100-5: Takeaways from Direct Commerce Association Digital Marketing Day – inc CRO and Email Automation

Right so this bonus episode is my takeaways from the Direct Commerce Association Digital Marketing Day I attended last week.

I ummed and ahhed about doing a takeaway from the event – partly because this week I’m busy promoting the launch of the new Get More Customers Club this week.

But I thought – there were a couple of awesome takeaways you all deserve to hear about, AND if any week deserves a bonus podcast – it’s the week episode 100 goes live!

(If you haven’t already had a listen to 100 – it’s me answering your questions – well worth a listen!)

Right – back to the takeaways…

I have info for you on:

• Funky Pigeon and how they’ve improved their overall email performance by improving their automated emails
• CRO – Clarity on the differences between website personalisation and website optimisation and where to start with it all

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

This is an area we don’t often cover – so I really wanted to bring you this bit. (And we have more CRO / UX content coming up soon with a couple of authors of books on just that!).

Dan Croxon-John from AWA Digital and co-author of E-Commerce Website Optimization: Why 95% of Your Website Visitors Don’t Buy, and What You Can Do About it (along with Johann Van Tonder who should soon be on the podcast talking about the book)

Dan’s session was very much on where to start with optimising your website. You could think of it as a Bright Shiny Object avoidance method!

Where to start?

• Optimisation first – that’s things which affect EVERYONE who comes to your website
• Once you have that sorted you can move into personalisation – where you’re optimising based on what you know about that visitor.

Kind of obvious really! eh!?

Basically you’re working to optimise for the largest group of people first.

Great table he shared:

Proves that there’s a lot more you can do than you think – and again focus on the biggest opportunities first.

Tools Dan was raving about:

• Google Optimise for A/B testing
• Qualaroo for mini survey’s in the site – eg a popup on the order confirmation page “Is there anything that nearly stopped you buying?”

Funky Pigeon – using Automated Email Campaigns to increase sales

Presented by James Atkinson, the head of marketing at Funky Pigeon, and Dan Kennedy from Experian.

They did a super-fast session about what they’d done to their automated emails to improve performance.

The overall result was that the sales- balance tipped from the broadcasts driving the most sales per week, to the automated emails (and wouldn’t all just love that!).

They worked on these automated campaigns:

• Welcome campaign
• Order and dispatch confirmation
• Abandoned Basket
• Reminder campaign (birthdays)

Each only had ONE email (and still only has one email).

Pictures of what they did (slides) for Welcome, Abandoned Baskets, and Reminder are in the shownotes (eComm…) I was quite quick enough to get the Order and despatch confirmation:

OK – so the key things they did to change everything as follows:

• Make the emails mobile friendly
• More calls to action
• Clearer calls to action
• More relevant calls to action
• Add a “View in browser” link – in case that was the issue
• Abandoned Baskets campaign – add the customer service details so they can get in contact about any issues
• Welcome campaign – emphases the key benefits of using FunkyPigeon (pre-pay and reminders)
• Welcome campaign – Reassure the customer they’ve made the right choice (Trustpilot review score)

Now can’t we all do that???

They took it to another level with the Reminder campaign – not only saying who’s birthday they’re reminding about, but also featuring products relevant for the age / gender AND mocking up those products to have the right name on them. We can’t all do that – but clever!

They measured the results in terms of the “Click to Open Rate” – so the percentage of those who opened, who clicked (pretty obvious when you’re busy tweaking creative!!)

Impact:

• Welcome campaign up 7%
• Abandoned Baskets up 42%
• Order confirmation up 155%
• Reminder up 2.5%

If you are yet to get started with automated campaigns, please start with the Welcome campaign – and you can get my free Welcome Campaign checklist on the website.

Well MasterPlan World I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself for making the time to get this little podcast out there for you.

Any comments questions – put them in the eCommerce MasterPlan World Facebook Group – and I’ll get back to you.

Have a great week and keep optimising!