Website Conversion Blog
Online Buyer Behavior 101 and the Many Paths to Conversion
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
The theory goes that if you make it easy for visitors to follow a simple path to conversion, you’ll generate traffic and revenue.
And yes, this is correct.
But this “single track” view of conversion is overly simplistic.
In this column, let’s explore why, and how it’s important to consider all of your available conversion paths.
Why Customers Don’t Buy
3 Shopping Cart Promotional Tactics for the Holiday Season
Friday, November 25th, 2011
In 2006, a Wharton professor first noticed that online buyers were more likely to respond to a free shipping offer that resulted in a savings of $6.99 over an outright savings offer of $10. The explanation was that it made the online price more comparable with the offline equivalent.
This fascinating insight into buyer motivations has contributed to on a major new piece of research into online buyer behaviour, which I’ve been working on over the last few months. It will be published on December 13th as an ebook titled ‘The Science of Shopping Cart Abandonment.’
To mark Black Friday, I’ve drawn from some of this research to look at the effects of holiday promotions, and how different price points impact buyer behavior. In particular, I’ll look at the relationship between the cart value and the shopping cart abandonment rate.
What are key price points that trigger abandonment? And can different pricing tactics lead to more conversions without eroding margin? I began my research analyzing a random sample of 264,631 abandoned shopping carts in August 2011, from a cross section of B2C e-commerce sites.
What we already know is that the value of the shopping cart has a disproportionate impact on whether an e-commerce purchaser will buy or abandon. What we have discovered is that it’s not a linear relationship and too simplistic to assume this as a general rule. This leads us to conclude that there are three promotional tactics that merchants should test this holiday season to improve conversions: (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…)
