Twitter trends: Sale and offer code tweets up 28%

In a SeeWhy survey in September, ecommerce marketers said they were planning on using social media for seasonal promotions this year, and in particular promoting free shipping offers. SeeWhy has been tracking Tweets on Twitter, and the trend is up.

Overall sale and promotion oriented key terms were up by 28% in the last two months. But the majority of the growth in tweets during the holiday season has been focused on the term ‘discount’, up by 80% over the last two months. Notably Tweets using the term ‘Free shipping’ however remain flat.

The growth in Tweets using sale and promotional terms were an estimated 32,000 tweets per hour. The largest single tweet term used was ’sale’ with 0.32% of the Twittersphere.

This data seems to indicated that ecommerce teams are reserving free shipping offers until after Black Friday, but have been relying more on straight promotional discounts in the run up to Thanksgiving.

Finding the Sneezer this Christmas

While you may be wondering about a potential resurgence of the H1N1 virus, ecommerce marketers this year are focusing on finding the ‘sneezer’ — the customer that spreads offers and promotions through social networks. Research by SeeWhy shows that a full 50 percent of ecommerce marketers plan to use social networks this holiday season to distribute promotions, discounts, and in particular, free shipping offers. And a survey just published by Internet Retailer showed that almost 50 percent of online retailers plan to add social network marketing to their ecommerce sites in 2010, ahead of any other advanced online application, including Video (36 percent), Blogs (34 percent) and Customer Reviews (34 percent).

Using social network integration features to enable website visitors to share content with their social networks is still in its early days. While marketers are obviously keen to get their message to spread virally, there is danger this season that social networks will be used as little more than cheap broadcast channels, and not communication channels by which to engage website visitors and customers.

Once your customer has shared your message with their social network, it’s important to identify and recognize their value specifically. You’ve just found an advocate that can potentially be very valuable. In 2010, retaining and rewarding sneezers will be increasingly important, but many companies fail to capture their identity or do anything with it.

Social shopping

Before you can build a relationship with your sneezers, you need to capture their identities and to do that successfully requires you to integrate with, and embrace, social networks in a different way.

Most of the social network integrations in the ecommerce space are at a very early stage and offer simple ‘follow me’ type capabilities. But as more sites add sharing capabilities, we need to begin to think about reward and recognition of sneezers. The key element is to capture the individual details as a first step.

For example, Facebook Connect enables ecommerce websites to offer Facebook members the ability to log in to their Facebook accounts without leaving the ecommerce site.

When they log in, the site has access to profile information about the user which can be used for personalization. The ecommerce site can also enable the Facebook user to share things they find and like on the ecommerce site with their Wall and Friends activity feeds. MySpace and Twitter have similar functionality.

It’s worth noting that the Facebook ID that is captured is not the email address, but rather a 15 digit number. While this may not be directly actionable, it’s worth capturing and storing this data for future use. Analysis of this data can subsequently enable you to identify which are your most prolific sneezers.

Naturalbornshopper.co.uk is a good example of how ecommerce can be inherently social:

In the top right hand corner of the screen, you can see the Facebook Connect logo which encourages the visitor to log in to Facebook.


Note also how Pencake.com offers you an alternate way of logging in, using Facebook. This is an elegant way of presenting a social network log in to the visitor.

When you click the login button, this is what you get.

It’s not an ideal message, because the implication is that somehow the site is going to get control of your Facebook account and access to your network. Of course, the visitor can change their settings within Facebook to prevent this or delete posts they don’t like, but this is not the point. When implementing an integration like this, the ecommerce site needs to take great care about the context in which this ‘write back’ capability is used.

This is how Trendistic handle this issue, but this time when you connect to Twitter:

There are different ways to connect ecommerce sites with social networks, but common functionality that this type of integration provides for includes:

•    Building a community by encouraging visitors to become fans or follow a feed
•    Enabling visitors to post to their profile feed from the website
•    Inviting friends to the website
•    Showing who’s on the website and recent visitors


If you’d like to find out more about social network marketing and how it might work in your specific case, then visit us at seewhy.com and get in touch.

