Abandonment Issues

It certainly feels like a huge mistake has been made when you know that a shopping cart was created by your (potential) customer, and then abandoned.  So, where did the site or product go wrong?

Shopping cart abandonment is a large concern for tiny and massive online retailers alike.  Research has shown

• 60-70% of online shopping carts are abandoned, and
• 99% of people will not finish a purchase on the first visit (SeeWhy reports), but
• 60-75% of those people do intend to complete the purchase
• most within the following 24 hours.

So, it seems that shopping cart abandonment is a normal part of the online shopping process.  Why?

Once a shopping cart has been abandoned, you have two main strategies at your disposal.


Re-targeting

The concept is fairly simple, when a visitor leaves your site to continue browsing, your ads will display on the other sites that they ultimately visit.  You would need to go with a service provider, and is priced similarly to other pay-per-click endeavors.  Your ads can be very dynamic, and include logos, top selling products, or the exact products the customer was browsing within your site. 

The payout?
According to comScore research (2010) retargeting brought an increase in visitor traffic of over 1,000% to a site above advertising without retargeting. 

The drawback?
This method is not suitable for sites visited fewer than 1,000 times per month.


Email Remarketing
This strategy delivers specific and relevant emails to engage customers and address customer needs, specifically their reasons for abandonment.  Many retailers employ this strategy, and it works for businesses large and small.

How do you make email remarketing work?
Fist, make it timely, 12-24 hours for initial contact is recommended.  In the email, include:

• appreciation and personalization ~thank the customer (by name) for visiting the site and for looking at your products.  Ask if there was a problem that you can help with.
• images ~not only of the abandoned items, but also recommended and/or additional products. 
• contact information ~logo, phone number, web links to the main site and their cart, FAQ page link.  Use unique contact sources (phone number and email address) to track email related inbound communications.  This will not only help measure conversions, but also identify those most likely to complete the transaction.
• customer loyalty ~information on guarantees and/or warranties, shipping policies, return information, and other perks available.
• call to action ~make it easy for them to complete the transaction

Some retailers offer discounts in these remarketing emails, but there is a drawback to doing so.  It can condition the customer to purposely abandon the cart, in order to receive a discount.  If you decide to offer a discount, do it sparingly, with a specific reason, and most experts agree that waiting is best.  Offering a discount in the second or third email, rather than the initial one, can have the most conversion impact.  The holiday season does give you a good excuse to try a discount for a limited time, without some of the conditioning risks.  Running and A/B test would be a good idea, to ensure that you are not giving revenue away unnecessarily.

Other email remarketing ideas that avoid discounting include:

• free shipping (with order thresholds that slightly exceed your average order total)
• live support, phone or chat (people still crave human interaction)
• free return shipping (combat the purchase-fear inaction)
• loyalty programs

The payout?
Your products are brought back into the minds of the consumer, when they are actually at the point of completing the purchase (which is at a far different time from their initial visit.)  Actual conversion rates vary, but research indicates up to 80% conversion for well timed and executed remarketing emails.

The drawback?
There are costs involved, varying quite a bit in the details.  Research different providers to ensure you get the right service, at the right price.


Mitigation
It would be a far simpler thing to just eliminate shopping cart abandonment in the first place.  The graph above shows that is unlikely, but there are a few things that you can optimize that may mitigate your efforts.

1. Simplify checkout ~Prevent abandonment by streamlining the process for user-friendliness.  Eliminate unnecessary or complex steps (like account creation.)  Ensure 100% error free shopping cart service, as one glitch can drive your customers straight onto the site of your competitors.
2. Embrace the cart game ~Add a "save for later" or "add to wishlist" type function.  This gives the researching customer time to complete the sale at their pace, without skewing your metrics.  Also, give your cart sufficient time before clearing to allow the customer to return and complete the sale without having to go through the shopping process again.
3. Shipping rate competition ~Adding shipping calculations before the cart can also avoid skewing metrics, and avoid spending on retargeting those customers who will probably not complete the sale, due to shipping prices.  That said, this is the time to negotiate for lower shipping costs, and to seriously consider your handling costs as well.  Noone likes hidden expenses, and the holiday season is over-run with shipping and handling discounts.  Don't lose sales by ignoring these most basic of customer concerns.
4. Security and trust ~People are more worried than ever about payment and information security.  Prominently display your security provisions at every point in the shopping cart experience.  Include confidentiality information, guarantees / warranties, return policies, reputation enhancers like reviews, professional affiliations and testimonials also help.

