Posts by: Hannah Stewart

How To Increase Ticket Sales for Events: 15 Fail-Proof Strategies

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Are you under pressure to increase event ticket sales? Are you struggling to spread the word about your event? Are you looking for better technology to convert website visitors into customers? Whatever your reason for landing here, I’m here to guide you through 15 strategies that’ll boost ticket sales for your events. 

There are 4 industry-standard tactics almost every company uses to sell tickets online. But if you want to truly enhance your online sales funnel and stand out from your competitors, you need to go beyond those tactics by optimizing your website too. 

With Yieldify’s personalization platform and services, you can deploy 11 powerful tactics to increase online ticket sales.

Our 15 recommendations fall into four categories: 

  • Collect more email and SMS subscribers
  • Increase conversion rates
  • Build a winning brand
  • Apply industry-standard tactics 

Together they offer a holistic, multichannel approach to increasing ticket sales for events. 

If you’re looking for a tool focused specifically on increasing website conversion rates, then check out our post covering 12 of the best CRO Tools on the market. 

15 surefire tactics to increase ticket sales online

  • Collect more email & SMS subscribers (1-3): A strong email & SMS remarketing database will help you spread the word about upcoming events, build hype and boost ticket sales. Drive more subscribers into your database with these three tried-and-tested lead generation tactics. 
  • Build a winning brand (9-11): In the face of increasing competition and PPC ad costs, it’s vital to strengthen your brand. Prove you’re a trusted ticket-selling platform with these three tactics.
  • Apply industry-standard tactics (12-15): These four tactics form the foundation of any successful ticket-selling strategy. Follow the industry standard as a starting point to increase ticket sales. 
  1. Run on-entry and on-exit overlays
  2. Display opt-in forms throughout the journey
  3. Use basket abandonment technology
  4. Social proof messaging
  5. Urgency messaging
  6. Welcome back messaging
  7. Improve user navigation
  8. Exit intent technology
  9. Use customer testimonials
  10. Brand reassurance messaging
  11. Embed video content
  12. Nail your pricing
  13. Use email remarketing
  14. Promote on social media
  15. Start a referral program

Collect more email and SMS subscribers:

1. Run on-entry and on-exit overlays

Email remarketing is crucial for ticket sales – but a strong remarketing strategy is nothing without a substantial list of subscribers.

To drive more email and SMS sign ups, start by showing opt-in forms to your customers on website entry and exit. Your customers are unlikely to add to their already cluttered inboxes without good reason, so include one of these incentivizes in your signup forms:

  • Discount code – e.g. offer subscribers 10% off on their first ticket purchase
  • Referral code – e.g. offer subscribers a 25% off ticket code when they refer a friend
  • Downloadable content – e.g. send subscribers a guide covering the best events happening in 2023 
  • Competition entry – e.g. enter subscribers into a prize draw for free event tickets
  • Resale updates for sold out events – e.g. send subscribers updates on ticket availability

If you’re in the market for a list building tool to attract new subscribers, read our post covering Yieldify and 16 of the best email list building tools on the market. 

2. Display opt-in forms throughout the journey 

With Yieldify’s layered lead capture, you can target customers at every touchpoint from entry to purchase. Embed subtle CTAs and trigger overlays throughout the customer journey to keep your opt-in form top-of-mind. Yieldify clients use these core strategies to increase email and SMS sign-ups: 

  • Floating notifications 
  • Embed on product pages
  • Slide-out (toaster) 
  • Sticky bar
  • Embed at checkout

All five campaigns improve UX, give you more opportunities to collect email and SMS subscribers, and attract higher quality leads. The logic is simple: customers who subscribe deeper in the journey are more engaged with your event and therefore more likely to buy a ticket. 

3. Use basket abandonment technology

When your customer adds a ticket to their basket, you know they have genuine purchase intent. But with concerns over pricing, availability for the event and reliability of your site, many customers abandon their basket before checking out. 

To tackle this problem, many Yieldify clients ask customers to save their basket by submitting their email and SMS details when they display exit intent. This is a critical junction in your customer’s journey – they’re unlikely to return to your site if you don’t add them to your database now.

Once they’ve subscribed, add them to your remarketing flows about the event they’re interested in. Be strategic with your messaging, providing updates on ticket availability and offering discounts to convert their interest into a sale. 

Increase conversion rates

4. Social proof messaging

Social proof is a game changer for ticket sales. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that, when used well, will all but guarantee an increase in your website’s conversion rates: Yieldify clients have lifted conversions by up to 31% using social proof. 

When we see our friends and celebrity idols at iconic events like the Super Bowl, Burning Man or Oktoberfest, it makes us want to attend too. To sell more tickets, drive interest in your event by showing how popular it is. 

For example, with Yieldify you can spotlight how many tickets you’ve sold in the last 24 hours, show customers how many people are viewing tickets right now, and use other social proof tactics to validate your customer’s interest and increase sales.

5. Urgency messaging 

Some events are guaranteed to sell out in minutes, if not seconds. But for many events, tickets will be available right up until a few days before it starts – so how do you convince customers to purchase now, not later? 

  • Tell customers what % of tickets are left to purchase 
  • Tell customers how long they have left before prices increase

By highlighting stock scarcity, you’ll remind customers that they could miss out altogether if they don’t act quickly. 

6. Welcome back messaging 

When a customer returns to your site, it’s safe to assume they’re considering buying a ticket for an event. At this stage in the funnel, it’s important you give them a website experience that acknowledges what they were looking for before.

For example, if your customer viewed Dua Lipa concerts on their last visit, ask them to pick up where they left off by redirecting them to the relevant ticket sales page. To incorporate welcome back messaging into your ticket-selling strategy, consider using an ecommerce personalization tool like Yieldify.

7. Improve user navigation

Subtle yet effective tweaks to website navigation can significantly reduce bounce rates and increase conversions – which is why it’s a key part of many Yieldify clients’ CRO strategy. 

Seamlessly guide your customers through the purchase funnel by recommending pages for them to visit based on their browsing behavior. For example, if your customer views tickets to see The Sound of Music, help them take a logical next step in their journey by redirecting them to the Musicals category.

8. Exit intent technology 

Zenreach data shows that 70% of visitors never return once they leave your site. We’ve already touched on how to drive email and SMS sign-ups when customers show exit intent, but how about conversions? 

With Yieldify, you can re-engage customers with campaigns that trigger in response to exit intent behaviors. For example, when your customer moves their cursor above the navigation bar, you can surface overlays that encourage them to continue browsing, including: 

  • User navigation experiences
  • USP messaging 
  • Customer testimonials

Build a winning brand

9. Use customer testimonials 

There are few tools in a marketer’s armory as effective as customer testimonials. 

When it comes to brand building, testimonials are more impactful than your own marketing material – so embed them generously across your website. 

The glowing words of unbiased, real-life people will create hype and show potential customers why they’ll have a great time at your event.

10. Brand reassurance messaging 

Many of your customers will be afraid of getting scammed, so you need to highlight you’re a legitimate seller and your website is safe.

Put potential event-goers at ease with brand reassurance messaging, for example:

  • Review platform ratings – Trustpilot, Reevo etc
  • Accepted payment trust badges 
  • Money-back guarantees 
  • USP messaging 
  • Third-party endorsements

11. Embed video content

Video content is an event marketer’s dream. It’s an excellent way of showcasing your event and venue online, so give customers a taste of your event with embedded videos.  

With Yieldify, you can embed video snippets from YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and any other social media platform. 

Apply industry-standard tactics

12. Nail your pricing

Your ticket prices will determine if your event is a sellout or a washout, so it’s imperative you get it right.

Our recommended steps are as follows: 

  • Calculate the minimum ticket price to break even
  • Research how much your competitors’ tickets cost 
  • Make a sales forecast
  • Use tiered pricing 
  • Incentivize sales during the lull period

Your first priority is to bring in enough ticket revenue to break even. Start by calculating the minimum price you’ll need to charge to break even using this simple formula: Total event costs / expected number of attendees. 

You should also analyze your competitors and the success of your previous events when setting ticket prices. Once you’ve taken these steps, you’ll be in a position to make a realistic sales forecast.

Once you’ve worked out your minimum ticket price, build a tiered pricing model to boost profits. For example, let’s say you need to sell 300 out of 500 tickets at $20 to break even. Once you’ve sold 300 tickets at $20, you can increase prices for the remaining 200 tickets in tiered batches to maximize profits.

Bear in mind that demand for tickets will spike when you release tickets and during the two-week period prior to the event. There will be a lull in the interim, so incentivize sales during this period with promotional experiences, flash sales and competitions.

13. Use email remarketing

With an ROI of 32:1, email marketing is the most valuable event marketing tool. 

If you don’t yet have a large and engaged subscriber base, start collecting emails using a lead generation tool like Yieldify. Our clients have driven up to 116% more leads using layered lead capture – which targets customers with customized and device-optimized forms throughout the purchase funnel. 

Once you’ve maximized your database, send emails to drive ticket sales, communicate updates and increase audience engagement. Research suggests open rates and engagement are highest on emails sent between 8pm-midnight on weekends.

A good email to drive ticket sales will: 

  • Be concise 
  • Have a catchy subject line
  • Include visuals – GIFs, videos & images
  • Drive urgency 
  • Target different audience segments 
  • Include a CTA 

14. Promote on social media

There’s a reason why 58% of marketers promote on social media before, during and after their events – because it creates excitement, builds communities and sells tickets. 

Before you create a content calendar, you’ll need to do market research to build customer personas and understand the content and social media platforms they engage with.

Use your customer personas to guide your social media schedule, but also factor in your industry. If you’re organizing an event for music, fashion, beauty or fitness, then use Instagram to boost ticket sales. For B2B events, LinkedIn is your platform of choice.

An end-to-end social media calendar should incorporate these 9 tactics: 

Pre-event: 

  • Influencer marketing 
  • Paid social promotions 
  • Announcements, reminders & deadlines
  • Contests and giveaways  

Mid-event: 

  • Leverage hashtags
  • Live event videos & images 
  • Product demos and videos (B2B)

Post-event: 

  • Repackage and repurpose content 
  • Engage attendees and build a community 

15. Start a referral program

Event organizers believe word-of-mouth or referral marketing is the third-most effective event promo tactic after email marketing and social media – a theory backed up by these stats:

  • Average cost per customer acquisition is just $1.40 
  • 92% of people trust referrals from people they know 
  • Customers are 4X more likely to buy tickets through referrals than organic event discovery

The best reward programs incorporate a high-threshold, high-reward system – a desirable reward to motivate referrals with a threshold that is difficult to attain (3-5 referrals). 

To maximize ticket sales from your referral program, use these 3 tactics: 

  • Provide unique referral links to customers on the purchase confirmation page
  • Integrate referral links into your pre-event email marketing schedule 
  • Add a page to your website outlining how your referral program works  

3 Potential Reasons For Slow Ticket Sales

1. Your pricing strategy is wrong

As we shared earlier in this blog, smart pricing is the bedrock of any successful ticket-selling strategy. Start by establishing the minimum ticket price to break even for your event, then use a tiered model to maximize profits.

Remember that you’re bound to experience a dip in sales when the initial scramble for tickets fades. When demand is low, run promotions, giveaways and competitions to renew interest in your event.

2. You haven’t considered the competition

When you set ticket prices for your event, use your competitors as a guideline for what customers are prepared to pay. If you fail to take your competitors into account and outprice your customers, don’t be surprised if you struggle for sales. 

You should also consider when your competitors are running their events. After all, your customers can’t attend two events at the same time.

3. You’re not pushing sales during the lull 

You’ve probably experienced the quiet period that occurs between your ticket release date and about two weeks before your event. But you can overcome this.

This is the time where event marketers need to get creative with email marketing and social media content.

Boost event ticket sales online with Yieldify

Using Yieldify’s personalization software and services, you can streamline customer journeys to ensure you’re maximizing ticket sales for your events. To find out more about Yieldify’s capabilities, check out our post covering 10 of the best website personalization tools on the market. 

Avoiding slow ticket sale FAQs

How to increase ticket sales?

