I’ve never opened any of the emails but they keep sending them. If you look at the subject lines they are very similar: discounts and limited time offers.

As an email marketing manager , it’s hard to imagine the individual Inbox of a customer when you’re sending millions of emails on a weekly basis but clearly if you look at the emails below you can see that their email program can be improved. Few obvious steps to improve it include :

1. Reduce the frequency of emails for non engaged customers

2. Try to communicate a  different value proposition in the subject line

3. Use personalization to email relevant offers for me

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.