Have a happy, safe and profitable holiday season, one and all, finally free of abandonment issues.
Thank you,
Laura

Optimize Your Website With Google Analytics

Sure, you have heard about web analytic tools and how great they are. You may even have heard a lot about Google Analytics. But did you really know how you can leverage this free web analytic tool to build your online audience, gain some valuable insights on your business and customers, and ultimately, measure how well you are achieving your website's goals?

Fret no more! Second Chance Solutions is here to provide you a few know-hows to maximize the use of Google Analytics.

But first, what is Google Analytics exactly?

"Google Analytics is a free web analytic tool that can provide you with comprehensive statistics and detailed reports regarding visitors to your website."

You can easily set up a Google Analytics account by following instructions on its website (http://www.google.com/analytics/).

Now you have the account set up and ready to go, what is next?

The Basics

First, you need to get familiar with what is on your dashboard.

You can specify the dates you want to see data for by changing the dates at the top right hand corner. You can also view data by hourly, day, week, or month.

You can see the percentages of new and returning visitors in a pie chart.

You can also access the demographics of visitors as you can see in the example below.

Here are a few Google Analytics terms on the dashboard to get familiar with:

Sessions: The total number of the period time each and every user is actively engaged with your website within the date range.

Users: New and returning visitors.

Pageviews: The total number of pages viewed.

Pages/Session: The average number of pages viewed during a session.

Avg. Session Duration: The average length of a session.

Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page visit (i.e., visits in which the person left your website from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

% New Sessions: An estimate of the percentage of first time visits.


You can also see more in detail regarding active users. The following graph shows the percentage of 1 day active user within the date range. You can choose to see the percentages of 7 day, 14 day, 30 day, or all together active users.

You can also view the detail regarding demographics of visitors by age or gender.

Another useful data you may want to look at is what type of device visitors use to access your website (Desktop, Mobile, or Tablet). This data will come in handy when you want to optimize your mobile strategy.

Digging Deeper

The Acquisition reports let you see how you acquire users, their behaviors on your site after acquisition, and their conversion patterns. 

All Traffic data tells you more about where your traffic comes from: social media pages, organic searches, or blogs.

Real Time reports allow you to see active users and their geographical locations in real time.

Advanced

Be sure to set up goals to better evaluate your conversion rates and gain some valuable insights regarding your visitors' behaviors. Your business goals can be varied depending on the type of your business. For example, if you are an e-commerce site, you may want to enable e-commerce tracking and start monitoring conversion rates for your products.

The Moz Blog

Utilize Behavior Flow feature to identity your website's strong areas with the most successful conversion rates and weak areas that need to be further optimized. Converters and Non-Converters segments can tell you the difference between visitors' behaviors that have made a conversion and those that have not.

Amazee Metrics

This is just a small portion of what Google Analytics can do. The tool is capable of so much more analytical wonders that could help gain better understanding of your business and customers.

Visit Google Analytics YouTube Channel for more in-depth tutorials.



May Mandy Han

Black Friday is over.... now what???

It is now noon (at my local time) which means Black Friday shopping is completed.  People have begun to return home, usually weary, but far from done with their holiday shopping.  Was your business' Black Friday less successful than you had hoped?  Do not fear, there are still ways to fix sluggish sales before the end of the holiday shopping season.

As surprising as it may be to most people, Black Friday is not the biggest shopping day of the year, nor is Cyber Monday.  In fact, the peak does not occur for several weeks, occurring on the weekend prior to Christmas.  This means there are still ample opportunities to capture attention, and sales.

The only fix that is really off of the table for this year is search engine optimization.  You should begin optimizing campaigns (according to Search Engine Journal) three to six months ahead of time, to secure the most coveted page rankings.  You should definitely consider a SEO strategy for next year, but there is one particular option that can produce similar results, with a quicker turnaround.

As gift-list-crazed consumers scour the internet bargains, well placed and intruiging pay-per-click ads can compel sales.  Consumers need to know your greatest deals, when and where to obtain your goods.  Pay-per-click ads do require some finesse, patience and experience to prevent disaster.  This is most definitely the time to consider seeking the direct help of an experienced internet marketer, with current experience in long-tail keyword research.  Be diligent about costs, to ensure that they are completely offset by the additional sales.

Email (or texting based) marketing is perhaps the most successful venue available to you for the remainder of the holiday season.  Overuse of email is largely forgiven during the buying frenzy, but do be judicious, as the unsubscribe button gets frequent use around the first of the year. 

