Day 1-30 Understand Existing Gaps
Day 31-60 Optimize for Onsite Conversion
Day 61-90 Data Collection to Improve Business
BASELINE ECOMMERCE AVERAGE STATISTICS
80% of customers will only buy once
Repeat purchases are based on perceived value, timing, use of the product, and need.
You don’t get a second purchase without a first.
The goal is getting that first product in hand.
50% of 1st time customers will buy without subscribing via a popup
Popups aren’t for everyone, some people don’t need them to convert.
But those people that do subscribe convert at a higher rate with an incentive.
50% of subscribers will not provide SMS via a popup
Phone numbers are more personal than emails, people are more hesitant to provide them.
It’s hard to improve this number even with incentives.
50% of subscribers will never open an email
Sad but true, most people just don’t open emails these days, so it’s important to leverage their attention during signup to benefit the customer journey for everyone.
Not collecting something of value to determine why they are there becomes a sunk cost.
70% of popup subscribers will never purchase
Just because someone subscribes doesn’t mean they will purchase.
The goal is to reduce the amount of friction to increase the amount of conversions for those popup subscribers.
40-60% of first time purchasers come from popup subscribers
People love an offer when trying out a new brand for the first time.
80% of email campaign revenue will come from people that have purchased
This is a stat most people aren’t aware of but puts a premium on focusing on getting product in hands as quickly as possible by removing friction for an already high intent audience.
CURRENT POPUP STRUCTURES
All businesses fall into one of these categories with their existing popups:
The vast majority of businesses fall into 1 and 2.
Understanding Existing Gaps
Goals in the first 30 days:
Our first job is to figure out how we can increase the number of conversions from people that are high intent and provide us contact information for a discount.
70% of popup subscribers will never purchase
These are people that are being offered a deal, exchanging information, but not converting, even with an offer better than what’s listed on the website.
These are our highest intent customers, if we cannot convert more of them, then we don’t stand a chance at converting everyone else.
So next we have to ask ourselves, “What friction can we remove to increase the percentage of people that subscribe in exchange for our offer to actually convert?”
Here are the top friction points:
Requiring an SMS
SMS is a valid marketing channel, but it’s not one that is as heavily subscribed to as email, consequently across most accounts we see around 50% of people that provide an email choose not to provide a phone number.
Not showing a coupon code when someone drops off on SMS step
The current behavior of popups is to just exit without showing a coupon code for the person if they drop off on the SMS step. This breaks the customer journey and provides zero feedback as to whether or not someone was subscribed to the email list.
Requiring someone to go to email to find a coupon code
Best practice has always been to put the coupon code in the popup, the goal is to keep the customer that came to your website to stay on your website and make a purchase.
Requiring someone to cut and paste a coupon code
With more and more brands using unique coupon codes, they continue to get more complicated and harder to remember. It forces people to have to leave your website to find a coupon code to cut and paste.
Not showing coupon code until checkout on cart
If you’re going to provide a coupon code, the earlier people can see the impact of the discount the better off you are, it’s a motivating factor in adding things to your cart.
Not including coupon code from signup in abandon cart, abandon browse, or welcome series emails
A lot of abandoned cart emails don’t include a coupon code from the welcome popup, which forces subscribers to go to another email to find it. This creates unnecessary friction.
Video Explaining the problem:
ACTION ITEM:
Replace your existing forms like for like with advanced features like auto-add coupon codes and SMS rerouting to success page.
The above will solve for all of the gaps above.
TIME TO IMPLEMENT:
Under an hour
KEY KPI TO MEASURE:
Subscription to conversion rate (how many people that complete a popup go on to purchase)
Below is a comparison of forms with Naturalized Numbers to illustrate the increases by implementing auto-add coupon codes and close icon rerouting.
From the above you can see 18.62% increases in revenue using auto-apply on mobile and 11.50% increases in revenue using auto-apply.
You'll also see an increase in AOV as a result of seeing savings in the cart as people shop and a 13.53% increase in orders on mobile and a 8.77% increase in orders on desktop.
Additionally, you can see a 13.04% increase in subscription to conversion rate on mobile and 7.71% increase in subscription to conversion rate on desktop.
Below is expected impact on the low end. As you can see from above not all devices are created equal or audiences but on average we're seeing in excess of the estimated impacts.
EXPECTED IMPACT:
5-10% INCREASE IN FIRST TIME SHOPPER REVENUE FROM POPUP SIGNUPS
Optimization of Form Triggers to Improve Business
Once we optimize the forms by removing friction by auto-adding coupon codes and altering the SMS step dismiss behavior rerouting to surprise and delight our subscribers, we can move to more advanced tactics to drive increased conversion.