‘Tis the season...to abandon your shopping cart

While past seasonal trends suggest that ecommerce conversion rates rise in the holiday season, there is some evidence that this year may be different. Will the 2009 holiday season be the biggest abandonment year on record?  SeeWhy tracks shopping cart abandonment rates across a wide variety of ecommerce sites and has watched the rate increase steadily in 2009 as the holiday season gets into full swing. For October 2009, the average shopping cart abandonment rate was at 71 percent, the highest this year so far.

In normal years, click through and conversion rates can be expected to increase as the deadline of Christmas approaches, and customers seek to find presents for loved ones.

But this year we’ve seen significant changes in buyer behavior as customers have searched for better deals. According to Hitwise, searches for promotion codes are up 40 percent year over year. The significantly increased sale volumes driven by the holiday shopping season have the effect of amplifying underlying trends.

The two main underlying changes in behavior seen this year are:
•    Increased use of shopping carts as ‘wish lists’ where items are bookmarked by leaving items in the cart
•    Buyers looking for a better deal, by comparing prices or searching for free shipping and voucher codes, especially among higher income buyers

This reflects the prevalent consumer behavior in 2009: more window shopping, more cautious and looking for a bargain. In addition, a pre-holiday season survey by the National Retail Federation revealed that customers are expecting to receive holiday promotions and will defer purchases in anticipation of finding a better deal. This doesn’t suggest that Holiday 09 will be a high margin, high converting period for ecommerce.

A recent Forrester survey conducted in Q3 09 highlights the primary current causes of shopping cart abandonment.

It’s worth noting that this study highlights behavioral reasons for abandonment. These are, to a significant extent, out of the marketer’s reach. High shipping costs have long been the single most significant cause of abandonment, and marketers are well aware of this. A recent SeeWhy survey into e-marketer’s promotional plans this Christmas shows that free shipping offers and discount promotion codes, distributed by email and via social media, are the tools of choice.

The Forrester data also highlights how little ecommerce teams can do about shopping cart abandonment: most ecommerce sites are now locked down from changes so the only weapons left in the marketer’s armory are price changes, promotions (especially free shipping) and abandonment remarketing.

So, this holiday it’s going to be fascinating to see whether extensive promotions, distributed by email and increasingly social media, will win out and drive high conversion rates; or whether a new breed of ecommerce-savvy consumer is emerging post recession who will search extensively for the best deal and only buy when incentivized with free shipping and other baubles.

Whatever, it’s clear that remarketing is going to be big in 2010. Customers are expecting it. In fact, they’re waiting for those free shipping offers.

eMarketers plan to get social this Christmas

Tactic: Free shipping offers + social networks
It’s been pretty clear that consumers have changed their online behavior this year: Hitwise has reported a 40 percent increase compared with last year in searches for discounts, promo codes and sales. And a National Retail Federation (NRF) study recently showed that while customers love the convenience of shopping online, customers are expecting discounts and free shipping this holiday season.

The combination of a down economy, price sensitive consumers and reduced marketing budgets might, in theory, signal a ‘Perfect Storm’ for ecommerce teams this holiday. But the outlook for online sales this year look pretty positive, with 38 percent of consumers planning spend more online this year (NRF).

Amazon.com is particularly bullish, forecasting up to 36 percent growth compared with fourth quarter 2008. Forrester analysts are predicting a more modest 8 percent growth for ecommerce as a whole, but have warned that ecommerce teams should be braced for a surge in traffic because of reduced in-store inventories may frustrate consumers and drive them online.

New research, carried out during the first week of November by SeeWhy, shows that promotions driven through social networking and email feature big in marketers plans this holiday. No doubt driven in part by reduced budgets, and by consumers searching for deals online, 60 percent of e-marketers are planning to offer free shipping and 57 percent  promotion code discounts.  Only 13 percent plan no discounts at all.

