MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

You get home from a long day in your marketing department or agency. Whip up a quick dinner. And just when you’re about to bite into your arroz con pollo, you hear that dreaded ring.

I call this situation Dan’s Lament. Our associate editor, Daniel Burstein, was sounding off to me about this situation earlier today. For some reason, at least in his household, they only get one type of phone call around 7pm and that, of course, is the dreaded telemarketer.

Now telemarketing is illegal at some level in the United States, as it is in many other countries, and Dan is on the National Do Not Call Registry. Yet there are those loopholes that ensure his phone still rings at dinnertime. In the latest case, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wanted to discuss his fishing habits.

Surveys. Non-profits. Or my personal favorite…political push polls. They all have found a loophole.

The more you segment, the less you blindly dial for dollars

I’ve really grown to hate telemarketers. Not so much because they prevent foodie friends of mine like Dan from enjoying a good winter vegetable salad with fresh, in-season kale, but rather as a professional marketer.

The technology and science behind segmentation have helped marketers target their message so much better than before, so I feel professionally insulted that someone would think they can, precisely at the dreaded 7pm, offer sandwich-toting Dan something he didn’t already think about buying in a store or online.

So I am a fan of do-not-call registries…even if they are only marginally effective.

Now I know what many of you may be thinking. “Wait a minute, Boris, I don’t mean to interrupt Dan’s enjoyment of a hearty winter vegetable salad or pastrami on rye, but these lists are a major challenge for me…I need to leverage the human touch for an upsell or to nurture a complex sale.”

The reality is that cultural and corresponding regulatory changes have led to a certain shift in the utilization of call centers, from making to taking calls. It’s not bad news. It’s great news for you savvy marketers that have the resources to leverage a call center, if you know how to do it profitably.

Is automation right for you?

If you are a Web marketer reading this, you might be asking yourself “what does this have to do with me?” However, looking at marketing holistically may be precisely where you can maximize return on your marketing dollars, as the automation afforded by the digital medium is not a one-size-fits-all solution to all sales processes.

Yes, it’s cheaper to sell online. Yet you may be doing a better job of selling and cross-selling over the phone, even though it costs you more. The question is where the higher net profit lies.

As the resident KPI (that’s key performance indicator) Guy at MarketingExperiments, among other things, I want to reintroduce you to a KPI that is critical to inbound marketing. It is the same KPI what would have been applied to a telemarketing campaign just a few short years ago: cost per acquisition (CPA).

The obvious use of this metric is to understand how much you can afford to spend on a media buy. You may be more familiar with this metric in the demand generation realms (paid search, affiliate marketing, lead gen, etc.). However, in conjunction with a bottom-line metric, such as revenue (preferably, lifetime) per visitor (RPV), it can also provide you with critical insights for directing your marketing efforts and formulating your messaging.

Even though your site can now do many things that have replaced telemarketing – from further qualifying a lead to completing an order to even getting that upsell – don’t let technology guide your decisions. Depending on the nature of your product, the human touch can be so much more effective for any or all of these steps.

So the best thing to do is… wait for it… test!

By varying the emphasis you place on calls to action that lead to a human interaction (phone number, live chat, call-me form), both in the layout of your pages (location, graphical weighting) and their prominence in the order process (from focusing the option as the primary action to not even mentioning it).

Experimenting with live chat is its own subject, as you can test how quickly (if at all) you want to turn the online chat into a phone conversation. You might even test a click-to-call button, although be wary of spam (and if you market in India, strict regulations).

What you’re trying to discover is whether the increased cost of acquiring a customer is offset or surpassed by an increase in closed orders, upsells, or higher-quality leads (e.g., for a complex sale, how does the increase in calls help your lead management efforts).

In other words, you will need to compare the change in CPA to the change in RPV (and depending on the nature of your business, both may need to be adjusted for the customer’s projected lifetime cost and value).

You have to be careful with how you juggle the numbers, as there are many potential pitfalls. Remember that your ultimate goal is increased profits. Depending on your business plan, your primary or close secondary goal is likely increased profits in the foreseeable future or over the customer’s lifetime. If adding human interaction results in sufficiently higher revenue per website visitor, it may be worth the extra cost.

But you’ll only know if you test. And use the right KPI.

How do you use inbound marketing, telesales, and customer service? What KPIs do you use to measure your success? Share your triumphs and ideas in the comments section of this post or start a conversation with your peers in the MarketingExperiments Optimization group.

