Author Archives: Peter

About Peter

Peter is CEO of Spring Metrics, a Durham, N.C.-based SaaS provider focused on enabling online ecommerce merchants to capture more revenue from their existing site traffic.

Holiday Conversion Tips: Get More Conversions from your Email Campaigns

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The sixth in a continuing series on Holiday Conversion Tips

We’re on the road to Cyber Monday, when projections are for well over $1B in online sales.  As email marketing campaigns ramp up, web businesses are looking for quick ways to ensure a higher conversion rate from emails to purchases.  You can maximize your email conversions this season with this “quick holiday win” by Spring Metrics, perfect for easy implementation in November.

Smart Offers are a sure way to increase your on-site conversions. If you’re already sending email campaigns to your list, take it a step further: reward visitors who click through to your site from your emails, and reinforce your email message through Smart Offers.

Smart Offers helps create consistency between your email and website messaging, without having to make major content changes on your site. For example, if your email displays holiday promotional items for kid’s toys, you can offer 10% off the specific items that match those in your email, or free shipping with the purchase of one of those items, to visitors who have clicked through from that email campaign. You can also combine a special offer with a message that says, “Thanks for reading our email!  Here’s a special offer for you.”

Mastergardening.com showed a Smart Offer to those who clicked to the website through an email that repeated the offer from that email campaign. This increased conversation rates from 2.2% to 2.34%. Their Average Order Value went from $23.95 to $87.45 for this Smart Offer through Spring Metrics.

Email campaigns are a useful way to increase conversions, but don’t stop there. Make this holiday season your most successful through Smart Offers. Find out more by downloading our Holiday Conversion Guide.

Holiday Conversion Tips: Using A/B Testing of Smart Offers

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The fifth in a continuing series on Holiday Conversion Tips

Get ready to put away the pumpkins and break out the holiday lights! It’s time to prepare for your traffic to grow now that holiday shopping is moving into full swing. This is the perfect time to use Smart Offers to maximize holiday shopping revenue, and A/B split testing will tell you the most enticing offers to drive conversions this season.

A/B split tests of Smart Offers will help you learn which offers have the best response and conversion rates in advance of the holiday traffic. For example, you can test two different incentives: free shipping and 10 percent off. Use visitor information, such as the location associated with their IP address, to make offers to certain visitors—perhaps free shipping to those in New York and 10 percent off to those in Ohio—and evaluate their response. You may find that the response rate is twice as high for free shipping vs 10 percent off.

You can run this test offer for a week, then try another test offer—pit free shipping against 20 percent off, or a free gift. Once you’ve identified a relative hierarchy of offer results, you can decide to activate the optimal offers across your entire website traffic, or a larger segment—just in time for Cyber Monday.

Replayphotos.com used Spring Metrics to discover that visitors from Arizona responded particularly well to a certain offer. This drove a 2.46 percent conversation rate, which happens to be 3x higher than the sitewide rate for the same time period.

Additionally, customer response may vary greatly depending on location, age, gender, etc., and different offers appeal to some customers, but not others. You can also use split testing to identify different offers to show to different visitor segments.

Knowing your customers will increase conversions and profits. Use A/B split testing now to discover how to best convert holiday visits into sales.  For more useful tips on how to get your company ready for the season, download our free holiday guide!

Holiday Conversion Tips: Active Upselling at Checkout

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The fourth in a continuing series on Holiday Conversion Tips.

Did you know that 40 percent of consumers will begin online holiday shopping before Halloween?

Increasing average order value (AOV) is a great method to increase revenue, even during traffic fluctuations.  You can actively upsell at checkout without adding expensive product recommendation solutions that are complicated to implement and maintain.

One option is to show select visitors a special offer to motivate add-on purchases based on their on-site behavior. By providing a simple nudge on your checkout page, you can entice shoppers to increase their cart size.

There are many ways to connect free shipping or discounts to order value. You can offer shoppers free shipping or a discount if they purchase a bundle of products or for orders above a certain amount.

Retailers can target offers at shoppers looking at specific products, such as a free warranty, a special add-on gift, or a discount.  Free gift offers can be linked to cart-size.  Use simple offers like “Spend just $15 more and get a free gift!” to motivate shoppers to spend a certain amount.

Cross Selling involves suggesting complementary products, like earrings to go with a necklace.  Upselling involves motivating shoppers to select a more expensive item or version of a product, or an additional feature, to increase AOV.

