The number one reason for shopping cart abandonment is that online shoppers are simply not ready to complete the purchase yet. As a marketer, that's something you don't have much control over. However, there is one thing you can control: the smart use of abandoned cart email flows. The average rate for documented shopping cart abandonment in 2017 is as high as 69.23%. But adjusting for technical performance and improving the checkout funnel can increase conversions for 35.26%. That’s $260B worth of recoverable profit with through check-out optimization and better follow-up emails! No ecommerce owner wants to face cart abandonment. The customer has been so close to making a purchase, yet for some reason, your chance for profit slipped through your fingers. Don't worry though, the loss isn't final yet, because with the help of sales recovery tactics using email marketing automation software, you can win your customers back. SaleCycle reports that around 31% clicked abandoned cart emails proceed to finish their purchases. The series of emails after cart abandonment is substantial because some clients leave their carts unintentionally. Reasons like site time-out, complicated check-out, or a website crash may have interrupted their purchase. Here are the top three email strategies to win back abandoned carts! 1. Set up the right abandoned cart email sequence The right email sequence triggered at just the right time makes a tremendous amount of difference. Marketo recommends a series of three emails scheduled as follows. I've included some actual email examples to help illustrate the points. Send the first email within an hour of cart abandonment You have to drive your clients to continue with the purchase before they leave their computers. The first email aims to address technical glitches. Don’t sound pushy, just aim to help the client just in case the abandonment is not intentional. Below is an example of a gentle reminder for the first email. Send the second email after one day This time, you have to create a sense of urgency. The cart abandonment email below by Grove informs the client that the cart will expire soon. You may also talk about fleeting discounts or stock availability. And send the final email after 48 hours This is your last chance to win your client back so give it your best shot. You can give incentives like free shipping, bonus items or an additional discount. Here's an example of a final abandoned shopping cart email that works extremely well. It comes from the ecommerce site for Aéropostale. 2. Use catchy, personable email copy Your success in re-directing your clients to the shopping cart starts at a smart subject line. It will dictate if your client clicks on your email. So, craft subject lines that drive receivers to click on. One example is this email subject line by Helm Boots: These will look great on you The words strike empathy and curiosity. It gives a sense of compliment which will compel the receiver to click on. Not so different from what a friend would tell you in real life while actually shopping in a store!   Appeal to your clients through creative wordings and graphics. It helps to know your buyer personas so that your copy will be more fitting. Use words that your clients can easily relate too. Humor is also a great way to spice up your content. The email below by Chubbies is clever, cool, and compelling. The visuals and wordings charm their target customers who are carefree and adventurous. 3. Use multiple, eye-catching buttons and links The email above by Chubbies also aced this up. It has three active links that direct the client back to the cart. The title, the main image, and the CTA button at the end of the copy are all clickable. Notice also that all the clickable elements stand-out from the rest of the copy. This makes it easier for your client to notice and click on your CTAs. The button below is cleverly worded. It has a distinct color and size you can’t miss. The copy further explains which elements are clickable in a friendly way. The CTA button is already clear but the added explanation guides the clients on the next steps and avoids confusion. Conclusion: Even before you start these top three tactics to get your customers back, you need the data to know which of your customers have abandoned their carts. Data analytics and triggers do this for you. They provide the information as to whom and when abandoned carts happen. The first step in solving your marketing problems is to identify what the problems are. Data analytics and triggers help you identify these glitches so you’ll know what to do next. After you have accurate data about who’s abandoned their carts, set up an email marketing automation software to automatically send your email series through behavioral triggers like shopping cart abandonment. Then drill down into analytics about every ecommerce checkout step to see where you can improve. With the correct data, effective automation software, perfectly timed emails, topnotch copy, and striking CTAs, you can leverage your losses into profits. You can gain back a part of the $260 Billion worth of recoverable earnings - and start to increase your add-to-cart rate too! [subscribe] This is a guest post by Kimberly Maceda, a Content Writer for ActiveTrail. Kimberly writes for some top online marketing sites and blogging advice on email marketing and marketing automation. Activetrail is a leading provider of professional-grade email marketing and automation software for growing businesses.