Sending more than 1.2 billion emails per year is a significant marketing investment. And for one of our Research Partners, this effort raised several questions:

• When will their list get irritated?
• How many emails should be sent on a regular basis?
• At what point do emails start hurting sales?

To ensure they were getting the most value from their marketing spend, our Research Partner wanted definitive, data-driven answers. So we tested for the optimal frequency that will maximize total revenue. While our scientists now have the benefit of reams of information and know the answer to these questions, we thought it would be a fun challenge to your “marketer’s gut” to test your acumen and see if you could spot a winner based on sheer intuition (and yes, there is a prize).

Background: The Research Partner is a large ecommerce company that sells well-known, inexpensive, perishable products online (if we told you any more we’d have to kill you). They had a massive, yet varying email send rate and was emailing the house list anywhere from once a week to four times a week. Most of the Research Partner’s strategy was based on the offers available at the time. With such variance in frequency, we wondered if sending more email messages would have overly negative effects on unsubscribe rates. And likewise, we wondered how much impact sending fewer emails would have on revenue. Ultimately, we were looking for that optimal email-sending sweet spot.

Test Design: We took a small, highly-motivated segment of the Research Partner’s house list and used it as our testing sample. We then split that list into seven segments that would receive different send frequencies as represented below:

Segment 1: 1X PER MONTH

Segment 2: 2X PER MONTH

Segment 3: 3X PER MONTH

Segment 4: 4X PER MONTH

Segment 5: 6X PER MONTH

Segment 6: 10X PER MONTH

Segment 7: 15X PER MONTH

We monitored the effect of the send frequencies for 60 days. We tracked delivery, open rates, click-through, conversion, revenue, spam complaints, and unsubscribe rates throughout the duration test.

Results: Testing for optimal frequency assumes that revenue and unsubscribes will increase at a steady rate until the list gets irritated. At that point, revenue will experience diminishing returns and even decrease. Likewise, unsubscribe rates will increase at that point of irritation.

We wanted to test the validity of this assumption, as well as discover the optimal email frequency for this company’s email list that increased both total revenue and lifetime value of the customer.

But before we reveal the results from our scientists’ brains, we want to test your “marketing gut” with the following question (Oh, and just to spice things up a little, one person’s intuition will get them a free seat in one of our online certification courses – normally $595.):

1. What is the optimal monthly send frequency for this company?
   1. 1-2 per month
   2. 3-5 per month
   3. 6-9 per month
   4. 10-15 per month

Congratulations to Sharon Mostyn, winner of the Email Frequency Contest, and one of only a handful of correct responses. Sharon chose the Landing Page Optimization Course as her prize. Subscribe to the MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the web clinic replay and research brief are available so you can see the correct answer along with a full analysis of how this discovery can help you shape your email campaigns.

To enter the contest, leave your choice as a comment to this blog post along with your email address or Twitter handle (make sure you’re following @MktgExperiments so we can reach you). We will select a winner randomly from the correct responses (and yes there is a correct answer). The winner and results for this test will be announced live on Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m. EST during our free web clinic – Optimize your Email in Three Steps: How one marketer tripled revenue from their house list.

Why is the holiday shopping season so great? Your customer has an immutable purchasing deadline. Her fifth-grade, Wii-craving son won’t let her forget it, and neither should you. But as…tick, tick, tick…precious time passes in the make-or-break shopping season, are you flexible enough to take advantage of this natural urgency factor to get the greatest ROI out of your traffic?

In the September 22 Web clinic, our special guest Linda Bustos mentioned the idea of how online retailers may want to shift their focus from regular shipping of physical products to more holiday-conscious messaging, eventually moving toward downloadable products when the time runs short. I thought that this point deserved a deeper look.

Natural Urgency: An Opportunity for Increased Relevance
The holidays are a goldmine because you have extra insight into what your customers want, and when they want it. I will use the example of Christmas in the rest of this post (because it’s the single most commercially impactful holiday in the world), but the same principles apply to other holidays or even to specialty products and services that exist in relation to a specific “deadline” that the customer has to meet, like a wedding, a housewarming party, or one of your aunt’s cats’ birthday. When you know that urgency is a factor in your customer’s decision whether to buy from you, it is critical that you help this customer not only understand why your offer is the best choice, but also how you can deliver it on time. Providing this helpful information will help your customer buy from you.

