Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Getting Started with Facebook Offers
With a few marketing tools already in play, like Facebook ads and sponsored stories, Facebook recently launched Facebook Offers for Page Administrators. The feature enables you, as page administrator, to offer discounts or promotions from your page. These promotions potentially create more customers, drive traffic to your website or store and increase sales.
Offers can be shared with the people who like your page, who can share them with their friends, who can share with their friends, and so on. Not only that, a news story is created just for offers, so when people claim your offer, it appears as a story on their news feeds and shared with their friends. These stories potentially create more claims, more stories, and generally more buzz. This feature, according to Facebook, is one of the most viral posts you can create from your page.
Facebook is relying on research that has shown that you can get 3 times return on investment in your business when people refer their friends, so Facebook Offers has the potential to generate more sales. Let’s face it, we all love a good deal, and we all love to tell our friends how great a deal we got.
Easy as 1 2 3
Creating an offer couldn’t be easier. All you have to do is go to your page and click Offer/Event and select Offer. You’ll have to decide if the offer can be redeemed in store (with a barcode), online (with a redemption code) or both. You’ll then be able to create a headline, determine the terms and conditions of your offer and limit the number of people who can claim it, should you choose to.
You’ll also need to set a budget. In its presentation of this new feature, Facebook conveniently claims that the higher the budget you set, the more people you’ll be able to reach. When you set the budget for you offer, it will show you the estimated reach of that particular budget, for example, the estimated reach for a $5 budget is between 95 and 176 people.
You can also determine who will your offer by gating the offer so only certain people can see it, or by adding news feed targeting to optimize your offer’s reach.
How does it work from a customer’s point of view? When someone claims your offer, they’ll receive an email with your terms and conditions, the offer’s expiration’s date, an online redemption code or barcode. In other words, all the details you filled in when you created the offer.
A few tips for creating a successful offer
Obviously, you learn most from experience, so by all means, experiment with your offers and get creative. If, however, you don’t want to feel like you’re shooting in the dark, here are a few tips that might help get you started:
- Give exclusive offers.
- Make a substantial discount. Facebook recommends at least 20% off, or even better, offer something for free, like “buy one get one free”.
- Clearly describe your terms and conditions.
- Use clear and appealing photos, preferably of people using your product, which tend to perform better than images of the product by itself. Make sure the photo looks good when viewed in a thumbnail.
- Keep your headlines simple and informative. Lead with your offer rather than a marketing slogan.
- Set a reasonable expiration date. Give people at least a few days to claim your offer.
- Promote your offer by pinning it to the top of your page so people will notice it.
- Inform your staff about the offer and its terms and conditions.
- Set longer expiration date but spend most of ad budget in first 3 days to create a viral buzz.
Success Stories
As new as this feature is, there is some data regarding its effectiveness. A Facebook case study of Auckland’s Big Little City, the consumer brand for Auckland’s central city Business Improvement, shows 10,000 people claimed offers, as well as 170% increase in fan base over a period of two months.
Sweet Frog, a frozen yogurt store with multiple locations in the US, reported 9,200 people claimed its offer and 144 people redeemed it in store. According to Facebook case study, the offer generated 500 new likes for the brand’s page.
More flexibility in your cart abandonment email templates
When we design our products and specific features within them ease of use is one of our main concerns. We consider the fact that our customers can log-in and have a cart abandonment email ready for use in less than 5 minutes a major advantage. One of the things that makes this possible are our built-in best practices together with default options that work well for almost everyone.
But sometimes our customers want more control over how things are laid out in the email and now that is possible using our advanced html widget. Using the advanced widget you can create an html template that will be used to display the items that were abandoned in the cart. You are also not only limited to displaying the item’s image but can also display it’s name and price.
To use the advanced widget simply edit your cart abandonment rule and check the Advanced widget (HTML template) checkbox.
The widget is comprised of three sections: header, footer and item html. The header and footer are optional and can be left empty. The item html is displayed for each item in the email. This means that if you decide to display the item in a table then the tables’ tags need to be placed in the header and footer (since they are repeated only once) while the main table data is placed in the item html section.
Inside of the item html section you can use the following tokens:
%image_url% – A link to the product’s image. This should be used in the `src` attribute of an `img` element.
%product_name% – The name of the product
%product_price% – The current price of the product
%click_url% – This link will lead to either the product’s page or to the shopping cart, depending on the setting you choose in *Click on product images goes to*. It should be used in the href attribute of the a element.
The advanced widget can be used in cart abandonment emails, viewed products emails and post-purchase emails. Below you can see the difference between how cart abandonment items are usually laid out and a possible use of the advanced html widget:
How to measure shopping cart abandonment rate in Google Analytics
While many online retailers know that shopping cart abandonment is part of the business, not every retailer will experience the same abandonment rate. Since the first step in solving any problem is understanding it, let’s see how we can measure the shopping cart abandonment rate in Google Analytics.
Google Analytics needs no introduction. This extremely powerful tool is used by over 10 million websites and is invaluable for analyzing and making the right marketing decisions. To measure the abandonment rate we will make use of two advanced features: Goals and Funnel.
Goals allow you to define and track conversion rates for various objectives. An objective can be anything: a visit to a certain page, filling and submitting a form or staying on the site for a certain period of time.
A Funnel is the path a visitor is expected to take on his way to completing the goal.
With these two terms defined you can probably already guess how we will set this up: our Goal will be the order confirmation page and the funnel will be the list of URLs a visitor must go through after adding an item to the shopping cart. In most ecommerce platforms when an item is added to the cart the user is automatically redirected to the cart page, so the cart page will be our starting point followed by the checkout page.