Reading Max Hasting’s excellent book on The Secret War, 1939-1945, I was struck by the parallel between the rise of radio communications in the 1930s and the more recent rise in internet data. The transmission of military and diplomatic messages by radio in the 1930s and 1940s provided intelligence agencies with a new gold mine. Never before had so much potential intelligence been floating in the ether, and yet it threatened to flood their limited manpower with a tide of trivia. The bottleneck was rarely in the interception (trivial with a radio set) or even decryption (made routine by Bletchley Park with the Enigma codes), but rather in filtering down to the tiny number of messages that contained important facts – and getting that information in real time to the commanders in the field. The Ultra programme (Britain’s decryption of German radio intercepts) was perennially understaffed due to the fact that other civil servants couldn’t be told how important it was. At Ultra’s peak in 1943, only around 50% of the 1,500 Luftwaffe messages a day were being processed – and it is unknown how many of those were in time to avert bombing raids. The new age of technology provided an almost infinitely wide field for exploration, as well as the means of addressing this: the trick was to focus attention where it mattered. The Secret War, page 203 The ‘new age of technology’ in the last two decades poses much the same problem. Data on internet behaviour is abundant: there are countless signals to listen to about your website performance, and the technology to monitor users is commonplace. And the bottleneck is still the same: the filtering of useful signals, and getting those insights to the ‘commanders’ who need them in real time. I started Littledata to solve this modern problem in interpreting website analytics for managers of online businesses. There is no decryption involved, but there is a lot of statistics and data visualisation know-how in making billions of data points appreciable by a company manager. Perhaps the most important aspect of our service is to provide insights in answer to a specific question: Group-Captain Peter Stewart, who ran the Royal Air Force’s photo-reconnaissance operations, was exasperated by a senior offer who asked for ‘all available information’ on one European country. Stewart responded that he could only provide useful information if he knew roughly what intelligence the suppliant wanted – ‘naval, military, air or ecclesiastical’. The Secret War, page 203 In the world of online commerce, the question is something like whether the client needs insights into the checkout conversion rate of all customers (to improve site design) or for a specific marketing campaign (to improve campaign targeting). So by focusing on insights which are relevant to the scale, stage or sector of the client company, and making these accessible in a real-time dashboard, Littledata can feed into decision making in a way that raw data can never do. Want to discuss this further? Get in touch or comment below!   Get Social! Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and keep up-to-date with our Google Analytics insights.

The primary concern of all PPC specialists is how to take all the traffic their ads and content generate and turn it into converting users. If you are taking the time and energy to allocate a budget and strategy for your PPC ad campaigns, literally throwing money at the problem, then you should at least be capitalising on as many conversions as possible. So what is the difference between traffic and conversions? What is it that bridges the gap between the two? Simple: the user’s experience on your page. That’s all there is to it. Optimising your landing page experiences to better fit the user’s needs and to generate a sense of delight in them is how you close the distance between traffic and conversions. There’s countless different tactics and styles of landing page optimisation that different PPC agencies employ. But, for the most part, they all circulate around the same basic concept: using consumer behaviour and basic psychology to increase the “delight factor” of a user’s experience on your landing page. The more delighted a user is with your page and your content, the more naturally they will be inclined to convert on your site. A more user-centric experience is what psychology based CRO is aiming for. Starting from the source Reverse engineering the problem’s of your campaigns is just as important as reverse engineering your goals. Just like when establishing a content marketing strategy, a landing page optimisation strategy requires you to first establish your goal (higher CRO), and then work backwards to identify the tangible changes you need to implement. To better understand how your paid ad campaigns and landing pages are performing as a unit, you need to make sure you are monitoring the right KPIs. Better yet, understanding what each KPI signifies about your user’s experience is an even deeper and more useful insight regarding your psychological research. VTC vs CTC For simplicity’s sake, let’s narrow down the field of analysis to just the advertisement and the landing page. For the first, you’re going to want to be looking at click-through conversions and view-through conversions. Now, VTC is harder to monitor because it records whenever a user sees your ad (an impression) but doesn’t click on it. Later that user revisits your page via a different route and converts on your page. If you were looking only at CTC, this conversion