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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

Whenever someone writes an article about Conversion Consultants (like us), we are always nervous that we might cross some of these lines.

We know that we have made these mistakes in the past.

The issue is exacerbated when the author is someone like Amy Africa, who has the experience and likes to tell things like they are. Her middle name could be "Frank".

I'm happy to report that we have evolved beyond these "lies" and firmly embrace the matching truths.

If you are looking for someone to guide your optimization efforts, have a conversion with a Conversion Scientist.

 @getelastic Linda Bustos sees what I see: that the state of mobile websites is like the state of desktop websites circa 1995. What will we look back at and laugh at in five years?

I think we'll laugh at the "hamburger" menu, what Linda calls the Adidas menu.

I also think we'll laugh at responsive designs for small screens, like phones. Small screens need a custom design.

The good news is that we have better tools for testing, and I expect Mobile 1.0 to have a short life relative to Web 1.0.

Linda's article is full of examples for you to not emulate. It will be seen as a harbinger of change in mobile.

It feels good to get Liked on Facebook. Brands are working hard to get more and more likes for their pages. However, does this translate into loyalty and sales? eMarketer tries to answer that question.

Regular expressions rear their ugly head in more and more places. Google Analytics is just one.

For me the regular expression showed up in the excellent Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress. I needed to redirect a URL that had parameters, like this:

http://conversionsciences.com/conversion-upside-report/?t=10000&v=344&x=250

To do this, I could not use a regular redirect, as everything after the ? would be stripped away. I needed to use a Regular Expression Redirect. However, this sort of thing -- using query parameters -- wasn't covered in any of the Yoast documentation.

This article gave me the hint I needed, and the technique that ended up working. To summarize, I used the following regular expression to match my URL with the parameters:

^\/conversion-upside-report($|\/.*$)

The parentheses save the matching contents into a variable, which I can access using $1 in the new URL, like this:

resources/conversion-rate-optimization-calculator/upside-report/$1

It worked great. Give it a try: http://conversionsciences.com/conversion-upside-report/?t=10000&v=344&x=250

Thanks to Himanshu.

We often talk about the power of the thank-you page. Once someone has purchased from you or signed up with you, a psychological effect called "Likeing" takes hold. The person likes you more for no other reason than that they chose you.

So, you must be good.

We recommend that you ask for social shares on the thank you page, ask them to upsell on the thank you page, and sign up for email on the thank you page.

Here is another great thing to ask for: Feedback.

Our pages must persuade. This is even true of B2B sales, where we feel we must speak like an adult to other business people. When we speak like an adult we lose our ability to persuade, much as a parent has little ability to persuade a teenager... of anything. Here are eight terms that thrive in business writing that keep us from persuading the visitors who WANT to be persuaded. They have a choice to make. Help them make it.

If you love the science of persuasion like we do, you should definitely be following my friend Roger Dooley's blog.

Here's a great example of how he uses research to deliver actionable advice to marketers and business owners like us.

The last one on the list can really make a big difference.

7. Conduct user research or share findings with developers

It isn't hard to get user input thanks to inexpensive and easy-to-use services like UsabilityHub.com and Verifyapp.com.

Learn more about how and when to use tools like this in our free Everyday Behavioral Science training.

Thanks @chiefmartec for an incredibly helpful and detailed tutorial on measuring social like buttons in Google Analytics.

How you phrase a discount is a powerful way to increase conversions. Some visitors do not like to do math, or will do it wrong. Therefore, offering 20% off is less effective than save $18. However, high discounts (50%, 90%) may draw buyers more powerfully than the dollar value.

You have to find out for yourself.

Karon offers a nice list of alternatives and some links to research for your enjoyment.

 @neilpatel While it may sound self-serving to share with you an article on why you should spend money with a company like ours, a conversion optimization company, I think you'll find the points made by Neil Patel are a great guide to choosing your conversion optimization strategy.

Yes, you need a conversion optimization strategy, even if you don't hire consultants.

Given Neil's background of creating companies in the online marketing optimization space (KISSmetrics and CrazyEgg), I hope we'll see some more from him in the form of tools.

Bryan Eisenberg is a great teacher and is one of the fathers of conversion science. In this post, he asks his audience to make recommendations on pricing tables, those pages that ostensibly help us to choose the right product for us.

Here are my suggestions.

The main purpose of a page like this is "Help me choose." Choice, as it turns out, is a conversion killer, so these pages can be very helpful. This page needs to tell me which is "The best value." A badge would be helpful, probably on the most expensive item.

The little "signal bars" are unique and may be helpful, but don't really tell me at a glance what I want to know.

The copy is unhelpful. Instead of "Essential productivity..." how about "Great system for a tight budget." Instead of "Yield better results..." how about "Good value ready for your network." Instead of "2nd Generation Processor..." how about "This system has the power to do heavy number crunching, video editing and graphics."

There are too many prices here -- four to be exact. I say, pick two: Savings and total price. Crossing out "Starting price" is a proven way to communicate value.

Finally, put the coupon code near the "Customize & Buy" buttons to give those transactional shoppers an extra push.

What do you find frustrating about this page?

If you like to study the steady march of the generations, you'll find this study of Millennials fascinating. Basically, Millennials are here to frustrate the retiring Boomer generation. They are the revenge of GenX. I think you can see from this article that Millennials will baffle Boomers (and GenX) with their attitudes.

While Data Scientists are in demand, the ability to manage them to productive ends and incentivize them to drive the company forward are skills that managers will need to develop before they see ROI.

Data scientist agencies, like Conversion Sciences will thrive until internal management gets up to speed on what to do with these new brainiacs.

This sentence summarizes why website optimization is hard: "But despite our intellect and like all earthly creatures, the mental circuitry of our biological ancestors had been optimized by evolution for a world where timeliness was more valuable than accuracy."

Here's a nice roundup of do's and don'ts for conversion rate optimizers. Even experienced AB testers like us need to be reminded of the "big rocks" of CRO, and this article has them. Process, segmentation, qualitative research, and mobile.

We can detect pages with low scroll rates using click-tracking software like CrazyEgg. When we see a page with poor scroll performance, we have two options: Move key content higher on the pageAdd cues to increase scrollingHere are some ideas for how to increase scrolling.

WORD OF WARNING

Use of animations and parallax should be used with extreme caution. Test into these treatments as they may detract from your content, and introduce technical problems on certain devices and browsers.

If these answers don't ring true with you, you're not ready for conversion optimization. "Why do [Designers] want to get bogged down in all of this marketing stuff? I like building websites - and that's what I want to do." There are two simple answers: Money. Money."

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.