The Ongoing Conversion Challenge
Grabbing the attention of potential new customers is challenging enough. Getting them to spend a few seconds opening the catalog you sent them or visiting your site is an expensive and often unsuccessful procedure. Moving them through multiple conversions from browser, to email subscriber, to first time buyer, to repeat customer, and, finally, to high frequency multi-buyer proves incrementally more challenging. If it were easy, then everyone would succeed, but if it were impossible, then everyone would fail. You can do it!
What can you do to increase your odds of converting your customers to the next level? The best practices list is long and sometimes contradicting, but here are a few of them that we recommend:
- Stay in contact with your customers. Multi-channel merchants are often concerned about being too aggressive in their email and catalog campaigns. They ask us to closely monitor unsubscribes to see if they are irritating their and turning them away. It is unlikely that you will overload customers with your frequent contacts. It is more likely that you are out of sight and out of mind. Keep letting them know you want them.
- Use dynamically selected content on your site and in your emails. Customers respond better to campaigns that offer products that interest them. If you keep sending them offers for products they have no interest in, you train them to delete your emails and discard your catalogs.
- Offer promotions. You don’t want to train customers to wait for a sale. Nobody does, but can you live with them buying one item at a sale price and several more products at full price?
- Send abandoned cart automated emails. Several abandoned cart research projects put the abandon rate between the upper 50% range to the low 80%. Odds are that customers will abandon two out of three carts started on your site before the final checkout page. Develop an automated email program to make multiple attempts at seeing those abandoned carts checked out. Customers exhibit no stronger purchase intent than putting items in a cart.
- Send abandoned browse automated emails. Nearly as important as abandoned carts is abandoned browse. With browse tracking techniques, you can know what your site visitors looked at, and that provides what you need for a series of automated emails.
Get Started
The marketing experts at CLI can help you implement these and other best practices that will address the conversion challenge. We believe that it is our job to provide you with the ideas and tools to help make you successful.
Get in touch with us to learn more.