their top priority, recognizing that landing pages have been added to gradually over time at the expense of simplicity and simple, strong calls to action. (…)

We’re used to getting transaction confirmation emails like those sent by Amazon. Recently, Loren McDonald advised attendees of a Conversion Academy webinar to extend beyond the purchase to include pre-purchase, post-purchase and relationship touch points. The result? More opportunities to engage prospects and customers, something Loren’s seen firsthand as the vice president of Industry Relations at Silverpop, a leading email service provider. Here are some of the key pointers he gave in his presentation and a checklist of what to do in order to extend the transactional email activity you currently carry out. (…)

Compared to other email campaigns, transactional emails are some of the most effective at driving revenues. For example, Carolyn Nye of S&S Worldwide presented at the Silverpop conference earlier this year and shared some data on their transactional emails. Transactional emails account for only 4.1 percent of overall email volume, but these campaigns generate over 40 percent of all revenues produced by transactional and regular email campaigns combined. (…)