“Three fifty,” says the waiter.

“How much for a refill,” asks the man.

“That’s free.”

“Fine, then, I’ll just have the refill.”

You and I both know there’s no such thing as a free cup of coffee. Somebody pays for every product or service you get.

The incredible thing is that consumers know there’s no free lunch, just as well as you know it. Then why do we like to pretend “free shipping” really exists, and why is it so powerfully effective?

In this article, we take a look at the free shipping paradox. We’ll talk about how best to offer free shipping, and how, when done the right way, it drives conversions and boosts bottom line profit.

Do You Really Have to Offer Free Shipping?

Studies conducted over the past five years consistently point to free shipping as the most effective promotional tactic available to ecommerce websites.

Prior to the growth of free shipping options for ecommerce stores, local retailers could counter the “I can get it cheaper online” objection with “Not after you add on the cost of shipping.”

Free shipping is a primary factor in the steady expansion of ecommerce sales. According to YCharts, online business grew from $27.8B for 2Q 2006 to over $97.3B during 2Q 2016.

And while the reality is that free shipping plans often fail to provide significant cost savings to consumers (the expense must be covered somehow), conversion rates typically take a healthy leap forward when free shipping is featured.

Conversion rates typically take a healthy leap forward when free shipping is featured.
Share on X

Why do online sellers who offer free shipping get such great results? Here are some of the most cited reasons:

• Consumers don’t like surprises. They want to know the total price upfront. Making them go through the entire checkout procedure, before they can find out how much shipping will cost, presents an added burden and potential disappointment. You set up a situation quite likely to waste their time.
• “Free” is a perennially sweet word. If I can purchase your merchandise online and not have to drive to the local retailer, I save time. If you will ship to me at no cost, I’ve also saved money – certainly gas money, and it appears I’ve saved the shipping expense as well. The consumer’s inclination is, “I’ll pay a little more for the product, if you’ll pay for the shipping.”
• If you do something nice for me, I’m more inclined to do something nice for you… and free shipping is a really nice gesture. I will thank you with my business.
• The Baymard Institute puts the average cart abandonment rate at 68.8%. That’s more than two out of three. When shoppers were asked why they abandon the cart during checkout, 61% cited extra costs (i.e. shipping rate). The next biggest reason (account creation required) came in at 35%.
• Many consumers now choose where to shop based on whether or not free shipping is offered. A 2016 Walker Sands study reported 88% of respondents say free shipping is the top incentive for shopping online.

Given the almost undeniable conclusion that adding free shipping to the mix is a good idea for most businesses, the million-dollar question becomes “How can we offer free shipping and grow profitability at the same time?”

Let’s talk about that.

How to Offer Free Shipping While Increasing Profits

You don’t want to offer free shipping and lose money. Unfortunately, many businesses have done that, and some are still doing that. Your desire is to consider free shipping as an avenue towards a better return on investment.

Initially, you want to investigate the potential of free shipping for your particular business situation. You want to test free shipping or free shipping options before you make a commitment.

Free shipping, done right, typically boosts conversion rate, average order volume, customer retention, and profit.

Free shipping, done right, boosts conversion rate, avg. order volume, customer retention, and profit.
Share on X

That’s your aim.

Here’s a three-step process to get started:

First Step: Take a snapshot of your current metrics. You’ll want to track conversion rate, average order volume, and net profit (at a minimum). Establishing a baseline is always the first step in testing. To begin, you are experimenting to see how changes in shipping will affect profit. You aren’t trying to optimize yet, you’re only taking a look at your options.

Second Step: Decide which free shipping offers you want to test. Most companies will want to experiment with carte blanche free shipping, free shipping for a minimum order amount, and free shipping under special conditions. See below for a list of ideas.

Third Step: Run the tests, observe and compare the data. If results warrant, you should then set up another set of tests to either do more discovery or begin the optimization process.

The Variables to Consider When You Offer Free Shipping

You’ll want to adjust the second step (deciding which free shipping offers you want to test) to fit your unique situation.

Here are some of the options we’ve seen our clients utilize:

1. Carte blanche free shipping – Some choose to increase prices to absorb the cost of shipping, while others take a hard look at profit margins and calculate how much extra sales volume would be required to make up for reduced profits per sale. It may also be that higher volume will qualify you for reduced shipping costs. Always work closely with shippers to get the best possible combination of cost and service.
2. Free shipping with a minimum order – This is usually the more doable option. Customers who are close to reaching the order amount for free shipping will very likely tack on additional products to reach the required threshold. That, in turn, can push your average order value up considerably and help make up for the absorbed shipping cost. Typically, you want to set the minimum order higher than your current average order value. How high? That’s a good thing to test.
3. Flat rate shipping – This isn’t a free shipping offer, but it does alleviate much of the shopper’s anxiety. Those who know what the shipping cost will be before loading up the cart are more likely to follow through and place the order than those who don’t know how much shipping costs will be until they’re ready to pay. This tactic is especially effective when higher-priced items are ordered. $5 flat rate shipping on a $150 order is far more attractive than $5 shipping on a $12 order.
4. Free shipping to limited locations – Given the sometimes exorbitant cost of shipping abroad, many ecommerce stores will offer free shipping only to those in their own country. Another possibility here is to offer free shipping from the distribution center to a local retail outlet. Be sure to spell out which locations qualify for free shipping.
5. Free shipping to members – Here’s a way to build loyalty and grow your mailing list. You can charge for membership or not, but helping people feel like they’re a part of your business and giving them a good reason for shopping with you are almost always good ideas. Amazon Prime is a great example of this model, but it could just as easily be only for those who subscribe to your email list (for free).
6. Free shipping as a campaign – You can set aside a special time for free shipping and let people know in advance. You can even make the offer only to a special subset of your customer base and use it as a reward for loyalty or as an incentive for those who haven’t ordered in a while.
7. Free shipping on select products – Some products lend themselves more to free shipping than others. Consider shipping costs and profit margins, then test free shipping on those items that make good financial sense. This method can also be implemented as a way to boost sales of items that are lagging.
8. Free shipping on combinations of products – Some sellers use a complimentary item approach. For example, “When you buy the rod and reel together, we’ll ship for free.” Others use a variation of buy-one-get-one to encourage the purchase of multiple items.

Look carefully at your business. Choose two or three tactics, or combinations of tactics, to test.

Then set the parameters for those tests.

• If you choose a minimum order threshold, where should it be set?
• If you choose carte blanche shipping, are there ways to lower associated expenses so the profit margin doesn’t get gouged too deeply?
• If you will test with only a certain group of customers, how will you identify those people?

Chart your test out carefully. Know what you’re testing, who you’re testing it with, and what results you expect to see. You should also set cut-off points that will halt a specific test if metrics fall too rapidly or too far.

Further Considerations for Free Shipping Offers

We’ve already mentioned the possibility that increased shipping volume may qualify you for reduced shipping costs. Don’t wait for shippers to come to you with that news, though. Be proactive in your negotiations.

Make shippers compete for your business. Compare their prices and services on a regular basis. Maintain a relationship with the representatives who service your location. We’ve seen companies reduce shipping costs by more than a third, simply by comparing rates and asking.

You may be able to take a considerable amount of sting out of free shipping by getting your shipping rates reduced.

Another thing to stay on top of is the cost of shipping each of your products. Shipping costs can change, and if the cost of shipping is larger than the profit margin on the item, you’ll lose money by selling it. That’s usually not good business, although there are times when long term customer value justify short term losses.

You Don’t Know Until You Try

Online shoppers often decide whether or not to consider doing business with you based solely on whether or not you offer free shipping.

Many ecommerce stores have discovered that incorporating free shipping as part of their strategic plan enables them to sell more goods and earn more profits.

Here at The Good, we’re always enthusiastic about testing. You’ll never know, for sure, what will happen if you begin to offer free shipping or decide to incorporate a variant of free shipping until you design an adequate experiment and try it for yourself.

The post How to Offer Free Shipping the Right Way appeared first on The Good.

Why create customer surveys?

There are a variety of reasons for creating a customer survey. They can change depending on the company and department but the key purpose remains the same. To better know and understand the people you serve.

Too many organizations replace real qualitative and quantitative data directly from their customers with gut reactions or stereotypes. While you might be able to get by on this for a little while, you are opening the door to lost revenue by not tailoring your offering directly to your customers most pressing needs. When your offering isn’t tailored to your customers, it reduces your conversions.

The customer survey is a powerful and simple way to get real data that can help you validate ideas, refine your processes, improve products, improve marketing, and ultimately improve conversions.

How to build customer surveys

There are many ways to gather customer data and a number of tools to help analyze the data. One popular tool is SurveyMonkey. It offers a wide array of question options, survey logic flows, and great data analysis tools. Another is Google Forms which is also a good free alternative to a paid service, but it has no built in analysis tools.

We’ve also included some other great options on our tools page that allow you to purchase responses based on detailed demographic data.

