eCommerce Analytics

Last time we talked a bit about the reasons behind abandoned carts and realized that there aren’t many weapons available to combat most of its causes. Even potential solutions that look tantalizing (showing S&H and tax on product pages) will likely just push abandonment to an earlier pre-cart point in the process.

If Nothing Else, Read These Two Stats

All is not lost, however. It turns out that remarketing to shoppers who have left full carts behind really can make a difference. Check out these two stats, pulled from the Experian CheetahMail report:

Even the most basic [remarketing] emails (even those that simply link to a website home page) pull in over 31% higher transaction rates compared to bulk promotions — a number that senior management will find difficult to ignore.

Yowza. That fact alone should should make you want to drop everything and put a remarketing program together today. But maybe you’re still skeptical. After all, won’t a remarketing email with a discount offer simply train shoppers to abandon the cart in hopes of a better deal?

Not to worry (from the same report):

Emails sent to cart abandoners (those who have placed an item in their shopping cart but have not converted) with an incentivized offer only pull $0.09 more in revenue per email than those emails that do not contain an offer.

We don’t even have to include a discount offer in the remarketing email to reap its rewards. Not bad.

I’m Convinced. What Else Should I Know?

Before you get started, keep these tips in mind when sending your remarketing emails:

Create a sense of urgency. Subject lines mentioning that an item is about to be out of stock or that the basket is about to expire is likely to garner a better response rate than one simply reminding the user that items are left in his or her cart.

Time it to hit the sweet spot. When is the sweet spot? Conventional wisdom says one  to seven days after the user abandoned the cart. Start by sending it two days after abandonment and then test random groups using different timing to find optimal response rates.

Link directly to the cart. From the report:

The quicker a customer can access their own cart and view the actual products they were interested in, the higher the returns.

How Much Time Will It Take?

Implementing a remarketing program is one of those best practices that can yield great results without much investment. If you’re ready to dip your toes in check out our next post. We provide, in usable form, the world’s simplest php email remarketing script that will get you a functioning remarketing program in a few minutes.

eMarketer has an interview up with Bill Nussey of Silverpop in which he warns against badgering customers with email marketing that is too frequent or irrelevant to their interests.  The phrase he used is to describe this more tailored, moderate approach to email marketing is “keeping it in the green zone”.

The phrase resonated with me — perhaps because the “green zone” is how we visually depict customers who are likely to respond favorably to given email content in our new product.  

Read The Email Marketing Green Zone »

I often feel that email is the neglected step child of retail marketing. We’ve all seen the news articles and blog posts that tout sexier marketing trends like Twitter and mobile marketing. Many retailers have already jumped on the social media and company blog bandwagon and will spend months planning and implementing these changes on their website. Yet, I so often run into marketers that are willing to throw together a weekly sales email in an hour and blast the same message to their entire customer list.  Why? Well, my guess is they are underestimating the “response” they get from email. Catalogers are quick to argue that offline communications drive online purchases, but how is online communication driving offline sales?

Read Why Getting Email Marketing Right is so Important »

For a long while, it seems as though email marketers have followed the idea of nothing ventured, nothing lost when it comes to email marketing. There was simply no reason to get better at email marketing because it didn’t cost all that much more to send out 1000 more emails. So what did it matter if the clickthrough rate could be optimized? It was easier just to buy 1000 more names and blast them all. Extra names = increase. Right? Well, now that every retailer out there is sending more emails, it’s making the forest that much thicker - and the path to your product that much more difficult to navigate. Couple that with the fact that a poor economy is just about the time that acquisition seems too pricey and we have a perfect climate for belt-tightening via smarter use of technology. Behold, the age of product recommendations has come to email.

Read Retail Email Marketing Embraces Product Recommendations »

I read a great blog post yesterday on why aligning your SEO and targeted email strategy is important to reducing your cost of new customer acquisition. Julie Batten’s Using Search and E-mail to Acquire Customers post at Clickz has some great info in it. I pulled out the following quotes that I thought were particularly interesting:

Read Importance of Coordinating Search and Targeted Email »

I talked last time about how variable pricing is a great way to maintain your margins on sale items and I gave three general steps on how to perform variable pricing with email marketing. The gist is that each of your customers has a different value for your products and the key is to figure out how to get them each to pay closer to what they are actually willing to pay. The main takeaway is that you should give different sale discounts to different segments of your customers based on their behavior patterns - and the patterns of other customers like them - concerning discounted items. Today, I’ll take a look at the main arguments that companies have when it concerns variable pricing.

Read Variable Pricing-Based Email Marketing: 25% Less Customers Can Make you 22% More Profit »

The one thing that any consultant will tell you is to start with the notion that profit = revenue - cost, and then go from there. The idea is that profit is the goal and that minimizing cost and/or maximizing revenue is the way to the goal. Typically, a firm must concentrate on one or another at a time to really be effective. What I’ve heard recently, however, with the economy in doubt, is a desperation-type chatter where firms want to concentrate on both at once and be effective at both. Well, the best action that I know that gets close to doing both, is database-based price discrimination.

Read How to Make Variable Pricing Work with Email Marketing »

Have we really dissected email marketing so thoroughly that we’re talking about best practices for “From” fields? In a word, yes.

Monday, Dharmesh Shah posted 8 email marketing tips distilled from an interview with Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman in The Boston Globe.  I agree wholeheartedly with 7/8ths of her tips, but #7 tripped me up a bit:

7. Two things that get your email opened: #1:  “From” and #2 “Subject”. 

Read Email “From” Field: Calling Card or Attention Grabber? »

First things first, no matter who you support, I hope all of you have either gone out to vote today, or are planning to go out to vote. Although I’m usually not this dedicated, I woke up at 6:30 this morning to try and make it to the polls by 7. I was hoping I might be able to get their before the crowds, but by the time I got there at 6:55, the line was already two blocks long. I’ve voted at the same polling station for over 10 years now, and I have to admit that I’ve never seen such an incredible turn out for any election thus far. It took me about an hour to make it through, which was actually less than what I originally thought, but glad I beat the long lines I know will be there later this evening.

Read Obama Leading in the Polls? Perhaps it’s Due to Better Marketing »

Being a Boston-area, MIT-based company, Istobe always pulls for other Boston-area, MIT-based companies. And this goes double for companies in the customer analytics and targeted email realms. Such is the case with Constant Contact, one of the email service provider (ESP) titans out there. And now we get a new survey from Constant Contact that echoes our ramblings at Istobe. email marketing is becoming more and more important for small businesses as the economy stumbles into the Christmas season.

Read Constant Contact Survey Shows Small Businesses Will Rely on Email Marketing this Holiday Season »