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.

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:

Many of our clients opt to try and recoup visitors who abandon the shopping cart by offering them a promotion. An interesting question came up over which promotion would entice more visitors to come back and complete their orders. Would a customer prefer to get a 10% discount of the total or would Free Shipping sound like a better proposition?

So we tested. Two different cart abandonment email templates were prepared and A/B testing was used to see what works best. 50% of abandoning visitors received an email alluring them to the charms of free shipping while the other 50% were put in the tough spot of saying no to 10% off.

It’s worth noting that this particular test was run on an online shop that sells a wide variety of consumer items but nothing that would be considered a high ticket item. The average order value hovers around $60.

It didn’t take long to see that the competition wasn’t fair and a winner was quickly announced. Free shipping performed 100% better than 10% off. Since the goal of this promotion was to convert people who abandoned the shopping cart, offering free shipping ended up doubling the conversion rate of the campaign.

Considering the items sold, average order value and the segment of visitors this promotion targeted; automatically going for the higher converting promotion was not a clear-cut choice. In some cases the discount was too steep to turn a profit or make the promotion worthwhile for the business. This time our cart abandonment segmenting features really came in handy so after calculating the right cutoff point the cart abandonment campaign was adjusted to offer the free shipping promotion only to customers whose cart total was above the cutoff point. The rest had to settle for a 10% discount. I think both groups ended up quite happy. That’s the important thing, no?

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.

1. Click on admin, select your profile and the click on the Goals tab
   
2. Enter a descriptive name for the Goal, we’ll call ours “Cart to Purchase”
3. 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
4. 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.
5. 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.

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 !

Send to Mobile using QR codes

This is our first experiment in the mobile space. The idea is to allow your customers to easily switch from their PC to their mobile using the barcode application on their phones. While on your website, customers can click on “Send to Mobile” tab, scan the code and continue browsing from their mobile devices.

Shopping cart abandonment

• User defined suppression value – you can limit the number of emails that will be sent to customers in a given period of time.  
• More segmentation options – you can send different emails to different customer segments based on the content of their shopping cart.  For example, you can exclude customers who abandoned products from a specific brand from getting an email with a coupon
• A/B testing – you can now test 2 versions of an email and see which works better for you

Behavioral Targeting

• You can target customers using iPads, iPhones and Android devices as well as target customers by screen size
• Quick access to reports

As always feedback is welcome!

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?