Group items tagged

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

Five Conversion Case Studies

Great case study on using Facebook to test ads and landing pages.

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.

Peep Laja @peeplaja has put together a great list of ways to increase conversion rate. The remarkable thing about this list is that he provides a case study for each of his recommendations, proof that these ideas have works somewhere. This lets you understand the circumstances that drove the improvements in conversion and help you choose the tactics you will use on your site. Thanks, Peep.

Good case study on landing page development.

The lesson of this landing page case study is "Less is more to a point." This supports the lessons of my Backward Landing Pages post and column.

 @unbounce Here is some data that we are seeing elsewhere, in which video increases conversion rates. The universal appeal of video is quite surprising -- and powerful.

@_EricElliott makes a strong case for choosing Web apps for your mobile users over deploying native apps through the app stores. We can add to this that AB testing Web apps (Elliott calls them progressive web apps) is easier with the tools we have. Many advanced tools don't yet support native applications.

However, responsive web designs aren't enough. You should still put the effort in to craft a mobile-centric web app, as if you were developing a native app.

This is a good overview of design trends from 2016. Not all of these trends are good ideas from a conversion optimization standpoint.

Scroll Animations, Large Thematic Images, Animated Micrinteractions, and Brutalism are probably hurting conversion rates.

The author makes a very important point: "this sort of experiment requires thorough research and in many cases the final result comes via several iterations tested and analyzed in terms of usability and visual perception."

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!

So, should you use a carousel, those rotating hero images now found at the top of most B2B and B2C websites?

The answer is "carefully."

This clever little site illustrates the reasons rotating banners are so frustrating. The timing, the amount of text and the order all come into play.

We have been able to tune a rotating hero on an ecommerce site so that it outperformed a static image. But it took several test cycles and didn't work in every case.

Have a little chuckle at yourself and enjoy the content on this site -- if you can read fast.

@yaost offers some good advice in this article. In particular, there are some testing "elephants in the room" that he points out. These include the fact that the Z score used by testing tools assumes a normal distribution -- a bell curve -- in the data. That is often not the case.

He also recommends ending tests on week boundaries. If you start a test on Friday and end it on a Tuesday, you may be exaggerating your results as Tuesdays are often bigger conversion days for ecommerce sites.

This article is just nerdy enough for most marketers, and you're going to have to add some nerdy to your repertoire if you're not already there.

In the case of paid search, the biggest barrier cited by 41% of company respondents was a lack of internal resources, followed by poorly converting websites (30%). Agency respondents had a different view on the issue though, with 49% blaming lack of budget, and 44% poorly converting websites.

Joe Pulizzi talks makes a convincing case that print is the marketing channel of the future.

Great case is made for using email to increase conversions of those who leave your site.

Great case studies from AB tests

This is a great example of how to optimize a purchase funnel

 @ReelSEO Having just completed my first two videos for my up-coming book, I was grateful to have these nine reminders of what makes video convert.

It's about time I started investing in video. The research and case studies I've read show that video is a powerhouse conversion tool, in almost all industries, B2B and B2C. Video isn't to boost your ego (although I like putting a little of myself in the footage). It has a job to do. These nine will help you get results.