eCommerce Analytics

Over the last few weeks Google has been rolling out remarketing features to users of its AdWords platform. These new features allow companies to continuously target visitors with ads after they’ve left its website in the hopes of luring them back. Think email remarketing but with ads on a content network.

Remarketing (often called retargeting) is not new. Dozens of companies have been offering this functionality for some time, including Criteo, Fetchback, Dotomi, and Adroll.

So why all the fuss? One big reason. Nearly every online retailer already has an AdWords account. This means the friction of setting up a remarketing program has suddenly been drastically reduced.

The Case For Google Remarketing

For many online retailers, the easiest way to dip a toe into remarketing is to do it with Google’s new features. There are no contracts to sign, no new relationships to forge, and a familiar PPC cost structure. It’s also relatively easy to set up a simple remarketing campaign that retargets site visitors with a generic ad.

Most important, the reach of Google’s AdSense network cannot be beat. No matter where your visitors go after they leave your site, you can be sure that they’ll soon be seeing an ad from Google’s network.

The Case Against Google Remarketing

The biggest drawback to using Google for your remarketing program (if you’re a typical online retailer) is the sheer scale of Google’s business. Google has to make its features appeal to every company in the world in order to make the tiniest contribution to their overall growth. They simply cannot afford to concentrate on adding features specific to integrating with e-commerce processes. Instead, Google’s business dictates that they must provide a self-service set of tools in the hopes that companies will do the heavy lifting with regards to business logic.

The result of Google’s reliance on self-service tools is that you’ll likely need a front-end developer to modify Google’s tracking code on the fly and a lot of patience for manually defining groups and rules in the AdWords interface. And if you want to integrate your remarketing program and reporting with your other systems, it’ll be up to you to do it since Google offers no professional services.

Should You be Using AdWords Remarketing?

If you are a tech savvy organization or are looking to get started with a basic remarketing program, then Google Adwords could be the perfect solution. It has familiar interface, a name you more or less trust, and solid functionality.

But if you are looking to implement a more sophisticated remarketing program or you need some expert help to guide you then you will want to look elsewhere. Like the rest of its tools, Google’s remarketing features are made exclusively for the self-service crowd.

We know why shoppers abandon carts and we also know that email remarketing is an effective way to lure some of those shoppers back to complete their purchase. But how can you try remarketing to users with abandoned carts without investing a lot of time and money?

Try a Simple PHP Remarketing Script

There are a lot of good reasons to implement a robust remarketing system but sometimes there’s beauty in simplicity, especially when you just want to try something out quickly to see how well it works. To that end, we present a simple PHP script to send remarketing emails to your shoppers when they abandon carts.

The Abandoned Carts Input File

This script reads a comma delimited text file that lists carts that are currently abandoned (your e-commerce software likely has a report that creates this report or you may need to bang out a quick SQL query to do it). The file contains one row for each abandoned cart with the first element of each row being the email address of the shopper the cart belongs to. After that comes the products that were left in the cart. For example:

shopper1@yahoo.com, Item1, Item2, Item3
shopper2@gmail.com, Item1
shopper3@hotmail.com, Item1, Item2


The Script That Uses the Input File to Send Email

The php script below then sends out a reminder email to each customer in the file that shows them which items are still in their carts. You can customize the from name and address, subject, and body of the email by editing the configuration section at the top of the script.


<?php

?>


To use this script, just copy and paste the above code into a file and save it as email_remarketing.php (or whatever) on your web server or a server with a php interpreter installed. Then add your abandoned carts report to the same location and call it abandoned_carts.txt. Browse to email_remarketing.php in a web browser and off it runs.

Some Caveats

There are a few things to keep in mind before using this script:

• This script was made to be run on linux servers. It will work on Windows servers but you have to add some mail relay info to the script (learn how here)
• This script sends only plain text email but you can tweak it to send HTML email if you like
• You shouldn’t send too many emails at a time with this script, otherwise you’ll run the risk of having the emails marked as spam and/or your mail relay throttling your throughput. Limit it’s use to a few hundred a day tops
• This is simple, simple, simple and doesn’t contain any real management or reporting functionality.

Using a simple php script to do email remarketing is not a sexy or glamorous solution to cart abandonment but it will let you test the waters quickly and see what kind of response it drives. If you like the results you see early on you can certainly add more functionality to the script or even consider building or buying a more advanced system.

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.

Looking a report of abandoned shopping carts can be frustrating. All those carts stocked full of high margin items just waiting to be checked out. But the shopper bailed just before pulling the trigger. Was it something you said?

There two recent studies that examined reasons online shoppers fail to purchase after adding items to their carts. CheetahMail published statistics as part of a whitepaper in January 2010 as did Forrester in late 2009 (link to summary blog post). Both largely agree with each other. Let’s combine them and see what they tell us:

Biggest Reasons Shoppers Abandon Carts

(40-60% respondents citing as important)

• Didn’t want to pay shipping costs/High shipping costs
• Total cost of purchase was more than expected (read: tax + S&H)
• Was doing research/wanted to compare price on other sites

Less Important Reasons

(10-30% respondents citing as important)

• Wanted to look for coupon
• Wanted to buy offline instead
• Checkout was too complicated
• Security concerns

No Silver Bullet Here

While it’s tempting to think that a streamlined checkout process can make big improvements in cart abandonment rates the data doesn’t seem to bear that out. Instead, the biggest source of control we have in getting a customer to complete a purchase is letting them know as early in the process as possible what the total price after tax and shipping and handling will be.

But won’t this just shift abandonment from the cart to an earlier point in the process when the full tax + S&H total is displayed? Unfortunately, it probably will. So we need to look at other ways to address the abandonment problem.

Remarketing to the Rescue?

Let’s take a look at how to do email remarketing — the process of sending follow-up emails to customers who left the site with a full cart. Remarketing produces surprisingly good conversion rates and can be a valuable tool in the fight against cart abandonment.

Ready to get started? Here’s a PHP email remarketing script to jump start your efforts.