You can increase ticket sales using a sound pricing strategy, email remarketing flows, social media and referral programs. To improve conversion rates and maximize ticket sales, consider using a website CRO tool. See our full list of 15 tactics to boost ticket sales here.

How do you avoid slow ticket sales?

Every event organizer is likely to see a dip in sales when the initial spike in demand from release fades, but there are many tactics you can use to tackle this problem, including: 

– Use personalization tools to optimize site performance 
– Run competitions and giveaways 
– Build awareness on social media 
– Offer incentives through email remarketing 

How can I sell event tickets quickly?

There is no one-size-fits all strategy to sell out an event quickly, but all 15 tactics in this blog will help you create excitement, build your subscriber lists and convert interest into more ticket sales. Some core tactics include: 

– Smart pricing 
– Email remarketing 
– Personalization
– Social proof
– Brand-building 

Managing eCommerce Projects In a Time of Crisis

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Ecommerce projects are hard work at the best of times. So, what should you do with them when hit by the unexpected?

It’s reported that 42% of companies don’t understand the need or importance of project management. Which doesn’t bode well when a crisis comes along.

The last few months have turned the eCommerce world upside-down. Amid the rollercoaster of crisis communications, demand, disruption to supply chain, and uncertainty about future recession, there are fires to fight everywhere. Those standard operating procedures you created may go out the window.

However, there’s a big question in the background: What happens to all our grand plans for innovation when a Black Swan event arrives? 

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Most of us had eCommerce projects in play when the coronavirus crisis arrived. These kinds of innovation projects can be big or small. It can be replatforming, switching or onboarding new technologies, or trying out new acquisition channels.

Now that the world has changed so quickly overnight, how do we decide what to do with them?

Ecommerce projects: The state of play 

First of all, none of us are alone in pumping the brakes in light of upheaval. In a recent survey by Marketing Week and Econsultancy, 43% of marketers reported having delayed or are reviewing planned technology or infrastructure spending in light of the COVID-19 crisis.

This comes as part of a wider freezing of growth. The same survey reported that 55% have paused new product or service launches, and 60% have delayed budget commitments. 

Business impact of coronavirus crisis on marketers

These numbers seem fairly substantial. However, they actually show that around half of marketers aren’t changing their plans for growth or innovation in light of the crisis. That’s a significant proportion of the competition that is still pressing ahead with business as usual (more or less). 

So the question is: Which of these two opposing camps should you fall into?

Which camp are you in?

From what we’ve seen in the last few months at Yieldify, where we work with around 1,000 eCommerce websites worldwide, there’s a fairly clear set of two different factors determining whether or not companies are pausing innovation projects. 

Prioritising short-term fires

First up is fire-fighting. Many eCommerce companies – whether they’re seeing a huge spike in demand (like our clients at Domino’s Pizza) or seeing traffic drop – are dealing with immediate disruption to their businesses that has to be prioritized. 

For example, many have seen their supply chains impacted by lockdown in China. Others have had difficulty in fulfilling orders as lockdowns increase in their home markets. Both of these have been accompanied by the challenges of remote working and a diminished workforce as a result of illness and self-isolation.

If you’re experiencing crisis management challenges such as these, it makes perfect sense to press pause on innovative eCommerce projects to redeploy your resource where it’s most needed. However, it’s vital as a leader that you raise your head up from the current fires to see what’s next on the horizon and be ready for it.

This crisis – like any other – will be over at some point, and business will return to normal. 

Long-term innovation vs. economic fallout

The second motivation we’ve seen for halting activity on eCommerce projects has been longer-term concerns about business success and viability in anticipation of the economic impact of COVID-19. 

This is where things get a little bit more complicated. Exercising caution in the face of potential rough times is, of course, a smart thing to do. But to stop completely is potentially to throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

Here’s why.

One of the hottest takes in our space right now is that the coronavirus crisis isn’t necessarily disrupting the eCommerce industry. It is simply accelerating change that was already in play. 

E-commerce growth 2020 chart

Put simply, it’s saying that the ones to survive this turbulent time will be the ones who had already done the work of transitioning successfully to a digital model. And the ones who don’t survive were already in trouble (or at least heading towards it). 

You can agree or disagree with this. For us, we think it’s a little too early to commit fully to an idea like that. However, there’s an important lesson in it for anyone who’s freezing their eCommerce projects in the face of a crisis: It’s very likely going to impede your recovery. 

You can look at it this way: If you’re lucky enough to be in a part of our industry where consumer behavior is generally playing in your favor as a result of COVID-19 (let’s say, online groceries), you’ll still need to emerge from this time with an ability to turn your newly-acquired customers into actual lifetime value. That work starts now. 

COVID-19 impact on website traffic

Alternatively, you might be in a vertical where there’s real nervousness about what a recession might do to your business. Luxury goods, for example.

You’re about to head into a time where there’s a smaller market to share, so your competitive edge needs to be ten times sharper. With less traffic coming in, your conversion rate has to get higher. You’re going to need to take your website’s experience to the next level to win. Again – that work starts now. 

How to keep moving forward 

If you had some grand plans in February that suddenly came grinding to a halt in March, where do you go from here?

To help you determine how you should move ahead, we recommend asking yourself the following three questions about the eCommerce projects you’ve pressed pause on:

1. What positive impact does it stand to make?

This is the first question to ask as part of a pretty simple cost-benefit analysis. In the world that we’re about to enter, you’ll need to make sure that you’re getting measurable results from your eCommerce projects in order to justify the resource and the budget. 

Focus in particular on those actions that will improve your website experience. Traffic is already volatile and there’s a limited level of control you have over this. Turn your attention to making sure that the traffic you’re getting converts at a higher rate. 

2. What disruption and risk do your eCommerce projects entail? 

If we’ve determined the benefit, then look at the cost. How much does your project necessitate putting your existing business at risk?

For example, replatforming usually involves teething troubles and bug fixes (39% see a drop in conversions immediately after launch). In the case of Marks and Spencer, it even involved getting existing customers to reactivate accounts – a huge risk!

Marks & Spencer replatforming with Yieldify

At times like this, you may want to delay sweeping changes in technology. But remember, that doesn’t mean ruling out changes altogether. For example, most chatbots and onsite messaging tools integrate with just a couple of lines of code and can be easily removed if you need to – and can make a real impact on your bottom line right now. 

3. Can you be iterative? 

Aside from looking at the cost-benefit analysis that you first put together, take the time to break your eCommerce project down with fresh eyes. If something seems too labor-intensive or high-risk at this point, see whether you might be able to break down your project into smaller, more manageable stages. 

Being agile and iterative at this point will help you immensely (a principle that applies to how you do business as a whole – not just how you manage innovation).

Closing thoughts

Perhaps you’ve re-evaluated your eCommerce projects and determined that even in their most agile form, the fires you’re fighting still need to come first. That’s perfectly OK. 

But let’s return to the point we made earlier about keeping your eyes on the prize, even when things are crazy.

If you’ve decided that your project is on ice for this week, ask yourself again next week. Don’t park this conversation for a months’ time. In the world we’re in now, a month is a lifetime. Check-in with yourself every week and repeat the exercise to make sure you’re on the front foot. 

In the meantime, we recommend signing up for E-commerce Leadership Series: our new series for founders, VPs, CEOs, and other eCommerce leaders. You will get access to valuable e-commerce leadership content, exclusive dinners, and event invitations.

Coronavirus and Online Travel Booking: 3 Facts Travel Marketers Should Know

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Discover the data on how coronavirus is impacting online travel bookings.

The coronavirus outbreak has already had a measurable impact on many industries, including online retail, tourism and travel. Two weeks ago, we took a closer look at the latter trying to discern the impact coronavirus has had on the online travel industry. Since then we’ve seen over 1,000 airport workers laid off, and that’s in the New York City area alone.

In this time of daily change, we’ve gone back to the data.

We’ve analyzed hundreds of online travel booking websites, looking closely at their traffic figures, their sales numbers and the paths that visitors have been exploring. This time, our analysis has focused on looking for the key turning points to date. Then we looked at what this means for travel industry professionals bracing for the future. Here’s what we found…

3 key facts on coronavirus and online travel booking

1. The tipping point came with Italy’s shutdown

On March 9th, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte imposed a national quarantine, describing the outbreak as the nation’s ‘darkest hour’. At the time of writing, these restrictions still remain in place.

While similar restrictions have since appeared in multiple countries in Europe, at the time this was an unprecedented move for a European government. The shockwave that this sent through consumers was immediately visible in what then happened to the travel industry as a result.

For websites selling holidays, we saw that both sales and visitor numbers had been volatile since the outbreak gained traction. However, the news in Italy was a tipping point. It was at this moment that even the idea of booking ‘staycations’ – a popular option that saw a peak during the earlier days of the outbreak, was hit by the worry that even movement in-country might be ruled out. From this point on, sales dropped dramatically:

Coronavirus impact on online travel booking | Yieldify

Similar can be said for transport. This category includes domestic travel such as buses and trains, but was far less impacted in terms of sales up until this point. However, once Italy locked down we can see the number of sales drop drastically:

Coronavirus impact on online travel booking | Yieldify

Interestingly, we saw the number of users landing on these websites rise – one theory is that these users were looking for information about what services would be running or cancellation policies. This is seemingly confirmed by the levels of traffic visiting coronavirus-related URLs on these Transport websites:

Coronavirus impact on online travel booking | Yieldify

So what can we learn from this as travel marketers?

Our broadest conclusion is that the unexpected causes the biggest impact – Italy’s decision was relatively unprecedented, therefore creating an extreme consumer reaction. However, the more expected the change, the flatter the curve of impact (to borrow an overused term).

2. Leisure and Tourism suffered an 80% drop in sales

Possibly the worst-hit sub-vertical within the travel industry has been leisure and tourism. In the last month, this industry has seen an 80% drop in the average number of online sales made each day. This has also come with a 63% drop in the average number of visitors per day:

Coronavirus impact on online travel booking | Yieldify

Upon inspection, the tipping point for this date interestingly aligns with the date of the UK’s first death as a result of COVID-19. This came a few days before Italy’s lockdown and caused a drop in interest in transport and holidays. This indicates that the hesitance for leisure activities set in a while before any concerns about simply moving from A to B.

The learning for travel marketers here is about how this kind of trend may apply to recovery. With the logic that we’ve seen so far, we can expect transport to pick up first. Additionally, business travel will recover quicker than leisure travel. Keep this in mind for when you re-accelerate your acquisition campaigns when the coast is clear.

3. Traffic isn’t the challenge: conversion is

In these circumstances, it’s normal to expect that the traffic to travel industry websites would drop sharply. That’s not necessarily the case.

Below we take a look at the change in traffic levels across our three key travel sub-verticals:

Coronavirus impact on online travel booking | Yieldify

What’s clear is that – as discussed – Leisure and Tourism sites have definitely taken a hit to their traffic. However, this isn’t the case for transport or for holidays: their traffic levels have remained relatively steady.

Contrast this with the picture when it comes to sales:

Coronavirus impact on online travel booking | Yieldify

The story here is very different – all three of our sub-verticals have seen a downward trend (some more recently than others). In this position, marketers need to focus on making quick changes to their websites in order to assuage concerns and encourage bookings.

Take a tip from Student Universe, who have posted a lengthy FAQ page about coronavirus, clearly linked to from their homepage:

Coronavirus impact on online travel booking | Yieldify

The onsite experience has never been more critical to the success or failure of your marketing efforts. This means that now is when you should invest time and effort into getting it right.

Appendix: The timeline so far

While the rolling news cycle means that we’ve seen dozens of updates on the development of the pandemic, we looked to identify some of the critical dates for the travel industry. Take a look at the turning points below and see if you can find a correlation in your own online travel booking data:

  • 31st Jan: UK confirms its first case
  • 11th Feb: WHO gives name to new coronavirus disease
  • 29th Feb: US reports first coronavirus death
  • 6th March: UK reports first coronavirus death
  • 9th March: Italian PM imposes country-wide lockdown
  • 11th March: US restricts travel from Europe
  • 11th March: WHO declares coronavirus pandemic
  • 17th March: EU closes external borders for 30 days

Making the Perfect Lead Capture Form: Tips, Stats and Examples

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Your 8-step guide to creating a lead capture form that generates quality leads at scale.

