Advertising Free Shipping
February 26, 2010 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
The other day I was reading an old article in the New York Times about how offering Free Shipping on your ecommerce site can significantly increase sales. The article discusses and shares insight into the strategies of the some of the most popular online stores and how they price their shipping and how it can greatly impact sales. Read the article here – Nothing Says ‘Buy’ Like ‘Free Shipping’ .
The Free Shipping Article had me thinking about how a company which was going to offer free shipping for a period of time and how they would promote the offer. Naturally I think most only stores undertaking a free shipping promotion would do two things. First they would put some sort of promotional messaging on their sites advising prospective customers that they might qualify for free shipping on their first order. Secondly, an ecommerce store offering free shipping would reach out to their existing customer with an EDM of sorts advising that for their next order the shipping is free. Another idea is advertising free shipping, but I’ll get back to that in a moment.
What I think most online stores forget is that free shipping could be a great lead generation strategy to build sales. A few years ago I was involved in an online store start up as a consultant. Well before the successful bricks and mortar company started building their new start up website, they undertook a market research study to identify customer ideals, which they assumed were very different from their existing bring and mortar customers.
The number one thing that came from the market research was that customers online were more likely to make a purchase on their new site if the shipping was free, opposed to paying a premium for the delivery. So the company went into the new ecommerce site with the marketing tactic that customers would never pay for shipping. They simply built the shipping into the price point. The result; sales exploded for them and they’ve never looked back. The site has turned out to be a multimillion dollar online business and I believe that it’s because of their foundation that customers will never pay for shipping.
Ok, so you’ve decided to run a free shipping promotion. So apart from reaching out to customers on your site or your existing customer base, you should consider running an advertising campaign to market your free shipping campaign. By advertising free shipping you’re removing one of the hurdles that many online stores face and reaching out to gaining new customers. It could be the best lead generation campaign you’ve ever run.
Apart from simply running your free shipping advertising across our entire network of grocery buyers, we can help develop your advertising creative. It’s important for the creative to indicate that you’re offering free shipping. Don’t put the key message in a small font, make it stand out in bold and gain attention.
For more information about running your free shipping advertising with Gourmet Ads, Download our Media Kit or Request a Proposal from our team.
Shopping Cart Abandonment
September 16, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · 1 Comment
For those that don’t know, shopping cart abandonment is when a visitor initiates your checkout process but leaves before completing their purchase. The issue of shopping cart abandonment is constantly measured and tweaked by nearly every ecommerce site in the world, because increasing the conversion rate can boost revenue significantly. There are dozens of “on the page” things that can be done, but in reality potential consumers will always abandon the checkout process.
Reasons which contribute to Shopping Cart Abandonment include;
- Just browsing and had no intention of purchasing anyway
- Product prices were too high
- Didn’t have the product, model, colour size etc
- Shipping costs were too high
- Desired product was out of stock
- Wasn’t 100% comfortable with the store
- Checkout process was simply to complicated
- Checkout requires too much personal information
- Site requires registration before purchase
- Shopping Cart didn’t work properly or they encountered errors
- Didn’t have a valid SSL certificate
- Didn’t take preferred credit card type
So apart from on page changes what can be done to decrease the rate of abandonment and increase the rate of successful transactions? Using Gourmet Ads wide range of campaign targeting options; we can develop a comprehensive retargeting campaign that will bring back potential consumers and increase your conversion rate.
So as an example, Gourmet Ads currently works with a mid sized ecommerce store which retails a wide range of gourmet food products and delivers around the world. When a visitor goes to the site, Gourmet Ads strategically drops session cookies throughout the checkout process. These are dropped at key times such as;
1. Everyone that visits the site
2. Everyone that visits the site via clicking on an advertisement
3. Everyone that adds an item to the basket
4. Everyone that clicked the checkout button, but doesn’t complete the transaction.
5. Everyone that makes a successful purchase
The Gourmet Food store then has long term campaigns running with Gourmet Ads which runs appropriate advertising campaign depending on where consumers are in the buying cycle. So for example someone that simply visits the site may then see an ad with messaging such as signup for our newsletter and get free shipping on your next order. But the best converting ads are the ones who have clicked the checkout button but didn’t complete the transaction. These consumers will see ads for major incentives such as 30% off your order, Two for One or free shipping.
