Website Conversion Blog
Analysis: Promotions Make Big Impact on Abandoned Shopping Carts
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011
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. (more…)
Video blog: Shopping Cart Optimization Walkthrough
Friday, December 17th, 2010
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.
6-Point Guide to Email Remarketing and European Union Privacy Directive
Thursday, November 4th, 2010
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. (more…)
How to Avoid a Legal Land Mine in Email Remarketing
Wednesday, October 20th, 2010
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. (more…)
Tactics to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment This Holiday Season
Thursday, October 7th, 2010
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. (more…)