Rules for survey question design

The survey should not take a long time for your customers to complete. This means question design must be a top priority. Design each question with a specific learning goal. Ideally, the questions will reveal the unique behaviors and preferences of your customer types. If you know what you’re trying to learn, it’s much easier to design a question to gain useful insights.

Begin with classifying questions, and ensure each question is multiple-choice. This helps to keep the survey short and allows for a more detailed analysis of the survey data later on. There are times when a free textual response question is appropriate, but those should be used with caution as they’re much more difficult to analyze quickly (or at all).

When you review your survey questions prior to distribution, always check that they will help increase your understanding of customer goals with relevant, actionable information.

11 types of questions for your customer surveys

Here is the typology of questions we typically use to create customer surveys:

1. Segmentation question (allow customers to put themselves into a meaningful group)
2. Product ownership question (how many / which products do they own, if any?)
3. Behavior oriented question (how do they buy / how often do they buy)
4. Content oriented question (which content is most useful in making a purchase decision?)
5. Decision making question (what factors are most important when purchasing? Durability, style, price, etc.)
6. Goal discovery question (what are customers trying to accomplish on your site?)
7. Goal ranking question (which goal is most important to them, most often?)
8. Product use question (how frequently / for what purpose do they use your products?)
9. Brand selection question (why do they buy from you? Price, quality, better functionality, reputation, recommendation, etc.)
10. Unique information gathering question
11. Option to participate in telephone follow-up (provide their phone number to be contacted for a brief telephone interview in exchange for an incentive offer)

How to distribute customer surveys

While it is easy to purchase survey responses from companies like SurveyMonkey or Amazon Mechanical Turk, there are two free and extremely relevant channels you can use to gather responses quickly: your brand’s marketing email lists and social media following.

For your email marketing list, sending a quick survey to a list of engaged customers will offer you the opportunity to connect with customers and build valuable business intelligence in the process. Because these are people you reach out to frequently, it is very important that you segment your list appropriately to minimize the number of people who opt out. Run a few subject line tests early on before sending out a survey to your entire list.

Two simple ways to segment your list are “engaged” (i.e., opened an email in the last 180 days) or “unengaged” (has not opened an email in 180 days) and “customer” (i.e., email obtained via past purchase).

It’s important to get enough responses to your survey to be able to confidently draw conclusions from the data you’ll receive. Use a handy survey sample size calculator to determine how many responses you’ll need in order to achieve statistical relevance with your survey responses.

How to write a customer survey email

The content of the survey request email should be to the point and free of any marketing. We have found that a plain (or minimally styled) text email with only one to two sentences works the best for getting a solid response rate. Try to be direct and grateful for the help.

Testing the subject and content of your emails before sending a final version will guarantee a greater response rate.

Here are a couple of example survey request email templates that have worked well for B2C and B2B clients.

Example B2C Subject Lines

• Help us improve our site with this brief survey
• Brief survey to improve [yourbrandsite.com]
• Get a 15% discount coupon by taking this survey
• Take our survey, get a coupon for 15% off any purchase

Example B2C Body Copy

Hi [Their Name],

We’re updating [ourbrandsite.com] and could use your help! If you are interested, please take this short survey: LINK

Thanks,
Our team

If you are surveying other businesses, it can be helpful to offer to share the data back with the participants (this is not always necessary). Here is some potential copy to test:

Example B2B Subject Lines

• Share your opinion and gain industry insights
• [First Name] – your opinion for our industry survey
• 2 minute survey on [Company Name]’s research process

Example B2B Body Copy

Hi [Their Name],

We’re conducting an industry wide survey to improve the process of _____ online.
If you will take 2 minutes to fill out the survey at [LINK], we will gladly share the results with you.

Thanks,
Our team

How to send the customer survey email

If you have been running email campaigns, you should have the timing down for when to send the email for optimal opens and clicks. If you have no idea when people are most likely to read your emails, try sending on Tuesday morning or midday Thursday.

Check out MailChimp’s resource section for some very detailed research on best send times by industry to maximize open and click rates.

If you want to gain actionable insights from your customer base but don’t have the time or team for this level of research, we’re here to help.

The post How Customer Surveys Help Improve Your Conversions appeared first on The Good.

Put another way: Everyone loves to see ecommerce sales flourish, but few want to be “selling.”

These sayings may be accurate, but they’re also dangerous. They can poison your business from the top down and the inside out.

The truth is that, across your website, in every page and every section within that website, every page is selling.

No sales. No company.

Waking up to that reality and grasping its ramifications can boost the bottom line and revitalize your entire ecommerce site.

For proof, let’s take a look at one often overlooked channel for revenue growth, transactional emails.

It’s a seemingly insignificant part of external communications, but realizing its rightful place as a powerful sales tool can reap big rewards.

The Most Overlooked Marketing Opportunity in Ecommerce

There’s daily chatter in marketing circles about building an email list, setting up autoresponder sequences, and getting promotional messages delivered to the chosen audience.

How often do you hear someone getting excited about the possibilities offered by transactional emails, though?

Never?

Here’s why: Transactional emails – such as order confirmations, shipping advice, and password resets – are boring. They’re uninteresting.

In our work at The Good, we’ve even seen companies turn the composition and timing of transactional mailings over to third parties.

That’s a huge mistake.

Often referred to as “triggered” or “automatic” responses, transactional emails typically draw a considerably better open rate than your marketing communications.

They can be an important component of your marketing strategy.

Study results vary widely, but a 2010 Experian report cited transactional open rates of up to 8X that of bulk mail. A more recent Silverpop study (see the chart below) tallied an increase approaching double.

Check your in-house statistics. How much more likely are your transactional emails to be opened?

Transactional emails present one of the biggest – yet most underutilized marketing opportunities – anywhere.

Types of Transactional Emails

To help get you thinking about the possibilities, here are some of the most common situations calling for a transactional email:

• A new customer registers and makes the first purchase
• A repeat customer places an order
• An item is out of stock and the order will be delayed
• An item is back in stock and available for purchase
• Someone needs a password reset
• Someone has a question for customer support
• A shopping cart is abandoned
• You mail an invoice
• You provide a receipt for a purchase
• You send out a shipping confirmation
• You request feedback from your customers
• You send out an opt-in confirmation to a new subscriber
• And more…

You may be thinking we’re treading on sacred ground here. After all, shouldn’t part of a company’s communications be kept free of marketing messages?

Won’t your customers object to being “targeted” even more?

That depends on how you lay out your strategy for leveraging transactional emails. Done correctly, customers will open more of your mail and respond to more of your offers.

Transactional Emails and the CAN-SPAM Act

As with all business email, keep the requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act in mind when composing transactional messages.

A line you don’t want to even come close to crossing is using a deceptive subject line to make the recipient think the message is transactional, when it’s really a thinly disguised marketing piece.

“When an email contains both kinds of content,” says the FTC, “the primary purpose of the message is the deciding factor.”

Here’s an FTC illustration (see below) that makes the point more than obvious:

Here are the FTC guidelines for determining whether or not an email can be considered “transactional”:

The primary purpose of an email is transactional or relationship if it consists only of content that meets one or more of these requirements:

• Facilitates or confirms a commercial transaction that the recipient already has agreed to
• Gives warranty, recall, safety, or security information about a product or service
• Gives information about a change in terms or features or account balance information regarding a membership, subscription, account, loan or other ongoing commercial relationship
• Provides information about an employment relationship or employee benefits
• Delivers goods or services as part of a transaction that the recipient already has agreed to

For the FTC, it’s all about purpose. If the email is designed primarily to sell, it’s a commercial message. If the main reason for the email is to follow-up with a transaction, though, it’s transactional.

Take advantage of the marketing potential afforded by transactional emails, but don’t lose sight of their primary purpose.

10 Transactional Email Tips for Maximum Leverage & Return

In our work with ecommerce clients, we’ve discovered certain principles that can help transactional emails deliver marketing calls to action effectively.

To get the most benefit from this list, pull up a few of your company’s transactional communications and compare what you see there to the best practices below.

1. Make sure to place the transactional information at the top of the message, and never-ever use a subject line that is misleading. The bulk of the message (80% or more) should be entirely devoted to the transactional purpose.
2. Make your marketing offer fit the email. An order confirmation, for example, might justifiably include a cross-sell suggestion. The customer ordered a fishing pole, and you just happen to have a special offer on lures.
3. Deliver ample information on the transactional end. Don’t just say “Thank you for the order,” confirm the contents of the order, the price and method of payment, and the shipping plans. Customers love to see the details about something just purchased.
4. Be sure the message is even and consistent. Don’t jump from a matter-of-fact recitation of shipping information to a high-energy marketing message. Each email should have but one voice. That voice can vary, but it’s still one voice.
5. Be timely and appropriate. Order confirmations should occur as soon as possible after the order is placed. Shipping data should be sent when it is set. Product review requests should go out after the customer has received the product and experienced its benefits. The more logical the content and timing of the message, the better it will be received.
6. Include social media buttons to the social channels where your company is an active participant. Provide incentives for customers to follow your channel and interact with you there. Every contact with customers is part of the buying journey.
7. Make sure your transactional emails are mobile responsive. You risk losing sales and damaging your brand by sending mail that won’t render properly on a mobile device. Chances are high your customer will first interact with the message via smartphone.
8. Don’t neglect personalization just because a message is transactional. Studies show personalization (using the customer’s name) is a high-return tactic. Marketing Sherpa says despite proven results (see the Experian chart below), only 35% of brands are personalizing email.
9. You don’t always have to focus on selling a product. There are huge returns possible from calls to action that get the customer to leave an online review or answer a brief survey. Don’t worry about offending people, they love it when you ask for their help.
10. Use transactional emails to keep your business fresh in the mind of your customers. The more often they hear from you, the more likely they are to return to your ecommerce site. At The Good, we’ve found that customer reengagement efforts can be magnified when delivered by transactional emails.