Volume pricing is another effective way to motivate higher AOV.  You can show customers who have put one item in their cart an offer to get a third item free if they buy two, or show them special pricing on quantities of three or more.

You can take advantage of these AOV-based offers during and after the holiday shopping season. Spring Metrics customer Mr. Snuff has enjoyed a 47% increase in AOV using this strategy.  Start planning your upsell offers now so you can capitalize when the holiday shopping frenzy begins. You can accomplish all of these using Smart Offers from Spring Metrics.

If you’d like to learn more about this and other holiday conversion strategies, download our 2012 Holiday Conversions Guide. The guide features 10 powerful “Quick Wins”— practical tips backed by real customer success stories—to help you drive increased revenue and conversions.

Holiday Conversions: Converting First-Time Visitors

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The third in a continuing series on Holiday Conversion Tips.

Don’t let first-time visitors simply walk away—make sure window shoppers move forward on the path to purchase as the holiday shopping season approaches.

Learning from and Converting First-Time Visitors

Most likely, a decent portion of traffic to your site is from first-time visitors. This portion will likely increase during the holiday season as window shoppers are searching for gifts, which is why it is the perfect time to maximize your use of Smart Offers.

Smart Offers can help you get to know your visitors better, increasing your chances of converting them into customers. And before the holiday season goes into full-gear, you can use Smart Offers to test different messages or incentives on your first time visitors.

For example, if your brand is known for competitive prices, you can use Smart Offers to test both different incentives and emotional ads on your first-time visitors. Do this before the holidays to optimize the offers and messages you use.

You can also optimize offers based on traffic source, geography, or time of day.  For example, for search engine traffic, you can show offers re-iterating the key-words a first-time visitor typed in a Google search; for first-time clicks from a new email list, thank them for checking you out and offer them a reward for taking the next step. Your first-time visitors are not a uniform group, and you can use Smart Offers to segment and personalize on-site content and promotions.

Find out why a visitor is initially drawn to your site, and then communicate with them accordingly. Are they driven by price, selection, brand, value, sentiment? Finding out why a visitor first came to your site is the key to figuring out how to keep them there.

It is much more difficult to convert a first-time visitor into a buyer than a first-time buyer into a repeat buyer.The number of first-time visitors will greatly increase as the holiday season approaches, so now is the time to take advantage and hook a first-time visitor using Smart Offers.

Spring Metrics’ Holiday Conversations Guide will show you how to turn visitors into subscribers and increase cart check-outs.  Find out more by downloading our Holiday Conversion Guide.

Holiday Conversions: Turning Visitors into Subscribers

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The second in a continuing series on Holiday Conversion Tips.

A key step to increasing purchases this holiday season and beyond is to email your past visitors when the shopping season is hot. But first you need their email addresses. You can convert more site visitors into subscribers and increase your pool of potential shoppers with Smart Offers. Start now to increase your holiday marketing opportunities.

Spring Metrics’ 2012 Holiday Conversions Guide features 10 powerful “Quick Wins”— practical tips backed by real customer success stories—to help you drive increased revenue and conversions.  Check out one of the quick wins below:

Converting more Visitors into Subscribers

If you can get a visitor to become a subscriber, you have already won half the battle. A visitor may not be ready to make a purchase their first time on your site, but the ability to have future communication with a visitor highly increases the chance that they will become customers.

One great way to build your email list is by using Smart Offers, especially to first-time visitors.  What is the average time on site for someone who has never visited your site before? If it averages 45 seconds, present them a Smart Offer after 30 seconds on the site—before most first-time visitors are expected to leave.

The offer can simply invite them to sign up for your special email newsletter, or offer them a special coupon code if they give you their email address.  You can also motivate visitors to become subscribers by offering to email them a link to a guide, ebook, or whitepaper.  These kind of offers will increase your chances of converting a visitor into a subscriber, and eventually, a paying customer.

Conversation is key to converting visitors into customers and first-time buyers into repeat buyers. Having an email address allows you to keep in contact with customers and present offers based on their specific needs. The amount of time to reach potential holiday shoppers is dwindling fast, so start collecting email addresses today.

Learn more about this strategy and many others by downloading our Holiday Conversion Guide.