actually wouldn’t be given any credit. But for the most part what either form of conversion metric is doing is looking at how successful your ad is at getting the user to click through to your landing page. Conversion rate, bounce rate, exit rate Once you’ve determined the success of your ad in regards to getting them to your site, it’s time to check out how your pages themselves are performing. This is the where the fault between traffic and conversions splits open. This is where conversion rate and bounce rate come into the picture. The conversion rate is pretty self-explanatory, but the bounce rate needs a bit more nuanced definition because of its relation to exit rate, which can get confusing. Basically, the exit rate of your page examines how frequently a user clicks through your ad to your landing page and leave that specific page via regular means of navigation. They might have gone to a different content page of your domain, they may have left altogether. The bounce rate shows you how often users are leaving your page by means of the back button or closing the browser entirely. While they both monitor the departures from your landing page, one gives a very different picture from the other. You can check out the infographic below by ion interactive for basic schematics and values of the five major landing page KPIs. Asking “why they aren’t” instead of “why they are” With your performance data in hand, you now need to look one step further into the reasons behind your lack of conversions and high bounce rate. Start, as always, by reverse engineering the problem. Ask why users aren’t converting on your site and fix the wrongs of your page before you celebrate the rights. There are three major psychological reasons for a user to be displeased or distrusting of a landing page. Identifying this friction points within your landing page content will help you tailor your pages to user’s preferences and increase the “delight factor.” Lack of information The first psychological red flag for a first-time visitor is a lack of information. This can be a very significant and harmful deterrent. Not supplying the user with adequate information instantly puts them into a sceptical state. The human mind does not like uncertainty. We are famous for “catastrophizing” the unknown because our minds are programmed to fill empty spaces. We subconsciously prefer to imagine the worst case scenario rather than a complete up-in-the-air unknown. When confronted with a lack of information, users often make one of two assumptions: either your site lacks the expert level content they are looking for and your business is not a well-informed authority on the matter; or - even worse - your landing page is a scam and is actually just click-bait looking for meaningless traffic. Don’t let a lack of information put a Vader style force-choke-hold on your conversion rate. Trust leaps The biggest hindrance to a landing page is the inability to generate trust in the user. Creating genuine trust leaps between the first-time visitor and the uncertainty of a business proposition is, at the same time. the sole purpose of landing pages and their toughest obstacle. Trust leaps, however, are a three step process that takes more than just the necessary and adequate information to complete the cycle. The common progression of a trust leap, beginning to end, is “trusting the idea” - “trusting the institution” - and, finally, “trusting the individual.” Too many landing pages over-prioritize the first two of the steps and for that reason fail to convert at a satisfying rate. Making sure you are transparent and authentic in your presentation through and through is key when it comes to user experience. These days, with digital media so entrenched in our culture, we all have a strong nose for spam and we are quick to jump ship if we feel we are in shady territory. Analysis paralysis Lastly, even if you are able to build a successful trust leap with the user, there are still psychological roadblocks that can stop them from converting. You may be so eager to impress and delight your visitor that you provide them with all the different options and services you make available to them. This may seem like a transparent and efficient way to market your services. But what it really does is throws your user into pits of analysis paralysis. While you want to provide all the necessary information you can, too much info can overload the user. As much as we all would like to believe the opposite, absolute freedom of choice is one of the quickest ways to drive a person crazy. An old idiom comes to mind when discussing the issue: “When given too many options to choose from, the exit becomes the only clear choice.” Keep your landing pages simple and specified. In almost all cases, you should limit each landing page to a single CTA and a single goal. Make the decision to convert an easy one. Fixing the common problems with transparent solutions So how do you make converting on your page such an easy decision? By removing any obstacles that may be obscuring your message or deterring your viewer. The checklist is simple and straightforward. You want to lower friction between your page and the user by filling in any gaps of information that they need and eliminating any superfluous or extraneous information that may distract them from converting. After you start to lower the friction and build a more user-centric landing page experience, you can consider the more nuanced forms of data presentation that you are employing. For example, many