It turns out that there is another effective technique to reduce cart abandonment rate. When cart abandoners come back  to your website after a few hours or days , you can help them complete the order by showing them a “Welcome back, we saved the cart for you” type  message. Here is a nice example from hello direct:

One of our customers who setup a similar campaign witnessed 70% increase in conversion rates when measured compared a control group which did not see the “welcome back” message.  It’s not surprising.  Usually finding the link to the shopping cart is hard, in some cases even very hard…

Thinking about what customers are trying to do next and segmenting them based on their most recent intent can help you win them as this example demonstrates.

As we get closer to the holidays season, marketers who can come up,  launch and test these type of campaigns quickly and without IT support, are more likely to win new customers.

We think that the next level of targeting and personalization will be based on information derived from the shopper’s social network profile.

60 Million people used Facebook connect in 2009. This number is amazing if you consider the disaster Facebook Beacon program created not long ago. The main difference is that now, users explicitly allow Facebook to access their information and have full control over the information that is published to their wall.

While the basic Facebook login provides is a 1 click signup process, it presents many untapped opportunities for online retailers to differentiate themselves using this technology, and personalize the shopping experience.

Here are a few ideas to get you started thinking about the new possibilities Facebook login opens up:

1. Welcome shoppers who have upcoming birthdays, with a special message or even better with a credit towards their next purchase
2. Show shoppers pictures of friends with upcoming birthdays and recent products they added to their wish list (Amazon already does that)
3. Identify shoppers with high social capital (for example more than 500 friends) and offer them incentives to perform social actions on the site such as “become a fan”
4. Music stores could promote products based on artists and bands the  shopper “likes”
5. Simple viral promotions that use “invite friends” functionality will be much more effective than asking users to enter email addresses of their friends to get a discount

These are just a few examples we have started to experiment with . There are many creative ways you can engage customers who login using Facebook.

You can see the report below:

UK conversion lift

UK visitors really liked the message and converted at 4.9% while the control group (UK visitors who did not see the message) converted at 0.5%.

That’s a big change. It did not involve promotions just a simple message that reassure customers that you ship products to where they live.

There are a few ways you can identify and value your repeat customers. The most naive way is by frequency and amount of purchase.  The image below shows how you can do it using our behavioral targeting product.

Most online retailers tend to focus on converting their first time visitors and do not reward their existing and often most loyal customers.  Studies have shown that top converting e-commerce sites do so well because of their focus on repeat customers.  It’s a good practice to reward repeat customers and offer them discounts to increase their loyalty, if you don’t do it, think about it!

There is another activity that it is becoming more and more important to measure and should be taken into account when evaluating the value of customers – it is their social activity. A like or a tweet from a customer who has many real friends/followers could result in increased sales.  A customer that posts a good review about your product can help convert future visitors who read this review.  These customers are valuable even if they are not big spenders themselves and should be treated accordingly.

If you think about it, you can’t really improve conversion rates unless you start segmenting your traffic and identifying those under-performing segments. Sure it takes time but compare it to the investment you make in acquiring media and driving visitors to your website. Go the extra mile: segment your traffic, figure out which segments are not converting and target them with relevant and personalized  messages. Improving conversion rates for these segments is the only way to increase the average.

There is  a fundamental difference between optimizing content based on a/b testing using tools such as Google Website Optimizer and serving targeted content based on manual or automatic segmentation rules. The first means someone creating multiple versions of a webpage and then activating a tool to measure which page variation is the most effective in achieving a certain conversion goal.

When we talk about Dynamic content in the segmentation/targeting space we mean that content will change dynamically based on visitor’s attributes and intent: for example promotional banners will change based on search keywords or Geolocation data. Of course it’s important to run testing on dynamic targeted content to measure its impact  on conversion rates and sales but this testing is very different than the a/b testing done for optimization.

When we clicked on one of the ads, and arrived to a landing page there was nothing on the page about the big sale which had been promoted in the ppc campaign. In addition the “Retail Price” was not listed on the page so  customers who landed on the page and were expecting to see a big sale were disappointed and left the site.

If you are spending so much money on ppc, you can easily increase your ROI by personalizing and optimizing landing pages to reflect the message which brought the customer to your e-commerce site in the first place. In this case adding  a “big sale” banner for the ppc segment and showing the list price would definitely move shoppers in the right direction.

We also recommend that you do not stop in personalizing landing pages but also show targeted messaging through out the session or even on return visits for customers who arrived with a specific intent (in this case to benefit from a sale).

The tool allows marketers to define highly targeted customer segments and present visitors with relevant personalized messages and product offers throughout their shopping experience. If shoppers arrive from your Google Campaign why not welcome them with the same message/offer you had on your Ad copy?

No coding , no IT , 5 minute implementation
Like our other services, the new segmentation tool is built on top of our Zero Integration technology and is utilizing a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model, and thus can be implemented in a few minutes. No coding, no back end integration we do it all.

Add content anywhere
You can add personalized content on virtually any page of your your website and tie it directly to search terms, referring urls, or referring marketing campaigns that brought the customer to your website. You can decide on which pages the content will be visible and do it yourself in a few minutes without IT involvement.

We understand your catalog really well
Our technology automatically extracts deep catalog information from the site HTML pages  so you can go beyond banners and target visitors with individualized product offers.

Social media integration

We introduced some innovative features which allow marketers to develop intimate relationships with customers and target them based on profile information from Facebook. These features are enabled if we you using one of our social shopping application.

We kept it simple
One of our design principles was to keep it simple. We’ve developed a clean, simple yet powerful tool that can be used without training by any marketer.

Feel free to drop me a line at ido at barilliance.com if you want to test drive the tool