Asking How Can You Help?

It’s the responsibility of the salesperson to make sure everyone who CAN be helped by his or her product or service IS helped. In a nutshell, that’s what sales is all about. Trust-Based Sales is NOT about SELLING… it’s about HELPING. – Debbie White

When you center your transactional email strategy on a desire to help your customers, when you seek to build trust and rapport, and when you know your offer is valuable – you’re on the path to stronger sales performance and a stronger brand.

Carry that intent to every corner of your company, and you’ll be amazed at the results.

The Good is here to help with the process. Our free Stuck Score can help you discover bottlenecks in your sales funnel and suggest ways to remove those barriers.

The post How to Get More From Your Transactional Emails appeared first on The Good.

So how do you improve user engagement on an ecommerce site?

Of course, there’s no singular tactic or strategy that is guaranteed to work for your unique brand, but in this article we’ll be addressing five methods we’ve seen help other ecommerce businesses improve their engagement metrics.

How you can get visitors to interact with your ecommerce or lead-generation site

First, a definition. For our purposes here, interactive elements are components of your website that require the visitor to make a choice, click a button, enter info in a form, etc… in short, elements where the visitor must make some sort of action in order to get to take the next step. The action can range from watching a video, to filling out a form, to listening to an audio recording.

The more someone interacts with your website, the more likely that person is to make a purchase. The same principle is in play when an automobile salesperson invites a prospect to take a test drive. Interaction builds familiarity and establishes a sense of belonging. 

In research terminology, interactivity “boosts social-psychological effects of content by creating greater user engagement with it.” In a way, interaction is akin to personalization. It creates a one-to-one communication with the prospect.

We’ll be addressing five specific examples of interactive elements you can use to improve engagement on your website:

1. Deepen your engagement with visitors with an opt-in form
2. Provide customization options
3. Integrate social media into the buying experience
4. Start a conversation with your customers
5. Utilize product videos

Five prime interactive elements for ecommerce and lead-generation websites

Interaction doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be. You do want to observe a few cardinal rules:

• Make sure it’s easy for the visitor to understand how to engage the interactive element. Remove all the friction possible. Make the process simple.
• Make the interactive elements stand out. Interaction decreases boredom and increases interest. The more interactive your site, the more exciting and fun it will appear.
• Keep the interactive element in smooth working order. It should respond quickly and be bug free. Few things are more frustrating online than thwarted attempts at interaction.

1. Deepen your engagement with visitors with an opt-in form

Whether as a stand-alone form or included in the flow of another element, opt-in forms not only help build your mailing list, but they give the prospect an opportunity to dig in a little deeper in their quest for the products or services they’re seeking. These work especially well if you can offer them something of value in exchange for their information. 

Designing the form is an art in itself. Artisans love to argue about the color of the “Submit” button, and copywriters tend to fight over which words work best to get that button pushed (surely not “Submit”).

Always be testing, and A/B tests or multivariate tests are an excellent way to fine-tune your opt-in forms to provide maximum effectiveness. Beyond colors and copy, you can test the location of your opt-in form, the size of the form, whether to make it static or have it appear at a certain point in the visitor’s journey, label alignment patterns, and more. The primary rule of thumb with forms is to ask only for the information you need. Don’t try to collect everything you want in one shot. The lower the friction, the better the experience.

A great opt-in form used by Minimalist Baker offers a free ebook in exchange for the user’s email address. What’s great about this opt-in is that it continues to engage the visitor even after they leave the site (to read the ebook). The more value you can offer to users with your opt-in form, the better it will perform.

2. Provide customization options

Here’s one creative way to get deeper interaction with your brand. When you let the customer choose options and participate in the design of the order, you amplify the degree of ownership and loyalty. Providing customization for products is an instant value-add, and it gives the customer a sense of exclusivity. 

Oakley allows their customers to personalize just about every aspect of their order. From lens color to material texture, to the cloth bag they arrive in, everything is customizable. This ensures that the customer gets exactly what they want, and that the product they’re ordering is uniquely manufactured to fit their personal taste. 

3. Integrate social media into the buying experience

The typical way of seeking social media interaction is to provide share buttons somewhere on the page. That tactic may work for some brands, but in general, we don’t see much engagement with share buttons, especially if they’re located on the product detail page. A smarter way to integrate social media into the buying experience is by creating a compelling way for customers to share the products they’ve purchased. 

Tuckernuck makes expert use of social media with their “#tuckernucking” instagram tag. Customers that use this hashtag can have their post displayed on the front page of the website as well as on product detail pages. Connecting with customers across multiple platforms is an excellent way to improve engagement, and the content you get out of it can be repurposed as social proof.

4. Start a conversation with your customers  

At this point, providing your website visitors with a personalized (and instant) method for communicating with you is an essential element of the customer experience. Having live chat on your site has quickly grown to be one of the most effective ways of connecting with your customers.

Allbirds uses live chat on their ecommerce site to provide customers with 24/7 customer support. The chat function is designed to help customers with essentially any questions they may have regarding the products, and you have the ability to be instantly connected with a real person to help answer your questions. Whether or not you opt to have live agents or a chatbot is up to you, but you want to plan to improve engagement with your users, having some sort of chat function is vital. 

5. Utilize product videos

Product videos are a great way to increase engagement with your customers and improve your site’s conversion rate. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million. Invest in creating 360° product videos for even just your top ten products and you’ll start seeing results almost immediately. 71 percent of consumers think that product videos explain the product better than images or text. If you can give you customers a dynamic way of viewing your products it’ll improve engagement on-site as well as greatly impact your conversion rate.

ASOS is known for creating great product videos to help achieve a more interactive and involved shopping experience. The customer gets to see a 360° perspective of the product and how it fits on the model. Already this positions them ahead of other retailers because they can offer customers a complete view of the product as opposed to just a collection of images. 

Give your visitors ways to interact with your business – Get creative

Now, it’s your turn. 

How do you plan to implement ways for your customers to engage with your website? Many companies focus a majority of their attention towards optimizing the buyer’s journey, but won’t think about how they’re actually involving and engaging with customers on-site. You may have the smoothest checkout process, the sleekest homepage, and the best product reviews, but if you don’t have a way for customers to interact and connect with your brand, you’re missing out on a big opportunity to improve key metrics like retention and conversion rate. 

The more you get your prospects involved with your website, the quicker they will convert into loyal and enthusiastic customers. You’d be surprised how the littlest changes can have the greatest impact on your site.

The post How to Increase Engagement & Conversions with Interactivity appeared first on The Good.

When you can uncover behavioral patterns in your customer groups, you can tailor your marketing strategy to target each group with the right message, in the right place, at the right time, leading to a higher opportunity for conversions.

For example, if you’re an ecommerce coffee retailer and know that your customers tend to re-order every 30 days, would an email promotion be most effective 10 days after their initial purchase or 25 days? (Answer: The latter)

So, how do you know to whom you should send what messaging, and how often you should send it? If you’re a marketer struggling to answer these questions, RFM analysis might be the solution you’re looking for.

This Insight will cover how you can use the RFM model in your marketing, and how it can be applied to increase conversions on your site. We’ll start with the parameters that make up an RFM score.

The Parameters of RFM Analysis

The RFM score is the aggregate of three parameters: recency, frequency, and monetary value. For clarity, we’ll define each parameter as it relates to RFM.

• Recency is calculated based on how long it’s been since a customer’s last purchase. It’s the most effective way of determining who’s going to buy from you today. Essentially, a customer who’s made a recent purchase with you is considered more valuable than a customer who hasn’t ordered in a while.
• Frequency is the number of purchases a customer has made in a specific time frame. It can be a good indicator of how often a customer interacts with your brand. That can give you an idea of how often you should try to reach them through marketing.
• Monetary value is simply the amount a customer spends on your product or service within a given time frame. While it’s not as good as the other parameters at predicting when a customer will buy from you again, it can give you an idea of how much they might spend if they do.

