Why is All That Stuff Still in Your Cart?

Published by Barbara Evans | Filed under Business Sense, General Info, Internet Marketing

We have visited this topic before, but it is certainly worth repeating.  A great way to pick up additional shoppers is to understand why shoppers are abandoning their carts before completing a purchase.  Of course, in order to understand why people abandon their carts – you must first contact them.  Depending on what your cart abandonment rate is – even picking up a small percentage of these abandoned carts could do wonders for your bottom line.

The 7th Annual Merchant Survey released by the E-tailing group recently addressed this ever-growing concern of cart abandonment among E-tailers.  Commentary on the E-tailing Groups survey stated that:

• In order “to save the sale, communicate with customers once abandonment has occurred.”
• Only 14% of websites studied sent an email to follow up with those shoppers who abandoned their carts.
• The numbers dwindled even further to only 7% for those retailers that called the cart abandoner.

In order for your business to follow up with shoppers that abandon their shopping cart you will need to have a shopping cart that actually saves the information needed for following up.  This information is normally collected when consumers add items to their shopping carts and create a username/password.

I think it’s fair to say that abandoned shopping carts are a goldmine when it comes to lead generation efforts – this is a person that went to your site and made a majority of the steps necessary to make a purchase.  Wouldn’t it be a great idea to ensure your shopping cart can keep track of shopping cart abandonment data so your business can get a sales/customer service person involved with following-up to find out why the sale wasn’t completed?

Improve Your Site’s Checkout Process

Published by Barbara Evans | Filed under Business Sense, General Info, Internet Marketing, Web Sites

It can be an expensive and time consuming process to lead prospective customers to your website, so I am in agreement with Google that Making your Website Work should be one of your main objectives to help people buy your products.

Ads that customers click on should have products or features displayed clearly on the landing page.  It should not take the customer 3 clicks to figure out that indeed you are offering free shipping for the next 24 hours for all online orders.

• Link ads to the right page,
• Mirror your ad title, and
• Ensure selling points are visible.

Make sure that if a customer clicks into your website that they can clearly navigate through your site.  Make it easy for your customer to find what they are looking for and also to go back should they have the need.

• Make product/service categories visible,
• Use easy-to-understand terms, and
• Highlight where to go next.

This is a good use of Google Analytics, to ensure that you can see where customers are falling off of the buying process.

A customer should only have to go to their wallet to get their credit card number to make a purchase on your website.  If your site requires a user enter a password or other information that may not be readily available – you may lose the opportunity to make the sell.

Don’t ask for unnecessary details,

Show a status bar throughout the check out process.

Expedite the process, and

Avoid distractions such as in shopping cart advertising.

Google also lists some common questions that customers want answered before they place an order on your site.  Make sure you have answered them.

1. Can I return this item within x amount of days?
2. Can I review my order before I confirm the purchase?
3. Can I easily contact support or customer service if something goes wrong?
4. If I hit the next button, will I be billed?
5. If I hit the next button, will I be able to make a revision still?
6. What is the total price with shipping to my address?
7. How many days before I get my item delivered?
8. Is this site secure, can I trust you with my credit card details?
9. What payment types other than credit card do you accept?
10. VERY important for travel/hotel sites – If I’m only making a booking, how much is due now and how much is due later?

Google should definitely be applauded for making the great data available above for all to view, but just like with any new venture it is still a good idea to have marketing guru’s on your side to ensure that the tips and tactics Google shares above and at make your website work – are applicable to your businesses unique situation.

Why You Want to Have Good Quality Scores

Published by Barbara Evans | Filed under PPC Practices

If you are advertising on Google it is a good idea to pay close attention to the quality scores (QS) within your account.  Within Google AdWords, quality is scored numerically from one to ten and is an approximation of how Google expects certain keywords to perform.

• Eligibility – Quality scores determine whether your ad is eligible to enter the auction for that query

• Position – Quality scores also help to determine the relative position of your ad in relation to the other ads on that result page

• Price – A better Quality Score reduces the price you need to bid to maintain a given position

• Top Slot – Only high quality ads are eligible to appear above the natural search results

Make sure you are paying attention to your keywords clickthrough rate, relevancy and landing pages as all three of these aspects contribute to quality scores. And also keep in mind that higher ad positions, conversion rates and keyword bids do not contribute to quality score calculations.

Read more Google Quality Score Myths and Truths here.

Social Media Brand Series- Who is Watching Your Brand? Part 1

Published by Kalin Dudley | Filed under Business Sense, Internet Marketing, Social Media

Kevin Smith

Its a Saturday night, comedian/actor/director Kevin Smith has just boarded his flight on Southwest airlines ready to take flight.  Minutes later Smith, who is a frequent Southwest flyer, is asked to leave the flight due to his weight and escorted off the plane immediately.  Within a matter of minutes, Smith’s experience is shared with his 1.6 million twitter followers and is National news by Sunday morning. The series of events that took place, while an extreme example, show strike fear in businesses across the land.  One of the top brands in any industry, a brand that took a decade to build through strategic PR moves….tarnished in a matter of minutes.

THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA – Who is watching your brand?

Think about all the investments (both time and money) in understanding how the general public views their brand /products / services and neglecting the unbiased opinions being shared online.  In the case of Southwest Airlines, their team was alert and responded immediately on all mediums to Kevin Smith and the 1 million followers they have on Twitter:

“@ThatKevinSmith hey Kevin! I’m so sorry for your experience tonight! Hopefully we can make things right, please follow so we may DM!

Hey folks – trust me, I saw the tweets from @ThatKevinSmith I’ll get all the details and handle accordingly! Thanks for your concerns!

I read every single tweet that comes into this account, and take every tweet seriously. We’ll handle @thatkevinsmith issue asap

I’ve read the tweets all night from @thatkevinsmith – He’ll be getting a call at home from our Customer Relations VP tonight.

@ThatKevinSmith Ok, I’ll be sure to check it out. Hopefully you received our voicemail earlier this evening.

@ThatKevinSmith Again, I’m very sorry for the experience you had tonight. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do.

@ThatKevinSmith We called you on the number you had on file in your reservation. If you prefer a different number, please DM me. Thanks!

Our apology to @ThatKevinSmith and more details regarding the events from last night – http://cot.ag/96KHC7 #Southwest“

Southwest also used their Media site: http://www.swamedia.com/ to issue statements to the general public about the occurrence.  This public response was also followed by private and personal responses to Kevin Smith.  Whether it was the right response, the most important piece was that Southwest was monitoring their Brand and thereby able to react immediately versus having a bigger surprise come Monday morning.

In some of the following posts, we will cover the next steps that occur… damage control!!

Here are some great tools available for monitoring your brand:

BLOG MONITORING:

Technorati: http://technorati.com/

Google Blog Engine: http://blogsearch.google.com/

Blog Digger: http://www.blogdigger.com/index.html

BRAND ALERTS:

How Sociable: http://www.howsociable.com/

Google Alerts: http://www.google.com/alerts