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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

The greatest threat to the accuracy of your analytics data is inconsistent implementation. Too often, Javascript "Tags" are left off of some pages, put on some pages twice or simply implemented wrong. And, as your site changes, more inconsistencies are created.

This affects more than just analytics tools. Advertising networks, ratings and review systems, user feedback systems and more rely on properly implemented javascript tags.

The promise of "Tag Managers" is that you can put one set of code on all of your pages, and then control, monitor and edit the javascript for all of these tags in one place, using rules to determine which tags get placed on which pages. It's another way for marketing to monitor the implementation of online systems without being beholden to IT.

Yay!

So, how are the biggest ecommerce companies using Tag Managers? Here's your answer.

For those students of analytics, here is a basic primer in how to look at those noodle-like graphs that Google Analytics and other packages prepare for you. There are some mines to be avoided and Stephane points them out artfully.

Interesting Videos for beginners. Includes Google Analytics and Web Optimizer how-tos.

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Great source for Web Analytics resources.

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Part 2 of Stéphane Hamel's Web Analytics primer. Warning: Beware of averages in time series.

Google Analytics can intimidate business managers, but it really is a tool to help business managers answer important questions. This overview from @lisabarone gives you  an idea of some of the good questions you can be asking your Web team to help you guide your online investments.

We're getting into some pretty deep stuff in part three of Stéphane Hamel's analytics primier. However, he saves the day with some simple definitions of when we can call something a trend.

We've had the privilege of working with several colleges to optimize their websites. The lessons laid out in this article cannot be overstated. According to SpyFu.com, of 5,050 websites in the "University" and "College" industries who spend more than $5000 per month on search ads, only 275 have split testing software installed. However, 4,208 have some form of web analytics software installed.

The bottom line is that those universities who are involved in testing their sites are going to win more top students to graduate and undergraduate programs.

"Many private universities spend upward of $2,000 to recruit each student who enrolls." A little optimization will go a long way.

Why Google Analytics is as good a choice as Omniture

 By @WAWorld These are some of the tools you want in your lab. They are the beakers, bunsen burners, mass spectrometers, and Geiger counters tha tyou use to test and evaluate your online marketing experiments.  From Web Analytics World

Why is conversion testing important? Well, get 12 experts in a room and you'll not find a great deal of agreement on what is right and wrong with a web page.

I will add that, had we all been given access to analytics, we would have come to some more common conclusions. Measure and test.

Quick Search Engine grader for web sites. Free.

How patient are you when surfing the Web? According to recent studies, you're not as patient as you might think. Slow loading pages will impact your conversion rates, and probably affect the ranking of your pages on the major search engines as well.

Recommended by Kate Buck, Jr.

An amazing list of tools for conversion scientists everywhere.