Each of these parameters contains a valuable piece of information about your customer’s past behavior. Similar to customer lifetime value, the RFM score can offer insight about what a customer is likely to do in the future. To understand the benefits of using multiple parameters, let’s look at some of the shortcomings of singular segmentation:

• A business that segments based on recency alone knows who their best customers have been lately. What they don’t know is how much these customers are likely to spend on your product. And while recent customers are most likely to be repeat customers, it’s hard to gauge their value without knowing how often or how much they are likely to spend.
• A company that performs its customer segmentation based solely on frequency knows how often their customers buy from them. That allows them to predict how often they’ll buy in the future. Focusing exclusively on this parameter, however, leaves them bereft of knowledge about a customer’s overall value.
• Finally, a business that segments customers based on monetary value knows the value of a given customer, but not if they will maintain that value.

RFM analysis is an effective method of customer segmentation that prioritizes customers based on their lifetime value
Share on X

In RFM analysis, all of this customer behavior data is combined into a single score that gives a more complete profile of any given customer. That profile allows companies to create targeted marketing campaigns that are likely to yield higher conversion rates.

By now you’ve probably realized the potential of implementing RFM analysis at your organization. So, how exactly do you do it?

Creating an RFM Model for Your Business

RFM analysis starts with organizing your customer purchase data. You’ll want to choose a range that is in alignment with your sales expectations. If you can reasonably expect a great customer to make a purchase every week, an ideal range might be six months to a year. If you can only expect one to two purchases a year, a five-year range might be more appropriate.

If you can, stick to a shorter range. RFM analysis is most effective when applied to one- or two-year period. To start, you’ll need three data sets from that period for each customer:

1. Time (days) since the customer’s last purchase (recency) Note: You can find this in Google Analytics under Audience > Overview > Frequency and Recency
2. A log of all the times the customer made a purchase in the data period (frequency)
3. The total amount the customer spent within the data period (monetary value)  

After gathering and organizing your customer data, it’s time to create a scoring system. Unless you’ve got the time and need for more precise grouping, it’s best to keep this simple. A 1-5 scale for each parameter works perfectly well, with 1 representing the lowest value customer and 5 being the highest.

These scores are also determined by your sales expectations. If you use a 1-5 scale, you’ll determine the range of each quintile based on prior interactions customers had with your company. This chart below offers an example of a potential range for a customer’s frequency score.

For the sample company above, the dataset period is a month and the most consistent customer bought 30 times. That put the 5 score for frequency at anything 25 or higher.

You’ll use this same method to determine the ranges for the other parameters.

Let’s say you’re a coffee distributor. If your most frequent customers make an order once a week, a 5 score would represent the 52 purchases they make throughout the year.  A customer who purchased in the past week would get a 5 for recency. If your big spenders bought about $60,000 worth of coffee beans in the data period, anything above $50,000 spent during that period might be your 5 for monetary value, above $30,000 might be a 4, and so on.

Organizing the Data From Your RFM Analysis

Once you have all your data collected and scored, you’ll want to organize everything into a table like in the example shown below.

As you can see, an RFM score isn’t calculated by adding the parameter scores together. Rather, it’s the result of combining each of them to form a weighted score. It works this way because each parameter is weighted differently, with recency holding the highest weight and monetary value holding the lowest.

In the chart above, the highest-rated customer has a recency score of 5, a frequency score of 3 and a monetary score of 5. That gives them a total RFM score of 535. The lowest-rated customer has a score of 111, indicating that they were in the lowest quintile for all three parameters.

All this data serves as an indicator of how valuable a customer is to your business. Customers with the highest RFM scores should be your highest priority in crafting your marketing. Customers with the lowest scores should be the lowest priority.

The beauty of RFM is that it doesn’t require you to ignore lower value customers in favor of higher value ones or to prioritize lower value customers to increase their scores. It allows you to offer each group what they want, and in doing so potentially increase all of their scores.

Utilizing RFM Analysis in Marketing

Once you’ve segmented your customers by their RFM scores, you can market to different groups based on their needs. This can be especially helpful in creating targeted email marketing campaigns.

So, how do you utilize RFM analysis as a part of your marketing strategy?

Generally, higher scoring groups respond well to deals that reward their loyalty. They like your brand already; you just need to ensure they continue to. That means offering your high-value customers special deals, bulk discounts, exclusive trials, membership to your loyalty program, etc. When you have a new product, they should be the first customers to know.

Lower scoring groups should be reminded about your brand. Send them previously viewed or wish-listed products. They saw value in your company at one point—try to make them remember why.

The key is to only send messages that a given group is likely to be interested in. A customer who places large orders every month doesn’t need to be reminded of your brand. On the other hand, someone who makes small orders once a year isn’t likely to be interested in bulk discounts.

RFM Analysis Is an Effective Means of Appealing to Different Customer Segments

A lot of marketing is geared—intentionally or unintentionally—towards attracting new customers. For many online businesses, however, 50 percent or more of sales come from retention. That means you should be spending the same amount of resources on keeping on your current customers happy as you do on attracting new ones.

If you’re focused on an email (or direct) marketing strategy, RFM analysis offers an effective means of segmenting your customer base and ensures you send each segment the content and messaging that’s likely to yield the highest conversion rate.

Marketing is about anticipating what a customer wants and creating a resistance-free path to their getting it. The key to creating that path is understanding what they want before you send them anything they don’t. RFM analysis shows you what a customer wants, so you can market it to them.

If you’re looking for actionable ways to increase the conversion rate of your ecommerce site, it may be time to consider digital experience optimization (DXO). At The Good, we focus on improving companies’ digital experiences through our own process of data-backed decision-making.

The post How RFM Analysis Helps You Segment and Convert Customers Better appeared first on The Good.

Let’s face it: A sizable chunk of your marketing budget goes towards customer acquisition and retention—so why not direct some of that attention to thank you page conversion optimization? It can be a relatively quick and inexpensive way to boost your marketing efforts and keep your customers engaged post-purchase.

Most ecommerce sites consider the thank you page as a quick way to let the customer or prospect know to check their email for a purchase confirmation, download link, or even a webinar RSVP. What a lot of ecommerce businesses fail to recognize is that the thank you page can (and should) contain so much more. It’s a perfect place to include a call-to-action with a sincere note of gratitude, promote related products, or refer the visitor to other content they may be interested in.

Note: You really don’t have to actually say “thank you” on a thank you page. More on that soon.

In this article, we’ll look at why the thank you page is a necessary component to include on your site, as well as nine best practices you should consider when developing your own thank you page. We’ll also take a look at four examples of highly effective thank you pages and what makes each of them so great. Each example highlights several of the best practice principles you can leverage to get more conversions on your ecommerce site.

Are Thank You Pages Really That Important?

After a prospect takes action on your website, the last interaction you’ll most likely have with them before they bounce is on your thank you page. It’s at this moment in the customer journey when the prospect is most primed to take action. Whether your thank you page enables customers to share a purchase on social media, add a related product to their shopping cart, or provide feedback on their buying experience, the page needs to be engaging so you can capitalize on your customers’ interest in your products or brand.

If your thank you page is a simple two-line message that thanks the prospect for their interest and directs them to a download link, that’s fine, but know that you’re missing out on a great opportunity to nurture them further along in the customer journey.

Best Practices for Highly Effective Thank You Pages

We’ve compiled a list of nine best practices that you should follow when designing your thank you page. It’s important to remember that every website is different—what may work to improve conversions for one ecommerce site may not work for another—so be prepared to test a few different versions of your thank you page before settling on the one that has the best outcome.

1. Always be selling: The thank you page on your site is an ideal spot to include more calls-to-action (CTAs). The customer is already primed for action if they’ve made it to your thank you page, so it would make sense to try and upsell the same product for a bulk discount, or even suggest a subscription. For example, if the customer just purchased a line of skincare products, you could offer an automatic renewal option that ships the same products to the customer each month without them having to place a new order.

2. Cross-sell with recommended products: Customers who buy flashlights may also need batteries, extra bulbs, or maybe even a tent. If the customer just bought something from your site, they’re primed to spend more if they see something that compliments their original purchase. Don’t be pushy or obnoxious, though. Be helpful and your customers will appreciate you for it.

3. Promote your original content: This doesn’t apply to every ecommerce brand, but for those that publish original content online via a blog or similar platform, the thank you page is a great place to promote that. The longer you can keep your customers engaged on your site, the better.

4. Provide a social share option: Social mentions help build brand awareness and can attract more prospects to your ecommerce website. Any time you can motivate a customer to share their purchase via social media, you’re getting free promotion and social proof for your brand.

5. Provide referral sharing options: Did you know that 92 percent of people trust recommendations from friends and family over any other type of advertising? If you aren’t already, you should be providing your customers with an option to share their purchase directly with friends through referrals. Referrals are different from social media sharing in that you’re directly asking for the customer to share their purchase with a friend. If they do choose to refer the product they bought to someone, provide them with a pre-written email that they can send instantly and a discount code that both parties can use on their next purchase.