Special Holiday Promotion
Now you can get Smart Conversions from Spring Metrics in time for the holiday season and save up to 32% in the process.  Sign up for a demo, test drive the solution on your site, and judge for yourself how quickly and easily you can get more customers, subscribers and followers in time for the biggest consumer buying spree of the year.

Holiday Conversions: Preventing Cart Abandonment

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This is the first in a continuing series on Holiday Conversion Tips.

Up to 40 percent of annual retail revenue is dependent on the holiday shopping season. At this pivotal time of the year, it’s essential that merchants convert as many visitors into paying customers as possible.

To help retailers get the most out of the upcoming holiday shopping season, Spring Metrics is unveiling our new 2012 Holiday Conversions Guide, which features 10 simple, yet powerful “Quick Wins”—tips and suggestions, complete with real customer stories—to help you drive more conversions.

The guide outlines steps you can take immediately to prepare for the holiday shopping season, as well as things you can do throughout the season to optimize conversions and maximize revenue. Let’s explore one of the Quick Wins below:

Quick Win: Prevent Cart Abandonment
Your visitor came, loaded their cart, arrived at the checkout, and is now just sitting there … longer than usual. Something is wrong. Chances are, this visitor is about to abandon their cart. But with real-time dynamic offers, you can get a message in front of that almost-customer to remind them on the spot of the value of making the purchase. Give them that extra nudge with free shipping, fast delivery, product scarcity, or a special discount if they purchase. Get them over the finish line!

Preventing abandoned carts with dynamic, smart offers is not just a holiday strategy, you can do this year-round. But for retailers who see a larger portion of their traffic—and revenue—during the holiday shopping season, it is particularly important to reduce cart abandonment during this critical time. We recommend testing a few different smart offers before the holidays, so that by the time the season is in full swing, you’ve already determined the smart offer that can reduce abandonment rates.

How does it work? You can set up a smart offer with Spring Metrics that automatically displays a rectangular “coupon” on their screen when a certain condition occurs: in this case, when a visitor has let their cart, full of one or more items, sit for a certain period of time without checking out, as measured by our software.

Download the Holiday Conversions Guide to learn more. It’s chock full of holiday retailing pointers!

3 Out of 2 People Have Trouble With Fractions

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One of our awesome team members forwarded a Time Moneyland article, which itself was a take off from an article in The Economist, which in turn was based on a study published in the Journal of Marketing.The gist is that consumers routinely fail to do the math correctly on discounts. 33% more product for the same price is a decidedly worse deal than 33% off, but according to the study buyers reach for more product in most cases.

Math is your Friend - Discount Offer Psychology

Statistically speaking, your site visitors are subject to this rule

As an online merchant, this information is highly valuable. In politics, they call it framing, and it’s critical to success. In retail, they’re calling is discount psychology. How you word your offers can make all the difference to the performance of your offer, and its impact on the bottom line. Spring Metrics Smart Conversions allows you to split-test your offers – just set up multiple offers to the same target segment and we’ll automatically divide the traffic and tell you which is performing better.

For instance, you may wish to encourage repeat customers to place larger orders. If you know they have a historical cart size of $50 but you’d like to get them up to $75, you can entice them to the higher level with a 10 percent discount offer and still pocket a $17.50 revenue increase.

This effect speaks to why Sam’s Club and Costco are so successful. Increased cart sizes for the same money. You may even hear your friends joking that they can’t get out of those stores without spending way more than they intended to spend. “I got two bazillion pot stickers for like $50!”

A more complicated example: your visitor/prospect is looking at a product page for a $40 item. You know that you’ve got a $60 item that is similar to what they’re looking at. So you make an offer to “buy this other [$60] item and we’ll give you an accessory for free” where your cost on accessory is less than the increased margin on the upsell. Your revenue went up, the overall cart margin went up, and you’ve got a customer now with a higher baseline purchase price at your store that you can re-market too in the future.

Make it Awesome, Or Don’t Bother At All

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Unless its going to be awesome, don’t do it. Don’t even bother.  Don’t even get started, don’t waste your time, or your friends’ or colleagues’ time either. Move on to something else, and make sure that it will be awesome.

That, at least, was the gist of a piece I heard few weeks ago about Brave, the Pixar movie (which I have since seen and thoroughly enjoyed). The folks who made the film referenced the involvement of Steve Jobs in the film and had worked with him on previous projects as well, and that is what they said he drove them toward: make it awesome.