Lead capture forms are deceptively simple. A few fields, a clear CTA and in theory, you should have leads pouring in faster than your ESP can handle. The reality of lead capture forms is very different – in a tiny space of digital real estate, you have to make decisions that mean the difference between getting a valuable new customer and wasted traffic.

At Yieldify, we create thousands of lead capture forms every year, and have captured more than 15 million leads along the way. All this has given us a pretty clear idea of what works and what doesn’t.

In this article, we’ll break down the must-haves of a high-impact lead capture form that is proven to generate results. Based on our experience with different lead-gen forms that we’ve built for clients over the years, we’ll offer you guidance on each step of creating a lead capture form that helps you collect email addresses at scale.

Lead capture form example | Yieldify

Lead capture form example

What is a lead capture form? A lead capture form is a form that captures visitor contact data – usually an email address – and sends it to a CRM system where it can be further used by sales and marketing departments. Lead capture forms are widely used to grow newsletter subscribers, in exchange for gated assets or discount codes.

How to make the best lead capture form

1. Targeting

Creating the perfect lead capture form actually begins with thinking beyond the form itself. The story starts with thinking about who you should be showing it to.

The best way to drive your submission rate up is to be selective about who you’re showing your lead capture page to. We’ve run the numbers and it’s clear that having 3 to 5 segmentation criteria, such as location, sessions count and basket value, is the sweet spot for a high submission rate:

Three to five segmentation criteria is the sweet spot for high submission rate

So what segmentation criteria should you be using? It’s going to be different for every website and depending on what exactly your lead capture form is asking for.

However, there are a few trade secrets we can give away. The first one is cart value. We found that targeting your lead capture form at users depending on whether or not they’d added to cart had a 3 percentage point difference in submission rates.

The second one is inactivity. We found that triggering the appearance of your form based on when your user becomes inactive raised average submission rates from 3.8% to 5.1%. British beauty booking service Treatwell used this successfully:

Finally, think about exit-intent technology. It might seem a little counter-intuitive, but we’ve found lead capture forms that launch when the visitor is about to leave to have an average submission rate of 6%.

Homair, France’s number one mobile home operator, effectively used exit-intent technology to address high abandonment rates of its holiday package basket pages. Together with Yieldify, Homair developed an overlay showing a countdown clock with a special “no reservation fees” offer. The result – a 144% conversion rate uplift and 670 new leads captured:

Homair’s lead capture form

On the other hand, we recommend avoiding the route that many websites take in launching a lead capture form the second that a visitor arrives on-site. While the numbers may initially look good, this is an extremely aggressive tactic that we encourage our clients to avoid.

One more thing to think about – consider targeting your forms depending on the traffic source your visitor has come from. This is an important way of ensuring that there’s complete alignment between the reality of the experience and the expectations set by whichever ad, email or post that’s brought your visitor to the site.

Here’s a great example of this from recipe box brand Simply Cook, who targeted lead capture forms exclusively at traffic arriving from Facebook campaigns:

2. Timing

Once you’ve decided who you’re going to target your lead capture form at, you need to think about the right timing for your strategy. There are good times and bad times to put your lead capture strategy front-and-center, so we’ve crunched the numbers to give you an indication of where they are.

First up, we looked at what time of day visitors are most likely to hit ‘submit’ on that form instead of abandoning it:

Data shows that evenings work best for lead capture

It becomes clear pretty quickly that:

  • Mornings are pretty erratic for submissions – the immediate pre- and post-commute hours work best.
  • Early afternoon hours can be a good time to pick up on people spending time at their desks.
  • Post-commute is a sweet spot – from about 7 PM onwards, the submission rates are consistently higher. They dip during the late afternoon, so avoid these periods.
  • Serious night owls seem to love submitting forms. Nope, we don’t get it either…

So now you know how to use the lead capture software to vary your e-commerce lead gen efforts across the day – consider applying this to your social media and display efforts that link into this. But what about how this fluctuates across the week? We checked out those numbers too:

Lead capture rates increase towards the end of the week

The pattern that appears clearly here is that the second part of the week (Thursday to Saturday) is where you want to concentrate your efforts in order to get the best submit rates.

3. How many fields should a lead capture form include?

The eternal question for a lead capture form is how many fields it should include. Too many and you risk putting your visitor off, too few and you’re not getting the data you want.

We wish there was an easy answer. Bad news on this one: there isn’t.

We ran the numbers on hundreds of lead generation forms to contrast the number of fields with the submit rate. What we found confirmed our expectations: single-field lead capture forms have the highest submit rates.

As a great example, this one-line lead gen form from Domino’s helped capture over 50,000 email leads in just one month. The moral of the story is to keep the number of fields in your lead-gen form to a minimum.

Domino’s Pizza lead capture form

Ask yourself whether enriched data, such as Name, Location, Job title, etc. will be effectively utilized in further communications or is it a “nice to have.” Remember you can always ask users to submit more data later on via your email marketing initiatives.

4. The structure of your form fields

Having a lead generation form that captures lots of data is great, but it’s pointless unless that data is clean. Having a database that is gradually filled with invalid email addresses, incorrectly formatted birthdays or 20 different ways of spelling ‘United States’ is a recipe for disaster.

This is where regex validation is critical as part of your forms. Regex validation makes it so that data has to be valid in order for your user to be able to successfully submit.

Another option is to consider the use of different types of fields, such as dropdown menus. These ensure that more complex data can be captured and processed cleanly, as well as making it easy for your user to complete:

Lead capture form with dropdown menu | Yieldify
Yieldify lead capture form with a dropdown menu in action

5. Incentivizing

To incentivize or not? It’s the million-dollar question. Giving away a discount in exchange for signing up to a newsletter is standard for many e-commerce sites, but it runs the risk of giving away margin. So is it worth it?

To help you decide, we reviewed lead capture forms that offered an incentive versus those that didn’t and the results were pretty clear:

With a discount: 5.9%
Without a discount: 3.8%

Worth losing some margin? It’s up to you. However, remember that a discount is not the only kind of incentive available to you. Another incredibly effective incentive mechanism is competitions, where you’re liable to give away much less in exchange for that data. Here’s a great example from Essie:

6. The message

When you’ve built a beautifully-structured and well-targeted lead capture form, there’s the final matter of messaging. Pitching the value that your user will receive in exchange for handing over their data makes all the difference to your submit rates.

When reviewing your copy, keep in mind the following principles:

  • Clarity – be transparent about what your user will receive when they sign up.
  • Brevity – cut any word you can, and use bulletpoints if you need to make multiple points.
  • Privacy – in an age of GDPR and CCPA, ensure that your forms are compliant for any users from the European Union or California region.

Kiehl’s is a great example of this in action:

Kiehl’s lead capture form

You’re unlikely to get this right on your first pass – that’s fine. A/B testing elements of your copy is hugely valuable to ensuring that you can optimize over time.

7. Lead capture form CTAs

So you’ve already decided on how many fields you’re going to include in your lead capture form and what message it’s going to convey. Great! You’re one step away from completion, and that step is the CTA button.

Writing a powerful call-to-action is a science in itself and we promise to explore in more depth next time, but here are some of the key techniques you can apply to make sure your lead capture forms have conversion-optimized CTAs:

  • Use a contrasting color – make sure your call-to-action stands out from the surrounding content.
  • Make it clickable – the first principle of a button is that it has to be and look clickable. Don’t confuse people with buttons that look inactive or otherwise
  • Be concise and convey value – the most effective CTAs clearly state what the user is looking to gain from submitting their details. Use action-packed language, such as “Shop now,” “Download today,” etc.
Check out GoSquared’s guide for high-converting CTAs

At the end of the day, you have to test, test and then test some more. You can test everything from the color to the shape, the size, the copy, the positioning of the CTA button, and more.

8. GDPR/CCPA compliance

Whatever your feelings were regarding GDPR, we already have another privacy regulation – the California Consumer Privacy Act or CCPA – on our hands and there probably are many more to come.

To make sure you don’t run into any legal problems, all your lead capture forms should be GDPR and CCPA-compliant. This means your form should actively ask for consent, clearly explain what the user is opting in for, and transparently state how the users’ personal data is going to be used.

GDPR compliant lead capture form

What next?

A strong email database, fed by well-optimized lead capture forms, is a critical commodity to any business. As we’ve shown here, there are some simple core principles that can make a huge difference, but a great deal of ‘what works’ varies from site to site. Rigorous attention to data, thorough testing and good benchmarking are key to making sure you get a steady stream of those all-important leads.

At Yieldify, our lead capture forms average a submit rate of 10% and they go from concept to live in less than two weeks.

We’ve helped businesses likes Domino’s, Marks and Spencer, Kiehl’s and many more achieve incredible results using our methodologies and we can do the same for you. If you’d like to find out more about how that would look, just request a demo here!

Lead Capture Form FAQs

? What is a lead capture form?

A lead capture form is a form that captures visitor contact data – usually an email address – and sends it to a CRM system where it can be further used by sales and marketing departments

❓ How can I capture more leads?

You can capture more leads by only using the number of fields you need to, incentivizing your lead capture forms, having a clear message, and clear CTA. You can also A/B test your form and key components to drive more leads.

Infographic: Customer Acquisition and Retention

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Find out how marketers are coping with rising customer acquisition costs

The balancing act between customer acquisition and retention has always been a tightrope act. Never more so than now, when the cost of traffic is rising to never-before-seen levels.

We interviewed 200 e-commerce marketers to find out how the acquisition-retention equilibrium looks as we head into 2020. Explore the results below, and for the full story, you can download the full report.

Infographic: research on customer acquisition vs retention

CCPA Compliance for E-Commerce

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The California Consumer Privacy Act arrives in January 2020 – here’s a brief guide to compliance for e-commerce companies

For e-commerce companies, CCPA compliance should be high on your radar for 2020. Like the General Data Protection Regulation (better known as GDPR) in Europe, it stands to make a huge difference to how you communicate with your customers. This article sets out the basics around what the new Act means and how to prepare your business for it.

Disclaimer: this post doesn’t constitute legal advice – seek professional legal counsel to ensure that your activities are compliant!

What Is CCPA?

The Governor of California signed Assembly Bill 375 on 28 June 2018. The California Consumer Privacy Act, also known as CCPA, will take effect on 01 January 2020.

CCPA focuses on data protection rights for consumers – however, it does not only apply to businesses physically located in California. CCPA protects the right of Californian consumers, regardless of state borders. So regardless of where your business is based, if you have customers in California you need to consider the impact of the new rules.

Retailers and CCPA: key implications and requirements

What does CCPA compliance for e-commerce really mean? Here are the basics of what the Act outlines:

  • When a California resident requests what personal data is being stored by an applicable business, the company will have up to 45 days to respond. The response must include a full record in order to be considered compliant with CCPA.
  • A California consumer will be able to opt out of sharing or storing their personal data with a business that provides the data to any third party.
  • A California consumer has the right to know what data was purchased, whom it was shared with, and which business it was purchased from.
  • Any California resident can request that any of their stored personal information be deleted.
  • For California residents under 16 years old, businesses are required to provide an “opt-in” function.
  • For California residents under 13 years old, a parent or guardian must consent.
  • California consumers cannot be penalized by a business for exercising their rights in accordance with the CCPA.
  • Businesses are required to offer California consumers easy-to-see opt-out options, such as a “Do Not Sell My Information” button, on their website.

Determining If CCPA Applies To You

CCPA applies to businesses that meet certain criteria. This includes:

  • Any business that sells to California residents and generates more than $25 million in revenue each year
  • Any company that receives or shares the personal information of more than 50,000 Californians
  • Any company that derives at least half (50%) of its yearly revenue through the sale of the personal information of California residents

For the most part, this means that small businesses are currently exempt from having to deal with CCPA compliance. While this may change in the future, larger companies are presently the only businesses that need to prepare for the CCPA staging date.