These principles aren’t just for online gourmet food stores; they can be applied to any other ecommerce site or lead generation site. So if you run a food or wine ecommerce store and haven’t developed a consumer retargeting campaign for your site to minimize shopping cart abandonment, then contact us. We’ll help you develop a strategy that will get sales and revenue up.
Advertising Helps Me Decide
July 6, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
While I was recently in New York I saw a guy on the subway that was wearing a Tshirt which said “Advertising Helps Me Decide”. While the Tshirt probably wasn’t aimed at media planners and media buyers to wear, it made me think about the message.
Often consumers are not in the market for something that you’re selling, but advertising can definitely spark the interest in a product. For online retailers there’s definitely a “spur of the moment” opportunity to be had with people that are bored at work or home. Just think of the sales of products in the early hours of the morning on QVC or similar. At the other end of the spectrum if a consumer is in the market for a product, then there is no doubt that advertising can play a role in changing the consumer’s intent to purchase their product.
If you want to grab one of the Advertising Helps Me Decide Tshirts they can be purchased here.
Retargeting Strategy
June 30, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
We recently wrote a blog on Search Retargeting and how you use the search engines to find relevant users for your products then using display advertising retarget them with highly related advertising. Since the Search Retargeting blog, we’ve had a great deal of enquiry asking about more generalised Retargeting Strategies to help generate a high return on investment for your online campaigns.
If you’re selling products online, the most important thing is for you to develop some sort of Retargeting Strategy. The sooner you start serving cookies, the sooner you can start retargeting and generating sales.
So first off what is retargeting?
Retargeting is tactic used by online advertisers who target previous website visitors and serve them an advertisement encouraging them to revisit the site and complete a purchase. The advertisements which get served could be via a roadblock or sequential targeting and can offer the user a range of advertising messages in order to complete the sale. This is done by dropping a cookie on the user’s machine depending on behaviour targeting criteria which we’ll go into detail further.
Why would I want to use retargeting?
There is no doubt that consumers do a great deal of research online before making a purchase and for products with long purchasing cycles retargeting is a strategy to keep your brand or website top of mind with your target audience. Often when a user starts off researching a product to buy they will visit a wide range of sites looking for information on the product. At this time if you drop a cookie with some information on their behaviour you can target this later in the purchasing cycle.
Who do you target?
There are few options to consider.
- Everyone – you should begin immediately gathering data on who visits your site, particularly if you’re a smaller or niche ecommerce site. You can target these users with branding campaigns in the future.
- People who look at particular products. I’d personally mark any user that looks at a high margin product. It’s no good marking low margin products because you’ll eliminate the margin with the advertising cost. Just stick to high margin products. These sorts of people can be targeted with product specific advertising, drawing them back to the site in the future.
- People that don’t complete the shopping cart. These types of people are obviously ready to buy, but there was something in the way that stopped the transaction. It’s usually either comes down to price or shipping costs. If you can eliminate an obstacle and bring people back to complete their shopping cart with 20% off your order if you buy today or free shipping then your conversion rate increases and you get the sale.
- People that signup for a member or newsletter but don’t purchase. They are obviously interested in your products, but are not ready to buy. Could these people benefit from offering them a free catalogue or a discount coupon in order to buy?
What are some of the offers or messaging I could retarget my audience with?
Anything really, the ideas are endless. The key is running different retargeting creative which appeals to that audience demographic. Some ideas on retargeting campaigns could include;
- 24 hour sale (everything reduced)
- Discount Code or Coupon Code
- Specific discount on a particular product
- Become a member and get a catalogue or white paper
- Signup to the Newsletter
Where would the Retargeting Campaign run?
The campaign would be run back in the Gourmet Ads network traffic pool. Our systems will start locating your retargeting cookies the moment they leave your site. So if a user has had a cookie dropped on your site, then visits a site within our network, they’ll see retargeting campaigns straight away.
