October 26th, 2011 by Mike Batko
E-commerce professionals like to talk about methods for increasing their sales. Much of this discussion focuses on investing in affiliate programs, marketing, PPC, SEO, and landing pages; which tends to drive new visitors to your website. But what about the visitors you already receive? Are they having the best experience possible?
Understanding the following high-level data points about your visitors will assist sellers in the digital product space increase their shopping cart conversion rate and drive ROI for paid search campaigns.
Data Point #1 – Where Are My Visitors Coming From?
It is important to present product offerings in your customers’ native languages. Looking at traffic by territory may only give you part of the picture, so another important metric to consider is browser language. Users in territories like Canada, may primarily speak one of two languages (French and English) and it’s important to know who is looking at your site.
Once you know what language your customers speak, ask yourself the question, “Have I localized for my top visited languages and if so, have I used local translators?”
A poor translation may be just as bad as no translation at all. Below is a screen-shot of a video game named Zero Wing, which was released in 1989 and did not sell many copies.
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Filed under cart optimization, conversion optimization, increasing sales, localised shopping carts, paid search campaigns
Despite its age, email is still the top performing channel in online sales. Only email marketing has the technology to drive and maintain customer engagement, track metrics for optimization, and foster market research all in one. But, a hastily set up email marketing newsletter can negate all these benefits.
It would take a full length book to cover all of the mistakes online marketers make attempting to improve their metrics. For the sake of brevity, I’ve focused on three basic mistakes that marketers make sending out newsletters.
Mistake 1 – Making Assumptions About Your Customer Preferences
Allow Customers To Define Preferences
In 1974, Burger King launched the “Have it your way” ad campaign; a campaign that communicated to the consumer that Burger King was there to provide a service as special and unique as each individual customer. Email marketing newsletters should have the same goal.
While you have the choice to set the content and frequency of your newsletters, my advice is to implement a preference center, which allows subscribers to define the type of content they wish to see and how often they wish to see it.
Another mistake marketers make is requiring subscribers to fill out scrolls and scrolls of form fields. Instead, implement a progressive profiling strategy.
Progressive profiling is a way to capture your subscriber’s information over time, without overwhelming them at the beginning. For example, if a new subscriber comes to your home page to sign up for your newsletter, you can ask them the basics for their name and email. Once you send them the confirmation email, you can drive them to a preference center or another landing page that will collect further data to help you provide relevant content to them.
Mistake 2 – Lacking Relevancy
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Filed under E-mail Newsletters, List Segmentation, Preference Center, Progressive Profiling
Enjoy the final piece of our series of posts on drip marketing!
Part 3: Email Marketing – The Third Hurdle
Previously, we discussed how to generate traffic through paid search and then collect user information through user registration. We ended our discussion with suggestions for building a large email list.
The goal, of course, is still converting users into paying customers, but these drip marketing tactics extend the customer relationship well beyond the initial visit from your paid advertisement.
Segmentation and Discounts
With all this free user data you can begin segmenting users based on their behavior. Start off with an educational touch point. For example, why not e-mail the users who do not purchase the product and explain to them why they should upgrade to the Pro version?
Understand that discounts truly motivate indecisive consumers. If the registered free users are still not converting after the educational touch point, send out a promotional touch point in the form of an e-mail that includes a percentage discount of the premium version of your product.
Sender Reputation
A good way to kill your email marketing campaign is to have service providers flagging your emails as spam. Without a double opt-in process or a check for inactive email addresses, users will give fake email addresses. If you keep sending emails to invalid addresses, ISPs will blacklist you.
My first recommendation is to automate email sending. I once dealt with a large email registration lists that was being sent out manually. Due to other activities we were tackling in the marketing department, the e-mails were not sent out on a regular basis. The volume we were e-mailing was also inconsistent.
These two pieces combined sent up red flags for e-mail services providers. We decided to set-up two rounds of automated emails for seven and then twenty days after the free user registers. The 7-day e-mail would use the same educational template we used previously for “Why To Upgrade.” The 20-day e-mail would be the promotional “discount” e-mail we used previously.
This automation allowed our team to eliminate more than twenty hours a month spent on e-mail delivery. After one month of running the automated e-mail follow-up process, the sender reputation score was back to over 95, and we were no longer being black listed by e-mail service providers. The e-mail volume being mailed was consistent and lower volume. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under Blacklisting, Drip Marketing, Email Marketing, Frequency Adjustment, Sender Reputation
