|
| Recent
Articles |
Reducing ECommerce Stress
Certainly it's important to plan and prepare for an online marketplace. It's important to learn what you can about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, traffic building, ezine publishing, RSS, blogging, PPC and other marketing methods.
The point of balance in ecommerce is there doesn't need to be an incredible amount...
Can Your Site Influence Your Visitors To Buy?
There is a way to influence consumers online particularly on your e-commerce website. There are in fact quite a few e-commerce websites that implement such tactics, problem is many other companies don't. Here are the "tricks" Some of the things you can add to your site to influence your visitor is quantity of a certain product...
What To Avoid When Setting Up An Online Store
Are you planning start your own online store? Avoid these mistakes if you want your online shop to be successful. 1. Poor navigation: Customers should be able to find products easily. Avoid something called 'mystery meat navigation' where customers are forced to guess what certain menu items mean since there are no text to tell them what a particular menu item is all about!
Improving ECommerce Product Findability
On both ecommerce and shopping comparison sites, users can find products in two different ways: searching and browsing. Searching obviously means using the site search whilst browsing involves drilling down through the categories provided by the website. Regardless of which method is used, users will be presented with a...
Techniques For Gaining Consumer Trust
When speaking of website optimization practices, it is often associated with SEO and the goal of achieving high search rankings. While this certainly is important to a site's overall visibility, gaining and retaining user trust should also be a primary focus of any company looking to bolster its virtual presence. We write a lot of articles at WebProNews about the SEO industry, as well as...
SEO-Friendly Ecommerce
One of the major drawbacks when taking the dynamic approach to web development is the resulting product not being optimized for the search engines. A number of issues contribute to this characteristic and most are them are correctable, but doing so is considered an advanced level of web design. Therefore, the demand for...
|
|
02.15.07
Target Cart Abandonment Through Email
 By
Anil Batra
Recently I read an article called Four Ways to Improve Marketing ROI Through E-mail by John Rizzi, CEO of e-dialog.
This is a good article for those who are trying to determine how to collect email, learn from email marketing and email effectively. In his last point he says "Use Behavioral Targeting" to convert abandoned carts. He suggests using incentives to bring customers back to complete the cart they had abandoned. This is a great idea but I want you to be aware of the following two issues before you jump into it.
1. Lack of Email Address: If you don't have an upfront email collection process it is very likely that visitors (customers) will leave even before they give you their email address. If that's the case then you won't have any email to target (You can still deploy anonymous on-site behavioral targeting. Check out my article on behavioral targeting).
If you decide to put email collection up front it might cause cart abandonment rate to go up. You have to provide a very good reason to your customers on why they should provide you email even before they started buying anything or checking out. Like any other change on the site, I suggest conducting A/B testing before you start collecting email addresses for all your customers. If the tests do not show desired result you might be better off with on-site anonymous behavioral targeting.
2. Backfiring of incentives: Let's assume you have the email address and are ready to send an email incentive. As you already know the word spreads very fast these days. Most of your customers (visitors) will find out about your offers which could ultimately result in two outcomes:
1. If the incentive is not too enticing (such as free shipping) your customers (even regular customers) might find out about it and start abandoning the cart in anticipation of receiving that offer or they might just use the coupon or offer code given to them by somebody on the internet.
2. If the incentive is too good (such as $10 free for any purchase over $5.00, not sure why would you do that but I have seen companies giving free money just to get users to signup), the word will spread sending new customers to your site. So be prepared to handle the amount of traffic this viral marketing will generate and a possible bankruptcy.
Appendix A shows what happened to Starbucks when they sent out an e-coupon to a limited number of employees (or that's what Starbucks thought).
So should you provide incentives to bring back customers who have abandoned carts? Yes I think so but think about all the pros and cons before you jump into it. Below are some of the steps that you should include in your process for using email incentives:
1. Select a sample (say 20%) of visitors, who abandoned the shopping cart, who will receive any offer (I am assuming you have already created and tested a process for upfront email collection).
2. Test different offers within this selected group. Testing will show you which offer works and which ones don't.
3. You can use more behavioral data (and I encourage you to do so) to determine what offer will make sense to which visitor segments (create few manageable segments so that you can stay focused). E.g. A customer who abandoned at the shipping step might be more interested in free shipping than a user who added products to the cart but then left without clicking on the final checkout button (provided the customer has given you the email address), a 10% off coupon might be a better offer for this customer.
4. Unless you purposely want to engage in viral marketing, make sure coupons and codes can only be used by those for whom they were intended for and for specific period only. Also don't forget to configure your web analytics tools properly so that you can measure effectiveness of these offers.
Note: If you provide users the same kind of incentives 2-3 times to a customer then he/she (most of them) expects it every time.
Appendix A: Starbucks Lawsuit
"Starbucks e-mailed the grande iced beverage freebie to a limited number of employees in the Southeast on Aug. 23, with instructions to pass it on to friends and family.
The forwarding turned into a frenzy as the coupon landed in thousands of inboxes and on Internet message boards - forcing the chain to reject scores of coupon-touting java lovers pouring into stores for the perk." Source: ocregister.com
Comments
About
the Author:
http://webanalysis.blogspot.com
Anil has over 10 years of experience in Consulting, Business Intelligence, Web Analytics, Online Advertising and Behavioral Targeting. Anil helps companies use Web channel data to improve online business results (lead generation, conversion, retention and self-help metrics). Anil has helped several fortune 500 customers effectively use web analytics and increase their ROI on the web. Anil has worked with customers such as Microsoft, SmartMoney.com, ESPN, T-Mobile, Hoovers, Realnetworks, Starbucks, and TheStreet.com
Anil holds a B. Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering from India and an MBA from University of Washington, Seattle.
|
|