6. Establish trust and credibility: The thank you page can be a great place to include testimonials and user-generated content (UGC) to establish trust with the customer. This may also motivate customers to share their own positive shopping experience with others.

7. Build your email list: If the prospect is interested enough in what your business has to offer, you should be providing them with a way to get more information from you. You’d be surprised by how effective a newsletter sign-up CTA on your thank you page can be (see example below).

Even if you already have the prospect’s email address, those who choose to opt-in to your mailing list are raising a hand to tell you they want to know more.

8. Ask for feedback on the buying experience: Include a short survey to collect feedback and insight on the customer’s buying experience. This is a great opportunity to find out if your customers were satisfied with their overall experience and to identify areas that need improvement.

9. A/B test your changes: Whichever improvements you decide to implement on your thank you page, it’s important to remember that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to optimizing your customer experience. One ecommerce site may have a winning thank you page that consistently generates repeat customers, but that same page may not work as well for another brand with a different target audience. To get the best results from your thank you page, try testing a combination of ideas until you find which ones make your target audience responds positively.

Before you start implementing these principles into the thank you page of your own site, it can be helpful to look at what your industry peers are doing so you get an idea of where to start.

Ecommerce Thank You Pages to Draw Inspiration From

We compiled a handful of examples of winning thank you pages to provide you with some inspiration before you dive into optimizing your own. By learning from the best, you stand a better chance of getting it right the first time. There’s a central concept behind each example: Any time you have a logical and legitimate opportunity to ask your best prospects to take action, don’t hesitate. Do it.

Note: We’re not advising you to copy+paste these pages, but we’re definitely encouraging you to draw inspiration from the principles they illustrate and incorporate those tactics into your own thank you page.

Example 1: Hubspot covers all the bases

The HubSpot page shown above is an example of how you can set up a thank you page that doesn’t actually say “thank you.” After all, you’re getting a free book in exchange for your email address.

Notice that the CTAs begin right off the bat. Right beside the Download File link is another button inviting you to Email a Colleague. Below that are social media icons, and below those is another section promoting the HubSpot Sales Blog. This may seem like overkill, but as long as everything you incorporate on the thank you page is a value-add for your customers, feel free to include it.

Many companies settle for the leads they get from giving away the book. Not HubSpot, though. Marketers there have learned you typically only get what you aren’t afraid to ask for.

Example 2: Less is more for Optimizely

Optimizely uses a simple but effective approach for their thank you page. When a prospect requests a download of one of their PDF guides, Optimizely sends an email of the document to the prospect’s inbox; however, they also include a download button on the thank you page so the prospect can access the file immediately.

Below the main header is a Recommended Content section where visitors are offered related content that they may also be interested in. The more relevant content you can push to your customer, the better chance you’ll be able to nurture them further along in the sales funnel.

At the bottom of the page, Optimizely includes social media icons to share the content you’re downloading. As you’ve probably noticed already, social sharing icons are an essential component to have on your thank you page. Never miss out on the chance for free promotion!

Example 3: Salesforce keeps it short and to the point

Salesforce takes simplicity to another level with its thank you page. Similar to Optimizely, Salesforce includes multiple options for downloading the requested resources, but excludes the social sharing element on their thank you page.

To the right of the Download Now button, Salesforce suggests another resource and then provides something that could move a prospect to customer status quickly—a demo session with a Salesforce staffer. If the prospect is already in the Consideration phase of the sales funnel, watching a product demo could be what pushes them to the Purchase phase.

This is a minimal approach to thank you page design, and while it’s effective for Salesforce (and most B2B companies), it may not be as effective for an ecommerce site selling consumer products.

Example 4: Amazon nails it

Amazon presents a great illustration of the “always be selling” concept. After thanking the customer for the order and providing an ego-bait sharing CTA of “I just bought …,” Amazon immediately presents a plethora of related products. This approach seems overwhelming, but they must be doing something right if their conversion rate for Prime customers is an astounding 74 percent.

Note that the thank you page is styled like any other sales page on Amazon. Rather than take customers out of the store to a typical thank you page, Amazon keeps them in the store and encourages them to shop some more—without missing a beat.

HubSpot, Salesforce, Optimizely, and Amazon—four heavy hitters that know how to use the thank you page to turn prospects into buyers and buyers into repeat customers. We hope these examples provide you with enough inspiration to start optimizing your own thank you page.

Amazon leverages design to encourage sales from the thank you page.
Share on X

Ecommerce Thank You Pages: Don’t Waste the Opportunity

Once your ecommerce website visitor has completed certain tasks (joined your mailing list, bought something from you, downloaded an ebook, etc.), you have an opportunity to express your appreciation for the interaction and offer them even more. “Would you like fries with that?” is a good example of a simple statement that has earned fast food restaurants millions (probably billions) of extra dollars.

By adding CTAs to your thank you page, you’re positioning your ecommerce website or email marketing campaign to maximize conversions and generate more sales. If your ecommerce business is looking to invest in optimizing your conversion rate, thank you pages are one aspect of the customer experience you shouldn’t ignore.

Having trouble coming up with improvements to test on your site? Redesigning any page on your ecommerce site can prove to be a challenge, especially if you don’t have the in-house expertise, so why not leave the heavy-lifting to the experts? Request a free landing page assessment, where we’ll pinpoint problem areas on your site and help you understand where to focus your optimization efforts.

Resources:

• How to Get More From Your Transactional Emails
• The Good’s Thank You Page (With Site Assessment Offer)
• How to Create an Effective A/B Test Hypothesis

The post Nine Principles for Optimizing Your Thank You Page appeared first on The Good.

Mobile devices have become the go-to technology for online shopping in 2019, with 24 percent of consumers making at least one purchase a week through a mobile ecommerce store. This is the first year that mobile phones surpassed other digital devices (desktop, tablet) in the number of ecommerce purchases made.

This raises a critical question: How is your mobile conversion rate performing compared to that of your desktop site?

The fact of the matter is that if your company isn’t investing in mobile conversion rate optimization (CRO), you’re already behind.

See, here’s the thing…

The CRO conventions that you applied to your desktop ecommerce site won’t translate in the same way to your mobile experience. Mobile CRO is a completely different beast to tackle.

This article takes a closer look at how optimizing for mobile is different than optimizing for desktop, and breaks it down into three key focus areas:

• Increasing site speed
• Improving readability
• Optimizing your user experience

Why Is Mobile Conversion Rate Optimization Important?

There are some significant differences between traditional desktop CRO and mobile CRO, and these variations can be the difference between someone clicking the “buy” button or going to another site.

Mobile CRO is focused on both speed and efficiency. Remember: Mobile visitors are typically browsing on a cellular network, which means that web pages, in general, tend to load more slowly if they’re not properly optimized. Additionally, mobile users are browsing on a much smaller screen, which significantly changes the way they browse.

The same general principles of CRO apply, but there are nuances that apply specifically to mobile users. If you don’t know and apply these nuances, you’re going to lose customers.

In fact, if people have a negative experience on mobile, they’re 62 percent less likely to purchase from you in the future.

If you want to retain customers and boost your bottom line, it’s critical to provide both desktop and mobile users with the absolute best version of your website.

15 Practical Tips to Optimize Your Mobile Site

Now that you know why mobile conversion optimization is so critical, let’s talk about how to do it. Here are 15 practical ways you can implement mobile conversion optimization.

Maximize speed

Thanks to lightning-fast home internet, LTE (and soon 5G) networks, and web giants like Amazon and Google, we’ve come to expect websites to load almost instantly. If there is any delay, we get impatient and bounce to another site. If you want to optimize your mobile site for conversions, it’s absolutely critical that it loads quickly.

A whopping 64 percent of smartphone users expect pages to load in four seconds or less. If your site is taking longer than four seconds to load, your conversion rate is probably suffering. To complicate matters, Google considers site speed when indexing and ranking your website. The slower your website, the worse your SERP ranking will be.

So how can you improve your overall site speed?

1. Load above the fold content first: Organize your HTML code to load above-the-fold content first. This way visitors on your site will see your homepage content first while lower-priority items continue to load in the background.

2. Avoid redirects: In layman’s terms, redirects are when visitors click on one web page and get redirected to another web page.

Having redirects on your site generates additional HTTP requests, and each of these requests can slow down your site’s load time. If possible, try to eliminate them altogether. For your mobile site, you should really only have an HTTP redirect that will take visitors from your desktop site (example: ecommercesite.com) to your mobile site (example: m.ecommercesite.com).

3. Resize your visual content: Images account for roughly 60 percent of your site’s weight. Large image sizes will dramatically slow down the load time of your site. The size of each page on your site should be about 1-2MB maximum, but a surprising number of ecommerce sites (especially image-heavy ones) are upwards of 8-15MB per page. To avoid this, resize and compress your images to fit the exact dimensions you need, and save the image as a PNG instead of a JPG. Also, consider the number of images you’re using on your site. The more images you have, the slower the load time will be.

