Process is Queen for Conversions

In a previous post, Content is King – for Conversion’s, I detailed why having engaging content on your website is critical for your bottom-line.  One of the main points of the article was to remind e-commerce merchants to not get discouraged if a marketing initiative did not produce the initial expected results, as the true results will come over time.  The primary goal of any SEM campaign (and the underlying advertising network) is to drive traffic to your site, but they do not have much control over what happens when the visitor arrives at your website or the process you deploy to make the most of that traffic in the future.

While we all would like new visitors to load up their cart and proceed to check out, we all know (even from our own personal online shopping habits) that “cart abandonment” happens.  In fact, 80 percent of online shoppers place items in their shopping cart and then leave, according to comScore’s Online Shopping Customer Experience Study.  These abandoned items represent lost opportunities and leave merchants wondering why a purchase was not completed.  There are many aspects to cart abandonment, but there are simple things you can do that can have a dramatic impact and make the most of every visit to your website.

 

One process step to deploy is email collection.  Going back to content for a bit, I strongly encourage all online vendors to have at least one piece of content that is worthy of a visitor entering their email address to access (i.e. How-to-Guides, Newsletters, Mobile Apps) then promote that piece of content throughout your website.  This gives you an opportunity to collect contact information on those people that are not ready to buy “today”.  Another strategy to consider is to prompt a shopper to enter their email address as soon as they put the first item into their cart and incentivize the action with some type of offer such as a coupon, discount or even free shipping.  This way, if they abandon their cart, you will still have an opportunity to build a relationship.  Depending on your shopping cart technology you can get very sophisticated but the goal is to collect those email addresses and to nurture your prospects into eventual action.

For tips on how to drive traffic and make the most of each visitor using NTENT, call us at 212.967.9502 or email us at customerservice@ntent.com.  We are always happy to help!

 

- posted by Greg Gossler, Marketing