CCPA vs GDPR

CCPA is very similar to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) passed by the European Union in 2018. The good news is that companies that are considered GDPR compliant will not need to change much in order to meet with CCPA compliance requirements.

CCPA is slightly more stringent thanks to its broader definition of personal information. However, there are many options out there to help a company implement compliance requirements before the January 2020 timeframe.

Consequences for non-compliance

The Attorney General and California court system are prepared to execute several different consequences for non-compliant businesses.

  • Unintentional violations can result in fines up to $2,500 each.
  • Intentional violations will each warrant a $7,500 fine.
  • Fines are assessed per person or account.

Fines add up quickly. Often, if a violation is present with one consumer, it is present with others.

To estimate potential financial damages, you could multiply the number of your California consumers by $7,500. For example: if you have 25 California customers. Those 25 customers multiplied by $7,500 means you could face up to $187,500 in fines based off the discovery of a single consumer’s violation.

These penalties can seem scary – so what do you need to do in order to avoid them?

Key steps for preparing for CCPA compliance

Here are the key steps for retailers preparing for CCPA compliance.

Audit data collection and management processes

A thorough evaluation of how your company collects and manages personal information is essential.

Deep-diving into where you store your consumer data and how you use it is essential to preventing intentional and unintentional violations from costing your business thousands in fines.

You should also examine the data you collect from third-party sites; third-party vendors should provide a CCPA Compliance Certificate on request to ensure data you receive will not result in damages to your company in a lawsuit.

Plan for consumer requests

Under the CCPA, you have up to 45 days to respond to personal information data requests from California consumers. You need to have a plan in place to quickly tackle these requests. This may include hiring personnel to address these matters efficiently and within the requirements of the law. Data extraction tools, response formatting, and a thorough understanding of the law will also be required.

Prepare for future regulations

Many experts believe the GDPR and CCPA are just the beginning of the data rights battle. California is simply the first state to take consumer data rights seriously enough to enact legislation. Future regulations are highly likely as more states become further involved with the data rights of consumers.

Bracing for impact

It’s hard to know exactly what to expect when CCPA hits – but there are some predictions that we can make based on GDPR.

First of all, you’re likely to see your email database take a hit. Here’s how much of their addressable databases marketers lost when GDPR came into force in 2018:

Read more here

However, there’s a silver lining here. Recovery from these losses was actually pretty quick. One year after the regulations came in, databases had successfully recovered to 93% of their pre-GDPR levels.

How did it happen so fast? Here’s another lesson we can take for CCPA compliance. The below were the top strategies used by businesses to recoup their databases – a greet steer for those looking to 2020:

January 1st will mark a new watershed for privacy regulations in the US – any preparation you do now will pay dividends in the short-term, and prepare you well for the evolutions in data privacy yet to come.

Avoiding Black Friday: New Strategies for Peak Season

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Avoiding Black Friday - advice for retailers

As a retailer, deciding whether to avoid Black Friday or Cyber Monday is tough. Here’s how to figure it out.

Avoiding Black Friday is a decision that few retailers dare to make. For decades, the Friday after Thanksgiving has been one of the most important days in the retail calendar – last year, 137 million people spent more than $850 billion during the sales.

However, the race to the bottom driven by discounting has started to provoke a backlash from some retailers. An increasing number are avoiding Black Friday and Cyber Monday, opting to protect their brands and margins through more creative campaigns. This is particularly true for the newer breed of pure-play e-commerce companies, where 22% are opting out of Black Friday.

Even among those who participate, a growing number have evolved their Black Friday strategies in order to cope with increased competition and challenged margins. Rather than one-day sales, many are turning the holiday into multi-day campaigns that start early or run in phases.

As a retailer, you stand a crossroads – here’s how to decide whether avoiding Black Friday is right for you, and what to do if you decide to #optout.

Is Black Friday right for new customer acquisition?

If new customer acquisition is your priority, Black Friday can appear as an obvious choice. But is it really all it seems?

First of all, timing is critical. Most companies plan their Black Friday strategy months in advance – according to our research, over 75% of retailers start their preparation before August. This means that your decision needs to be made early if there’s much chance of success.

If you still have time to consider your options, consider that this is a seriously expensive time to be acquiring new customers. Competition for clicks will be fierce, and the cost with it.

This brings us onto our next consideration – if you’re investing in traffic, it’s only worth it if you have confidence in your conversion rate optimization. With every click costing more, your site needs to be ready to ensure that you see return, with cart abandonment strategies in place to catch every potential new customer.

If you feel confident that you can get a good return on your ad spend, there’s one more thing to consider. One of the biggest issues that retailers face is how to retain those new customers once Black Friday is over. That’s for a good reason – you’ve just scooped up a large number of discount-hunters, who are likely to repeat that behavior again.

Conclusion: Black Friday isn’t quite the new customer bonanza that it might first appear to be. You not only need to be able to spare a healthy budget, you need to be confident that your conversion and retention strategies are healthy.

Should you follow your competitors?

You know your customer base. This also means you likely know who your prime competition is. Understanding their strategy may help you determine yours – but is it wise to follow the crowd for Black Friday?

A good first step is to run the numbers and do a little spying – so we made it a little easier. You can use our handy Black Friday benchmarking tool below to see what proportion of e-commerce businesses are taking part and what their strategies will be:

 

If you’re concerned that your competitors will be stealing your market share during Black Friday, use data from years past to query just how much you might have to lose by opting out.

If you’re still unsure after balancing the numbers, remember that avoiding Black Friday isn’t really an either/or question after all. So if discounting stands to hurt you, you can simply choose to participate in a different way.

You could, for example, focus your Black Friday promotions on delivering value through free delivery, added loyalty credit or even free gifts instead of discounting. You could also leap ahead of the pack and start campaigns early to take advantage of the many millions of shoppers who’ll be researching their potential purchases ahead of time.

Conclusion: if your competitors are likely to be taking the leap but you’re unsure if your numbers stack up, try a Black Friday strategy less focused on discounting.

Does Black Friday fit with your brand?

In recent years, Black Friday has been held up as a negative symbol of consumerism. The images of crowds fighting for bargains in big-box stores aside, for many Black Friday is seen to encourage excessive spending on things we don’t necessarily need.

Whatever your opinion is on the matter, it’s important to consider this perspective when deciding whether Black Friday blowouts really fit with your brand.

An increasing number of retailers have decided to make avoiding Black Friday a conscious part of their marketing strategy. In 2015, outdoor equipment giant REI announced that it would no longer participate in Black Friday sales. It actually didn’t open at all during the event, urging employees and customers alike to #OptOutside.

In fact, REI not only encourages employees to spend the day out in nature instead of shopping – it pays them for the time off. The movement included over 834,600 Tweets and 12.5 million Instagram posts, showing that avoiding Black Friday can generate great momentum.

Even if your brand doesn’t necessarily suit making a big moral stand around Black Friday, there’s always a question about whether discounting is right for your brand. In a more subtle act of avoiding Black Friday, Everlane participates in fundraisers during the holiday. As it consistently offers products that are roughly 60% less than their original price tag it made little sense for it to discount. Instead, it collaborated with Surfrider Foundation and donated more than $250,000 to help clean up beaches.

Conclusion: Avoiding Black Friday is an opportunity to make a statement about your brand – but be creative with it.

What to do if you’re opting out

Deciding to avoid Black Friday can be a bold choice – so what should you do if you opt out?

First of all, be ready to capitalize on organic traffic from visitors expecting to see Black Friday deals. If you don’t have discounts ready for them, what can you do to capture them instead? Consider offering value-adds in exchange for email sign-ups or highlighting other time-limited campaigns.

Secondly, consider piggybacking on Black Friday by running campaigns in the week before the big day. Our data shows that the weekend before Black Friday is a major ‘pre-peak’ in traffic, so consider what you can offer to those early-bird shoppers before everyone else gets in on the game.

Finally, think about what your Black Friday narrative is going to be. A great deal of your customers will expect discounts – don’t leave them puzzled. You need to build a great story around why you’ve chosen to opt out of Black Friday, like REI did. More than shying away from a big event, it’s an opportunity to build your brand and make a statement.

Sustainable E-commerce: An Interview with Frank And Oak

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Sustainable e-commerce is less a ‘nice to have’ and more of a critical component of a retailer’s brand. We spoke to Megan Driver from leading retailer and Yieldify client Frank And Oak about how the team has made sustainability a core part of their e-commerce business.

‘Sustainability’ isn’t necessarily the first term you’d associate with the idea of a successful e-commerce brand. ‘Fast-moving’, yes. ‘Innovative’, sure. But as sustainability moves up the list of consumer priorities, many retailers are following suit. 

Frank And Oak is one such brand. A Canadian clothing company that was founded in 2012, it’s known for making good on its commitments to become a more sustainable e-commerce brand, raising $20 million in 2018 to expand its growth. 

Earlier this year, Frank And Oak partnered with Yieldify to drive website personalization, and in particular, to focus on growing its email database through Yieldify’s email capture capabilities and lead capture software. 

With sustainable e-commerce still a relatively new concept, the brand needed a stronger email database to nurture and educate consumers about the brand’s differentiated value. 

We interviewed Megan Driver, Senior Manager, Affiliate Marketing & Lead Generation, to tell us more about how the brand has successfully integrated sustainability into its business. 

As a brand that has been committed to sustainable e-commerce since the outset, what’s driving the shift in e-commerce, and retail more generally, toward sustainability?

The decisions made in the fashion industry have a huge impact on people and the planet. Faced with the irrevocable effects of climate change and poor conditions for garment factory workers around the world, more and more companies are recognizing the urgency in the fact that we all need to make a change and do our part. 

This is why we are committed to minimizing our impact by prioritizing recycled fabrics and responsible practices throughout our supply chain to make quality clothing that lasts.  

Can you tell us a bit about how Frank And Oak puts its commitment to e-commerce sustainability and responsible environmental practices into action? 

All of our garments are produced by certified manufacturing partners in Canada and across the globe. Our goal is to use sustainable fabrics and sustainable practices throughout our supply chain.

We started in 2017 with 5% of our products made with sustainable processes & materials, and are excited to announce that this year approximately 50% of our products will be made with minimal impact processes, with a heavy focus on recycled materials to reduce waste.

We use a lot of recycled and organic materials such as Polylife recycled polyester, recycled wool and hemp, and Organic Good Cotton. These are part of our eco-conscious production methods, which include cruelty-free insulation, hydro-less denim (which uses 95% less water than traditional methods) and eco dyes.

A key area for focus in sustainable e-commerce is what happens in fulfilment. Packaging is, unfortunately, a necessary part of any business like ours. They’re made to protect products as they get tossed around in transit or carried around town in busy customers’ hands. Until better solutions come along, we remain diligent in sourcing materials as conscientiously as we can. Our shipping boxes and shopping bags are 100% recycled and 100% recyclable, with our shipping bags 50% recycled too. 

On the brick-and-mortar side, our stores are built conscientiously in partnership with Canadian artisans, using recycled materials and creating minimal waste. When it comes to updating and renovating existing stores, we choose to make as few modifications as possible to the existing space, always reusing everything we can.  

Additionally, by understanding that each community is unique, every one of our stores is conceived with each neighbourhood in mind.

Being environmentally responsible usually comes with being socially responsible – what does Frank And Oak do in terms of CSR? 

One of our key programs has been the Let’s Give a Shi(r)t campaign. North Americans throw 9.5 million tonnes of clothing into landfills every year, when 95% of that can instead be reused or recycled. We launched the Let’s Give a Shi(r)t initiative in December 2018, with the goal of redirecting garments to help eliminate growing landfills and effect positive change. 

It centres around the store – all Frank And Oak stores across Canada now offer customers a place to ethically dispose of their gently used clothing and we’ll match it with a donation of a Frank And Oak item. We’ve also partnered with grassroots nonprofits across the country who work to divert tonnes of textiles from landfills, ensuring they are redistributed to help those in need. During the holiday season last year, we surpassed our ambitious goal of collecting 5000 clothing items, and this is just the beginning. 