The underlying principle here is that you must use everything you know about your customers (and every interaction they have with your site tells you something) to present your offer in the most meaningful, relevant way. For example, knowing what holidays are coming up within the next few weeks, you may want to test links to “Christmas gift shopping” on your site. While your catalog of products will not change, you know that anyone that clicked on that link is looking for a Christmas gift, and now you have a date to work with. You can test letting your visitor choose the target holiday, or if you have the data to assume that your customers are predominantly Christmas gift shoppers, your site by default can address that particular holiday.

December 1: Make your site holiday conscious
Just twenty-five shopping days until Christmas. If you’re in B2C ecommerce, you probably know this number by heart. Share this sense of urgency with your customers, remind them about the last time they had to do last-minute shopping, and communicate the sense of content that results from knowing that you don’t have to worry about making it to the store after work when the gifts are being safely shipped and delivered.

Of course, the critical number that matters online during holidays has to do not with shopping… but with shipping. Make sure your shipping cutoffs are crystal clear on your site. “For guaranteed delivery by Christmas, you must purchase by…” If you fail to communicate this information, your customer will look for someone that does. Don’t expect your customers to dig through your “Terms” pages to figure this out. “Unsupervised thinking” on your pages is especially lethal and especially inexcusable when you know that there is specific information that your customer needs to make a purchasing decision.

December 15: Reflect urgency using clear delivery options
As you get closer to shipping deadlines, you may want to amplify the message that shipping costs will soon increase, and that the customer will save money by purchasing today. Not only does this help create a reasonable sense of urgency for your customers, perhaps it will also remind you to figure out what a Bakugan is before you end up arm wrestling another guy wearing a “World’s Greatest Uncle” t-shirt for one at the toy store on Christmas Eve.

December 19: Increase emphasis on alternative shopping options
You will reach a point where guaranteed delivery by Christmas is still possible, yet increasingly or even prohibitively expensive. If you have a brick-and-mortar companion store, now is the time to use that to your advantage. You can emphasize how customers can save money on shipping by ordering online and simply picking up at the store. Make sure you communicate how easy the pickup process is and the advantage of not having to fight through the maddening crowd of shoppers. You may consider an express pick-up line at the store, and if you have one, emphasize its additional convenience on your site. You can also offer a better price or holiday-specific bonus item for buying online (which would allow you to collect payment immediately) instead of at the store.

If you don’t have physical locations, proceed directly to the next recommendation…

December 24: Prominently feature electronic-delivery items
By now, the children are all nestled snug in their beds, and all the gifts are tucked under the tree… Or are they? Your target customer just might be pulling his hair out, trying to figure out a last-minute gift. Here is where an ecommerce site can be a huge advantage by creating a digital offering that last-minute customers can buy… even as the clock approaches midnight.

These could be either all-digital products, like streaming or downloadable audio, an online brokerage account, or a gift card, or you may have to get creative and craft an offer that combines digital and physical components, such as an instantly downloadable cookbook that goes with cookware that will be delivered after the holidays.

An important aspect of digital products is presentation. Especially in the case of gift cards (even the physical version isn’t much to look at), you need to help your customer create a sense of giving a “real” gift. That is, help your customer out and don’t make it look like he has forgotten to buy a gift for his mother-in-law for the third year in a row.

Perhaps you can make an attractive, customizable PDF that the customer can print out to give the digital gift a physical nature. Communicating the benefit of giving (remember, your value proposition here is in part what the giver will feel) such a digital gift may take some education as well. Again, do not rely on unsupervised thinking. Don’t expect that it’s obvious to your customer that printing out a gift card document (really, its only function is to have a record of a coupon code) and putting it into an envelope will put them right back on the “favorite nephew” list. You could test communicating this by showing an image of someone giving this virtual gift to a delighted recipient.

The bottom-line is – it must seem substantial enough that the customer doesn’t feel self-conscious about giving it in person. If the gift is for a long-distance recipient, perhaps you could use video or Flash to make a customizable, attractive gift.

This is a great opportunity for nonprofits and charities as well. Consider buying paid search ads with keywords such as “last-minute gifts” on the 24th and 25th. Create a virtual gift that embodies the power of your charitable mission – perhaps an ebook of stories from people that have been helped or a virtual gift card so the recipient can choose where the donation is spent.

Above all, make it seem like a real, worthwhile gift that anyone would be happy to receive. Even with all-digital gifts, you can give your customer the option (perhaps for a small additional fee) to have a physical document mailed to them later, so that the digital gift will feel a little less digital (and, again, clearly state that “you will be receiving an official copy of your donation certificate…”).

