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DIY Call Tracking from Jason Owen at PubCon

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

Thank you and confirmation pages are an overlooked opportunity to keep conversion scenarios going.

Shopping Cart abandonment is one of the first places we look when helping e-commerce sites increase their conversion rates. Why spend time and money optimizing a site if the buyers can't get through a shopping cart? Pricing and shipping offers are two issues we have to address at a strategic level. Here is a very informative article from @SeeWhyInc. I particularly like their cart value vs. abaondment rate graphs. Check them out.

 @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."

Leads, customers and conversion rate round out this list. Now that's conversion.

What Seth calls a "Use Case" we call Personas in the world of conversion. Otherwise the benefits are the same: understanding your most important visitors, ending bad relationships with poor customers, and getting everyone on the same page.

"I may have an answer to your questions."

Doesn't this sound hopeful? And you do. Whatever industry you are in, it is fundamentally your duty to understand your market's problems and to figure out how to solve them. The philosophy of content marketing is that teaching prospects about their problems is as important as teaching them about your solutions.

So, if you have some helpful knowledge that helps prospects solve problems, how are you letting them know that you're there for them?

Here are twelve ways to call attention to what you offer. Then you can let the content speak volumes for your solutions.

Does your company have a Markishing department yet? That's a Marketing/Publishing department, and if you don't you better start working on it.

This infograph from Eloqua illustrates the power of content at various stages of the purchasing cycle. You don't have to be an enterprise to be using this kind of markishing approach to marketing. Learn about content development and cascades in my up-coming book.

I'm always wary of any list that claims to be "complete." This list comes pretty close, and includes one of my favorite selections from The Conversion Scientist Blog.

The list is novel in that you can select the categories of interest to you and the post will modify itself to serve you best.

I'll be intersted to find out if this novel feature increases conversion rates on the page.

What do you think?

You may believe us, but does your boss?

As you know we believe that dedicated landing pages are one of the most powerful ways to increase revenue and leads online. It would be best to have a special landing page for each offer you make in an ad, email or on your site.

But who has time to build all of those pages??

If you knew that more landing pages meant more money, you might be able to get your boss to give you more resources.

This post from Hubspot may have the data you need.

This is a great roundup of the biases and psychological effects that drive humans to act. Every marketer should be comfortable with these concepts.

This article turns much "good advice" about writing on its ear. And it passes the test of an article on writing: It's well-written.

Landing pages are a key strategy for monetizing your investment in pay-per-click ads. Here's some evidence of the importance of having landing pages with text that Google can read.

While our landing pages are for humans, we must remember that Googlebot is a visitor as well.

 @crestodina I spoke at the Conversion Conference #convcon this week about flipping your message according to your Web visitor. This can be applied to subject lines, search ads, display ads and landing pages.

One of the most powerful "flips" is between the four kind of visitors outlined by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg in their book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?.

Here is a creative twist on the four kinds of visitors you'll encounter on your website: video game characters.

Is the page, post or email you're working on right now targeting Frogger or Mario or Galaga or PacMan?

It should.

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.

PayPal is a preferred method of payment for many of your visitors. Even if you've got a merchant account and gateway all setup, you should consider PayPal as an alternative source.

However, measuring transactions through PayPal is problematic. Or it was.

Here is an excellent post on how to configure your PayPal account and Google Analytics for full-transaction tracking, includkng Ecommerce tracking.

 @eConsultancy brings the excellent teaching of Claude Hopkins Scientific Advertising into our online world. It's almost conversion steampunk until you realize that we haven't invented very much original.

And we've left some smart ideas behind.

Enjoy these nine tips and you should be able to find a free PDF of Hopkins' book somewhere on the Web.

If not, email me.