Just recently, we launched our newest initiative: the Look Good, Do Good summer sale. We partnered up with WWF and The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. The Look Good, Do Good initiative allows customers to look good while helping the planet by donating $5 from every sale item to this amazing initiative!

What are some of the e-commerce challenges that brands face in becoming more sustainable, and how has Frank And Oak overcome these?

One of the main challenges would have to be in educating the customer on new sustainable materials and the processes used in creating eco-friendly garments. As an e-commerce company, it’s sometimes hard to combine all the benefits of sustainable manufacturing in a condensed and meaningful way. 

Since so many of these are completely new practices, most people have never heard certain terms before and had no idea these materials and technologies even exist. They also lack a complete understanding of the full impact that traditional manufacturing methods have on the environment, and the importance of the decisions some retailers are taking to become more sustainable.

When it comes to e-commerce sustainability, there’s an additional challenge: consumers can’t physically touch the product and see that in most cases this new eco-friendly product’s quality is at par with traditional methods and in most cases, far superior in terms of quality and overall benefits.

Our biggest success to combating this would have to be our new online blog, The Handbook. Through this new content platform, we’re able to really dig deeper and provide more detail into our eco-conscious materials and processes, with great infographics, videos and Frank And Oak’s staple witty humour. 

We can then promote these content pieces in our emails, social media, paid advertising and on our website as a way to entice the user to learn more about why what we’re doing is important and to hopefully, further confirm that real change only happens if everyone takes part.

How does your marketing complement your credentials as a sustainable e-commerce brand focused on minimizing the impact of the fashion industry on the planet?

Ever since day one, our brand has placed a high degree of importance on our branding and we strive to make every new campaign unique, thought-provoking and authentic. By following this set of core values in our marketing, when we made strides as a brand to become more sustainably- focused, we knew these factors would only become more important. 

The Look Good, Do Good campaign I mentioned before is a perfect example, since we were able to combine something as simple as our annual summer sale with an initiative to help clean up our Canadian shorelines. We strive to be as transparent as possible in our marketing and admit our current limitations outright, since we’re only getting started and we are continuously innovating.

What part does Frank And Oak’s eco-friendly mission play when it comes to the online customer journey and how are you planning to improve or optimize this?

From our very first touchpoint with customers, we try to highlight our sustainable e-commerce practices so they know outright who we are as a company and what we stand for. For instance, when users subscribe to our email mailing list, the first email we send them gives them a brief on our sustainable practices.

Our retail locations also have sections in-store dedicated to explaining our eco-conscious process, and on each of our items on our site and on the garment hang-tags (and even printed on the item itself sometimes), we highlight sustainable features. 

We’re striving to make every touchpoint with our customers meaningful while also showcasing our sustainable principles, but we still need more work on this – especially for our subscription box, Style Plan. We offer one of the only sustainable clothing subscription boxes in North America, but many people who know of or have subscribed to our box have no idea it’s comprised of eco-friendly clothing. 

What’s the work that you’ve been doing with Yieldify to contribute to your strategy? 

Because so much of our relationship with the customer is driven by educating them, it’s really important for us to capture email leads at the top of the funnel so that they can be nurtured. A big part of why we started working with Yieldify is their specialism in turning website traffic to email subscribers. They were able to benchmark performance from over 200,000 campaigns to recommend strategies early on in the partnership that have proven success and high adoption rates. 

Frank and Oak interview on sustainable e-commerce

So far, we’ve been running a series of A/B tests to ensure that we’re not only capturing more leads, but that we’re employing strategies that get good ones: valid leads from engaged customers. As you can see on our website, one of these tests offers a discount to first-time buyers: 

We’re currently working with the team at Yieldify to see what happens next in the customer journey for the users that sign-up using this mechanism and seeing what we can improve in order to make sure these users stay engaged.  

Using segmentation strategies such as targeting men and women with different creatives, we’ve captured over 30,000 leads in two months. The rate of capture speaks to the extra effort being worthwhile – whilst most submit rates are around the 4% mark, ours is over 14%. 

This is really just the beginning – what we’re interested in looking at is what happens next. For example, if someone declines to sign-up, how do you re-engage them later on in their journey and get them to reconsider? There are so many possibilities for those customer journeys, and that’s what we’ll be exploring over the coming months. 

What advice would you give to other retailers who are looking to make sustainability a bigger part of their e-commerce offering? 

I would say that going for sustainable e-commerce is definitely a huge business decision, and takes a significant amount of time, internal resources and research. But as we’ve seen, climate change and environmental issues are quickly moving to the forefront of everyone’s priorities, so the time to start making a change in how you do business is now. 

Becoming a completely sustainable company can’t be done overnight, but as long as companies are making small steps now with the goal of one day making that happen, I think that’s the most important learning and advice I can share at this point in time. As retailers, it’s our responsibility to evoke change in our own industry since no-one else can make that impact for us.

The Black Friday Benchmarker

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Want to know whether your Black Friday plans square up to your competitors? You’re about to find out…

When we asked over 400 e-commerce marketers what they feared the most about peak season 2019, the top answer was ‘the competition’.

As we head into the busiest and most important part of the year, it’s more important than ever to make sure that your activity places you favorably against your rivals. Comparison shopping is just too easy these days.

In the below benchmarking tool, all you have to do is answer five simple questions about your plans and we’ll tell you how they compare to your competitors. It takes five minutes and could mean a huge difference to your success this year – good luck!

 
 

In the meantime, you’ll want to make sure that you have all bases covered when it comes to your Black Friday preparation. To make sure you’ve checked every box (literally) download our Peak Season Preparation Checklist for free below:

Peak Season Preparation Checklist

Comparison Shopping: What is it & 5 Ways to Prevent it

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Comparison shopping is one of eCommerce’s biggest problems – here’s how to solve it.

Product price comparison shopping is the scourge of the eCommerce retailer. It’s now easier than ever for a shopper to compare thousands of products and prices in just a few clicks. Thus, abandoning your beautifully-optimized site in seconds for pastures new.

Of course, all these comparison shoppers have a major impact on your bottom line. Your revenue and return on acquisition spend can be hard-hit when your traffic goes elsewhere for their final purchase.

So, what’s the secret to stopping comparison shopping behavior? Let’s start by looking at what it entails.

What Is Comparison Shopping?

Comparison shoping is common practice undertaken by consumers where they compare the price of multiple goods from multiple retailers before making a purchase decision. Price is frequently a deciding factor and comparison shopping is especially popular for purchases of higher-value goods and services.

How to prevent comparison shopping

To find this out, we went straight to the source: tips websites for comparison shoppers! We went to sites like moneysavingexpert.com and lifehack.com to uncover the hacks and tricks that comparison shoppers follow to hunt for the best prices. And then we found ways to fight back.

Overall, it turns out that halting comparison shoppers in their tracks doesn’t have a single, silver-bullet solution. Success against comparison shopping means employing several long-term and short-term strategies – here goes…

1. Got a guarantee? Make it clear!

Let’s start with one of the key comparison shopping tips from Money Saving Expert:

What’s really happening here? This tip is at the core of why comparison shopping is such a big deal: a consumer is rarely sure when they’ve found the best offer.

This uncertainty is what keeps them searching for hours and employing increasingly complicated hacks. They’re never quite sure if there’s another, better offer somewhere out there. This is our first fundamental of preventing product price comparison – make it crystal-clear that the best price is right in front of your user.

Here’s how Australian retailer HobbyKing did this. When a user highlighted a certain product, Yieldify’s click trigger read this behavior and served a best price guarantee message:

HobbyKing price comparison example

Of course, this depends on actually having the best price for the product that you’re selling! If that’s not necessarily the case for you, don’t worry – there are other tactics at your disposal. Read on…

2. Comparison shopping isn’t just about price

There’s much more to the eCommerce experience than product price comparison. While it’s the major one – and there are dozens of product price comparison sites to attest to that – it’s far from the only element that your potential customers are weighing up.

If you’re looking to stop a comparison shopper in their tracks, you need to consider what else they might evaluating about your product. Here’s another example from Money Saving Expert:

The key thing to take away from this tip is that even while your comparison shopper is searching for good deals on price, they’ve still got lots of other considerations in mind. Trustworthiness and security (if the deal looks too good to be true, it probably is), delivery costs and times, and returns policies – these are all things your price comparison shopper is also looking for.

In the below example from one of Yieldify’s clients, LinenHouse, the brand has showcased its other decision-making criteria and display them prominently below its product categories. By focusing on other benefits such as the free shipping threshold, 14 day free returns policy and their Australian brand heritage – the consumer is encouraged to look beyond simply price.

Essentially, if you don’t have the ability to promote the best price guarantee, consider which other proof points you can highlight instead. This is where clear brand USPs, displayed in the right place, can really help differentiate your brand offering.

3. Use social proof, and lots of it

Social proof comes in many, many shapes and sizes – and they can be your best weapons against comparison shopping.

First up, there’s the use of social proof as a means of creating a sense of urgency. It is a common conversion rate optimization tactic that’s particularly powerful here. This is all about making it clear to your shopper that the offer you’ve put on the table isn’t going to last forever. If they delay, they risk missing out.

Another way of using social proof for this purpose is to show stock levels. It’s a common tactic used in the travel industry to encourage bookings.

But social proof has another dimension. In the last section, we talked about the other things that comparison shoppers consider outside of price. One of them was security and trustworthiness – this is where social proof comes to the rescue again. This time, it’s in two key forms: customer reviews and trust badges.

Let’s look at reviews first. In the above example for a home and garden eCommerce brand, your eye is drawn immediately to their 5* ratings which provide reassurance. These are an incredibly powerful way to assuage any concerns over safety and security that might have come up in section 2. Showing reviews through platforms like Trustpilot and Yotpo are easy ways to show your comparison shopper that your site and your service are legitimate.

Trust badges are those seals of approval and verification that get conferred on you by third parties that carry authoritative weight. These could be award logos or even star ratings. The key is to have ones that your customers will recognize and then strategically place them in the journey.

4. Engage cart abandonment strategies

Your eCommerce comparison shopper is not dumb. They know what you’re up to and they’re more than ready to put the work in. Unfortunately for you, this means that they’re often willing to play a long game in the hope of discounts:

This tip inevitably encourages a cringe from an e-commerce marketer. Comparison shopping means that your cart abandonment strategy might be working against you!

So what do you do?

There’s no easy answer. If you’re running an email remarketing strategy that involves discounting, then you’re probably doing so because it’s working. So should you reconsider because comparison shoppers have figured you out? Not really.

There are smart things you can do to identify comparison shopping behavior on your website. Our favorite way to do so involves some tell-tale clicking:

What you’re seeing above is age-old ‘tell’ for comparison shopping: highlighting the name of the product so that it can be copy-pasted into the search bar. We’ve all done it.

This is where you can use smart tools to react to this behavior. Our new click trigger (what you saw earlier on the HobbyKing website) allows you to spot this behavior and react to it. In HobbyKing’s case, it enabled them to show a best-price guarantee. However, you could just use it to better identify product price comparison behavior in order to re-shape your strategies around it.

5. Can’t beat comparison shoppers? Join them.

Despite everything we’ve just said, facilitating product comparison can actually be a good thing. Hear me out.

There’s a merit to recognizing if comparison shopping is inevitable for your category, because you can pre-empt that behavior.

Showing a best-price guarantee is actually the simplest way of doing just that. You’re acknowledging that product price comparison is important and owning that conversation. However, let’s remind ourselves that comparison shopping isn’t just about price. Reviews, stock levels, quality indicators and features are just as important.

If you’re able to offer your shopper the opportunity to compare and contrast these facets of different products, you’re keeping that evaluation process on your site. Here’s an example of how WooCommerce allows you to add comparison tables to your site:

You’ve pre-empted the temptation to compare and contrast – congratulations!

So, that brings us to the end of our recommendations on how to identify and prevent comparison shopping. The general theme is to acknowledge that comparison is a natural part of decision-making and that defeating it lies in making that process easier for your shopper. Comparison shopping happen because of consumer doubt and insecurity – incorporate that thinking into your customer journey.