Beyond December 25
Obviously, the above recommendations are ideas on how you can make best use of timing to play up a sense of urgency for a universal deadline. Except, it’s not universal. There are many other dates to keep track of this time of year. Hanukkah begins at sundown, Friday, December 11th. Military families often face much earlier shipping deadlines for guaranteed Christmas delivery to deployed family members. As do those shipping internationally in general.
Use the power of Internet marketing to serve these segments as well. Buy paid search ads with keywords relevant to these customers, and make sure you link those ads to relevant pages that focus on the dates important to them (don’t display your countdown to Christmas for customers that searched for “Hanukkah gift ideas”).

Sometime in January
Now that you’ve had time to recover and learned what a Bakugan is, take a look at your metrics. How much did the metamorphosis of your offer from regular shipped products to driving customers to a physical location to selling an all-digital gift improve your ROI? Whether it was a banner season or a disappointing season, make sure you learn what works best for your site and use that information next year.

As always, the ideas above are meant to be tested, and we hope that you will share some of your interesting test results with us.

Daniel Burstein contributed to this blog post…and hopes Boris goes wassailing around the office with his guitar for the holidays.

To listen to Boris Grinkot’s last-minute holiday tactics to increase revenue from your house email list, join us this Wednesday for our next free web clinic – Optimize your Email in Three Steps: How one marketer tripled revenue from their house list.

At our web clinics and optimization training workshops, two of the most frequent questions are: “What else can I test?” and “Do you have a good example?” MarketingExperiments research analysts provide practical test ideas and examples in the “What else can I test?” column.

According to the “2010 Media Planning Intelligence Study” from the Center for Media Research, email marketing is still the most preferred and effective way channel marketers have to communicate directly with their customers. It is also the preferred method of communication by consumers as well. In its Email Benchmark Guide 2009, MarketingSherpa reported that consumers overwhelmingly identify email as the ‘best way for companies to communicate with me’ (see survey results).

In this post, we are going to review several tactics you can consider to improve the look and feel of your emails and, in so doing, increase clickthrough rate. However, please remember that improving email response starts even before designing the layout and content of your email. It’s very important you look at how to increase qualified opt-ins, rate of deliverability, quality of rented list, etc. These are topics we will review in future posts. Improving the content and layout of your emails can give you quick a win. Also, if you start testing now, you can be ready for great a performing email template for the holiday season.

Note: most of the email examples I’m using are from ecommerce retailers, but the same principles apply to services or B2B emails.

Here are eight tactics that you can use or re-visit to increase your email clickthrough rate:

1) Analyze and segment your list. No matter when or how frequently you send emails, if they are not relevant, you will never achieve the highest possible response. A customer segmentation analysis will help you increase relevance by identifying the number of unique customer segments and their main product/service interest. With this information, you can not only target the content of your emails better, but also reduce the number of calls to action per email; preferably to only one call to action (see NextStage Evolution study results of ‘Raising clicks: Reduce the Number of Actions‘).

As an example, I can cite a recent case study from MarketingSherpa that explains how The American Greetings team got a 70% lift in conversions from a simple email test that matched subscribers’ preferences to content in the offer. In short, they started from zero by analyzing the lifecycle of their subscribers, type of ecards they sent, and type of senders they were. For St. Patrick’s Day, American Greetings team designed two versions of the email – one promoting a traditional St. Patrick’s Day e-card, the other promoting a humorous St. Patrick’s Day e-card. Conversions, in this case, were people who went to the site after seeing the email and purchased the e-card or a $15.99 annual subscription. See email designs below:

Funny St.Patrick's Day Email

Traditional St. Patrick's Day Email

FYI – If you are interested in reading more about segmentation analysis, here is a great article from iMedia with application examples: Email Segmentation for Success

2) Maintain continuity from subject line to headline to call to action. The role of the subject line is to either match a specific motivation of your customers or spark it. In any case, once they are motivated by your subject line, the role of your email is to maintain and strengthen that motivation. Therefore it is important to re-state or support the offer in the body and call to action. However, don’t go overboard with long copy. Remember that the goal of the email is to get a click, not to do the sale. Short copy and bullet points are usually all you need to support the offer. See ‘not this, but this’ examples:

