How many times have you walked into a store just to find the right shirt in the size you were looking for isn’t there anymore? You have probably asked an associate if they would have it in stock a few days from now. Now imagine the same scenario happening at your store online. The focus of most online store fronts is to increase conversion which is the most important goal of all online stores. But addressing inventory shortfalls and having a way to follow up with the customer are fundamentals of any successful retail business.
Of all the visitors coming to your site some might immediately drop off (otherwise known as “bouncing”), some might take a short journey through your online store and a very small fraction will actually make a purchase. In the midst of all this, there will be visitors who would want to know more information about a product or would like to buy something from your site but couldn’t find anything they like from their visit. A shrewd online store will extract the most from customer visits in multiple ways such as collecting visitor email addresses for reaching back to them on products and helping viewers during their journey on the site by having options for live chat or phone call.
Email Address Collection For Your eCommerce Site
A lot of sites require visitors to log in prior to accessing their full contents. This gives the store owners the advantage of easily gathering contact information from shoppers. The risk of this practice, if it is not implemented in the right way, is that it could turn potential customers off and lead to an increase in bounce rate. This is where Bay Leaf Digital can help. How many times have you visited an online shop for the first time only to be greeted by a pop-up requesting your email address right when you enter the store? Compare this to asking for your contact details the moment you walked into a brick and mortar business…. Not good, right?
Based on a lot of A/B testing experience we have concluded that the timing and method of collecting contact information heavily influences the store’s ability to let the visitor move around and find details on the site as well as to help them when they are searching for information. Some pivotal criteria that can be used for collecting email addresses are:
1. Based on the depth of the funnel:
Depending upon the funnel (layers and structure) for your site, you could tap into exit numbers of various pages. Bay Leaf Digital can help you identify the best points within your site for collecting data. This could be in the form of when the visitor exits from the site from one of the funnel pages on your site. This practice is used by a lot of travel websites to send the visitor the travel itinerary. This is also a part of remarketing strategy, about which we will soon be sharing a series of posts.
2. Based on the number of visits:
If a visitor keeps returning to your site, this is a great time to reach out. When a visitor returns to your site, he is already an engaged visitor and wants something you want to offer—so you need to be able to identify return visitors and have an eye catching popup to reach out and gather their email addresses.
3. Second page email collection:
This is a bit of a desperate measure and should be used sparingly. In this scenario, if the visitor is perusing a lot of pages but hasn’t entered a funnel you might want to try to snag contact information. Bay Leaf Digital can help you identify the points where your visitors are not entering the funnel so that you can collect information to increase your email base.
Increasing the email base is one of the important tasks an online store needs to do, but any effort related to collecting the email address needs to be carefully evaluated so that it doesn’t impact site conversion which is the ultimate goal. An increased email base is your way to showcase new products to the visitor, promote recognition of your brand, reach out to your customers if they have any queries and implement remarketing (more on this one in future blogs).
Bay Leaf Digital can help you pinpoint and maximize your efforts to increase the number of email addresses in your email base by selecting target pages, identifying visitor types and designing the right kind of pop-up (one of the most significant influencing factors).