I’m not an enormous fan of exceptionalism, so I’m cautious that this be interpreted in that vein. But I find there’s enormous validity to taking that approach to life. We do it here at Spring Metrics, and it makes what we do fun and (we think) that much more powerful and usable for our customers. We make the UI awesome, and the data-orientation of how we drive performance for our customers is awesome too. Children also seem to do it naturally; they never do anything “just to do it” unless they are being forced.

You could argue that you’re “forced” to work, but most of my colleagues and presumably the readers of this blog have at least some choice in the matter; yes, an income is required, but there is some determinism available in where we all work. So, wherever you are or whatever you’re doing, make it awesome. And if it can’t be awesome, maybe it shouldn’t be at all.

The rewards are greater, both to yourself and to the greater community, and that pays it forward in a sense. High quality work, with your heart and soul in it, will get you more of whatever you wanted to get out of it: satisfaction, usability, money, time savings, beauty, or just the pleasure of a job well done.

The Tao Te Ching has a line it: “Retire when the work is done.” Perhaps we can update that slightly to “Retire when the work is awesome.”

Increasing Social Engagement at the Time of Purchase

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social engagementHere at Spring Metrics, we’ve been helping our customers increase their social engagement and we’ve been seeing some noteworthy results. After gathering data for a few months now, we’re able to share some early and surprising figures.

While the public debate about the impact of social media on your online business continues (our data shows they are clearly positively correlated, and the only question should be how much a Like or Follow is worth to your business), many e-commerce merchants and retailers are quietly getting on with the business of adding social media to their toolkit.

Looking at the question from a different perspective, we have seen that catalyzing your following at the time of purchase by enticing buyers to become advocates has increased social engagement, as measured by the total number of Likes, by 23% in an average of six weeks. That’s a stunning result, and we humbly believe only partly due to our product and our awesome support team; the rest is due to simply leveraging the opportunity at the right time, when the visitor is at the point of purchase and feeling good about their decision.

Also captivating is that in early results we’re seeing that more than half of the visitors will Like or Follow, but then not purchase… yet. It’s too early to show stats on how many of those social advocacy actions turn in to purchases at a later date, but we can see that it’s not zero. And looking at the infographic we released today you can see that 54% feel more likely to purchase after Liking. So rather than simply losing the momentum of that visitor after the non-converting visit, you have preserved on average 54% of the time and money you spent attracting that visitor. And of course there’s the indirect effect, again too early to quote stats but it’s not zero either; customers are seeing a clear increase in sales from social media channels.

What is Real-Time?

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The Wikipedia entry for Real-time talks about several different categories of real-time: computing, media, communications… (it also mentions Bill Maher but we can skip that for now). The computing entry describes “real-time response times are understood to be in the order of milliseconds and sometimes microseconds,” which is pretty much what I used to think of when I was a software engineer, and in my mind is the origins of the phrase.

what is real-timeIn contrast, when I ran sales, out here in the human world, one of my guys used to say “we’re going to do this one real-time, partner” and that meant either this minute or this hour or this day depending on what exactly it was that we would be tackling, but in any case not much else was going to get done until the opportunity was nailed. (In most cases it meant “saddle up, I’m putting you on the phone in minutes and you better be loaded for bear!”).

Now in SaaS, especially in our business of serving up content to website visitors in real-time, we’re exactly at the interactive epicenter between the human and computer. If our system or the other systems it interacts with miss a beat, a customer may miss a conversion. And sometimes that’s microseconds or milliseconds.

Today in the office we talked about this. Our engineers have done a ton of work to tighten all the screws down and eliminate the slippage wherever possible. But still there’s the “fast bounce” visitor (who truthfully was very unlikely to be enticed to convert anyway, regardless of how fast or how targeted the content is); and there’s the inevitable delays between our Amazon servers and wherever the site is being hosted and the CRM or data sources we’re accessing to present the visitor with relevant content. But the more important aspects are the human factors aspects of real-time. More like my sales friend. We’ve spent time building in the right behavior to induce the desired results. Having something pop up instantaneously, it turns out, doesn’t have the best effect. A very slight delay creates a better contrast effect.

This reminds me of professional cycling. Some time back, the game was all about making the components lighter and lighter. Several years ago, we crossed the technology threshold and now the cycling regulations specify a minimum weight for the bikes. The technology outpaced the needs of the sport. And so it is with real-time: it’s about the people, your customers.