With a proper retargeting strategy, you can expose that consumer to specific ads as they surf and shop outside the walls of your site. For products with a longer purchase cycle, retargeting leverages sequential advertising to reinforce your message as the consumer goes through the research and consideration process prior to completing a purchase.
To learn more about developing a Retargeting Strategy for your site or ecommerce store, contact us for more information and we’ll prepare a proposal for your consideration.
No Budget! Just ROI
December 16, 2008 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Recently a prospective client said they had no budget for online advertising. I immediately thought he was trying to be misleading as this company’s advertisements appear on a number of sites on the internet. So I said to this to the company’s marketing manager that I’d seen there ads on sites on the internet and they said, we have no budget, just ROI. At the time their strategy wasn’t clear to me, but after learning and seeing it action, I now understand it backwards. Since that first conversation, I’ve heard this a number of times after talking with prospective clients and thought its worth sharing with you.
Most professionally run online stores know their conversion rates when a particular audience visits their store, ie a 5% conversion rate means that for every 100 people that visit the site, 5 actually make a purchase. Apart from conversion rates, most ecommerce managers know how many times consumers visit the online store before they purchase, how many pages they’ll look at, where they are located and how much they usually spend. Most of this intelligence can be sourced from various web analytic tools like Google Analytics or Web Trends as well as custom reports and metrics.
So after they know the kind of customer that spends, the challenge is how to find these consumers online, and then drive them to the store. Savvy advertisers will generally run a short trial campaign for say 2 – 4 weeks with a budget of say $5000 to see what kind of audience an advertiser like Gourmet Ads delivers and if they are actually buyers. Some channels drive traffic, but they don’t buy.
Once these savvy advertisers know the conversion rate, they can work out the return on investment (ROI) on the advertising costs. Once they’ve got a return on investment in mind, they’ll book ongoing advertising over multiple months, monitoring the return on investment and not the budget. As long as the sales continue these savvy advertisers purely monitor the sales and renew the advertising. The key here isn’t to get complacent; it’s essential to continually change the advertising message, branding and look and feel of the advertising as well as the deal to ensure that audiences continue to be engaged with the advertising.
Because the quality of the click in vertical advertising networks is much more qualified than horizontal networks, we can continue to drive the same levels of return on investment for advertisers over time. See a recent post titled Vertical Advertising Increases ROI.
If you’d like to learn more about the Gourmet Ads vertical advertising network, request a media kit.
Landing Pages and Conversion Rates
November 12, 2008 by Benjamin Christie · 2 Comments
Today we are going to take a moment to discuss the importance of landing pages and their effects on conversion rates. First of all, let’s go over the vocabulary: A landing page is the first page a customer sees when they click on your advertisement. Your conversion rate is the percentage of the viewers to you website that take a desired action which might be purchasing a product or signing up for your newsletter. Even those companies, who have no intention of selling their products directly online, such as breakfast cereals and ice cream manufacturers, need to have effective landing pages in order to make the most of their online marketing campaigns.
A landing page should usually not be the same as the company’s homepage in most cases. In order to prompt a viewer to action and achieve high conversion rates the website needs to be as specific as possible and make the desired action very clear. A great example of an effective use of landing pages to increase (and track) conversion rates would be a potato chip brand that places an ad. When a viewer clicks on the advertisement they are directed to a landing page all about that brand of potato chips. The call to action on the landing page encourages the viewer to “click here” to download a coupon for the potato chips. Since the person was interested in the potato chips when they clicked the ad, the conversion rates are likely to be quite high. Many people will likely download the coupon and buy the chips on their next shopping trip.
There are several ways for a company to judge the effectiveness of their landing pages and increase their conversion rates. One of the most effective ways is through the use of split testing. Split testing allows a company to create two or more different versions of landing pages and send a segment of their clicks to each one. Then they can view the conversion rates for each landing page version and choose the most effective one. The companies with the highest conversion rates make a habit of regularly split testing their landing pages and making various tweaks and adjustments, because the market is ever changing and there is no guarantee that what worked last month will still be as effective this month.
So how effective do you think your landing page is? Feel free to leave a comment below.