Comparison Shopping FAQs

❓ What is comparison shopping?

is a common practice undertaken by consumers where they compare multiple goods from multiple retailers before making a purchase decision. Price is frequently a deciding factor and comparison shopping is especially popular for purchases of higher-value goods and services.

? What is the purpose of comparison shopping?

The main purpose behind comparison shopping is attempting to find the best deal on a product or service.

? How does comparison shopping help the consumer?

Comparison shopping helps consumers make informed buying decisions by comparing price and other factors across a number of different potential suppliers. Consumers may also factor in information such as customer reviews, quality of service, levels of expertise, and the overall customer experience when weighing up which brand to choose.

Product Update: June 2019

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What’s new to the Yieldify Conversion Platform this summer

The start of summer sees a lot of updates coming to the Yieldify Conversion Platform. From new tricks to stop comparison shoppers leaving and cleaner ways to capture data, join as we run down the latest targeting and format options available this month on the platform.

New triggers: Click and Hover

Our two new behavioral triggers make it easier to engage with your visitor at the perfect moment, helping them continue their journey onto conversion.

How it works

  • Trigger messages when your user clicks or hovers on a button
  • Trigger messages upon clicks on ‘un-clickable’ elements like images and paragraphs

When to use it

Clicks and hovers are great indicators of user interest, so the possibilities for using it to encourage conversion and even cross-sell are limitless.

One of the most powerful is to stop comparison shoppers in their tracks: as soon as someone selects a product title to copy-and-paste it into their search bar, trigger a message that shows your best price guarantee.

Example of click trigger

Here are just a few more potential uses:

  • Up-sell ‘the whole look’ when someone adds a single item of clothing to their cart
  • Provide extra information on a product when a user shows interest, minimizing the number of touchpoints needed to get them to conversion

Want to see more? Get a demo here.

New format: In-Page Full-Width Banners

As the next evolution in our In-Page Personalization functionality, we’re introducing full-width banners that sit squarely at the top of your page. These ‘stick’ to the top of the screen to remain visible as your user scrolls down the page:

Example of in-page banners

When to use it

In-Page Personalization is becoming increasingly popular with our customers as it’s an effective short-cut to achieving personalized pages without code changes. Here are just a few things you could do with these banners:

  • Announce a flash sale by showing a site-wide banner to all new users
  • Run seasonal promotions on key category or product pages

New targeting: session targeting

The Yieldify Conversion Platform already has a number of targeting options based on how much your user has engaged with your website. You can target visitors based on things such as: the amount of time spent on site, the number of pages viewed and the specific pages they’ve landed on.

What you might notice about all of those options is that they were all in-session options – our new targeting option changes all that. Using Session Targeting, you can target visitors based on the precise number of sessions they’ve had on your site.

This allows you to show different messages depending on your user’s specific session. For example:

Conversion Platform

When to use it

This targeting function opens the door to targeting based on longer, more complex purchase journeys – perfect for sectors such as travel and financial services. Some examples:

  • Target visitors in their second session with more high-level information, saving more detailed or technical information for a user on their third or fourth visit
  • Highlight alternative CTAs (such as call centers or other sources of help) for users taking more sessions than average to convert

Enhanced targeting: geo-targeting at regional and state level

Geotargeting has been a mainstay of the Yieldify Conversion Platform since its launch, but now we’re getting super-granular. You’ll now be able to narrow your targeting to state or regional level.

When to use it

Here are just a few ways you can use this to further personalize your activity:

  • Holding events? Highlight these to users in the area.
  • If you can offer customer support or click-and-collect from brick-and-mortar stores, then highlight this to visitors from eligible locations

New content: dropdown menus

Being able to effectively capture data from your visitors is critical – but it’s only any good if that data is clean. Free-text fields can leave you vulnerable to messy, inconsistent data – with dropdown menus, you can make sure that you gather information in an easily indexed format:

Example of dropdown menu

Even better, it’s so much easier for your user to engage with (particularly on mobile).

When to use it

You can capture pretty much any kind of data you want, but here are a few ideas that our clients have found particularly useful:

  • Collect your user’s birthday month to offer them birthday promotions
  • Give users a simple question to determine why they’re leaving a site
  • Capture product interests in order to personalize your email sequences

Not on the platform yet?

The Yieldify Conversion Platform hosts all this and more. If you’d like to see more about how it could help personalize your website 5x faster than other methods, then request a demo here and our friendly team will be in touch.

For more detailed information and technical instructions, don’t forget to visit our Knowledge Base!

B2C Lead Generation: 4 Strategies for Success

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Explore 4 B2C lead generation case studies showing how real companies drive more leads.

1. Improving B2C lead generation by addressing privacy anxiety – Scribbler’s plan

Data privacy scandals pose a growing problem to B2C lead generation. Last year, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) led companies around the world to redesign their privacy policies. Multiple privacy scandals at Facebook and incoming legislation from California reflect that privacy is a top-of-mind concern for consumers.

That’s the elephant in the room when you ask a website visitor to opt-in as a lead. However, there’s a simple way of getting around this challenge. Many visitors are often willing to exchange their data in return for something tangible (see our research here) – usually money off or enhanced service. So take a page from Scribbler, which offers a 10% off coupon in return for a subscription:

Yieldify Scribbler B2C lead generation campaign

Remember that if you ask for more sensitive details like a birthday, you’ll need to provide more assurance on how you’ll protect and use that data. Read Scribbler’s full customer journey optimization case study here.

2. Get ahead through personalization like Marks and Spencer

When a marketing tactic is easy to use, it becomes more expensive. Just think about how much Google and Facebook Ads have increased in cost in the past five years. If you’re looking for a new opportunity, pursue marketing tactics that are still considered difficult – like data-driven personalization.

According to our research, most marketers consider personalization one of the most difficult challenges facing them. If you can make it work, you’ll have an advantage in delivering relevant messages that are more likely to convert.

The easier approach is to personalize based on persona rather than attempting to personalize to a 1-on-1 level. If you have high-quality data, go for full personalization.

This is where leading British retailer Marks and Spencer executed effectively. In launching their new website, the team worked with Yieldify to differentiate between new visitors and returning visitors, showing different CTAs in order to make sure that visitors engaged:

Marks and Spencer lead generation case study

By personalizing to the visitor’s sign-in status, this resulted in a 5.4% conversion rate uplift in new visitor registration (read more here).

3. Re-position your newsletter – the Kiehl’s model

Getting your visitor to sign up to a newsletter simply for the sake of ‘staying in touch’ is no longer a good enough reason for someone to share their data with you. To convince today’s consumers to hand over their sought-after information, take the time to enhance and clarify the value that they’ll receive in exchange.

Beauty brand Kiehl’s generated leads through effective positioning of its newsletter as a VIP club, detailing three clear benefits of signing up ahead of the CTA:

Kiehls email sign-up overlay

This applies even if you can’t offer monetary incentives as Scribbler did in the first section – value lies as much in elements like exclusivity or early access, so explore what can work for you.

4. Recruit your customers to gain more leads – an online eyewear retailer’s way

One of your best lead generation channels is your existing customer base. Nielsen research in 2015 found that over 80% of people trust recommendations from friends and family – it’s a huge opportunity that when leveraged effectively, can generate masses of leads.

How can you engage your current customers to generate more leads? Simple: reward them. One online eyewear retailer used a referral program with a simple offer: “Give $5, Get $5 when you refer a friend.”

The results speak for themselves: a 22:1 return on investment. If you have a smaller budget, make the reward for referrals offer to a small segment of your customer base. Find out more about how to leverage your existing customer to acquire new ones in our free ebook.

Want to grow your lead generation program?

If you’re keen to emulate the B2C lead generation success that you’ve seen here, check out our free ebook, packed with examples and detailed advice:

Meet the Team: Lana Kropyvna, Head of Design

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In this series, we sit down with Yieldifiers across the business to find out more about what they do all day.

Next up: Lana Kropyvna, Head of Design

What’s your role at Yieldify?

I lead the Design team, which is made up of four fantastic designers in London and Portugal.

Together with our Client Services team, we develop customer journeys for a variety of brands – from Domino’s through to Megabus. These innovative user journey strategies help increase conversion rates and sales.

As a team we’re passionate about interaction, behavioral science and technology. We apply research and creative thinking to a human-centered approach, finding ways to improve user experiences via design and delivering intuitive digital experiences.

What did you do before you joined the team here?

I have over 8 years’ experience working on a wide variety of projects with a pretty eclectic collection of brands covering e-commerce, media and finance.

My previous role before joining Yieldify was with a digital design team in a start-up, creating branding and identity projects, web assets and email campaigns. I was heavily involved in developing brand guidelines and communicating them to the teams in EMEA, US, and UAE. This came in very handy when we were rebranding in Yieldify!

Tell us about the part the Design function plays at Yieldify

What we do within the Design team is to create the catalyst between the user’s needs and the technology. We do this by creating a seamless digital experience between the client’s brand and our technical solutions.

How do you think it’s different to what other companies like us do?

All campaigns for our global clients are designed internally by our team, the design of which is usually turned extremely quickly.

I would say we’re different from other companies in the space because of the level of experience that each designer has within the team. Almost everyone in the design team has passed a 3-year milestone at Yieldify – as such we’ve all learned the best practices and ways to apply them in order. It means that we can deliver incredibly quickly, which allows our teams to be reactive to new insights and trends and therefore get faster results for our clients. 

What do you think our clients value most about what you do?

From the feedback we get, I’d say they value our attention to detail and how we translate their brand guidelines into campaigns that integrate really well into their wider marketing. 

As a team, we make it our business to know the client’s brand inside-out, paying close attention to their trends and the message they’re communicating so that we can apply it in our design thinking. Any marketer will tell you just how critical and sensitive it can be to capture the nuances of individual brands at every touchpoint, so it’s so important to have an experienced who can get it right without dozens of iterations. 

How important is the role of design in e-commerce?

People buy with their eyes. If something doesn’t look good, users won’t be interested in it – end of story. There’s a furious competition online for everything, so good design is the key to a successful user journey.

Does the structure of an e-commerce site bring any particular design challenges?

Shopping online can be a frustrating experience bought on through many factors. The decision-making process, as well as the checkout flow,  needs to be clean, clear and straightforward. Every one of our design solutions has to be on-brand, stand out and give the user a seamless, enjoyable experience. 

What design trends have you seen emerging in e-commerce recently?

There are quite a few. Personalization is obviously key, but so are easier checkouts and payment solutions, seamless integration with mobile. What really unites all of these is delivering a more user-focused approach rather than just a technical solution to a problem.

What trends do you expect to see become more popular?

Digital experiences are evolving and becoming more deeply integrated in the physical world – we’re already starting to see a blurred line between the digital and physical, helping make shopping experiences richer.

Quickfire questions

What do you like best about working at Yieldify?

I love that I get to work with a variety of really great brands. Our work reaches large, diverse audiences and I feel that through what we do, we’re helping to influence the way people behave online.

What’s your proudest achievement since joining?

We recently went through a rebranding exercise where we repositioned Yieldify with a more confident visual identity. Working collaboratively with different teams and launching this to our clients was a very proud moment for both myself and everyone at Yieldify.

What was your biggest learning?

I’d say my biggest learning is that I can’t be everywhere at the same time! I’ve since learned to delegate tasks more, giving further responsibility to other team members and getting more time to focus on my tasks and do them well.

Introducing In-Page Personalization from Yieldify

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In-Page Personalization

Our biggest launch this year will revolutionize your personalization strategies

Personalization has always been kind of a drag. Most platforms take months to get up-and-running and then demand hours upon hours of skilled time in order to execute. In fact, 30% of marketers rate personalization among their most difficult executions (it’s up there with machine learning).

New In-Page Personalization from Yieldify – announced worldwide today – sets out to change all that. Here’s how.

What is In-Page Personalization?

In-Page Personalization is – put simply – the ability to add personalization to your website pages without having to touch their code.

