The Three Rs That E-Commerce Marketers Should Master
We are all familiar with the 3 Rs from elementary school: reading, 'riting
and 'rithmetic. Similarly, there are three essential Rs that
marketers—especially those working in e-commerce—should have a firm grip on:
retention, retargeting, and re-engagement.
Just as reading is the keystone for education, customer retention is vital
to success, and businesses that are good at keeping customers have the power to
maximize
lifetime customer value (LTV) and grow revenue—in some cases by more than
25%.
The other two Rs, retargeting and re-engagement, are tools marketers can use
to boost retention rates and keep customers on board.
In the case of most consumers, the main point of engagement in today's
digital marketplace is the online shopping cart. It's where customers finalize
purchases, but it also serves as a basis for marketers to build profiles that
allow them to develop long-term customer relationships.
The problem is that a large majority of online shoppers abandon the shopping
cart, by some estimates at a rate of over 70%, which leads to trillions of
dollars in lost sales.
But here is the stat that really counts: Over 60% of those lost shoppers could be won
back.
Retargeting and re-engagement enabled by technology solutions, such as marketing
automation, data management platforms, and content personalization, can make a
big difference.
Retargeting
Imagine someone visits your website, clicks on several items (e.g. ,a few
pairs of running shoes), adds one pair to the shopping cart, but then leaves
without checking out or even entering an email address. How can you find her
and unlock that potential revenue?
To better understand and serve your site visitors (and drive sales),
websites commonly use a system of tags—snippets
of code that report information about visitor actions and send it to an
analytics platform.
Each time visitors click a link or view a new page, the tags register that
information, and in some cases a cookie is set
to find the visitors elsewhere on the Web after they leave your site. The
ability to deploy and manage these tags is not easy, and using a tag management
system can help.
You can use tags and cookies for a variety of purposes, but in this case
they are extremely useful for retargeting a lost source of revenue (i.e., visitors
who didn't convert).
Going back to our example, we understand that thanks to the tags added to
your site's code, a cookie tracking the user is now stored in your data
management platform (DMP) and identifies the visitor as being a part of an
audience that is interested in running shoes.
Later, when that visitor goes to another website with available ad space,
the ad exchange where that space will be sold creates a user ID (e.g., a
third-party cookie) to let potential publishers know who is visiting that site.
By syncing these cookies, it is possible to identify that user (who is no
longer viewing your page) as the visitor who recently abandoned the shopping
cart.
Armed with this knowledge, you can target users with a personalized ad based
on their previous activity and prevent them from becoming another source of
lost revenue.
Re-engagement
When customers land on your e-commerce site and later leave the shopping
cart without completing their purchase, the first step to recover them is to
re-engage.
And since there is theoretically a 60% chance of being successful, it is
well worth the effort! But here is the catch: Your
message must be engaging.
There are two main ways to re-engage customers: display ads or by email. In
both cases, the goal is to use the items left in the cart to win the customer
back.
For both remarketing display ads and re-engagement email campaigns to be
effective, you must personalize the content. In the case of email, this means,
at a minimum...
- Visitor's name
- List and pictures of items left in the shopping cart
- One-time offer based on items viewed
- Suggested items for cross-selling
- Offer to connect them with Customer Service in case of questions or concerns
You can also personalize remarketing display ad campaigns (though to a lesser degree than email) by including the items from the abandoned shopping cart in the ad.
Tech for Re-Engagement
For remarketing and re-engagement campaigns, marketers have various tools available to them:
- SalesMango is a relatively new solution on the market, but one that incorporates retention scoring and dynamic content serving based on engagement ratings.
- Marketo, one of the leaders in marketing automation, also offers integration with Magento and other popular e-commerce services.
- HubSpot has also added a solution called Groove that connects HubSpot customers with the Shopify platform.
But what if visitors enter an email address, but then don't complete their registration? You can use a re-engagement platform that enables you to capture and save an address as soon as a customer enters it into a form field.
Other Tools to Boost Retention
There are other areas of customer retention where technology plays an important role. Customer satisfaction makes a huge difference in keeping customers connected to your brand.
Improving customer experience—from search and browsing to item selection and, most important, the checkout process—is vital. If at any point the customer is dissatisfied, he or she may abandon the purchase.
What can technology do to help? A couple of things:
- Smarter search that keeps the browsing experience simple makes it easy and quick for customers find what they want. You can use cookies to track previous browsing history and build lists of suggested items. You can also provide a better customer experience with improved filter options. Among the tools are SpringSearch and Swiftype.
- Real-time assistance can be key to holding on to a customer who is about to leave his or her shopping cart. To combat this, more and more sites employ real-time chat systems, such as Zopim and Intercom.
No comments:
Post a Comment