But the big news is that 50% plan to use social media such as Twitter and Facebook to distribute promotional offers. Having invested in building social networks in 2009, now it is clear that many marketers plan to exploit them to spread the Christmas cheer, and promotion codes specifically.

eMarketers get tactical for the holidays

Particularly in the ecommerce sector, there’s lots of focus right now on optimizing the website conversion in anticipation of the impending holiday season, Black Friday and Cyber-Monday. A poll SeeWhy conducted in early October among 95 eMarketers shows that they are (understandably) shifting their priorities towards short-term initiatives directly connected to website conversion and revenues.

In the poll the question asked was “What is your top marketing tactic in the last 9 months and the next three months?” Each respondent was forced to choose ONLY their top tactic, primarily to highlight any changes.

 In terms of techniques used, not surprisingly, SEO ranked highest when looking back over the previous 9 months, and showed the biggest drop of 25% due to the longer lead time required to get SEO results. Search and display advertising also showed a marginal drop of 1%, but this is too small to be considered significant.

But the big news is that Abandonment Remarketing is the number one marketing priority for 13% of respondents. This is significant in two ways: Firstly that it is the TOP tactic, among all the potential marketing initiatives, for the holiday season for so many sites. And secondly that the swing is so significant, up by over 300% compared with the previous 9 months.

In fact if you look back to the previous holiday season, many of the top US retailers focused on shopping cart abandonment emails, so clearly this is a seasonal initiative for some. Of course some of those retailers also learned to their expense that shopping cart recovery programs can, if not executed properly, train customers to expect offers. Hopefully this year we will have learnt the lessons from last year since it is straightforward to ensure that you don’t train customers.

The ‘Other’ category highlights a flaw in our survey design. It’s a significant swing, up by 150%, but frustratingly we don’t know more. Our best guess, based purely on anecdotal evidence is that this shift is to promotions, but I’m curious to see what you think. What’s your top initiative this holiday season?

Lessons learned: When to Make A Holiday Promotional Offer

At holiday time, many online ecommerce sites rely on promotions as a central part of their seasonal marketing strategy. While inherently tactical, they have been demonstrated to be particularly effective where consumers are more cautious. Clearly promotions are going to feature big this holiday season.

One of the areas where the cautious buyer is most visible is when they abandon the shopping cart online.

Done well, promotions can be a very effective kicker here to convert abandoners into buyers. There are several independent studies which have measured the effect, for example the Marketing Experiments team commented:

“Utilizing an incentive to recapture abandoned carts has proven to be one of the simplest and most cost-effective email marketing techniques that we have tested.”

But last holiday season some of the largest retailers learned the hard way that promotion codes in shopping cart abandonment remarketing emails can backfire.

So before you leap to roll out a ‘Free Shipping’ remarketing campaign this holiday season, give pause to the lessons learned last season. We learned that if not done right, promotional offers can actually increase your shopping cart abandonment rate. If it’s too automatic, then you can train you customer to expect an offer. So rather than increasing your conversion rate through effective remarketing, your abandonment rate increases slightly, and your margins decrease.

This particularly impacts this ecommerce sites where there are lots of repeat purchases.
Best practice email remarketing is to follow up immediately, within a few minutes, with a service communication.

You can summarize best practice as ‘Tone and Timing.’ Following up with an overt sales message can be counterproductive and result in higher level of unsubscribes.

Following up too late, say 24 hours after the abandonment, with a promotional offer will cause a host of issues:

• Low relevance to the visitor – the potential purchase is no longer ‘front of mind,’ so your email is no longer relevant

• Getting out of step with the visitor – the visitor has made an alternate purchase from one of your competitors, so your email is totally irrelevant and may be regarded as spam

• Customer service issues – the visitor may have already come back onto your site and purchased anyway at the full price, so you email will lead to anger and damage to your brand

The way to avoid these issues is to adopt Tone and Timing as your mantra. An immediate follow up along the lines of: ‘Oops was there a problem…can we help?’ is much less likely to annoy, but demonstrates your commitment to service. You are guaranteed never to be out of step with the customer this way, which has the effect of dramatically simplifying the rules governing your remarketing program.