Note: To set up goals you must be an administrator of the Analytics account.
- Click on admin, select your profile and the click on the Goals tab
- Enter a descriptive name for the Goal, we’ll call ours “Cart to Purchase”
- In Goal type select URL Destination and enter the URL of your order confirmation page. This page is typically accessed only when an order is completed
- Click the Use funnel checkbox to add the necessary steps to complete an order. In the screenshot below you can see that I added the cart page as step one and the checkout page as step two.
- Save your Goal.
And that’s it! Depending on the amount of traffic on your site it could take anywhere between a couple of hours to a couple of days to see meaningful data.
How can we tell the shopping cart abandonment rate? Using the Funnel Visualization page.
This report contains a lot of interesting data but the one we care about is the abandonment rate. We can see that in our sample data we have a 43.66% funnel conversion rate which means that our abandonment rate is 56.34%.
I hope you found this post useful.
New Features: Enhanced and Personalized Triggered Emails
Today we are launching two new features that expand the scope of triggered emails and increase the potential synergy between our different products.
Shopping cart abandonment doesn’t necessarily mean that the experience you provided to the visitor was lacking. Sometimes the visitor is simply not sure about the product he wants to buy. A new feature allows you to use personalized product recommendations in your cart abandonment emails so visitors see not only what they abandoned but also related products and alternatives.
To use the feature simply select Barilliance Triggered Emails as your email provider and paste the html code inside your cart abandonment template.
A second new feature is Post Purchase Triggered Emails. Just as you can target visitors who didn’t complete a purchase, you can also send triggered emails to visitors who recently completed one and ask them to send a review for the product they just bought or send specific offers depending on the purchased item. It’s also a great way to reach out to customers who haven’t made a purchase in a while.
Post Purchase Emails are available as a new action under your existing cart abandonment actions menu.
As always, feedback and suggestions are welcomed !
This is just too funny not to share
As you probably know, one of our products is a shopping cart abandonment solution, which sends triggered emails to people who leave items in online shopping cart without completing the purchase.
A couple days ago, we received the funniest voice mail ever. We just couldn’t stop laughing.
Hear it for yourself here:
Shopping cart abandonment voicemail
Checkout using Facebook login on skechers.com
There is an opportunity for online retailers to leverage Facebook login (formerly known as Facebook Connect) to streamline the checkout process. I wanted to share what skechers.com did and while not perfect, it’s a good start.
The first checkout screen presents the traditional options but adds the option to use Facebook/Twitter.
When clicking on the Facebook login button , the user is prompted to grant Skechers permission to access his/her account
Next, the user is taken to the account page which I found a bit confusing. I would expect to arrive directly to the next page where I can fill additional data and submit my order.
So I had to click “checkout now”, and then we see the value of Facebook login. Skechers fills some of the information for me (First and Last name) and it also has my email address (from my Facebook account). For some reason , the country was not automatically selected for me.
Next steps are the typical additional checkout pages you would expect to see. What do you think? Do consumers prefer to checkout using their social network profiles on skechers.com?
Major update to the behavioral targeting product
Today we are announcing a major upgrade to the behavioral targeting product. The goal of this release is to make it as simple and quick as possible to get value from the product, especially for new customers.
Often, we’ve been asked for best practices that could be implemented using our BT product so we added the “Opportunities” feature which is a collection of pre-defined best practices that customers can use out of the box.
The second feature is the “Offer Zone”. The Offer Zone is a dynamic content zone which allows marketers to create targeted messages quickly without the need for external designers. It also supports tokens, which means that you can create a single rule that shows the message: “We ship to %country%” , and visitors from different countries will see their respective country names and flags. In the screen shot below you can see an example of the offer zone on our website at the bottom right corner.
Barilliance offer zone
The combination of the Offer Zone and Opportunities features, allows you to benefit from best practices and ideas that worked for other customers and get to test them on your site real quickly.
Auto applying coupons for eligible customer segments
Back in November we released a new and powerful feature as part of the behavioral targeting product. It allows marketers to automatically apply coupon codes only to eligible segments of customers, and to create a sense of urgency and scarcity around the offer. It also provides better control of codes distribution since you don’t need to communicate the actual code to customers – our software fills the code and applies it automatically.
The screen below shows an offer to international visitors who arrive to GolfMena.com – $20 off on international shipping
When they click on the banner and arrive to 3balls.com , this segment of customers see the offer and that it expires in 24 hours
Next when they add products to the cart (value over $99) , the coupon code is applied automatically for them. This is just one of many segments you can target with this feature. Other examples will be discussed here in the future.
Increasing Email CTR from 6% to 50%
A customer of ours found out that his email marketing efforts were becoming less and less effective. During the last year he sent out 50% more emails than the year before but generated less visits and lower sales. He thought that by better targeting and personalization the email communication with his customers he can increase the ROI from this under-performing marketing channel and boy he was right!
Instead of sending emails to everyone, he now sends emails only to customers who visited the website in the last X days ( we produce this list for him). And these customers receive relevant and personalized product recommendations based on their activity on the website.
Not surprisingly in the very recent campaign, CTR increased from 6% to 50%
cart abandonment due to high shipping cost
A recent customer used our targeted feedback forms functionality to survey shoppers who abandon the checkout process. Very quickly, the top reason emerged and not surprisingly it was high shipping charges.
Many websites in the US offer free shipping when a certain purchase amount is reached but there are more creative tactics one can use. Here are a few ideas that can drive loyalty and payback in the long run:
1. Offer free shipping to first time visitors who are nearby
2. Offer free shipping to customers who purchased in the past.
3. Offer country specific discounts on shipping based on order value