Originally published in Romanian in 2014.
As you’ve probably found out from today’s press, here is the answer to the “teaser” from a month ago: together with Rares Banescu, I’ll be developing the Retargeting.biz project (aimed at the international market, and especially at the 4 big English-speaking online markets: the US, the UK, Canada and Australia). It’s an extremely interesting project, and just as difficult, since it’s a service built for online stores that are small, medium, large or very large – it adds value at any volume and in any niche, marketplace-type stores included.
Where did this come from, and why? The Romanian e-commerce market undoubtedly has serious profitability problems, and the share of online stores with a satisfactory profit margin ranges from small to minuscule. One of the main reasons for this lack of profitability is, without a doubt, a conversion rate that is far too low, with the average estimated at 1% (personally, I think it’s even below 1% in some niches). In other words, we invest money in the store software, in loading it with products (sometimes thousands or tens of thousands), in SEO, AdWords, Facebook and social media in general, affiliate marketing, special campaigns, PR and whatever else comes to mind, we bring visitors to the site and we stoically accept that 1 in 100 will buy and 99 will move on. Well, if they made it to our site, it’s very likely that a large share of those 99 would like to buy something we’re selling, right? Somewhere along the road between the landing page and the exit, we don’t respond the way visitors expect, and so we don’t win a new sale, just traffic on the site.
If we had a brick-and-mortar store and saw that 99% of the customers walked in and out without buying anything, what would we do? The 3 who look at the prices of 10 pairs of shoes and put them back, lost in thought: wouldn’t we approach them with a special offer? The 4 who keep coming back to one particular blouse: wouldn’t we encourage them to try it on? The 5 who try on the same pair of boots 3 times and keep looking in the mirror: wouldn’t we let them know they can return them within 10 days if they don’t feel comfortable in them? In the nearly 10 years of e-commerce that I’m celebrating next month, I’ve learned a lot, but one thing in particular: to understand the motivations of an online store’s customers and to anticipate the behavior they’ll have based on those motivations. That way we can raise the conversion rate spectacularly by offering every potential customer exactly the reason they’re waiting for in order to buy.
That’s what retargeting means: personalized communication and maximum adaptation, down to the level of each potential customer, to convince them to become our customer and not the competition’s. It’s a difficult project because it relies on technology, but above all on the marketing algorithms that get the maximum effect out of every interaction. It’s a service that every online store needs, without exception.
Do you have an online store? Want to test Retargeting? Send me an email ([email protected]) and tell me the store, your average monthly visits and the approximate number of newsletter subscribers. For the first 3 of you who write to me and whom we decide to accept, we have a unique offer: you only pay the subscription after the first month, and only if the results live up to your expectations. If you don’t make at least 2 times more money using Retargeting than the service costs you, you drop it and you don’t pay anything. Guaranteed ROI, deal? 🙂
P.S.: I forgot to tell you what the picture at the top of the article is… It’s a screenshot of the current Retargeting admin interface (the new interface, modeled on Analytics, with less text and more charts, will be ready very soon), for one of the 10 clients we worked with during the BETA period. What does this screenshot tell us? That a store for which we manage 7,027 subscribers recorded additional sales of 23,156 lei (Romanian lei, RON) over the last 30 days using Retargeting.ro. The subscription for these services is somewhere under 1,000 lei, so I’ll let you do the math …