sites love to compare their prices and performance to their competitors on their page. Comparison pricing If you have the lowest prices in the business, why not advertise by putting your low price right next to the jacked up prices of your competitors - right? This may seem like a good idea, at first. But it can actually put the idea of comparison shopping into the minds of users that previously might not have even been considering your competition. On top of that, bragging about your drastically lower prices has been shown to actually inspire a sense of hesitancy in users. They tend to believe that if you are advertising your low price as your main selling point, then your services might not be top notch and it may be worth their while spending a pretty penny on a service that is worthwhile. Don’t overthink your landing page presentations. You’re taking the time to develop trust with your first-time users, so trust them to make the comparisons on their own. Don’t impose market statistics on them as if you are in court arguing your dominance in the field. Let them come to their own decision organically - that’s where “delight” comes from. Urgency with solutions If you are looking to break down roadblocks to ease the user’s conversion path you will also be working towards speeding up and optimising that conversion path as well. True landing page streamlining requires removing inefficiencies and implementing optimizers to replace them. Many PPC management services love to inject a sense of urgency into their CTAs in order to emotionally evoke a higher conversion tendency in their audience. While this is a good idea in and of itself, and a strong “click now!” or “don’t miss out!” CTA can really close a conversion out, urgency only works to emotionally evoke readers when used correctly. Studies show that when given “urgent” warnings, subjects were actually not necessarily more eager to act. What the results showed was that when they were not given any information on how to remedy the urgent situation, test subjects were actually more likely to rationalise themselves as exempt from the urgency and were actually less eager to act! On the other hand, those subjects that were given information regarding the urgent situation (or at least most of them) followed the information provided to them and acted immediately. Remember that we do not like the unknown, so if you are trying to change the mentality of a user with urgency, you must be specific with the reasons why it is urgent and the actions necessary to remedy the situation. Like in the above graphic: if not here, then where? If not now, then when? And if not us, then who?! Put a face to the service Unless you are a snake-haired Greek gorgon who goes by the name of Medusa, matching a face to your service will always help your brand appear more trustworthy. If your landing page doesn’t have any pictures of your business teams or employees and lacks any personable touch, users might start sniffing out your pages for spam. At the very least you should have an employee directory page somewhere within your pagination - which should be streamlined and flat for easy user experience (but that’s another point of discussion, you can check out this post for internal linking strategy if you’re interested). Having a brief personal bio for each of your employees brings an approachability to your page that is sometimes lost in the online retail world. (Also, as a bonus, it will show your employees that they matter to you and aren’t just cogs in a system.) If you really want to wow the users clicking to your landing page, you can go one step further than an employee directory page and introduce employee testimonial videos or team introductions for your possible clients. Our eyes have a natural inclination to pay attention to motion, then image, then text last. So using video on your landing page (above the fold!) is a huge way to increase engagement, even if it isn’t focused on building trust. The trick is not to appear authentic, but be authentic. Users today are well informed and ready for your business, your job isn’t to finagle them into converting, but to get them to embrace you as a trusted authority - the conversions will follow. Focusing on the inputs not the outputs Using psychology in your CRO campaigns means looking one step deeper than the behaviour of users on your landing pages. It means looking into the reasons and emotions behind those behaviours. Too many conversion campaigns these days over emphasise the importance of hitting their quotas and monthly growth percentages. “Don’t make your goals, your goals, make the habits that lead to your goals, your goals.” Focusing on the inputs that will build trust and lower friction on your page instead of making all of your decisions based on minor bumps in your CR% is a simple re-allotment of your priorities and focus, but will make huge and long-lasting changes in the way you develop and design your pages. Happy users are converting users, that transitive step is a natural and quick one. So don’t focus so much on turning your users into business opportunities. Focus on delighting them and making them happy. And making them happy starts with knowing how they tick. Team Bio About Sean Martin - I am a Content Marketing Manager at Directive Consulting, a digital marketing agency in Southern California. We specialise in integrating SEO, PPC, Social, and Content into our online marketing campaigns. Check out my posts on the DC blog to see how we are innovating and changing the game.