Note: To get a sense of how your mobile site is performing, use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool. It will show you how both your mobile and desktop sites are performing, as well as provide recommendations for improvements.

Optimize your user experience for conversions

When it comes to optimizing your experience for conversions, you’ll want to follow many of the same conventions that you do for optimizing your desktop site. Your site should be easily navigable and should minimize the number of steps necessary to make a purchase. You may have a site that loads in two seconds or less, but if the user experience (UX) is clumsy, your conversion rate will still suffer.

4. Integrate digital wallets: Customers want to be absolutely sure that their information—particularly their payment information—is secure. In fact, 19 percent of customers abandon their carts because of security concerns over giving out their payment information.

To alleviate concerns, offer digital wallet payment options, such as PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Android Pay. This provides customers with a secure, trusted payment method, which can help alleviate security concerns.

5. Simplify navigation: Few things make mobile browsing more difficult than a cumbersome navigation menu. If you try to port your desktop navigation menu directly to your mobile site, there’s a good chance that it’ll be too detailed and clunky, lowering your overall conversion rate.  

Ideally, you should give your customers a comprehensive menu that highlights your key products and makes it easy for customers to quickly get to any area of your website.

6. Only have one call-to-action (CTA) per page: Generally speaking, too many CTAs on a page creates friction for users and lowers your overall conversion rate. This is even truer on mobile sites, where screen real estate is limited. Cluttering the user experience with multiple CTAs can complicate the flow of the site and confuse visitors. A good rule is to only include one CTA on each key page of your mobile site.

7. Shorten the purchase path: The more clicks required to complete a purchase, the more you’re hurting your conversion rate. This is why Amazon has made 1-click ordering such an integral part of the shopping experience. They want to make it as easy as possible for users to add a product to their shopping cart and make a purchase. In fact, 59 percent of smartphone users favor companies whose mobile sites or apps allow them to purchase products quickly.

8. Minimize pop-up usage: Pop-ups can be very disruptive to the user experience, which can frustrate users and lower the overall conversion rate.

If you’re going to use a pop-up, make sure it’s short and sweet. Also, make sure it’s easy to close so that visitors aren’t left trying to figure out how to close it out.

In the pop-up text, try to avoid using negative wording since this can make visitors feel bad about opting out of the pop-up. At the same time, try to create a sense of urgency without being overly wordy.

It should be noted that overly intrusive pop-ups can even affect where your site ranks in Google searches. Google is increasingly focused on giving users a smooth experience, and in 2016 they started penalizing sites where the pop-up covers the entire screen.

9. Don’t include every page on your mobile site: Including every page from your desktop site on your mobile site will result in a cluttered user experience. Include only key pages, and if visitors want to dig further into your site they can use the desktop version.

Note: Google has a great tool to test how mobile-friendly your site is. All you need to do is enter your site URL and wait for it to generate a report. The report tells you if your site is mobile-friendly or not, and gives you specific areas for improvement.

Improve the readability of your content

When it comes to using your mobile site, you have two specific challenges related to readability. First, users are impatient, especially when browsing on mobile devices. If your site is cluttered with walls of text on every page, users will get frustrated trying to read and will bounce.

Second, users are also using significantly smaller screens, and large blocks of text will be exceedingly difficult to read.

You’re better off breaking up your text into much smaller, more readable sections. Make sure the text is easily skimmable as well.

10. Use less text and more visuals: When it comes to designing your mobile site, a picture is truly worth a thousand words. Instead of relying heavily on text, use eye-catching visuals to draw the user in.

For example, instead of including a wordy description for every product, include images that highlight the specifications of the product. Show off the product as much possible. Consider using images of people using the product to help users envision how they would use it.

11. Utilize white space: When it comes to mobile browsing, you want your site to be as readable and skimmable as possible. When adding text to your site, break it up with white space so it is easily skimmable without losing its value.

Use white space and increase the line spacing to make your site much more readable.

12. Shorten your headlines: Because of the limited screen real estate, the headlines on your pages shouldn’t exceed six words. The more words you try to cram into your headline, the less room you have for other content above the fold.

Note: If you’re looking for a way to test the readability of your site, Readable is a great (and affordable) tool you can use to check the copy of any page on your site.  

13. Implement autocomplete: It’s no secret that typing on a mobile device can be frustrating. The more you can help your users find what they’re looking for without much effort, the more likely it is that they’ll convert. This is why both Google and Amazon use autocomplete. They want to make it as simple as possible for people to find what they’re looking for.

If possible, implement autocomplete on your site to help customers on the path to a purchase.

14. Use product videos: If a picture is worth a thousand words, you could say that a video is worth ten thousand. Research has shown that product videos can be a very effective method for improving your conversion rate. According to a study by OptinMonster:

• 79 percent of consumers would rather watch a video than read about a product.
• 84 percent of consumers have bought something after watching a video.
• 90 percent of consumers watch videos on their mobile devices.

In terms of mobile conversion optimization, it’s hard to beat the power of video.

15. Make it easy for visitors to check out: Few things are more frustrating than getting to the checkout process and finding it difficult and cumbersome to use. In fact, a complicated checkout process can lead to up to 28 percent of visitors abandoning the transaction altogether.

Make it easy to enter and edit the credit card number. As noted above, offer multiple payment options so that visitors feel as secure as possible. If at all possible, reduce the number of checkout steps required (a single step is ideal). Use a progress bar to show visitors how they are progressing through the checkout process, and implement guest checkout so users don’t have to create an account.

Your goal is to make the checkout process as smooth and seamless as it can be.

A/B Testing Is Your Best Friend

When making changes to your site, it’s absolutely critical that you A/B test the changes to ensure that they’re producing the desired results. After all, it’s entirely possible to implement changes that have a negative effect on your site.

Each ecommerce site is unique to its target audience and industry, so even if you follow all the best practices listed above you still aren’t guaranteed success. You’ll most likely need to test a handful of ideas before you figure out what works best for your site.

Change one variable, A/B test against the original design, evaluate the results, and then make changes as necessary.

Optimizing for Mobile is Essential

Thankfully, mobile conversion rate optimization (CRO) doesn’t need to be a difficult task. If you can implement the recommendations above, you’ll be well on your way to a better, conversion-centered mobile site.

It’s critical to remember that CRO best practices don’t work the same for every ecommerce site. As with every successful CRO project, you’ll need to test out multiple ideas and designs to determine the exact approach your mobile visitors will respond to.

Need help optimizing your mobile site for conversions? Contact The Good for a free landing-page assessment, where we’ll take a look at your site and determine where you should start optimizing.

The post 15 Ways to Optimize Your Site’s Mobile Conversion Rate (with Examples) appeared first on The Good.

So, what’s the right way to conduct a win-back campaign?

In this article, I’ll give you five essential principles behind what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to win-back campaigns. Then, I’ll describe the field-tested steps you can take to feel a whole lot better about pressing the Delete button to remove inactive subscribers.

What Is a Win-Back Email Campaign?

A win-back email campaign is meant to re-engage subscribers who have stopped engaging with your messages. The aim is to get their attention and convince them to respond so you’ll know they’re still receiving your mail and are still interested in your products or services.

Why Are Win-Back Email Campaigns Important?

Email is one of the most effective marketing mediums at your disposal, yet the average open rate for ecommerce email currently sits below 16 percent (per Mailchimp’s monthly report on email campaign stats by industry).

Your engagement may be higher than that, but it’s probable that fewer than 20 of every 100 emails you send will ever get opened.

Many of the subscribers on your list have probably been dormant and disengaged from your email campaigns for months. They haven’t unsubscribed, but they’re either choosing to ignore your messages or are simply not seeing them.

The problem isn’t only that those subscribers are missing out on the benefits you’re offering them, but that their presence is driving your open and click-through rates down. That tells spam filters and other components of the email delivery system that your mail may not be desirable—thereby potentially causing your email delivery rate to sink even further.

It’s an ugly spiral you want to avoid.

Email open rates can vary significantly depending on the industry, as shown in this study from 2016 by Mailer Mailer

How Can I Boost Email Subscriber Engagement?

Everyone wants to know how to build a huge email list, but size doesn’t matter nearly as much as quality. An engaged list is a list that converts. You want subscribers to open your email, click your links, and ultimately buy your products or services—the more the better.

So what do you do when you’re paying enterprise-level rates to an email service provider (ESP) to host a large list of people, yet your open rate is hovering just above 10 percent?

The obvious and most-suggested solution is to clean the list. Set parameters for who stays and who goes, and then filter out the zombies and remove them. Pruning a 50,000-member mailing list down to 10,000 members can save you several thousand dollars per year in unnecessary expenses and help convince the spam traps that you’re only mailing to people who want to hear what you say.

But, by launching a win-back campaign before you perform list hygiene, you can reactivate a percentage of the prospects or customers you would have lost in the cleaning process. It’s a “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” approach to list management.

The best time for a win-back #email campaigns is just before cleaning the list

Are Email Win-Back Campaigns Cost-Effective?