But what about those customers that need a promotion code before they will convert? Best practice here is to employ three tactics:

• Multiple email follow-ups – two or three follow ups work best, though this will depend on the specifics of your business; in some cases up to six are used

• Keep the promotion to the last email – staying in the context of a service communication

• Segmenting your visitors – selecting only those customers that, from their behavior, require an offer in order to convert to avoid training your customers to expect an offer

Adapting to the changing behavior of today’s buyers requires ecommerce teams to change the way they market, and while promotion codes will continue to be a valuable tool in the marketers arsenal this holiday season, care needs to be taken to ensure that they help not hinder the conversion process.

Macy’s have taken the lead in actively promoting their special offer codes with a web page resource for customers. But promoting special offer codes is a tricky business, and many ecommerce marketers are still shy of using social media to actively promote discounts

In a future blog I’ll look at social media and the viral distribution of codes.

More information about remarketing to website abandoners, and website conversion can be found in the best practices section of www.seewhy.com/resources

Voucher codes & website conversion

A recent study (registration required) showed that buyers are spending more time researching online, but spending less money. No doubt, most of these consumers are searching for better deals, and in particular voucher codes.

Voucher code sites aggregate discount codes submitted by users and therefore made aware to the general public. As consumers have latched on to the challenge of searching for a code to enter into the ‘Enter Promotional Code’ box on the checkout form, retailers have found that their promotions have on occasions spread much further than anticipated. Consumers are more likely to abandon their shopping cart as a result if they can’t find a promotional code online.

Macy’s Voucher Site
At the xChange conference I chatted with a colleague at Macy’s and discussed how they address voucher codes I was quite surprised not only at their solution, but also their results.
Due to the widespread nature of these sites, Macy’s now publishes their own special offer site that lists only Macy’s voucher codes. Their logic was simple: ‘Our buyers are searching online for Macy’s vouchers, some of which will work, some of which will be dead links, and it takes them offsite to search.’

By creating their own voucher site, Macy’s acknowledges the challenge, and by making their codes relatively public, they are not only avoid the affiliate fees of aggregate sites but also keep control of their promotions.

It’s an interesting development, since the traditional approach has been to try and ignore the voucher sites as much as possible. Macy’s have taken back control of their promotions, calculating that any additional discounts that are given will be offset by a reduction in affiliate fees or (in their case) paid for by the manufacturers.

What’s interesting is that 40 percent of Macy’s voucher code page visitors go on to convert and become customers. It’s effective because it recognizes that customer behaviour has changed: if visitors are searching for vouchers online, why not keep them on the site and make it easy for them to complete their purchase as planned? The converse is a scenario where customers abandon specifically because they are unable to find a voucher code that works.

The OfficeMax Approach
Another approach I like has been adopted by OfficeMax, where they’ve put a hyperlink under the Promotion code box to encourage you to sign up for a newsletter.While this is a great way to get more newsletter sign ups, it won’t stop shoppers from surfing to find promotion codes.
Perhaps the ideal treatment would be to combine these two different tactics and have a hyperlink under the promotion code box (OfficeMax) which takes you to the promotion code page (Macy’s)

Of course, even if you’re achieving a 40% conversion like Macy’s, that still means that 60% are abandoning. When they do abandon, remarketing is a very effective way to recover these lost shopping carts, but given that one of the potential causes was that the visitor was unable to find a promotional code online, you need to take this into account. The challenge here is to try and determine when to make a promotional offer.

If you’d like to find out more about remarketing, and when and when not to use promotion codes, then take a look at SeeWhy Abandonment Tracker Pro here