In a recent Internet Retailing webinar, How Space.NK optimised their customer conversion rate to increase sales, we heard from Tim Renew, global sales director at cloud.IQ and Jez Wilson, head of ecommerce at SpaceNK in a session on conversion rate optimisation.
Tim Renew, global sales director at cloud.IQ, opened the webinar with an introduction to the company, which was founded in 2013 as a cart abandonment provider and has since become a SaaS business that helps ecommerce businesses convert more of their traffic. He then went on to a broader discussion of conversion rate optimisation.
Setting the scene
“The level of choice that consumers is phenomenally greater than probably even this time last year . The level of people starting to launch online is growing phenomenally, and where people used to be able to convert 10-15% of their visitors into a purchase, nowadays only around 2% actually convert to an online sale. A huge amount of people are dropping off.”
• Finding new customers is more complex than converting existing customers.
• CRO can help increase revenue by 6-12%.
• GRAPHIC: Example of anonymised purchase funnel.
Path to CRO: Understand – engage – acquire
Understand
Data insights: understanding site traffic through analytics.
• Track everything you can, and keep analysis ongoing: have they been to your site before, what traffic source did they come from, what device, what do you know about them already. Plus own business objectives and goals.
Engage
Smart overlays: pop-up boxes with relevant messages
• Biggest annoyance can be to be presented with an overlay at the wrong time.
• Show them based on real-time action, judged likeliness to buy and what message will engage them most, as correlates to business objectives.
• Email overlay, for example, might target visitors that haven’t been before. Or educate customers through a link to a whitepaper (B2B) or detailed information about the products that are on offer, eg a buyer’s guide. Catch their attention by understanding their interests and through building up profiles of the types of products people are interested in.
Overlay examples: Asics, SealSkinz, The British Museum (social sharing)
Targeted emails
• Use data on user behaviour to “turbo-charge” email marketing campaigns and unify the customer’s shopping experience.
• Browser abandonment emails
Acquire
Capture at exit
• Offer codes based on user profile/business needs, offering relevant discount codes to those that need it, according to understanding of the customer. May not always be relevant.
•Trigger personalised emails to abandoned baskets: 75% of people, on average, abandon a transaction but 15-20% of those could be converted to a sale.
• How to run an abandonment campaign
• Example: Space NK
• Replenishment campaigns
• Upselling/crosselling
Native app integration
“The most valuable real estate in the world seems to be the home screen of someone’s mobile phone”.
• Tracking possibilities: from when the app opens to when they close it.
Example results
Space NK: Can we help with your order email: 7.3% uplift in online revenue, 18% conversion, 6,259% ROI.
• Fully optimised CRO vs non-optimised.
• Travel company example.
Conclusions
• Make the most of the customers you have already
• Be smart, have technology do the work for you
• The journey to buy should be as easy as possible – identify pinch points
• Always keep business objectives in mind
• Quantify everything.
The presentation was followed by a Q&A session, featuring guest speaker Jez Wilson, head of ecommerce at Space NK.
To find out more about the webinar,watch it at your convenience, and see the Q&A session in full, visit the Cloud.IQ webinar page.
