So, you’ve figured out how to get folks to click through to your online store, but now you’re finding that the rate at which that traffic converts into sales is too low. I’d like to share one example of how to change that, a strategy that lifted the conversion rate for a targeted segment by 470 percent.

Heading into the recent holiday season one retailer discovered that 4 percent of visitors to the online store were landing on out-of-stock products. Obviously this was not good– the conversion rate for these visitors was disappointing –but it’s nigh on impossible to keep every product in stock, particularly during heavy shopping days.

The solution? Display a special message to those visitors who land on an out-of-stock product. Acknowledge that the popularity of the product means it is sold out and, because it’s not available, offer them a discount on other products, limited to the current visit.

The result? The conversion rate for these “out-of-stock” visitors jumped 470 percent (as measured against a control group within the same segment). That’s nearly six times as many conversions from this segment of site traffic. And the numbers were even better for new customer acquisition: a lift of 700 percent. In other words, the campaign pages generated eight times as many new customers as the control group.

Delivering a targeted message to a carefully defined traffic segment clearly pays big dividends. In this case, a potentially poor customer experience was transformed and the retailer increased revenue without any additional spending on acquiring new traffic.

Indeed, this retailer has experienced a 3.8X increase in revenue from the “out-of-stock” segment, a lift of 256 percent and a fine example of how mining your site statistics and addressing under-performing segments of your customer traffic with tightly targeted campaigns can pay off.

Bookmark and Share