This is a short post, but I had to get it out there. I received my weekly Best Buy email newsletter yesterday and was very intrigued by the advertisement. It advertised $800 off for a Sony Flat Panel TV. I am in the market to purchase one, so I clicked on the link.The email itself was very well done:

So, I clicked the most logical choice, “Shop Now” as I wanted to see what kind of great deal I was about to get. This is the body of the landing page that I landed on:

Do you see what the major problem here is? No where on this advertisement does it get me to start shopping for my TV. Great, you sold me on the offer in the newsletter, I click on the offer, and you simply list the boring details of the offer, and gave me no link to the TV’s or packages that fall under this offer? Really?

This could have been a HUGE success with a simple “Shop for this Offer Now” Button and then display the packages, with easy links to purchase. Instead, they have made it too diffcult to understand what you are getting and where you are getting it at.

Moral of the story is this. Email newsletters convert at a very low rate. You have too many filters:

Filter 1: Get them through the Spam Filter. If it gets through their spam filter -

Filter 2: Get them to open the damn thing. If they do this….

Filter 3: How do you get them to click on an offer? If you get them to get past step 3, then you are looking good on conversion. Unless you did what Best Buy did above.

Filter 4: If you get them to click on the offer and hit your landing page….THEN YOU BETTER SELL THEM!!! Make it easy for them to locate the offer they obviously liked. Get them to purchase it.  If purchasing is too complicated and requires assistance, then make it easy for them to fill out a lead form, contact button, etc.

Follow those rules and your email marketing newsletter will convert!!

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If you sell something that can potentially be given as a gift, your conversion will start to increase significantly. As the holiday nears, people stop “shopping” and start buying. Some tips to extract every penny out of this holiday:

1. Increase your paid search bids buy as much as 100% (I would watch this closely). So long as your website conversion is climbing, your roi should be fine.
2. Increase your shopping engine spend. Shopping Engines like Nextag, Yahoo, shopping.com, etc. are like Westfield malls, they get their highest traffic volumes during November and December.
3. If you have a product that can make it to their home in time for the 25th., make sure to advertise that all over your site. No call to action is more immediate, and nerve-racking for a visitor with the thought that the present wont arrive.
4. If you have a large item that wont make it in time for the big day, find a small gift, representative of what they are getting so that the loved one can wrap something. A close colleague of mine sells massage chairs that traditionally take 2 months to get. He would send a massage chair pad with every order so the gift-giver had something to wrap up.
5. Don’t automatically shut your campaign off on Christmas day, too many companies do this. Take advantage of post-Christmas shopping. Also, not everyone celebrates Christmas, so those people are still buying.
6. Get your site ready to trigger a “post Christmas” day sale and launch it early morning on the 26th. When new years comes, do the same thing.

Hope these help!!!

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I am a frequent builder and user of online carts. The fact is, the more questions you ask, the more likely you are to lose your potential customer before they click the “submit order” button. I have listed items that are surely going to bring down your shopping cart conversion rate and up your abandonment rate:

1. Asking “what Country are you in” (especially those carts that do not offer international shipping)
2. List credit card type (um, simple programming: starts with a 3=Amex 4=Visa 5=Mastercard 6=discover)
3. Having more than 4 steps. Limit them, get them in and out of your cart as quickly as possible!
4. Having a “clear cart” button – why would you want to put this idea in your head
5. Offering too many up-sells – online shoppers are easily distracted (phone ringing, boss asking what they are doing) so don’t confuse them with up-sells until AFTER they submit their previously intended order.
6. Newsletter Options – Don’t freak them out by making them think you are going to spam them, ask this question on the confirmation page
7. Shipping Options – List shipping cost BEFORE the person enters their credit card. Customers want to know the absolute total before they feel comfortable enough to pull out their credit card.
8. Let them know how many steps are left. If on step 3, they don’t know how much longer the process will go, you may lose their attention. Let them know that they are almost done.
9. So long as you have a decent return policy, remind them what the basics are next to each of the submit buttons. Sometimes they just need a little reassurance.
10. Let them know (in big and bold) that your website is as secure as it gets and they have nothing to worry about. I even think going as far as a hacker guarantee is a good move. At the end of the day, your customer is protected by the credit card company, so you wont be holding the bag for much if your site gets hacked.

I could go on and on but I think these 10 are the basics. Always think of your customer as having ADD and paranoid. Solve these two problems and you should have a lower than average shopping card abandonment rate.

Spider Test: Daytona Qualifying , Grammy Performers

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Too many people try too hard to get people to whip out their credit card and purchase online. Unless you are a huge brand name online, the highest conversion you can expect (the amount of sales you get divided by your total number of visits) is about 2%. I hardly see more than a true 2% conversion rate when you ask for a credit card.

Now, when it comes to gathering data (an online lead) you can get as high as 15%. If you are a good sales person, you should be able to close half of your warm leads. If you closed half, your overall conversion would be 7.5%. This is about 4 more sales that you would have if you would have relied only on your website to close the deal down.

Imagine what you would have to do to get your website to close 400% more sales. You would most likely need to do 4x the amount of marketing. What would you rather have?

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Are you as sick of seeing the ad below as much as me?

If I see another Google ad my head will explode.

With the reach they currently have, I believe Google will start doing more bad than good for themselves. They will have the same issue that Alta Vista/Yahoo/Excite had in the 90’s. Although banner ads are now have a click through rate of under 1%, when they first came out, you could get a click through rate close to 6%.

Right now, all data shows that text ad’s kick the crap out of graphic ads all day long. The problem is that more than 50% of ad-based websites are displaying Google ad results. If people see the same thing over and over again, they will simply stop clicking on them.

Website owners, please start spreading your wings a bit. There are other ways to make money and more advertisements to make money on. The more we see them, the less often we will click.

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