Not this

But this

Or this

3) Use simple and vertical layouts. As mentioned before, try as much as possible to design your email body for one specific call to action. Secondary calls to actions and support links can be present in the email but they need to be clearly de-emphasized. Consider always an email template that guides the eye path from top (headline) to bottom (copy and call to action). The same principles that we recommend to landing pages apply to emails (see Optimizing Offer Pages). In case you have seen that presenting multiple offers works better with your target customers, then I recommend using a vertical layout; list offers in order of profitability for your business. Usually the first offer on the email is the one that will receive the most clicks. See examples:

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

4) Make sure your CTA stands out. Although you can design emails to be clickable anywhere in the body, it helps if you drive customers’ attention to a specific call to action. The more you can guide your customers’ eye-path to certain action the better the chances they will perform that action. At the end it is all about reducing unsupervised thinking! See ‘not this, but this’ examples:

Not this	Not this
But this	Or this

5) Offer alternative-view options. In cases when images are blocked or customers are checking the email from their cell phones, it helps to present the offer with simple text links at the top of the email. Just adding clear, easy-to-follow text links can increase the opportunities for your customers to read and act on your emails. See ‘not this, but this’ examples:

Not this

But this

6) Try a PS note. A PS note is a great resource to complement the offer or add an additional incentive for customers to click. In terms of usability, PS notes are not only effective with those customers who were not sold initially and needed an additional push, but it is also effective with those customers who open the email and scan it from top to bottom to get a sense of what the whole email is about. When they scan from bottom up there is a chance they will act on the PS note of the email. See example:

Example

7) Leverage the footer for social media. We all want our customers to follow us in any way and everywhere. However, most of the time calls to action to become fan or followers are secondary goals on most email campaigns. The footer is a great place for secondary objectives like this one. The calls to action are not in the way of the main offer and do not compete with the primary call to action. See example:

Example

8 ) Advertise other products or present up/cross sells subtly. The same way visitors are used to identifying the left column of a web page as an advertising area, they identify the left column of an email or newsletter as another advertising area. As a result, the effectiveness of the advertising in your emails is minimal. Customers learn to automatically avoid this area. The most effective way to fight banner blindness is to place advertising in unusual places or use uncommon formats (atypical banner sizes and contextual text links instead of banners). See examples: (Amazon.com, 1-800-Flowers).

Example

Example 2

Let us know if you test any of these variations with your email campaigns and how they do. Also, feel free to share with us any other ideas that you have seen working really well.

Not sure what you should test next? Want to share your testing ideas, questions or feedback on this topic? Use the comments section below or tweet me at: @anagabydiaz

Editor’s note: Anyone involved in eretailing should know ecommerce analyst Linda Bustos. The driving force behind the award-winning GetElastic blog, Linda is also a MarketingExperiments certified optimization professional and knows our methodology inside-out. So we were delighted to have Linda as a featured guest on our ecommerce clinic and now on our blog, with her wrap-up and takeaway tactics from the session.

Just as shoppers often wait until the last minute to finish their holiday shopping, often online retailers find themselves behind on their holiday optimization.

Procrastinators need to implement ideas that don’t involve long lead times for design, development or approvals. In the Ecommerce Holiday Playbook for Procrastinators web clinic, we shared tips and tactics that online retailers can implement in as little as five minutes to make the most out of the “most wonderful (selling) time of the year.”

The 5 areas covered were:

• SEM (Search engine optimization and paid search)
• Shopping engines
• Email
• Landing pages
• Post-holiday (ring in the New Year!)

1. Search Engine Marketing

• SEO: Add value propositions in meta descriptions and page title tags to increase clickthroughs

If you’re familiar with the MarketingExperiments Conversion Sequence, you’re well versed in the importance of value propositions. They are the key to success in any optimization effort. Are you leveraging your value propositions at every marketing touch point?

If it’s true that 80% of web sales begin with a search engine query, it’s important that you sell yourself in your search listings, whether they be organic results or pay per click. Are you communicating why someone should click on your link, instead of anyone else’s? What is it about your store that is unique?

Make sure searchers can see in your title tags and your meta descriptions what it is that makes shopping with you the best choice.

• PPC: Bid on relevant holiday keywords, such as …

People are not just searching for products, they are searching for ideas. It’s quick and easy to set up a holiday Ad Group or groups targeted to gifts and gift ideas for different holidays and recipients. Then flip the switch December 26th for after-Christmas sales. Last year Google Trends, which tracks the most popular searches of the day, exploded with searches for after Christmas sales.