The new In-Page functionality pairs with Yieldify’s appropriately-named On-Page Personalization, which includes overlays, banners, Notifications and much more. Where On-Page Personalization is intentionally more prominent, In-Page Personalization is designed to be more subtle. Using the two together forms the backbone of any effective Customer Journey Optimization strategy.

Here’s an example of how it could look on a mobile site:

In-Page Personalization example on retail mobile device

Not sure which bit we’re talking about? That’s exactly the idea. The In-Page Personalization element here is the ‘120 people…’ flag in blue – it has been added in a matter of minutes and will only appear on the site’s most popular products, even then only materializing after the user has dwelled for a few seconds. To your user, it all looks seamlessly like part of your site.

All of this is hosted on the Yieldify Conversion Platform, which gets up-and-running in less than two weeks – a fraction of the time than the multiple months that most personalization platforms demand.

Who is it for?

In-Page Personalization is made for any e-commerce team that wants a fast and easy way to personalize their website – that means it’s great for everyone from retail to financial services.

A great example of the product in action comes from NEST Fragrances, who have used In-Page Personalization to deliver social proof messaging as part of the fabric of their site:

In-Page Personalization displayed on the NEST Fragrances website

The work so far has already led to a 30% uplift in conversion rates:

“With In-Page Personalization, we’re now able to make our website content reactive to our users’ behavior in real-time. With limited resources and bandwidth, it would have been very difficult for us to deliver this on our own. Based on initial results, we’re excited to see where we can take it next.”

Brian Crowley, Director, E-commerce and Digital Marketing at NEST Fragrances

Here’s another example from the award-winning tour operator Leger Holidays, who used in-page personalization to show a message at a late stage in the booking funnel, encouraging users to continue on their journey:

According to our team, using this format on the Leger website meant this message could be anchored right alongside the relevant sections of the form, without interrupting the visitor journey. To date, the results have been impressive, with conversion rates up by +15.7% versus the control group.

And here’s another example from award winning OTA TravelUp.

TravelUp In-Page Personalization

Sticky campaigns allowed TravelUp to situate a ‘Fly Now Pay Later’ message seamlessly and in context across all devices – anchored to the ‘book now’ button on the booking page. This was initially shown to all visitors who reached the booking page, based on the hypothesis that this behavior demonstrated high intent and that conversion would, therefore, be likely. 

However, the results told a different story, and so TravelUp sought to learn from this. With the flexibility of the Yieldify Platform, the targeting for the campaign was quickly adjusted to include only new users, this time with the hypothesis that the ‘Fly Now Pay Later’ message would be more attractive to those visitors in research mode, who had perhaps not yet saved up to book their flights. With the adjusted targeting, TravelUp proved its hypothesis correct – new visitors in research mode were more likely to convert when shown this sticky campaign. The message drove a +5.24% uplift in conversions among this target group.

How does In-Page Personalization work?

It works in two very simple ways:

1.Sticky campaigns

These are creatives and messages that you can ‘stick’ to almost any element of your page. These will continue ‘sticking’ to that element, no matter where your user scrolls, making them appear completely seamless with the rest of your page content.

2. Embedded campaigns

Of course, not every page design allows that little piece of extra space that you might need for a Sticky campaign – this is where Embedded campaigns come in. These will add your message or creative directly into your page.

Both types of campaign look identical from a user perspective (in that they’ll have no idea this isn’t already a part of your website).

Why bother though?

Since launching this new functionality in beta, we’ve seen an overwhelming response from e-commerce companies across the world. Dozens of clients have told us that this offers an invaluable route out of time-consuming and complex personalization, making fast and agile personalization available to them for the first time:

“Changing elements of our website so that it can be properly personalized used to be one of our biggest challenges – it competed with other priorities and would take a considerable amount of time to get it live. Using Yieldify’s In-Page Personalization has been a game-changer: now it only takes minutes. It’s opened the door to a faster, more agile approach to ensuring our website performs at its best.”

David Gomez, Insurance Director at AllClear Travel

To prove just how easy it is, here’s a quick video that shows you how to put a campaign together:

Here’s where there’s another element that makes all of this pretty special: behavioral triggering. Where many personalization platforms will allow you to invest your time and resource into creating personalized pages depending on cohort segments, Yieldify allows you to take things to the next level by being able to change the appearance of that content depending on in-session behavior.

How do I get In-Page Personalization?

Both In-Page and On-Page Personalization form part of the Yieldify Conversion Platform. As an award-winning product, it specializes in its speed and ease-of-use – you’ll be able to get up-and-running within two weeks, with just a single tag to have your IT team integrate. We’ll take care of the rest.

To find out more, request a free demo.

As part of your demo, we’ll assess whether In-Page Personalization looks right for your website, and then use the time to walk you through our ideas for how it could achieve the best results.

How We Took Yieldify’s Branding to Infinity and Beyond

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In late 2018, we took a look at what we’d achieved as a business. Over 1,000 clients, an award-winning platform and 30 billion datapoints. We’d come a long way.

The problem was that the way we communicated ourselves was lagging a little bit behind. It was time for a refresh of our brand.

Starting the rebrand project

First things first, the message.

Over a year ago, Yieldify began talking about Customer Journey Optimization – we’re proud to be flying the flag for this exciting new practice. In writing extensively about it in that time, we’ve come to learn just how much it resonates with marketers in e-commerce and beyond.

For example, a report we published in late 2018 found that more than 70% of marketers understand the customer journey, but optimizing it still presents challenges. In 2019, we’re looking at a landscape where CJO rises further up through the agenda and starts to becoming an established practice for marketers.

Our challenge was to see whether we could push this further and bring CJO to the marketers who’d never heard of it. We wanted to do this by connecting it to another concept, one much more widely understood and recognised in the market: personalization.

To make CJO easier to understand, we decided to bring personalization directly into our messages. In a nutshell, we now described CJO as ‘personalization across the full customer journey’. In other words, if personalization is a tactic, CJO is a strategy that makes use of it from A-Z.

So in crystallizing our messaging in order to build a visual identity on top, we created a new tagline that would encapsulate this in a simple soundbite:

“customer journeys made personal”

With personalization and CJO now firmly knitted together, we had a solid verbal identity that orbited the idea of the journey. This spoke not just to the kinds of customer journeys that our clients’ customers would take, but the journeys that our teams take our clients on as we help them navigate the new challenges of e-commerce.

We knew that we were looking for amplification and enhancement rather than a complete revolution – our message was being taken to the next level, rather than changed.

Now we could start thinking about how we would translate this visually.

Creating a new logo

It’s arguably the most important piece of a brand identity – or it’s at least the one that everyone notices first. Our logo was over five years old and badly in need of updating for Yieldify’s new phase.

Once again, we started with the journey: we wanted our new logo and icon to convey the idea of progression and movement. The arrow element the formed part of our former logo had done this, but it needed a cleaner and more flexible execution.

We broke down what we were looking for into two constituent parts: an icon and a full logo. Following a few rounds of scoping, we’d arrived at what we were looking for:

The rationale was simple: the subtle arrow directions of the icon gave the journey-centric energy we wanted, creating a sense of movement and momentum. Building out into the rest of the logo, this offered us an important level of continuity while creating an outline that was bolder.

And the atom? We killed it. There are enough SaaS businesses out there with an atom for a logo so we just gave it a 21-gun salute and sent it off to the great icon graveyard in the sky.

Expanding the palette

Continuity being important, we didn’t want to change too much about our color palette. Instead, we wanted to expand our set of colors in order to give ourselves more flexibility as we diversified our marketing activities (and swag collection).

To that end, we added three new accent colors to our palette:

Building a universe

Then we came to what was arguably the most exciting part of the whole exercise: our new mascots and their world.

Before the big unveil, a little context. In recent years, the B2B marketing world has come to better understand that at the end of the day, we’re all still selling to humans. What that means is that the considerations around emotion, brand and engagement that were previously assumed to belong more squarely in the B2C camp have begun to be recognised as just as important for B2B.

For us, that meant that we wanted to build a creative landscape around Yieldify that was imaginative, playful and full of the kind of warmth and friendliness that we believe to be at the core of who we are as a business.

The development of this idea started with a new ambassador – a character that would embody our values, our ambitions and our attitude. After hundreds of Slack arguments over her name, Sky was born:

So, why a female astronaut to represent a marketing technology company? The answer goes back to our central message: journeys. Sky explores and charts new courses not just in this universe, but in others too. On top of that, she humanizes and personalizes the process and the experience the way we do as we work with our clients.

With Sky in place, the rest of our universe began to form around her. A colourful, multi-dimensional landscape of colours and iconography that provided us with a whole new playground of elements to translate across every Yieldify touchpoint. From the popsockets that adorn all of our phones to the 2019 e-commerce calendar that now features an LGBTQ+ alien, we built out a wide range of elements that mean every element of your interaction with Yieldify offers something new:

Yieldify calendar

Launching our new brand

As a business operating in four countries with clients in dozens more, we decided to phase our new brand and messaging rollout in order to make the transition more manageable. With Sky and friends appearing in new materials since the end of 2018, the launch has culminated in today’s launch of our brand new website. We’re all-new for 2019.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts and questions about our new branding. Check our events page to see where you can meet us in the coming year to see it all brought to life (and even take some of the new swag home with you).

Meet the Yieldify Team: Mark Murray, Head of Travel

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In this new series, we’re sitting down with Yieldifiers across the business to find out more about what they do all day. First up: Mark Murray, Head of Travel.

What’s your role at Yieldify?

I head up the Travel vertical at Yieldify, making sure that clients are receiving value through their campaigns and maturing with us to deliver more personalized experiences to their customers.

What did you do before you joined the team here?

A large part of my background has been in working with MVT platforms and consultancy companies. Similar to how we work at Yieldify, this was all about delivering enhanced customer experiences enriched by data, making sure that we target users at the right parts of their journey.

Tell us about the kinds of travel brands that Yieldify works with

We work with a wide range of travel brands across almost every aspect of the industry. 

From train companies like Virgin Trains, Stansted Express and Loco2, to holiday companies like Leger and GolfBreaks, to OTAs like Flight Centre, TravelUP and Student Universe. 

For Yieldify, travel is one of our most exciting areas of growth. We’ve onboarded dozens on new travel clients over the last year alone as there’s so much appetite in the industry for a solution that can help companies adapt to the challenges of a complex customer journey. 

They all seem pretty different – do you think these travel companies have anything in common?

Travel is quite a complicated industry: it’s not like retail where your purchases are smaller but more frequent.

When it comes to travel, users need time to think about their purchase – that’s the key challenge that I think most of the brands I’ve listed have in common. It’s about presenting the right message to the user at the right time, knowing whether they’re in research or purchasing mode.

What does Yieldify do for travel companies? 

When we work with travel brands, we’re all about being able to show targeted messages in the customer journey at the right time.

Critically, this doesn’t always involve trying to convert that user in-session. As we’ve just discussed, the customer journey in travel is long and complex, but actually pretty well-defined into key phases. We ensure that our activity is mapped to those different stages and the respective softer conversions that happen along the way.

For example, the goal for one stage could be capturing an email address when a user looks to exit. This means that we can communicate with them at another point in time, or provide trip information to help them decide where to go. It’s once we have that later stage of engagement that we can then run campaigns like urgency messaging or social proof to really push the user and convert.

What are the key trends that travel marketers have on their radar right now?

You can’t talk about travel without raising Brexit.

It’s a massive topic within the UK travel industry, and a lot of our clients are feeling the pressure by consumers not wanting to book until they know where the UK will stand within the EU. Airlines, in particular, are struggling, but on the flipside, we’re seeing that local UK companies are doing quite well with the staycation side.

Looking to 2019, I think we’ll see the first half of the year and maybe beyond focusing on Brexit. We might see some travel companies pushing users to take the opportunity to go abroad before any restrictions, but I think that when (or if!) the UK has an agreement in place, we’ll see a spike in holidays. So where January is usually the key month for bookings, I anticipate there being another spike later on in the year.

