News
Tactics Views
is something that a lot of companies forget; if it’s your site, you can, and should, respond to as many reviews as is appropriate.
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Video Video is huge. Sadly, most companies
don’t know how to use it effectively.
Your two- to four-minute spot is a mini infomercial for your products or service. Make sure to have a solid intro and closing, complete with an aggressive blue-screen pitch and calls to action throughout.
Thrust emails Seed your list and don’t open the
emails you send to yourself. It will
give you a good indication as to where your emails are being delivered—inbox, spam folder, or the trash. As an aside, do this in-house, don’t ask your provider to do it for you. Test pop-ups to capture email addresses. You can test an offer, a sweepstake, a deal of the day, or even just ubercompelling creative. Pop- ups will work. If they don’t, it’s likely because your bias against them is keeping you from developing killer creative. Be sure to have your phone reps collecting
email addresses, to the tune of 85 percent at a minimum, as well as mobile phone numbers. Yes, you really should try to obtain mobile numbers even if you don’t know how to use them right now. It’s also a great time to train your customer service reps to upsell items that your web customers are most likely to buy.
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Trigger emails Triggers should be the most
successful programme in your
arsenal. Don’t have a trigger programme? Start with order confirmations and abandoned-cart emails.
An abandoned cart programme is made up
of a series of emails; not just one but a series of three to five at least. Keep the emails simple, they shouldn’t look like your regular thrust emails; personalise them; include the items that the user has abandoned and make sure there are lots of clear action directives such as a bold “return to cart now”. With abandoned carts, you’ll also want to
test midis or catfishes on entrance, reminding users they have something in their cart, and/or taking them right to the cart when they come back. Additionally, you should consider internal
remarketing banners and plugs (non-animated banners) and outbound telemarketing. Your order confirmation programme should
also be made up of a series of emails. If you are able to test your confirmation, try testing your standard “thank-you” email versus an immediate thank-you letter that allows the user to add anything to his order before it’s shipped. Use this space to upsell anything the user should have bought and didn’t. It may take you a while to figure out this formula—what the user will add to the order—but once you’ve discovered it, it often adds a whopping 15 to 30 percent to your average order value, depending on your order size. You’ll also want to send out a shipping confirmation as well as a “you have your order, now’s the time to order more” and a “please rate and review your order” emails. A lot of times, companies use generic, written-by- IT-type emails for order confirmations. Order confirmations, and any other kind of thank-you emails are great opportunities to sell more stuff. Use them wisely. If you’ve mastered both order confirmations
and abandoned carts, you should look at EBOPP’s (emails based on past purchases) and reactivation emails. The holiday season is the ideal time to reactive old customers and old enquiries. Again, these should be personalised triggers.
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External remarketing
banners Your banner success will be largely
dependent on your creative, so test out a bunch of versions before you rollout your programme. If you can, be sure to test a version where you add the picture of the last item the user abandoned to the banner; RBIs (remarketing banners with items) are typically the most successful by a lot.
Outbound
telemarketing Have a lot of abandoned carts? Test
calling the carts with the highest average orders that have been abandoned. You only need to test a few of these to know if this programme will work for you. Hint: chances are it will work like gangbusters.
Analytics Make your life easier and develop
some “read and react” reporting.
This one-page report should include only the essentials you need to run your ecommerce business. The format should be an overview so you can look at it at-a-glance and then delve deeper into areas where you see problems. Make sure to separate your iPad and tablet
traffic from your smart- and feature-phone traffic. iPads and other tablets make great shopping devices so you often see twice your regular conversion on them. You don’t want those results to influence what might be happening on your other mobile results. You may also want to consider adding a package like Bango to help you with your mobile data as it’s not always well interpreted by some of the other analytics providers.
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Mobile There’s no doubt about it,
mobile is the thing to work on
for 2012. Consultants make it sound super- expensive and ultra-time-consuming. It’s neither. Right now, there are three things that make the biggest difference in mobile. The first is showing up: having a presence, no matter how small or imperfect it is. Second is speed. Granted, that sounds like a tip from 1998, but the reality is that your conversion—to an action or an order—will completely depend on how fast your site is. The average mobile pages are 250kb right now. The pages that convert the most have weights of less than 100kb—many of them closer to 50kb, maximum. The third thing is navigation. Users expect to do, browse and buy the same things they do on your regular website. So if you want to start to build solid mobile navigation, you should take the five to eight things that are most important for your users and build on them. Start with a single jump page and then go from there. Bonus tip: make sure to optimise your emails for mobile devices. That is the most important thing to start with.
Amy Africa is chief executive officer of Eight By Eight, and has been at the forefront of web usability studies, web design improvement, and successful ecommerce for more than 15 years.
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