2. Shopping Engines

• Add free shipping, value proposition
• Plan for increased bids during holiday period
• Know when to turn down your bids (after shipping cutoff)
• Sanity check data-feed accuracy
• Pull non-holiday categories if budget is a concern

We know that shoppers use search engines to hunt for gifts, and often their searches direct them to a comparison shopping engine like Google Products, Shop.com, BizRate, PriceGrabber etc. Shopping Engine Optimization is the “other other” SEO, and is also called Data Feed Optimization.

Data feeds are the way merchants provide their catalog information to these sites, and the information you include in your data feeds may vary from engine to engine. Some engines allow you to add shipping offers or other value propositions in extra fields. So it’s important that your feeds are tailored to each engine and really take advantage of your options.

On the strategic side, you should also be planning for increased bids to remain competitive. Holiday click prices are often higher than the rest of the year. While you don’t have to increase bids, depending on what other retailers are doing you may have to to keep appearing high enough in results, and it also provides you with a slight advantage if your competitors don’t turn up their bids.

Don’t forget to turn down your bids after your shipping cutoff date. This is different for every retailer, so make sure you have a process to do this.

And make sure your data feeds are accurate – that you’re not listing out of stock product, pre-orders, backorders and non-holiday items, especially when you’re working with a set budget and you’re spending more per click. It may make sense to remove categories that are typically not gifted to others (like computer cables if you’re an electronics store) temporarily for the holiday season.

3. Email

Stress the benefits of online shopping in your subject lines, including:

• Save time
• Save gas
• Avoid lines
• More selection
• Hard to find items
• Gift finder tools

Some of my favorite examples from last year are (emphasis mine):

Easy-to-Make Holiday Cards. We’ll Mail Them.
Avoid the Rush! Get Your Gifts Now, Save $15 & Pay NO Shipping!
Avoid the crowds – Shop from Home and get Free Shipping
The Gift Guide Is Here: The Best Gifts at Even Better Prices
Email Exclusive Free Shipping, No Threshold. Today Only!

Holiday time is both great and gruesome for sending retail email. On one hand, when you deploy retail email you hope that the recipient is interested in shopping that week. During the holidays, you’re nearly guaranteed that he or she is. However, you are also competing for attention against any other retailer that the subscriber has opted in to.

Like Dr. Flint McGlaughlin says, the goal of the email is not to sell but to generate interest in visiting your site. The offer and the creative is important here, but before one sees your email message, they must be persuaded to open your message. Subject lines matter!

Remember that we as ecommerce marketers want customers to use the online channel to shop. It’s great if you have local stores that may still benefit from your demand generation, and converting online can be attributed back to which campaign and email version referred the visit. This gives you better insight into what is and isn’t working. So may I suggest that you really communicate the benefits of shopping online, as well as shopping from you. The above examples do that.

4. Landing Pages

Address the FUDs (Fears, Uncertainties and Doubts, or, Anxiety)

• Clear link to gift guide (create new category if needed)
• Clear link to store locator
• Clear shipping cutoff link
• Shipping policies, return policies, countries ship to
• Customer service number (every page is a landing page)
• Promote e-gift cards (never too late!)

Just as important as driving traffic is having an optimized website prepared to convert it.

If you already have a gift guide feature, make sure you’re flaunting it — not just in navigation as a text link that blends in with the rest of the links, but clearly on your homepage and on product/landing pages.

Have a clear link to your store locator if you have offline stores. It’s fine to have it subtle the rest of the year in the header or footer menu, but around the holidays – especially after your shipping cutoff date — this deserves more prominence.

Customers want to know what your hours of operation are and even telephone numbers, so make sure that info is on your store locator page.

Shipping cutoff information is also very important. Many retailers do put this information front and center on the homepage. I recommend you show it on every page, because every page is a potential landing page. Don’t assume everyone starts at the homepage and absorbs your messaging and remembers all your details (research shows that’s often not the case).

Ditto for links to return policies and shipping policies, including countries you ship to. Even if your shopper is in the US, they may be shipping overseas.

Don’t forget customer service numbers on every page of your site and every step of the checkout process.

And if you do offer electronic gift cards which can be sent instantly, this is important to showcase – especially after your shipping cutoff.

5. Post-holiday

Post shipping cutoff strategies include promoting gift cards, any in-store pick up options and even gift notifications sent immediately to gift recipients, letting them know they weren’t forgotten but that their gift may arrive a bit after the holiday.

