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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

In my upcoming book, I make the case that email is preferable to social media for storing market attention. You might think that, in the era of mobile devices, my preference for email may seem quaint.

Think again.

Clearly, mobile devices and email go together like milk and Cap'n Crunch cereal. Only healthier. Enjoy these stats and keep that email coming!

If you're a frequent reader of our blogs, you won't be surprised by this report from Custora stating that email is a more effective marketing channel than social networks.

In fact, I say in my book that email is the biggest social network on the planet. Business people plan their days by their inbox. They program audible notifications when new items come into their inbox. It's not smart, but it's true.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you should send self-promotional crap. That won't work in email, mail or social media. But certainly don't eliminate email from your marketing mix.

Your conversion rate is affected by a series of "micro-conversions", and this is especially true of email. To get your emails to convert, you must get the recipient to open it, and three components affect open rates: Who it is fromThe Subject LineThe first lines of text, which are shown by many email clientsThis article focuses on subject lines that work for those of us offering training and education. These may have more limited success with other audiences. It is interesting nonetheless.

 @unbounce Chris Pearson of DIYThemes recently stated that email is the foundation of online marketing. Period. B2B or B2C, email continues to outperform social media by a wide margin according to MarketingSherpa (and others). Here are some interesting tips on how to get your readers opening and clicking more of your email.

In my new book, I talk about the importance of having Marketing Batteries that store visitors attention for you to use over and over. The "Subscriber Battery" is your email list. The "Social Battery" will include your Twitter followers.

The problem with the Social Battery is that it discharges unreliably compared to the Subscriber Battery. As a result I recommend converting your social networks to email contacts. This charges your Subscriber Battery from your Social Battery.

Here is a great set of tactics to get more email subscribers from Twitter.

 @tawatson This is a smart way to look at email frequency. I especially like having a "maximum time between emails." 

As you know, I believe email is more effective than social media marketing at this juncture. This article drives the point home. "Email is, unsurprisingly,  still the most important mobile app. According to Forrester, 87 percent of smartphone workers use email on their devices (which leaves me wondering what other 13 percent use their smartphones for), and collectively, they do 32 percent of their email on a smartphone."

 @KISSmetrics This is a great tutorial for how you can keep your emails from getting tagged as SPAM. As a side bonus, these techniques will also help get more of your emails read by your prospects.

I especially like "Sending emails onec every two or three months can be more detrimental than sending multiple emails dialy. Why? Your customers may forget all about you."

It might help to look at email as a social network. It is, only it is VERY large. My 91-year-old grandmother "friended" me years ago on email. We share video, pictures, posts … everything via email. So, if you have a social media strategy that ignores the biggest social network on the planet, is it a complete strategy? Not even close.

While we don't recommend sending cold emails to prospect I found these tips somewhat fascinating especially:A picture is worth a thousand wordsRecipients who opened your first are more likely respond subsequent emailsAdd link website in the lineSome of might work for subscribers as well.

It's great to meet email professionals that 'get it." By "It" I mean conversion, or "What to do after the email recipient clicks through."

If you have any doubts about "It" then you will appreciate Scott Bratcher's summary check list. He even links to one of my stories.

Good email stuff from @matthewhayes on @ClickZ. Email is so important to conversion.

We've seen in email tests that subject lines can have implications far beyond the open rate. We've seen two identical emails with identical landing pages have the same open rates and the same click-through rates (CTR), but one generated more sales than the other.

What's the difference? The subject line.

In short, subject lines are important.

And they are difficult to write.

This infographic does a great job of boiling things down to help remove the indecision when you are writing subject lines.

Email is the biggest social network on the planet. If you find yourself reluctant to tackle this proven cahnnel, here is a one-stop resource for inspiration and instruction.

Email in a Mobile and Social World

Once again email wins (as usual) but most companies are doing it wrong.

I recommend a kind of social media strategy that we call "Content-oriented" social media. This strategy revolves around creating content and sharing it with your social networks. If it gets shared around, you generate more qualified prospects to your site to convert. Clicks are measureable, which we like at Conversion Sciences. Here are nine errors we make that limits the amount of sharing that goes on around our content. NOTE: In #8, the writer defines six sharing personas. Note that 7 of the 8 prefer email as a tool of their sharing. This is an article on social media. The insinuation is that email is a social media tool. You may know that I call email the largest social network on the planet. Just saying...

 The interesting graphic shown in this post by Custora shows how e-commerce businesses are gaining customers and how that has changed since 2009.

It is no surprise to see cost-per-click (CPC) search advertising growing over that time. However, it is gratifying to see that email has grown the fastest, far outstripping banner advertising, Facebook and Twitter.

In my book I say that email is the biggest social network on the planet. It appears to be so for e-commerce companies as well.

Everything is true about email, except that it is dead. When you factor in conversions, sales and engagement, email is just getting better.