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Planning Ecommerce Promotions

By Eric Leuenberger Leave a Comment

Planning Ecommerce Promotions

In the past I’ve touched on this subject, however not until recently did I realize that it seems every store owner I speak with has at least one thing in common. None of them have taken the time to sit down and actually plan out a promotional calendar for their business.

I personally recommend sitting down and developing a 12-month plan consisting of at least two different promos per month with room for a “spontaneous” third if needed. If only running two promotions, I recommend running one during week one, and the other during week three. More on why I do that in my next post.

Planning out a promotional calendar is a critical element toward increasing your sales. When properly implemented, a promotional campaign can win new customers and keep your current base coming back for more. If you have continued to put off this part of your business, you are hurting your chances to capitalize on big opportunities. There should be no excuses … you’re only hurting your business by not doing it.

What good promotions do

On a general level, good promotions have several things in common:

  1. They have an intended audience in mind.
  2. They generate interest.
  3. They create urgency.
  4. They create excitement.
  5. They generate sales.
  6. Provide great value to those who redeem them.
  7. They are planned with a clear objective that the business owner desires to achieve.

Intended audience: A well thought out promotion has an audience it wants the attention of. Whether that audience is targeted or open to the masses it makes no difference, all good promotions have some audience they want to reach.

Generate interest: Good promotions have the ability to generate the interest of their intended audience. This interest is generated through the look of the ad used for the promotion, the copy used in the ad, the offer, and even the placement of the ad itself.

As a simple example for illustrative purposes, if you decided to increase your “new business” base then it would be considered a “targeted campaign” toward “new customers”. Your offer might be a “15% off your first purchase with us” and placed in a prominent location throughout your site. Likewise, if your promotion was a “mass targeted” campaign to “move inventory” then you may want to develop a promo that is “Get $25 off the purchase of $75 or more” (which does not show favoritism to any one demographic.)

Create urgency: Good promotions have a time limit to them. Once it’s over it’s over and the offer is gone.

If you’ve ever participated in a promotion that “expires on xxx date” then you’ve been exposed to the “urgency factor”. Putting a time limit on promotions creates buyer urgency. Urgency generates sales.

When developing promos with expiration dates, don’t extend the promotional period unless you have a good reason for it. Once your buyers understand that when you say “it’s gone” … “it’s gone”, they’ll respond in droves providing your product meets their needs.

Create excitement: A well-planned promotion will generate some excitement. That excitement can oftentimes lead to “referral” business where one person tells others about it and you get the domino effect. I’ve seen instances where a very well planned promotion gets listed on a board by an “excited” customer, and the sales that promotion generates goes through the roof. It can and does happen.

Generate sales: Good promotions generate sales. Whether the objective is to attract new customers, win back past customers, or get current customers to repeat buy, the direct result of a well planned and implemented promotion should be sales in the end.

Provide value: A promotion is only effective if it’s worth the buyer’s time. It must provide enough value the intended audience that they perceive it as the best choice. Although not the sole options, internet only discounts, free shipping offers that save on gas and travel time, and buy one get one offers can be big.

Planned with an objective: You should plan a promotion with an intended objective in mind. Whether the objective is to move inventory, get new customers (first-time buyer discounts), introduce a new product or line of products, or meet monthly quotas, every promotion should have a plan. This plan usually “leads the charge” in the development of the promotion in the first place and oftentimes can assist in determining what the exact offer will be.

No matter your store’s size, no matter your market, if you haven’t yet planned a promotional campaign for the coming months, you really need to get started. You could be missing out on some enormous opportunities.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategies

eCommerce Strategy Enables Higher Recovery of Abandoned Carts

By Eric Leuenberger 1 Comment

Abandoned shopping carts and eCommerce all to often go hand in hand.

Let’s face it, if you own an ecommerce site, you can expect to have some sort of abandoned cart rate. That does not mean you have to accept that abandonment rate though. You can (and should) implement strategies to recover some of those potential lost sales. If you are not doing anything to try to recover them, then you need to think about starting.

A cart is considered abandoned when a potential customer adds items to their cart, starts the checkout process, but fails to complete that process.

Recover abandoned shopping carts reportAfter testing various strategies for one site, I found a mix that yielded a 51% recovery rate of previously abandoned carts. In addition to the carts that were recovered, we were able to gather superior feedback on why others did not elect to complete their purchase.

Using this information, we were able to make further adjustments to the site that reduced future cart abandons and helped increase conversion.

According to industry reports, the average abandoned cart rate for ecommerce sites ranges between 55% and 70%. Many of those visitors abandon at different places, with most coming during the checkout process itself. Recovering a portion of those abandoned carts can add sales to your bottom line that would have normally been lost.

There are all kinds of reasons why a user may abandon the shopping process including:

  • Poor site design
  • Lack of direction and communication
  • Confusion
  • Lack of proper customer assurances
  • Site credibility
  • Distraction
  • and more…

Recovering Carts: Finding The Right Mix

When crafting solutions that attempt to recover sales from abandoned carts, you should test various tactics to find the right mix that works for your site. What works for one market may not necessarily work for others. Generalities may be present that can be implemented across multiple markets, however, it will come down to how each demographic responds to your message that will ultimately determine which tactic or tactics work best for your store.