If you show a popup too early in the journey, people will dismiss it, but if they get deeper into the customer journey and you don’t show that offer again, then they will get to checkout and leave and go to google to search for a discount code.
The trick is to balance the scarcity of the offer (no stickies here) with the timing of the offer.
Multiple opt-in points across the customer journey:
Once the behavior of the forms has been changed and the customer journey touchpoints have been layered in a solid baseline of performance can be understood.
ACTION ITEM:
Duplicate forms across website at strategic places to gather more opt-ins
TIME TO IMPLEMENT:
Under an hour
KEY KPI TO MEASURE:
Subscription to conversion rate (how many people that complete a popup go on to purchase)
The above numbers are a secondary form shown on product pages after a 45 second delay, they serve to double tap the visitor while they are deeper into the journey. The longer delay ensures a balance of not providing a discount to people that know what they want and are fine with purchasing without a discount.
This results in lower total revenue numbers, but equally impressive gains across Revenue, AOV, and order counts.
We do see a slight dip in subscription to conversion ratios as these customers are higher intent than our past Home Page sign ups and deeper in the funnel.
EXPECTED IMPACT:
5-10% INCREASE IN FIRST TIME SHOPPER REVENUE FROM POPUP SIGNUPS
These first two stages should increase your revenue from first time visitors by between 10-20% with minimal changes to any marketing strategy.
Combination of Auto-Apply and Secondary forms:
The above happens with no data collection required.
Also, keep in mind that this is adding more purchasers to your email list, which will increase the amount of revenue you make from email campaigns as 80%+ revenue from email campaigns come from people that have already purchased.
More purchasers = more potential repeat purchasers.
Data Collection to Improve Business
We focus on Subscription to Conversion from people that sign up via our popup forms because these people are signing up willingly to unlock an incentive in consideration of making a purchase.
This group typically converts at a rate that is much higher than those that don’t subscribe for an offer.
If we can’t convince this group of people to convert, we’re going to have a hard time getting normal traffic to convert.
The goal of data collection is to understand the difference between what makes someone more likely than another to purchase from you.
Collect Zero Party Data across different parts of the journey to improve different parts of your customer journey.
Improving your Ads
The main expense for most ecommerce brands is their ad spend and their Cost to Acquire a Customer.
So we need to look at what makes a subscriber more likely than another subscriber to purchase.
On your landing pages, create a popup.
On your landing pages, create a popup form with an offer that's really good.
Use a Formtoro form so that you can ask a few questions and include a coupon code that's auto-applied to the cart.
Then ask a few questions with our live data collection.
"What about our ads made you visit today?"
and we ask
"Why are you in the market for our product category?"
Then we take those data points and look at what answers are driving the most revenue and conversion rates along with...this is important, this is the contextual information you need to make these decisions, this is the gap of most every software out there. (I'll keep screaming about this!)
"What matters most to you in our product category?"
Guess what ads we create more of?
People make marketing way harder than it needs to be, like miles harder than it needs to be. If you have this information, create these ads, have a good offer, and you're still not getting sales, you don't have a feasible business.
This is a closed feedback loop that hedges against most risk of testing and worthless spend.
It's not an attribution thing either, on the vast majority of paid networks you can't actually control who sees your ads, that's up to the platform.
Your goal is just to speak to the highest quality audience, with the proper messaging.
That's it.
If the messaging is good, it should work, if it aligns with what drives revenue and conversion but still isn't showing results, tweak the messaging within the parameters to unlock something better for the audience.
Improving your emails
The average subscriber that converts does so within a few hours of signing up.
Within the first 72 hours 75% of all people that are going to convert have.
You have at most 3 emails to better sell to people based on the data they provided, that means picking reviews that talk to their goals, hyping up key features and benefits, and closing with an irresistible offer for them.
But there are multiple touchpoints across the customer journey that you should impact, here’s a full checklist: https://jonivanco.com/customer-journey-digital-touchpoint-checklists-with-questions/
With advanced targeting options, logic mapping between questions, and frictionless auto-add coupon codes with redirects on close, there’s no downside to collecting more data from your subscribers to better understand how to improve your marketing.
For a full breakdown of how you can leverage data, check out:
Marketing today starts by reverse engineering friction points, eliminating them to improve baselines, then pushing further to build strategies to improve the overall performance of processes.
ACTION ITEM:
Add data collection to your forms around key insights into the customer journey
TIME TO IMPLEMENT:
One week
KEY KPI TO MEASURE:
Quality of audience, overall business performance
EXPECTED IMPACT:
UNCAPPED
This is the exact formula we use internally with clients to drive outsized results.
