Online advertisers are always looking for innovative ways to engage customers early in the visit, increase conversions and ultimately boost sales.
There are several ways to reach consumers at key times in their purchase process, such as asking for an email address or a Facebook "like", encouraging consumers to add more to their carts at checkout, and incentivizing users to click on special offers and deals. These types of tools are effective in drawing in new customers with offers via social media or getting customers to increase their average order size and even getting them to leave information that will allow for later engagement.
Early Engagement
We have found that tools presenting a pre-purchase opportunity for a site visitor - such as adding their email, giving a Facebook "like" or a leaving a cell phone number in order to unlock a special offer - captures between 2 and 7 percent of the daily site traffic, and ultimately boosts conversion rates by 10 to 20 percent.
This typically manifests itself to potential customers in the form of a slide out, modal or lightbox that prompts the visitor to add their email in order to unlock a special offer, which is immediately displayed if they opt to add the information.
Increasing Customer Purchase Size
There are also tools that enable brands to encourage shopping to add more to their carts to increase order size. They can also work in slightly different ways, but the basic idea is simple. Once a shopper begins adding items to their cart and heads for the checkout, a header, slider or pop-up will appear and let them know if they spend "X" amount more they can get an additional incentive such as an increased discount or free shipping. This encouraging information leads customers to add more to their cart and leads to higher conversion rates as well.
Cart Abandonment
A recent study from the Baymard Institute found that 68 percent of all e-commerce visitors abandon their shopping cart. According to the study, leading causes include: shipping cost, shipping speed, return policy, website speed, website errors, checkout process, site security and more.
Other studies have shown abandonment rates as high as 95 percent of shoppers exiting a website without buying, leaving their email address, providing a Facebook "like" or a cell phone number. Without a solution, those customers are lost forever.
Although retargeting is a solution, it may not necessarily work in real-time. Offering a "guest" checkout (no password required), stating shipping costs upfront and assuring that proper secure shopping badges are present on a website have been found to increase conversions by a large margin.
Often these tools are built into an ecommerce platform. Such tools enable advertisers to send an optimized behaviorally targeted popup to interrupt the customer from leaving the website and bring customers back to the site after they left without buying. At eAccountable, we have found that this type of feature converts 30 to 50 percent of these abandoned carts. That’s significant.
Once brands determine their goals – whether it’s capturing emails, getting more Facebook "likes", acquiring mobile information, or increasing the dollar value of customers’ purchases (or a combination of any and all of these) - they can determine which tools and services will work best for their needs and help them achieve success.
Durk Price is the CEO and Founder of eAccountable (https://www.eaccountable.com/).
Mr. Price is the CEO and Founder of eAccountable. The Company launched in the year 2000 and is celebrating its 15th Anniversary. eAccountable provides digital agency services for numerous Internet Retailer Top 500 merchants like: Extended Stay Hotels, Modell’s, Photos.com by Getty Images, Waterford, Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, Royal Albert, Sage Software, Chicago Bears, PsPrint, PerformanceBike.com, PureFormulas.com, Gaiam, Rockler.com, RockbottomGolf and CanvasOnDemand.com. eAccountable is a partner of Americaneagle.com