The phone rang. The dog ate the remote control. The kids couldn’t find their soccer ball. These are all everyday distractions. And they can all prevent online customers from completing a transaction.
While we’ll never know exactly why someone got distracted, we frequently know when online customers abandoned a transactional process. Whether it’s abandonment from a shopping cart, a registration process or an enrollment form, marketers often have actionable data at their fingertips.
But few marketers are taking advantage and using this data. Shockingly, trigger-based emails account for only 2.6% of total email volume.1
When you consider that trigger-based abandonment emails typically recapture more than twice the number of transactions compared with a withhold group, figuring out ways to implement a behavioral marketing program should be a fundamental practice for all marketers.
So what are trigger emails and what is behavioral marketing? Simply put, a trigger email is defined as one that’s sent in response to a customer action, behavior or event. These activities constitute the “trigger.” Behavioral marketing is the discipline that focuses on accurately segmenting and targeting audiences based on behaviors and actions.
Targeting customers who abandon an online process is a huge behavioral marketing opportunity. Along with trigger emails, marketers employ a number of tactics in their efforts to recapture lost opportunities. But many marketers don’t embrace customer abandonment with the discipline it deserves. The following examines the critical techniques for retargeting abandoners the right way.
Leveraging data insights
The simplest form of retargeting is serving customers the exact message they saw before they abandoned. The flaw with this technique is that the original message failed. Simply reminding abandoners of their intent is often not enough to get them over the finish line. The best retargeting strategies always keep this in mind.Considering that the vast majority of online customers abandon rather than convert, marketers need to ask themselves why. The answer is most commonly found in their own behavioral data. Whether customers are not prepared with their account information or they abandon because an enrollment process is too confusing, marketers need to identify root abandonment causes before they retarget. Otherwise, marketers won’t be able to get customers over the hurdle that discouraged them in the first place. Not all abandoners are created equal.
iPay Solutions is a perfect example of a company that retargets abandoners the right way. As an online bill pay provider for thousands of financial institutions, iPay mined its data to uncover why customers weren’t signing up despite being offered online bill pay service for free. What the company discovered was that customers weren’t abandoning because they weren’t sold on free online bill pay, they were abandoning because the enrollment form was overly complicated. Viewing this as an opportunity, iPay streamlined its enrollment form and retargeted abandoners with a trigger-based email series. The emails prompted abandoners to complete their enrollment and provided simplified instructions for getting through the process. The campaign boosted conversions by almost 100%
Retargeting from your web pages
Persistence is often the difference between converting a prospect and losing one. And many times it’s simply not possible to capture email addresses from a web page. With the average documented online shopping cart abandon rate of more than 67%2, many of today’s leading marketers are turning to retargeted banner ads to complement their campaigns.
Retargeted banner ads are an extremely cost-effective way to follow online visitors and consistently remind them of their intent. Whether customers abandon from a content page or a conversion page, retargeted banner ads re-engage customers and get them back in the engagement mind-set.
The fact that 99% of users never click ads3 presents a significant obstacle with traditional banner advertising. That’s why successful marketers are using retargeted banner ads that engage without the customer needing to click through. Banner ad engagement is typically defined as any interaction with an ad, such as hovering, scrolling or clicking, that influences a conversion. Today, engagement is measurable and is largely identified as the leading online advertising performance metric.
Design your website so it has the ability to retarget
All successful websites have something in common. They provide value to online visitors and they’ve figured out a way to capture customer information. With the growing expectation that you need to give to get, online visitors are used to giving their email addresses for something they find of value. That’s why more online marketers are capturing email addresses whenever they have something compelling to offer. In the case of consumer websites, value often takes the form of monetary incentives or discounts. In the case of business-to-business websites, value often takes the form of thought leadership or inside information. Successful websites typically feature gripping calls to action (often referred to as “cliffhangers” or “teasers”) with simple, non-threatening data capture mechanisms to access their most lucrative content. Be sure your website does the same. Email addresses are the perfect unique identifiers to determine if web visitors go on to convert or abandon. These same addresses can be used to power your abandoner email campaign.
There are also several prevailing strategies when it comes to your website’s enrollment forms and registration pages. A common practice is to ensure customer email addresses are among the first pieces of information captured. Even if a customer abandons without clicking “submit,” online forms can scrape data that can be used for retargeted communications. Another practice involves asking customers to log in before they enroll, register or engage with a website. This process can be a bit cumbersome, but it absolutely ensures customers can be tracked and retargeted.
Topics: Email Marketing
