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
The power of a personalization platform
Personalization is all about listening and understanding the individual customer which is key to any B2C company. Barilliance provides a personalization platform and our customers can leverage strong synergies between our products.
Here are 2 examples:
- Our product recommendations service, includes rich segmentation capabilities (from our behavioral targeting product) which allows our customers to setup sophisticated merchandising rules based on Geographic locations or on-site search terms for example, and to promote specific products for these visitors
- Customers who use our cart abandonment emails functionality , can use post click marketing tactics, and show a banner on the website to customers who clicked on the email, with the same offer they promoted in the email
Now think about feedback forms, the pop-ups that ask customers for feedback. Add a personalization platform underneath and suddenly this simple application becomes a channel to start relevant and proactive conversations with your customers. Instead of showing the same feedback form to everyone, you can start asking very specific and relevant questions. For example: shoppers who abandoned the cart and are first time visitors or customers who bought stuff in the last week or someone who arrived from an email campaign and is about to leave the site. Instead of starring at Google analytics and wondering about the low conversion rate of French visitors, you can be proactive and ask them why they are leaving or if they got confused.
Personalization changes the game and touches everything; that’s why we are so excited about it.
growing your email list
There are several common practices online retailers use to grow their email lists. Offering first time visitors a coupon is probably the most effective one and it can also create a nice conversion lift for this particular segment.
Yesterday, I came across a less common practice which could be also very effective. The merchant added an “email cart” button on the shopping cart page.
email my shopping cart
Most shoppers who abandon the shopping cart do not even start the checkout process and by using the “email my cart” value proposition, you can grow your email list, but even more importantly you get a chance to remarket to these shoppers .
Cart abandonment emails, the feedback opportunity
Most merchants think about cart abandonment emails as an opportunity to recover lost sales and that is indeed the ultimate goal. But following up with this segment of visitors presents another opportunity: getting their feedback.
Shoppers who started the checkout process but and have not completed the order is one of the most lucrative segments for feedback solicitation. From this segment, you can understand if your checkout process is too long, or if you charge too much for delivery or if first time visitors don’t feel confident buying from you.
One of our customers used this verbiage in his cart abandonment emails: “We’ve noticed that you recently tried to purchase some items from our website but for some reasons you haven’t finished the purchase. If we’ve done anything wrong please let us know by replying to this email or by calling us on …”
Guess how customers responded? many of them replied saying that the customer did not do anything wrong and provided additional information about their situation. From these emails our customer started conversations with these prospects that either led to sales or provided important feedback.
So when you craft your remarketing emails, think about them also as an opportunity to start a conversation with your prospects/customers and use the right tone to spark such conversations.
personalized email recommendations without integration
We’ve been supporting email recommendations for a while now but it required our customers to use our apis which also meant – an “IT project”. We noticed that this approach creates a barrier for adoption of the technology and we thought that there must be a better way to add product recommendations to emails without pushing the integration burden to our customers.
We are excited to announce that in the spirit of our “zero integration” philosophy we came up with an innovative way that allows our customers to add personalized product recommendations to emails without any coding. And even better, our new product works with any email marketing platform that supports custom fields.
As a marketer all you need to do is login to your Barilliance account and create an email recommendations widget and then:
1. Select your email provider
2. Customize the widget if you want to
3. Copy and paste the HTML into your email marketing template
4. That’s it!
After you hit “Send” in your email marketing software , your emails will contain personalized product recommendations based on customers’ recent activity on your website.
shopping cart abandonment service released
Last week we released the latest member of our e-commerce personalization products suite: a shopping cart recovery tool that sends automated emails to shoppers who left the checkout process without making a purchase.
Of course we maintained our zero integration philosophy which means that online retailers can implement the service in a few minutes. Our code snippet reads the content of the shopping cart without special tags!
Currently we provide an end-to-end solution and our system sends out the emails but in the future we will add “connectors” to popular email marketing platforms.
If you are using our product recommendations or segmentation products, there are exciting synergies between the 3 products. For example if you offer a promotion in the email, you can upload a matching banner on the shopping cart page that will be served on for those customers who clicked on the link embedded in the cart abandonment email.
Drop us a line if you want to give it a try.
What does Facebook’s new like button mean?
A few days ago Facebook announced their latest platform direction, the “Open Graph”. If you remember at some point Facebook tried “Beacon” which handled privacy miserably and failed. 2 years ago Facebook Connect was announced and was supposedly a big success but is now renamed “login” and is part of the new Open Graph and social widgets initiative.
The major change that Facebook is introducing is the “like” functionality which allows users to interact with the site and to see friends’ activity without connecting to Facebook if they are currently logged-in to Facebook. This is similar to “share this” in many ways. While this is probably going to increase engagement on the site, it is important to understand that as an e-commerce site you don’t establish relations with the user and don’t get access to the his/her data in this “like” model. Only when user connect or log- in to Facebook on your site, you get access to their data. So while the Open Graph could make e-commerce sites more social and engaging (see www.levi.com for example) it is recommended to drive users to login using Facebook on your site so that you can establish direct relationship with the user.
Last year we introduced our social widgets. Here is an example for our social wishlist widget:
We used Facebook connect and therefore participating sites had direct relationships with the users.
This is how it looks when I “liked” a product on levi.com
In this case only Facebook knows that I like the product but Levi.com does not, as I have not logged-in.
We are quite happy to see Facebook actively leading this revolution. As a personalization vendor we recognized the synergies between social networks and personalization early on, and leveraged infomration from Facebook in a unique way that is optimized for e-commerce sites. The new developments from Facebook will allow us to continue and innovate and make shopping more personal and social.
Global expansion
Q1 has been great for us. We deployed our services on 16 new e-commerce sites across 7 new countries (Brazil, France, Germany , Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK) .
We now have customers in 13 different countries in 8 languages, we are excited!
Going the extra mile
Yesterday I stumbled upon this blog post http://www.nonlineblogging.com/blog/2010/2/11/dont-be-mr-average-why-averages-are-a-bad-bad-thing-in-digit.html and it’s right on.
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.