I found that through my testing, the best mix was to send an email within 2 – 4 hours after the cart was abandoned. I wanted to try to recover the sale while the initial transaction was still fresh in their mind

In the “From” section of the email I used the name of the website. In the subject line I used the following text: “Question about your recent shopping experience with us.” The body of the email included the items that were in their shopping cart when they abandoned, asked them to help by telling us why they abandoned the cart, and reminded them that since the cart was saved, they could quickly and easily complete their purchase by coming back to the site.

Ideas on Where to Start

Depending on the technology implemented, eCommerce store owners fall into one of two boats when it comes to cart recovery. Those that have the ability to track and contact visitors who have abandoned their cart, and those that don’t have the technology in place to do this.

Either way, here are a few thoughts on what you can do to generate more sales no matter what your technology allows.

  1. If your ecommerce technology has a cart recovery system in place (one that allows you to see those users and contact them) use it. Test various time frames and copy for sending email reminders. Try different subject lines, various offers and incentives for recovering and closing the sale. Equally important is to listen to those that respond to you with reasons why they did not complete the process. Use that information to make the needed adjustments on your site to avoid future abandons for that same reason.
  2. If you do not have a program in place that allows you to see and contact those users who have abandoned their carts, but you know they are abandoning, then start with your analytics. Find the main areas these users are leaving and address those pages first. Look for problems with design, wording, presence of customer assurances, etc…

    Where your site lacks them, add them. You may not be able to recover those carts who have abandoned already, but you may be able to reduce the number of future abandons by making the proper changes to avoid it before it happens.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategies, Shopping Cart Abandonment

Latest Promo Campaign Generates 18% Ecommerce Conversion Rate

By Eric Leuenberger Leave a Comment

One of the greatest joys of my ecommerce coaching engagements with store owners is being able to help them grow their online business.

While coaching, I’m constantly testing various methodologies which add incremental increases to their conversion rate.

During a recent promotion with one store owner we were able to achieve sustained conversion rates of a whopping 18.67% over a twelve day period. This conversion rate is well over the industry standard conversion rate of about 2.4%.

The graphic below is a screenshot of the analytics program showing the spike in conversion during that time period.
Ecommerce promotion analytics report

The average sustained conversion rate for this client over the past 15 months is a solid 10.48%. Again, well above the industry average. Yet, the recent promotion made even that conversion rate look small with the peak conversion rate being an unheard of 26.17%!

How Did it Happen?

By creating a promotion that work in conjunction with events already happening in the media, we were able to feed off of the hype and excitement that was generated through those channels. The best part is we never paid a dime for that exposure. We let the media do it for us and simply created a campaign that took the excitement and moved it to the client’s website in the form of a promotion.

What was the promotion’s foundation? March Madness and the NCAA basketball tournament.

With all the media exposure and hype surrounding that event it made sense to create a promotional campaign which captured the excitement. It’s often said by many that if you want to make money, “follow hollywood” or “follow the media”.

The general idea of the campaign was simple. Take the excitement surrounding the NCAA basketball tournament and turn it into a game which let the customers choose their own “tournament participants” (i.e. products) simply by purchasing their favorite products from the online store.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Blogging, Conversion, Marketing Strategies

It’s Cyber Monday. Are you Ready to Take Advantage?

By Eric Leuenberger Leave a Comment

Quick reminder here. Today is Cyber Monday.

Many people will be doing their holiday shopping online today. Be sure to take advantage of it!

If you followed my previous post titled Cyber Monday Marketing Ideas for 2007, then you had better be following up with an email this morning to your customer base.

If you did not follow that post, there is still time to take advantage of this holiday shopping rush. It doesn’t matter what you do, but you gotta do something!

Filed Under: Marketing Strategies

Customer Surveys Reveal Holes in the Dam

By Eric Leuenberger Leave a Comment

DamIn its simplest form, a dam can be seen a structural system that controls water.

It can stop water completely, or it can be opened up to allow water to flow through in a controlled manner.

Although simple in nature, the dam is made up of many different complex systems. All systems work together as a single unit to achieve one task — control the flow of water.

Periodically, as with all complex systems, the dam needs to be inspected for potential risks that may present problems down the road. If found, these “risk areas” should be addressed before they become a real problem.

For example, if not found and corrected, a single hole in the dam could very quickly turn into an out of control emergency.

E-Commerce Websites are a lot Like Dams

Your website can be thought of in much the same way as a dam. It is simple in concept, yet contains an array of complex system that work together as a single unit, controlling the flow of traffic through it to achieve a desired goal — generate sales. A hole in any one system can jeopardize the entire outcome.

Water is the Lifeline to Survival

Remember, a dam controls water. In a website, traffic is your “water”. Your traffic contains both visitors and customers (customers actually buy, visitors just look). Whereas a dam controls water, your website should control traffic. Properly controlling that traffic will become the lifeline to your ultimate success.

How to Find the Holes in Your Website

If you were managing a dam, you would probably send out inspectors to analyze, take notes, gather data, and report on the integrity and stability of the structure.

But you’re not. You’re managing and running an e-commerce website. So, who do you periodically send out to gather and report data back to you? You send out “Inspector Survey.”
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Marketing Strategies

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