We’ve been searching high and low for some of those feel-good stories to bring you a little joy and we found the perfect data stories to put you in a good mood! Mike Schmoker said it well: “Things get done only if the data we gather can inform and inspire those in a position to make a difference.” Here are the stories that inspired us, making a difference in our lives. And if you like data as much as we do, trust us, you’re going to love these! The Dear Data project  We recently came across this fun project, Dear Data by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, about sharing their personal data, as pen pals. Dear Data, is a year-long endeavour of two designers living in different parts of the world, creating a friendship that will last a lifetime. They collected and hand-drew their personal data, sending it to each other in the form of postcards. With social media being the forefront of conversations these days, this beautiful story helps bring back the nostalgia of communication. If this doesn’t give you chills, we don’t know what will! What they did Every week, for a year, they collected and measured some sort of data about their lives through drawings. Each recipient would be given a code to decipher the picture. They used postcards to express themselves, and you can see a beautiful example below: Spirit of Alan Turing Now here’s a story that’s a little different, bringing the wonders of art and data together. There’s a new installation in Paddington commemorating Alan Turing, a computer pioneer and codebreaker that was born in 1912. The piece of public art shows an array of flashing lights that showcase changing words by Nick Drake, a Hackney-based poet. His poem brings a look into Alan Turing’s past in the present, presenting his spirit through data. It’s a thought-provoking installation using algorithms that bring with it intensity. The intent is to find some sort of pattern or code, and as people stroll by, someone will notice the meaning behind the project. And as the Londonist says, “That really is good art” and we agree! This is not the first attempt at celebrating Alan Turing, and we definitely hope it’s not the last! The design of data for the world  We’ve found the man that’s dedicated his life to data and in a creative way! Brendan Dawes creates projects focused on data for himself and the world around him, whether they’re art installation, interactive forms of communication, or a way to bring out a smile. As he perfectly sums up, “whilst I often work with data, I believe data by itself is not enough; data needs poetry.” One of his 2014 exhibitions that struck interest is the Dot Dot Dot exhibition. The show made use of data in some form or another. A few data-inspired installations included ‘The Happiness Machine’ and ‘Moments in Music’. When a button or dot on display was pressed on The Happiness Machine, a mention of the word ‘happy’ by a random stranger on the internet was printed for all to see. What a feel-worthy moment to showcase happiness through data. The Moments in Music exhibit developed unique art pieces, from data derived from sound waves. Through a software, songs were analysed and then specific moments were printed, showing real-world moments from digital music. Our final thoughts These wonderful stories prove that data doesn’t have to be overwhelming and mundane and you can really add your creative twist to any project. Individuals observing data needs to decipher it in a creative way, whether it’s to bring results or prove an experiment as there are a multitude of aspects. At Littledata, we come up with creative solutions to improve your performance through Google Analytics. We make data creative so you can enjoy the benefits! Have you read any other inspirational stories recently? Leave a comment below or contact us! Further reading: New in Littledata: an improved navigation, trend detection algorithm, and more Take your ecommerce website to the next level Analytics in store - online and offline Image credit: Image courtesy of Engadget, Dear Data, Brendan Dawes, and Londonist.