Combat subscriber fatigue by segmenting your customer database (by preferences) and send target-specific emails.  This will amp up the relevance level, and give your customers a more satisfying experience, which can translate into higher sales and more loyal customers.  Using mop-up ("last chance to save") and VIP promotions garner good click through rates, and higher conversion rates as well.

We at Second Chance solutions wish your business a very happy holiday shopping season!

Pinterest for Success

If you do not know what "Pins" mean, you could be missing out on one of the hottest social media platforms of late.    

Pinterest's popularity is skyrocketing and it has now firmly taken its place as the fourth most popular social media site ahead of Tumblr and Instagram.

So what is Pinterest? And how can it help to complete your social media strategy?

"Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool that helps you discover and save creative ideas."

Pinterest allows you to pin or link to photos of interest. It uses image boards called pin boards to share photos in collection. The whole concept is based on the idea that many people used to have clippings of their dream vacations, life goals, recipes, etc. on boards. Pinterest is very much like a virtual pin board where you can discover ideas and  inspirations and share them with others. Each photo has a click-through link that leads you back to the website where it was discovered. Users can check out other people's pin boards, like, comment or repin as they wish.

60% of Pinterest users are women. Thus, quite tellingly, the most popular subjects on Pinterest are Recipes, Fashion, Fitness, Beauty, and Decor. 

Here are a few influential Pinterest accounts:

Martha Stewart Living

Refinery29

Birchbox

                        

The Knot

But why should you add Pinterest to your social media strategy for your business?

Here is why..

(Source: Entrepreneur.com)

Pinterest is an excellent media channel for you to better market your content. It inspires users and it has a striking visual impact. It is a great tool for you to build your brand image.

Each pin serves a purpose and it must be visually interesting and appealing. There are a few things to bear in mind when managing a successful Pinterest account:

• Keep pin boards fresh, relevant, and fun.
• Focus on a handful of topics or themes.
• Know your brand and what you want to market.
• Ensure your images are top notch quality and pin-worthy.
• Strategically time your subjects to current happenings and news.

So now you have a Pinterest account. But how do you measure its success?

Clicks back to your website, conversions, and the number of followers are good indicators to measure your Pinterest activities and engagement. Click-throughs from pins could seriously drive traffic to your website. Having an exceptional landing page to greet users  and providing positive experience once they land on your website from a pin will increase your chance of converting click-through to qualified leads.

Now that you know everything there is to know about Pinterest, start today and pin your way to success!

May Mandy Han

Help your Customers to Choose

Although Thanksgiving is not yet upon us, the holidays are officially here.  Stores have decked their halls, and shelves overflow.  There are so many things to choose from, how do we even start?

Marketing asks a consumer to make choices, often a difficult task for people.  We employ a host of techniques: research, feedback, analysis of competition products as well as our own product line.  Does this work make it easier for the consumer to choose?

Sheena Iyengar, a psycho-economist, has fascinating insight into the process of consumer choice.  Wattime well spent in avoiding the mistake of over-complicating the process, and stressing the consumer.

Enjoy!
Laura

Marketing Video Mistakes ~how to avoid them

Make a marketing video....

I know this sounds silly, as that is the whole point, right?  Too many businesses make videos with:

~no purpose

~no objective

~no strategy

Don't make a video purely to jump on a marketing bandwagon.

but not a movie...

Less is more.  According to the marketing video producer, Michael Mogill, the 60-90 second range is best.

focused...

Since you will have limited time to engage your audience, so

~stick to a single priority sales or branding point

~get that message out first, then support with specific facts

~and be clear on what action viewers should take next.

 on business...

Remember the purpose of any marketing endeavor: to clearly define the benefits your business  can provide to the target audience for this video.  Prominently display your logo, website URL and other branding identifiers.

and quality.

An amateurish video will only degrade the quality of your work within the minds of your prospective customers.  Attention to details and good planning (throughout the process) will result in a video that will help, not hinder, your marketing endeavor.

(Don't forget.... you will need to market the video itself, it will not simply jump onto screens!)

What's in Store for Internet Marketing in 2015?

There is no denying that Internet Marketing is evolving at the speed of light with ever-increasing new technologies. To survive in this ruthless business environment with fierce competition, you need to be aware of upcoming Internet Marketing trends to stay ahead.

Watch the presentation video below for' predictions for Internet Marketing trends in 2015...

May Mandy Han