Which factors are the main reasons for shopping cart abandonment?
Cart Abandonment specialists, Cloud.IQ have released a new infographic with some fascinating findings regarding how and why our customers are abandoning their purchases and how we can leverage this opportunity to generate more sales.
Some stats of interest:
88% of online shoppers who abandon online purchases before completion are open to being emailed by retailers afterwards..
35% actually say they will actively welcome these emails
For every £100 spent on driving customers to the site, only £1 goes into converting them
To see all the stats and the full infographic, view it here.
…
How does your use of key email tactics compare?
Following on from the post by Becky Hesilridge summarising adoption and examples of different email marketing strategies, Pure 360 have released an infographic from their research to share more insight on how email marketing is being used in 2014.
Companies were asked how they are are using email marketing, and if they have an email marketing strategy.
57% have an email marketing strategy, and 65% feed back on results. The sector most likely to have a strategy is the Retail Sector and the fourth most likely to be implementing one.
Thanks to Becky Hesilridge for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Becky…
Which email clients should we design and test for? 2014 update
It's important to agree the target email clients you want the email to be displayed in when briefing an agency to develop a new email template or enewsletter layout. Of course, large volume senders will want the email to render in all, but for smaller businesses it's OK to target and test a smaller number.
Traditionally the main email clients to target were the main webmail services plus different Outlook versions.
Hotmail
Yahoo! Mail
Gmail
Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010
B2B marketers would have added different versions of Lotus Notes and Blackberry with Gmail becoming more important through time amongst professionals.
In 2014 this is radically different - you also need to think really seriously about how emails will render on different mobile platforms.
This 2014 infographic has the data published from their clients for the whole of 2013 - it's from the excellent Litmus…
Lessons on using the right e-retail incentives at the right time
'Should we use discount codes in a our abandonment emails?' is a question we’re often asked by retailers at Triggered Messaging. On the surface, incentives look like a great idea because you can recover more carts and gain more sales you wouldn't have otherwise. Most of our data supports that point.
HOWEVER, when considering profitability, cart abandonment programs can be dangerous. You can give discounts when you didn’t need to.
In this article we share this case study of one retailer we worked with who discovered that they were needlessly giving away discounts costing over $3,000 a month.
What’s more, we’ll show how it appeared to be a success, even though it damaged profitability. Then we’ll tell you how you can make your abandonment incentive programs more intelligent and strategic to increase customer acquisition and lifetime value.
Here is the analysis we…
A summary of research findings on email communications strategies
At Pure360 we work with a lot of marketers with different aims, objectives and strategies. To gauge the current state of email marketing strategies used, we recently completed this in-depth email strategy research based on a survey in partnership with PlanToEngage.
Over 600 email marketers responded, giving us a wide range of results. Results fell into the following categories; strategy, best practice and measurement & reporting.
The results were surprising; indicating that many email marketers are not currently practicing their email marketing with a strategy in place. Therefore many of the practices which would logically follow such as an editorial calendar or automated campaigns are also not being practiced.
Email Strategy
Having a clear and focused email strategy is vitally important to your marketing mix; without a well-defined strategy your email marketing ROI is likely to suffer. This may seem fairly…
How to create a water-tight email marketing strategy for building customer loyalty
The traditional definition of customer loyalty is a financial one– your most loyal customers are clearly those who keep returning to do business with you. But loyalty in the digital world has much wider implications.
For some organizations it can be the bald metric of how frequently their customers do business with them.
For others, such as online retailers, it is also a measure of how often customers share favourable reviews or feedback on the organization or brand.
However you define and measure customer loyalty Customer satisfaction vs. loyalty
At the heart of any loyalty-driving campaign lies the need to raise customer satisfaction levels.
Ten steps to building customer loyalty
Step 1. Gain senior management and cross-business commitment to raising customer satisfaction across the enterprise.
Focus on the channel that lets you build intimacy. One of the most effective…
Making your emails more relevant by appealing to different reader personalities
In Part 1 we introduced using Personas for Email marketing based upon motivation, in Part 2 I'm going to review the 4 main different personality traits that are common to everyone and show how to apply them to email creative. Aristotle was one of the first to identify them and named them: Melancholic, Phlegmatic, Choleric and Sanguine, however we will be using more descriptive names for these personalities in this post.
By leveraging both personas and personalities, you not only know where to place content, images and set tasks but also know how to speak to them (TOV), what offers to deliver and help them to accomplish their task the way they feel comfortable doing so – thus enabling higher and potentially quicker, conversions.
(Image courtesy of Henk Wijnholds)
Based on the well-known…
Google's Gmail change may change Open Tracking reports
Google notified Gmail users on the 12th December that they had implemented a change to the way that linked images are handled in Gmail webmail. They explained:
"...thanks to new improvements in how Gmail handles images, you’ll soon see all images displayed in your messages automatically across desktop, iOS and Android.
Instead of serving images directly from their original external host servers, Gmail will now serve all images through Google’s own secure proxy servers".
So images will now be seen by default by Gmail users unless they proactively switch them off in settings (or have previously done so).
I first alerted email marketers to this on my Zettasphere blog on 6th December since the change has been in place for a while - it appears that around the 3rd December Google implemented a change. Now it's official, we're alerting Smart Insights readers to the change so…
Triggered email campaigns vs traditional email
We regularly feature advice on behavioural email marketing on our hub page since we think they are often an under-used or under-developed technique to cost-efficiently engage prospects and customers.
"Triggered emails" is an alternative way of described them which EmailMonks uses on this infographic on 'triggered email marketing campaigns'. It clearly shows the value of this technique and how, with access to the right CRM system or email service provider, campaigns can be set-up; whether it's based on an action, event, demographics or other criteria.
Companies now have more information available to personally react in 'real time' or at timely relevant touchpoints, to engage/convert and at times 'save a sale'. Relevance helps lift open rates for trigger emails such that they can often be the most important emails you send, so ripe for optimisation:
'Autoresponder open rates are 4x higher than generic emails, and triggered emails have…
A briefing and ressearch on the impact of Google's new Tabbed Inbox
December 2013 update: Return Path have released a comprehensive study evaluating the impact of Gmail's tabbed inbox. We have added it to the end of Tim's post to enable readers to compare their open and delivery rates in Gmail.
In August 2013, Google made two important changes to the Gmail inbox that all email marketers need to understand.
What has changed?
The two changes that Google have made are distinct, but have been introduced together.
1. Tabs added to the inbox separating promotional, social updates and other email
2. Ads that look like emails may be placed at the top of the promotional tab
These changes are being automatically rolled out to all Gmail users.
As Gmail users access their inbox they will see this popup to inform them about the inbox change:
Then the Gmail web interface looks…
