Monetate - Test, Target, Personalize

You don’t need to be a pirate to double the revenue from key segments of your online traffic, you just need a treasure map; and unlike treasure maps in the movies, this one requires no sword fights or bloody sacrifices. In fact, it’s free.

These are trying times for online retailers, but if the year-end press releases are true, the brightest and best were still able to capture double digit gains during an otherwise dismal holiday season. How do they do it?

One trick to beating the odds and coming up trumps in a down economy is to find the hidden value in the traffic you already have. And one way to do that is to picture your site activity as something other than a series of graphs. Try thinking of it as a landscape, a topographical map if you will. Then ask yourself, where are the low points? Where do you see traffic coming and going without conversion?

Here’s what we found at one US-based retailer. Despite the fact that the company was not actively pursuing international sales we saw that its site was attracting a considerable number of visitors from outside North America. With a simple messaging campaign that required no discounting, the retailer was able to double the revenue from that segment.

Here’s what we observed after our initial survey of the sales landscape:

• 20 percent of the visitors were from outside the U.S. (even though the company has never targeted international markets).
• Very few of these “foreign” visitors were converting.

So why were these foreign visitors spending time on the site without buying? After studying the site from sea level, so to speak, we realized overseas visitors could easily miss the fact that the company does ship internationally. This was understandable. Because the retailer was not focused on foreign sales there was little apparent incentive to devote precious web site real estate to advertising the international shipping option.

We decided to find out what would happen if the availability of international shipping was made more apparent to foreign visitors. We created a set of campaigns that displays messaging about international shipping in the form of banners and overlays, but only to people who are visiting the site from locations outside North America (thus getting the point across without requiring dedicated web site real estate). For added effect, the campaigns target visitors by country and inform them that the retailer is more than happy to ship to their specific country.

The results? Measured against a control group, this campaign produced a 100% lift in conversion rate and 100% lift in revenue from this segment, a segment that was one fifth of the entire site traffic.

Bear in mind that these campaigns are not “offers” of free or reduced shipping. The customer still pays the shipping. The campaign simply serves a relevant message to the appropriate traffic segment. In other words, that segment’s revenue doubled without the retailer having to cut prices or give anything away.

In addition, the site saw a 167% lift in new customer acquisition from this segment. That means more than two and a half times as many visitors were converted into new customers, with no need to discount prices.

We think this example demonstrates how small changes in your website marketing and merchandising can have dramatic effects. By looking at the sales map, a low-lying area of under-performing web traffic was identified. A campaign of welcoming and reassuring messages changed that, and the buried treasure–the segment’s true potential–was uncovered, resulting in a very significant boost to this retailer’s bottom line.