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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

What is the conversion scenario for a blog? This defines it nicely.

My partner is fond of saying that the best judge of your marketing is your accountant. This is relatively easy to do online, to measure your marketing results all the way to revenue. Plus the learnings can be tried in other parts of the marketing portfolio.

Marketing is always trying to get a seat at the executive table. This report shows why CMOs continue to struggle.

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.

I'm giving away free copies of my book Your Customer Creation Equation: Unexpected Website Formulas of The Conversion Scientist. There are no strings attached.

Starting December 15 and running through December 19th, my book will be completely free in the Amazon Kindle Store. Just click on "One Click Buy" during the promo dates, and it'll be delivered right to your Kindle free of charge.

Don't have a Kindle? Never fear. You can read it on the Amazon Cloud Reader on your computer, or through the free Kindle App available for your Smartphone or iPad.  

  So what is this book I am offering for free? It's called The Customer Creation Equation: Unexpected Website Formulas of The Conversion Scientist™. It gives readers the foolproof formulas to creating a website that not only gets the right traffic, but converts that traffic to customers, returning customers and advocates.  

Some of the great things you'll learn in this book:

- Identify the unique customer creation formula for your site. - Set up your own digital conversion lab to measure your progress. - Develop landing pages for your site that actually deliver. - Charge your marketing "batteries" to reduce your advertising expenditures. - Communicate authoritatively with designers, developers, and executives.

So please, do not buy this book.  

Go over to the Kindle Store and get your copy absolutely free. Your website will thank you for it.

Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg often say, "You can't read the label from inside the bottle." It means that you can't really see the solution to a problem if you're too close to it.

This may be a good argument for bringing in consultants for your most important business processes. After working with a client for a year or more, we often find ourselves inside the bottle with them and have to get outside influences to read the label.

Apparently, there is a firm psychological principle at work here that can be measured. What does the label say on your business bottle?

A parent after my own heart. There are several important lessons about A/B Testing here: Alternate the children so that you eliminate natural differencesAlways declare a control before testing something elseYou must have a knowledge of statistics to do this rightAccurate measurement and tracking are critical

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.

What happens when you understand what your online recipe is? Magical things. More visitors. More sales. More leads. More revenue. This is not a job for a web designer or developer. As the business owner, marketing manager, or agency, you must know how to shepherd the development of a site into a repeatable, measurable formula. Here's an opportunity to learn more.

Did you know that load times affect conversion rates. Google has recently started penalizing your page quality score if you have slow load times. Pingdom Tools measure the performance of your Web site and help you diagnose the source of slow loading pages.

Dave Evans mentions me (among others) in an excellent overview of measurable Social Media strategy.

If it isn't measureable, it didn't happen.

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...

A new tool for our online conversion lab! Facebook is apparently going to give us more insight into the behavior of individuals on our Facebook pages. The more we know about the success of these pages, the better decisions we can make about spending our marketing time and dollars on social media.

Despite all the hype, social networks are not a panacea for businesses, and many are putting too many resources into them without knowing the payoff.

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

New way of thinking about the sales funnel.