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Practical Ecommerce: 7 Things To Boost Conversions

February 21, 2015

The Practical Ecommerce blog published a post earlier this month outlining seven simple, free steps you can take to boost conversions online. It’s a great article that includes several methods we emphasize, such as clarifying the checkout process and providing contact information. Of course, we also really like the last piece on the list:

If you’re not retargeting abandoned carts with time-sensitive discount offers via an automatically generated email campaign, then you should at least give that strategy serious consideration.

Imagine you’re that hypothetical storeowner with the 10,000 monthly visits, the $100 average sale, and the 3 percent conversion rate. Imagine that you would like to add $5,000 to your monthly sales starting today. Let’s add some more detail to that picture.

We know that if your conversion rate does not change, you’re going to need to achieve an additional 1,665 visits throughout the month to make your goal happen. Without an alternative strategy, that might mean being forced to resort to additional pay-per-click spending. If your average cost of advertising were $1.25 per click, then the added marketing cost to generate the additional 50 needed sales, or $5,000, would be $2,081.25 in pay-per-click ads, in total, or a little over $41 per order.

But let’s just say that, on average, you get six nearly-completed abandoned carts every day. In each case the cart is far enough along to get the email address of the potential customer.

What if you added a limited-time offer of a 15 percent off coupon in a retargeting email to your existing nearly-converted shopper base instead? If that strategy were effective one-third of the time in recovering the sale, that would yield two successful recoveries per day, or approximately 60 added sales per month on just 180 abandoned carts. That’s a projected value, after discounts, of an additional $5,100 in monthly sales.

You can read the entire list here.