Let’s say you send a series of win-back emails to the 50,000 subscribers on your list who haven’t responded to anything you’ve sent them in months, and let’s say that win-back effort generates a 6 percent response rate.
That means you’ve just resurrected 3,000 people who now want to hear more about your business. If 10 percent of those buy something from you in the next 30 days, and your average order value (AOV) is $100, then you just claimed $30,000 in sales.

But hold it. What if your average customer lifetime value is $6,500? That means your win-back campaign saved 3,000 customers who could potentially deliver millions of dollars in sales revenue.

Was it worth it?

You bet! And the best part is you can use your win-back strategy over and over again.

How Do I Create and Manage Win-Back Email Campaigns?

You now know why win-back email campaigns are important and understand the importance of launching win-back efforts prior to list cleaning operations. Next, let’s turn to the nuts and bolts of email win-back campaigns.

What are the factors influencing success?

Here are five win-back email principles you can take to the bank:

1. Your case really is different.

You’ll find articles galore giving you the exact sequence you should use for a win-back email campaign. The examples you’ll find in those articles can certainly be helpful, but I’ve found that what works for one seller’s audience doesn’t work for another’s.

Like anything else in conversion rate optimization, you should be testing constantly to see what your particular audience responds to best. Never assume your results will be the same as the case study you read.

2. You need more than a catchy subject line.

Email marketers often fall victim to the idea that provocative subject lines and titles are the most important part of writing. While it’s true that getting the reader’s attention is the first necessary step in sales conversions, there’s a whole lot more to the process.

Strong subject lines will pull better open rates, but content that doesn’t live up to the promise made in the subject line will lead to dismal click-through rates and leave the prospect with a poor impression of your brand. Every part of your email must work together to convince subscribers to take the next step on the path to sales.

Your win-back campaign emails need the strongest subject lines you can muster, but make sure the content inside delivers on the promise you make on the outside. Don’t try to clickbait your audience in; just be helpful and honest, and your subscribers will appreciate you for it.

3. It’s not an incentive unless they really want it.

This can be a tough truth to grasp, but your best prospects don’t necessarily want the same things you want. One of the most formidable roadblocks in marketing is the false-consensus effect. We believe that everyone thinks and feels the same way we think and feel and that we know what’s best for them (if they would only listen).

False consensus is a cognitive bias that can lead us to ignore the data and make marketing decisions based on what we think rather than on what our prospects think. Win-back campaigns love to use freebies and discounts as a means of getting dormant subscribers to click a link and rejoin the family. Incentives work, that’s for sure—but make sure your offers appeal directly to your best prospects.

4. Everyone loves to be helpful and heard.

Subscribers who fail to respond to your freebie offers can sometimes be persuaded to respond to a call for help. Are you perplexed about whether to change your logo, add or remove a product from your store, or anything else your best prospects might have a strong opinion about?

Ask them.

When you show genuine interest in what people think and feel, they’ll return the favor. One of the best ways to show your respect for a person is by asking one simple question: “What do you think about this?”

5. Don’t stop testing.

At The Good, testing is central to everything we do. We know what we think, and our clients tell us what they think, but we can’t tell for sure what the customers think until we put something in front of them.

Mix it up with your email win-back campaigns. Experiment with a series of three emails versus a series of nine. Play around with the timing between sends, the time of day (or night) you send emails, and variations of the subject line.

Test everything—whether via A/B tests or multivariate testing—and then study the results to make your next email win-back campaign even more effective.

You Can’t Lose with Email Win-Back Campaigns

Win-back email campaigns can save subscribers who would otherwise be deleted from your mailing list. If you are successful with 10 percent of your inactive subscribers, then you’ve got plenty to celebrate. If nobody responds, at least it gives you the opportunity to clear out some of the contacts that are taking up space on your mailing list.

For those who want steps to follow, try this process:

1. Tag or otherwise segment all subscribers on your mailing list who haven’t opened at least one email from you in the past 120 days.

2. Create an autoresponder series for those subscribers only, and remove them from your regular sending schedule. The win-back campaign is all they should see until they either prove they’re still listening, unsubscribe themselves, or are eventually removed from the list as inactive and unresponsive.

3. Set up a series of five win-back emails spaced one day apart.

• Day one: Notify them they’re in danger of being removed from the list and that you need their response.
• Day two: Restate the situation, provide a special offer (incentive) for responding, and tell them how to unsubscribe.
• Day three: Repeat the offer and emphasize how critical the situation is.
• Day four: Ask subscribers for their opinion about something important to them.
• Day five: Give them one more chance at the special offer, and tell them there will be no more emails if they don’t respond.

4. Assess and improve your strategy. Closely monitor your open rates and click-throughs. If your emails aren’t performing the way you’d hoped, it’s time to reassess your approach and try something different.

That’s it. Wait at least three days after the final email is sent, and then remove the dead weight from your list. I know that can be a tough thing to do, but your subscriber base will be much healthier because of it. Every tree needs to be pruned from time to time.

If the results of your win-back efforts are dismal (3 percent or under), dig deeper to see if you’re experiencing a deliverability problem. They can’t open your mail if they don’t get it in the first place.

Here at The Good, we focus on optimizing conversion rates for ecommerce stores. If you’re searching for effective ways to increase conversions on your site, complete a free landing page assessment that’s designed to help you pinpoint specific problem areas on your site that need improvement.

Resources:

• What Others Fail to Teach About A/B and Multivariate Testing
• Email Win-Back Programs: Do They Work?
• How to Build a More Valuable Email List

The post 5 Principles for a Successful Win-Back Email Campaign appeared first on The Good.

And it’s becoming a big problem. Approximately 30 percent of Americans say they’ve been hit by porch pirates at least once, according to a study done by Xfinity Home.

Cathy Robertson, a shipping and delivery expert with Logistics Trends & Insights in Atlanta, says:

It’s just common sense that along with all the tremendous upsides to ordering online, the downside is things can be stolen… You’ve got something worth 200 bucks being delivered to your home? You better be sitting on your front steps when it arrives.

So what’s the solution? How can the porch pirates be thwarted?

In response, many companies are fighting back by shipping items directly to stores and allowing the consumer to pick them up.

In this article, we’re going to cover:

• How exactly the ship-to-store option works
• Why many stores are using it
• How the rise of “porch pirates” presents a unique opportunity for you
• Why you should consider implementing a ship-to-store option

What Exactly Is the Ship-to-Store Option?

It’s not particularly complicated. If you have a brick-and-mortar store(s), you simply offer consumers the option of picking up their order at your store instead of receiving it at their home.

Numerous “click-and-mortar” retailers have implemented a store pickup option, including:

• Apple
• Walmart
• Macy’s
• Nordstrom
• Target
• Kohl’s
• Dozens of others

Amazon is going to unique lengths to offer a ship-to-store option. In many cities, they have “lockers”, which are a sort of storage unit where customers can pick up their packages.

Taking things a step further, Amazon recently announced what they’re calling “Key In Car” delivery. Using an app, customers can give couriers access to their cars, and the couriers will then place the packages in the cars, significantly reducing the chances of package theft

Writing in The Verge, Andrew Jenkins notes:

After purchasing an item and selecting in-car delivery, Amazon sends a series of notifications to let you know that the package is on its way. At any point, you can choose to change delivery locations or “block access” to the car in the Key app, if for some reason you need to run a quick errand or your car won’t be immediately accessible to the delivery person. Amazon will then default to your backup delivery location if access to the vehicle is blocked.

Clearly, Amazon recognizes the problem of packages being stolen and is going to great lengths to prevent it.

Perhaps it’s time you also considered implementing a customer-focused delivery option with your ecommerce business.

Why Offer Ship-to-Store Shipping?

You may be thinking that implementing ship-to-store shipping sounds complicated. Are there really that many advantages to it? It turns out there are.

First and foremost, it prevents package theft. This in and of itself is a big win, both for you and for your customers. The simple truth is that the threat of package theft is starting to influence the way customers shop online.

In Los Angeles alone, reported package thefts have increased by a staggering 581 percent since 2010. And with most thefts going unreported to the police, it’s a safe bet to say that the number is quite a bit higher.

In a recent study by Shipp, 53 percent of people have actively changed their plans so that they can be home when a package is delivered, and 41 percent of people have avoided purchasing certain items online due to theft concerns. The primary type of item that people have avoided buying? Not surprisingly, it’s electronics.

In the same study by Shipp, 61 percent of people said they felt that online retailers weren’t doing enough to prevent package theft, and a whopping 71 percent said that they would be open to having their packages delivered to an alternative location, such as a locker.

The moral of the story? People want to be sure that their packages won’t be stolen, and if you can offer an alternative delivery method, it’s likely to increase your overall conversion rate and customer satisfaction

But ship-to-store shipping has more advantages than simply offering peace of mind to consumers. It can also increase your in-store conversion rate.

