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Retargeting Emails - Do E-commerce customers like or loathe them? March 10th, 2011Leave a commentGo to comments By Charles Nicolls, SeeWhy At SeeWhy, when we first launched our remarketing service in 2009, Randy Stross wrote a piece about email remarketing in The New York Times suggesting that while remarketing might be a great idea for ecommerce websites, it's not a great idea for consumers. He likened emails following up on abandoned shopping carts to a salesman chasing you down the street if you didn't buy from his store. There are major differences, of course. We've long argued that remarketing emails, when done well, not only drive conversions but also build brand trust. They can deliver great service and provide customers with the confidence to return to buy-either online, by phone or in store. If Randy was right and customers universally resented the intrusion, then these emails wouldn't work. In aiming to answer the question more substantively, I turned to data, and specifically email marketing benchmarks. The key metrics to look at to determine whether customers like or loathe remarketing emails are: the recovery rate the open rate the clickthrough rate the unsubscribe rate Frankly, the evidence is overwhelming: Remarketing, when done well, is appreciated by customers. Here's the evidence: (1) The recovery rate The recovery rate is the percentage of visitors that abandon shopping carts, and remarketed visitors thatthen return and purchase following remarketing. At SeeWhy, we measure recovery rates across all our customers, and currently the average is 20 percent. So, one in five shopping cart abandoners come back and buy, having being remarketed. In some cases, the recovery rate is as high as 50 percent. Moreover, when remarketed customers buy, they spend on average 55 percent more than customers who didn't abandon their shopping carts. (2) The open rate The average email open rate for remarketing emails is currently 46 percent, m

Thousands of directories are available on the Internet to connect you with a number of sites. Some Paid and some Free online directories are available for this purpose. Some directories take one time fee while some take reoccurring fee. When you make a submission to a paid or free directory, then your site is also accessible with these sites by the search engine. By directory submission, you can be confident of getting traffic on your site. In this way you can enhance the Google Page Rank for site as well as your SERP also grows up. Directory Submission helps in creating relevant and long lasting link building.

In my new book -- see preview on Facebook -- I isolate five conversion signatures, one of which is right for your website. One is the Site as a Service signature, and the first conversion strategy is "Turn Visitors into Tryers."

This case study bears out the importance of that strategy. SaaS sites have an advantage over ecommerce sites in that their visitors can try the product right there on site. Why not offer a trial? Find out the other strategies in a free video introducing the book's core concepts.

In my book Your Customer Creation Equation I talk about the two conversions that online services have:Conversion from visitor to trialConversion from tryer to buyerI recommend that online services find ways to get the visitor started as soon as possible. Online services have the advantage that we can try the product right there online.

This article is further proof that getting the visitor engaged with questions is a more effective way to find more tryers and buyers than the typical home page.

Site as a Service Home pages have one purpose: To get visitors to become "tryers" of your application. In general, we want to be as efficient as possible, asking for only the required information to join a trial. Then we let email carry the mail. Lander offers an interesting experience on their home page. This treatment requires several clicks when one would suffice. This does two very important things: It conveys a sense of the company's personality and brandIt discourages poorly qualified visitors making their list convert to buyers betterThis is a good trade-off a lower conversion rate (to tryer) and improving the quality of a list.

For online services like Shopify, "Onboarding" is a fancy word for conversion. This slideshow takes you through Shopify's successful onboarding process.

One thing to note: they have Optimizely split-testing software installed. This could be how they came to this successful "onboarding" implementation.