For example, Upresent.com is a service for merchants to offer such messages.

Last holiday, Musician’s Friend offered a $20 comeback coupon for the gift buyer, which is a great incentive to come back and purchase again during the typically slow month of January.

Finally, though we are really close to the holiday, it’s not too late to think about your merchandising for post-holiday. Popular approaches include showcasing items for New Year parties…

…and New Year resolutions – like Drugstore.com’s emphasis on products to help you lose weight, stop smoking, get fit, look your best, go green or be healthy.

For more ecommerce tips, tactics, ideas and research, be sure to visit (and bookmark) the excellent GetElastic blog.

At our web clinics and optimization training workshops, two of the most frequent questions  are: “What else can I test?” and “Do you have a good example?” To answer these queries with practical test ideas and examples, we’re pleased to present our new “What else can I test?” column.

More than 60% of US online retailers are seeing shopping cart abandonment rates of over 20% this year, according to a recent eMarketer article. Among the most cited and common reasons for that abandonment: just doing comparison shopping, lack of money, looking for a coupon, and no alternative payment methods available.

In a recent survey with one of our research partners, we found that the number one reason for abandonment was shipping prices, followed by “I did not intend to purchase at this moment.”

Here are a handful of ideas, drawn from our research, that can help combat those issues and decrease your cart abandonment rates:

1) Offer alternative payment methods. Credit cards are still the most popular method of payment with about 55% of online retail purchase volume in 2008 (eMarketer), followed by debit cards with 27%. The forecast for next five years shows credit cards as the #1 payment type. However, alternative payment types like debit cards, Bill Me Later, PayPal, and Google Checkout are growing fast in popularity.

Test offering any of these alternative methods and don’t forget to promote them in your shopping cart as well as on your homepage and product pages. It’s important to let visitors know all the payment options available as soon as they land on your website. See examples:

Alternative method of payments - example 1

Alternative method of payments - example 2

Note: Some online retailers are seeing a significant improvement in average order value by providing a Bill Me Later option.

2) State your shipping prices or rules upfront. Simply state your shipping prices or rules in a visible area in your website and cart page. The best locations are next to the shopping cart, page header or footer or within content in the product pages. See examples:

Shipping prices upfront - example 1

Shipping prices upfront - example 2

3) Offer exclusive products online. These can help with shoppers who are just browsing and researching. You may need to do some research to find attractive products that you won’t lose money on if you only offered them online. See example:

Online exclusive offer example

4) Put your nav bar to work for your cart. It’s a common mistake to think that the navigation bar needs to stay the same in your cart page. I understand usability might be the reason, but you don’t want to offer more links to your visitors to abandon the cart. Instead your nav bar can become your center of “anxiety relief.” Use it to state your shipping prices, customer support options (phone number, email, chat), method of payments available, and security seals. The nav bar can help reduce your visitors’ anxiety by making them feel more secure and comfortable with your checkout process. (If you don’t have a navigation bar use the bottom section of your cart page). See example:

Anxiety relief nav bar example

5) Promote your promo codes. The feeling of missing a promotion because you don’t have a promo code can be frustrating. It actually can lead to abandoning the cart to go and search for promo codes online. Instead of wasting your visitors’ time, offer them a way to get promo codes directly from you. GetElastic provides a great example of how to do this. Another option, if visitors come from a channel that you can control (email, PPC, banner, affiliate), is to have the promo code prefilled for them. You can use the visitors’ session or URL to carry over the promo code value and use it right in the shopping cart page.

6) Plug in a progress bar. This is a very simple and easy update to your cart and checkout pages. Especially for those online retailers that have a short (two to four steps) checkout process, having a progress bar can help reduce visitors’ anxiety and encourage them to continue. For longer checkouts (more than four steps), I’d recommend testing first reducing the number of steps and then testing a progress bar. See example:

Progress bar example

7) Brand your checkout process. Along with the progress bar, naming your checkout process can reduce visitors’ anxiety. By naming I refer to using adjectives to describe the nature of your checkout process. For example, “easy checkout”, “1-2-3 checkout”, “express checkout”, etc. Test different names powerful enough that can create a sense of relief in your visitors’ mind. See example:

Branded checkout example

For more tactics and suggestions on how to optimize an eretail website, join us for our Sept. 30 web clinic: Ecommerce Optimization: A holiday playbook for procrastinators.