It turns out that when customers come to a store to pick up their package, they tend to make other purchases while they’re there. Some of these purchases are impulse buys, while others are on items already needed.

Writing in Forbes, Bryan Pearson says:

These super-short trips [to pick up packages] can result in higher-proportioned revenue because shoppers who place pickup orders, encouraged by the prospect of a quick in-and-out visit, remain prone to split-second purchase decisions.

“As good as delivery is getting—one-day delivery, sometimes one-hour delivery—that still can’t compete with the one-second immediacy of being in store and picking up that avocado … because I thought about it in that moment,” explained Todd Dipaola, chief executive and founder of InMarket.

The statistics back this up. Every year, customers spend approximately $5,400 on impulse purchases, according to a survey by Slickdeals.net. Eighty-five percent of respondents to the survey said that their impulse purchases were in response to some sort of discount or deal. On top of this, 8 out of 10 impulse purchases are made in brick-and-mortar stores.

This presents a unique opportunity for you as a retailer. By offering in-store pickup, you significantly increase the chances that a customer will make additional purchases once they’re in the store. If you can combine in-store pickup with specific discounts, you may be able to significantly increase your conversion rate on those discounted items.

Riding the Ship-to-Store Bandwagon

48 percent of retailers in the United States are already offering their customers the ability to ship packages directly to the store including 62 percent of the top 50 ecommerce retailers.

Best Buy, Walmart, Target, and other retailers are using the ship-to-store option as a way to compete with Amazon.

And with package theft likely to continue rising, we should expect more retailers to offer their customers a ship-to-store option.

In addition, if you can get customers into your store, there’s a much higher likelihood of them making additional purchases, which will increase your overall conversion rate and revenue.

Yes, implementing a ship-to-store option complicates the shipping process slightly for you. But it’s quickly becoming a non-negotiable move for ecommerce retailers.

So, will you hop on the ship-to-store bandwagon, or will you continue allowing your customers to fall prey to the “porch pirates”?

The post How to Leverage Ship-to-Store for Better Experiences (and Conversions) appeared first on The Good.

You find analytics frustrating, so you don’t set up Google Analytics Custom Alerts.

Your checkout process develops a glitch on Friday afternoon that causes would-be buyers to give up on trying to buy from you and go elsewhere. It’s Monday morning before you discover the problem. Now you have to explain what happened to the VP of Marketing (who then has to go hash it out with the CEO).

Unfortunately, this scenario and others like it happen way too often.

Here are some of the nightmares we’ve seen:

• The email sign-up process breaks and stops collecting information to build the list.
• Sales for a particular product plummet when a graphic on the product page fails to load properly.
• Page load time increases drastically, sending visitors elsewhere.

The list of possibilities is huge. Ecommerce sites are prone to technical hiccups—but you don’t have to just stand by and let them happen.

Catch them soon enough and the damage may be minimal. Let them go without detection for long, though, and heads are going to roll.

We want to make sure that never happens to you.

In this guide, we’ll demystify Google Analytics Custom Alerts so you can respond to future issues and minimize their effects.

What Are Google Analytics Custom Alerts?

Custom alerts tell Google Analytics to send notifications (email or text) when signals you’ve predetermined on your website are triggered. You set the standards, and Google will let you know if there’s a deviation from those standards.

Custom alerts are relatively simple to set up, can monitor just about anything related to your ecommerce website, and can absolutely save your bacon should a situation be ready to mushroom into a potential catastrophe.

Why Should You Worry About Custom Alerts Anyway?

Unless you have the time, team, and energy to monitor every data point on your ecommerce website 24/7 and can interpret changes in the flow at lightning speed, you’re a candidate for custom alerts.

Custom alerts are like having a strategically placed network of warning signals embedded in your website. If traffic dips too quickly or too far, if sales begin to flag (or soar), or if your Facebook ad suddenly stops working for you, custom alerts will let you know immediately.

That’s much better than finding out the hard way.

How to Access Google Analytics Custom Alerts

We’ve got good news: Creating custom alerts is one of the simplest things you can do in Google Analytics. This guide will show you exactly how to get started.

The screenshot above shows how to access Custom Alerts in Google Analytics. Thanks to TenCoats for allowing us access to their analytics dashboard to illustrate this guide.

Here’s how to access custom alerts settings:

1. Log in to Google Analytics and navigate to the property you want to view.
2. Click on Customization.
3. Click on Custom Alerts.

The first thing you’ll see after following the path above is the Custom Alerts dashboard. To get started with Custom Alerts, click the “Manage custom alerts” button (see the next screenshot).

Once that opens, click the “+ NEW ALERT” button (see the screenshot below), and you’re good to go.

You’ll need to name the alert, determine which reporting views you want it to work with, choose the alert reporting frequency (period), and enter the email address and/or mobile phone number (USA only) to which you want alerts delivered.

You then choose the Alert Conditions and save the alert.

We’ll walk through the steps of creating an alert soon, but first, you must decide which Google Analytics Custom Alerts will serve you best.

Which Custom Alerts Do I Need?

Google Analytics is essentially a robust table of dimensions and metrics gathered by bits of code you place on your ecommerce website pages. Dimensions are attributes—for example, City, Page, and Browser Type (see screenshot below). Metrics are the quantitative measurements, such as the number of pageviews. Reports and Alerts are ways you can view and manipulate the information collected.

While the possibilities are extensive, some of the popular custom alert types we’ve seen are notifications for significant changes in:

• Website traffic
• Pageviews
• Sales
• Bounce rate
• Conversion rates
• Traffic source types
• Page load speed

Basically, if a metric is important to your ecommerce business and you want to know when deviations from the standards you set occur, custom alerts will serve you well. Set up the critical alerts first (checkouts, conversion rates at essential points along the path to sales, traffic to your site, etc.), then add non-essential alerts later.

Google Analytics is a robust table of dimensions and metrics.

How to Set Up a Google Custom Alert for Checkout Completions

The process for creating custom alerts is the same for every metric on which you desire notifications. After you click the “+ NEW ALERT” button (see How to Access Google Analytics Custom Alerts above), you’ll have several options for creating custom alerts.

We’ll walk through the selections for our example account (TenCoats.com), and then you can log into your Google Analytics dashboard and practice setting up custom alerts for your site.

In the screenshot above, you can see the options TenCoats.com selected when setting up there alerts. Here’s some more information about your options when creating alerts:

Alert name: Use something significant to you. It’s not uncommon to have a dozen or more custom alerts set. When one fires, you want to immediately know which of your KPIs it is tracking.

Apply to: The default is your current view, but you can choose other views or even other properties to apply it to as well.

Period: Choices are Day, Week, and Month. TenCoats.com chose to monitor daily checkouts, but we could have also set custom alerts to inform us about significant changes to weekly and/or monthly checkouts.

Send email: You can choose to have alerts sent to you only or to multiple email addresses. The From address for custom alerts is noreply@google.com.

Setup mobile phone: This is currently for U.S. phones only. It allows you to get text messages when alerts (Intelligence Events) fire.

Alert Conditions: This is where the process can get a little tricky. You’ll need to choose the traffic dimensions you want the alert to apply to, and then set the conditions that trigger the alert.

When determining the traffic dimensions, you can choose All Traffic (as we did in the custom alert shown above), or you can limit the alert to track by Custom Segments, Users, Acquisition, Behavior, E-commerce, or Systems. Click the box at the bottom of the drop-down list to view all choice possibilities alphabetically.

The best way to get familiar with Alert Conditions is to experiment. Before you get too involved in the sandbox, though, be sure to configure the primary custom alerts most important to your business. Your basic alerts shouldn’t be difficult to choose, but more complex settings are certainly possible.

Click “Save Alert,” and you’ve set your first custom alert!

To edit or delete a custom alert use this path: Admin > Customization > Custom Alerts > Manage custom alerts.

Google Analytics Custom Alerts and Your Ecommerce Website

You’ll need to adjust your custom alerts over time. It won’t take long to determine whether a certain alert is firing too often or not often enough. You may also find additional metrics you want to observe.

As long as your alerts are significant to your own key performance indicators and are set at meaningful levels, you can’t go wrong.

Here’s why:

The alerts you set are visible only in your current reporting view and the other views to which you choose to apply them. You determine who should be alerted and whether that alert should be delivered by email or text message.

That means you don’t have to spam anyone else with custom alerts. You can direct them only to yourself until you’re confident of the settings and are ready to share the capability with others.

The only way we know of to really mess up with Google Analytics Custom Alerts is to not configure them at all.

If you’ve experienced headaches with your prior attempts to set up Google Analytics features, we definitely understand. You don’t have to deal with it alone, though. Call The Good and speak with one of our analytics professionals.

Resources:

• 5 Essential Ecommerce Google Analytics Reports (For Great Insight)
• A User’s Guide to Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce
• A User’s Guide to Google Analytics Goal Flow Reports
• A User’s Guide to Google Analytics Users Flow Report

The post A User’s Guide to Google Analytics Custom Alerts appeared first on The Good.