Another key trend is responsible tourism. 70% of people now believe that travel companies should ensure help local people and the local economy. I think this kind of sentiment has been reflected in trends such as the huge popularity of shows such as David Attenborough’s ‘Blue Planet II’. A focus for 2019 will be how to communicate CSR to users on site, through their journey and at destinations as it becomes more important.

Looking at the onsite experience, personalization and mobile are still the two primary focus areas for travel. Mobile, in particular, is an interesting challenge for travel: users don’t like spending thousands of dollars on their phone, but the hours they need to spend researching their major trip means that inevitably many of these will be on mobile. For the marketer, the question remains is how to translate research into purchase in a mobile environment. 

How have these trends evolved over the last couple of years?

In terms of personalization, travel is a little behind the retail sector, but it’s catching up fast. The next stage is being able to send information cross-device so you’re not treating the user as a brand new visitor.

Mobile has a focus on the research phase: 40% of users research flights and accommodation on their mobiles, however when it comes to bookings this falls to 21%. That number’s growing and I think in 2019 we’ll see this keep climbing. 

What do you expect to see next?

Artificial intelligence will become a huge influence on users. Data is getting bigger and bigger each day, but harnessing it effectively to serve the right experiences to users with the right content is becoming key. Ultimately, the only way to deliver 100% 1-2-1 personalization is through machine learning – it may be some way off for many, but I think we’ll see more trailblazers in 2019.

Quickfire questions

What’s the best thing about working at Yieldify?

The people. Everyone is so friendly and willing to help, which makes it a great environment to work in and a place where we can really go above and beyond for our clients.

What’s been your biggest mistake?

[editor’s note: we pressed Mark on this for some time but he maintains he’s never made one]

What’s your proudest achievement since joining?

Believe it or not, not all of our campaigns work first time: we need to learn and adapt through optimization (that’s kind of the point). One of my proudest moments is taking a client through this journey where campaigns weren’t performing too well, conducting a deep review and analysis of their site and changing our approach with their campaigns. They are now flying high (pun intended) in terms of results and doing really well.

Product Update November 2018: Improve the Customer Journey

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This month on the Yieldify Conversion Platform, we’re introducing new ways to improve customer journeys through new targeting options.

Customer journey optimization is logical in theory, but it’s often harder than it looks to improve the customer journey. That’s why we’ve introduced three new features to make it a lot easier: Campaign History Targeting, Data Layer targeting and Page Depth targeting. These allow you to adapt your activity to multiple stages of the customer journey, without the need for a complex set-up.

Our bonus features for this month approach the customer journey from a different angle: time. Find out more about Time-of-Day and Day-of-Week targeting.

Campaign History Targeting

This is one of our most exciting targeting developments yet.

Campaign History targeting allows you to target campaigns based on whether a user has already seen another Yieldify campaign within a set time frame. This conditional logic allows you to construct end-to-end customer journeys with just a few clicks. 

According to our data, 21% of first-time purchases take place on a visitor’s 2nd session. You therefore can’t afford to provide a stale experience to your returning visitors. Using Campaign History Targeting, you can show visitors a promotion consistent with where they are in the journey to keep the experience relevant and improve the chances of a return purchase.

Data Layer Targeting

The second way to improve the customer journey is with data layer targeting. This allows you to target your activity based on elements present in the data layer, making it easier to deliver the next level of personalization. Here are just a few ways you could use it:

  • Target particular product items based on their SKU
  • Targeting travel searches based on the route combination
  • Target on a pre-defined or custom segment of users where the segment is specified in the data layer
  • Target on the type of a page (e.g. product page, category page, search results page) if it’s not specified in the URL

If your website set-up means you don’t have the opportunity to read much data from the page, then this is a game-changing piece of targeting. Talk to us to find out more.

Page Depth Targeting

The difference in engagement levels between someone who’s just landed on your website compared to a visitor 20 product pages in is clear. It’s for this reason that we’ve introduced Page Depth Targeting to the platform.

This feature allows you to improve the customer journey by targeting based on the number of pages that a user has visited in their session. This makes it easy to differentiate your message for someone who’s new to your site versus someone who’s in the middle of in-depth browsing. Combine it with other features to create personas for long-term targeting. 

Bonus features: Time-based Targeting

While our new features this month have focused on how to target the customer journey, we’ve also introduced some new options: these are all about time.

How you browse during your lunch break at your desk is different to how you browse when you’re on your mobile during the commute home. It, therefore, makes a lot of sense to differentiate your experiences throughout the day to reflect these different customer journeys.

Using Time-of-Day Targeting on the Yieldify Conversion Platform, you can easily set campaigns to target shoppers at certain times of the day.

This is exactly what soak.com did with a campaign that targeted lunchtime browsers (those landing on product pages between 12:30-14:00). It used Dynamic Social Proof to create a sense of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) among mobile users who would otherwise have been casually browsing. The notification showed how many other users had browsed the product in the last day, indicating popularity:

With bathrooms being a high-consideration product with a long purchase cycle, this moved a high-funnel browser further down the path of purchase. As a result, the campaign generated an 11.2% conversion rate uplift in the target group.

In addition, you can use Day-of-Week Targeting to further improve the customer journey based on time-related behaviour. This allows you to only show campaigns on certain days of the week. You could, for example, use this to target different messages on the weekend to high-value shoppers vs. weekday evening window-shoppers.

Get on the platform

Not using the Yieldify Conversion Platform yet? Request a demo and we’ll show you how it can work for your site.

The Complete Guide to Onsite Remarketing

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Onsite remarketing guide | Yieldify

Onsite remarketing is much more than pop-ups. This guide unpacks what it can do for eCommerce conversion rate optimization and more.

The concept of onsite remarketing is not necessarily a new one, but it’s often misunderstood.

In this guide, we’ll unpack what it is and how to apply it to your marketing activity. At Yieldify, we’ve been doing onsite remarketing for 5 years and created over 200,000 campaigns – so we hope that you’ll be able to take our learnings with you!

What is Onsite Remarketing?

If ‘offsite’ remarketing is like waiting for someone to leave your store before trying to entice them back, onsite remarketing is roughly the equivalent of having a helpful sales associate engage them while they’re still in-store. 

Also known as behavioral targeting, onsite remarketing involves creating a data-driven strategy to engage visitors while they’re on your website.

While many people consider onsite remarketing as consisting solely of exit intent pop-ups and lightboxes, the truth is that a strong onsite remarketing strategy is much more. It draws heavily on the principles of behavioral psychology in order to deliver an effective, agile way to engage your visitors that static UX simply can’t achieve.

By relying on a data-driven strategy designed to produce specific outcomes, it can have a major impact on your site’s performance while remaining unintrusive for your visitors. So how does it work?

How to put together an onsite remarketing campaign?

Before you start

The danger in onsite remarketing is to think that you put a pop-up on your site and then wait for the conversions to roll in. In reality, onsite remarketing is all about personalizing the customer journey – you’re creating experiences that adapt and shift to the individual user’s behavior.

To do that effectively, you need a strong strategy that’s grounded in analytics. Start with a clear goal (you’ll discover more about these later on in this article). Then, get a clear idea of what your customer journey looks like and start to put together your campaigns with an eye to the overall journey.

Then you can get started on building those campaigns. The first thing to understand about onsite remarketing is how it’s put together – each campaign has 4 simple components:

1. Who to target

This is arguably the most important part of the campaign: deciding who you’ll show it to. Target too broadly and you run the risk of showing irrelevant content, target too narrowly and you’ll take a long time to reach a significant result.

You’ll want to create a segment out of a number of carefully-chosen attributes. In this example below, we’ve used the Yieldify Conversion Platform to create a target segment of returning users on desktop or tablet devices who are currently on the checkout page with more than £40 in their cart:

onsite remarketing options on the Yieldify Conversion Platform

The options on the left-hand side of the image show that there are numerous other options from which to create a target segment, ranging from location to time of day.

2. When to trigger

Once you’ve decided who you want to show your campaign to, you need to decide what behavior they’ll need to exhibit in order for the campaign to trigger. Simply put, if targeting is deciding ‘who’, triggering is deciding ‘when’.

The most common options are exit-intent, timer or scroll trigger. Used well, you’ll be engaging your target user at the perfect moment to elicit a lead or a conversion.

3. What to show

Once you’ve decided on the right person and the right time, it’s time to choose the right content.

Starting with static content, you can offer discounts, highlight promotions or even use grow your email database by utilizing the power of a lead capture software. At this point, many people assume that you need to offer a discount in order to keep your potential customer engaged – that’s not the case. While discounting can be great when offered to the right target customer, there are many more effective ways to encourage a conversion.

Check out this example from the beauty brand Skyn Iceland. They A/B tested two creatives on abandoning visitors and found that the discounting message didn’t perform as well as one that simply highlighted the brand’s value proposition:

Skyn Iceland campaign

To take things to the next level, your content should get smarter. One of the best and most effective ways to do so is with Dynamic Social Proof, which shows your user how many other visitors have been engaging with the product that they’re looking at. This can create a powerful sense of urgency, helping drive your visitor further through the funnel. Here’s an example from shoe brand Kickers:

Dynamic Social Proof Kickers case study

Best practice here is also to A/B test your creative – a simple change in artwork or CTA messaging can make all the difference to your click-through and conversion rates.

4. How to show it

Finally, decide what the best format is for your content. As we’ve said before, onsite remarketing is much more than pop-ups. While these are an impactful way to engage your visitor, you have many others at your disposal.

For example, notifications can appear at the bottom of a screen to deliver a subtler message – or even two of them:

Double Notifications for onsite remarketing

Add banners to the mix and you have multiple ways of delivering your onsite remarketing.

Now you know how a campaign is constructed, let’s look at three of the key ways you can use them.

Cart abandonment

Cart abandonment is still one of the biggest challenges facing an e-commerce marketer, with over two-thirds of shopping carts going abandoned. After all, creating the perfect checkout process is much easier said than done.

Here are some examples of how onsite remarketing can reinforce your brand and turn those apprehensive visitors into paying customers.

1. Use exit-intent wisely

Exit-intent technology is probably one of the best-known elements of onsite remarketing, and for good reason. It’s perfect for those ‘last ditch’ attempts at recovering a user who would otherwise be leaving your website.

2. Use social proof

If you look at the key reasons behind cart abandonment, there are two that stand out. Firstly, would-be customers are looking to see if they can get a cheaper price elsewhere. This can be very easily beaten by using social proof. This example from Omni Hotels is a very simple message that shows would-be price comparison shoppers a guarantee that this is the best possible price. It resulted in an impressive 39.5% conversion rate uplift:

Omni Hotels onsite remarketing for cart abandonment

Secondly, visitors sometimes think that they can simply return later when they’ve time to think about their purchase. Onsite remarketing’s answer to this problem is to create a sense of urgency. As we previously mentioned, Dynamic Social Proof is one of the key ways to do this – but it’s not the only way.

Like French holiday company Homair, you can use dynamic countdown timers to show that your offer is time-limited. This is a powerful way to drive urgency (in Homair’s case, increasing conversions by over 100%):

Homair onsite remarketing example using countdown timer

c) Be helpful 

One of the key reasons that carts get abandoned is because the purchase process is too complicated – this can result in confusion, frustration and giving up. Changing your checkout process is difficult, so onsite remarketing is a great way to quickly and easily make the process simpler for your customer.

Take this example from Virgin Trains. To avoid abandonment in the booking funnel, the team implemented an overlay campaign to show users that they were only a few steps away from having their ticket booked:

Virgin Trains booking abandonment onsite remarketing campaign

Other ways to be helpful include highlighting your call centers (if you have them). Click-to-call campaigns (which you can track with services like Infinity) are great for more considered purchases in finance and travel.

Increasing average order value

Once you have a customer purchasing from your website, you have a golden opportunity to increase the value of that customer’s order. However, trying to increase average order value comes with a risk of distracting your shopper from getting to the checkout. Your approach needs to be well-targeted and strategic: this is where onsite remarketing comes in.

1. Use the cart 

When it comes to onsite remarketing, reading the cart value of your shopper is your best friend. Even better, reading exactly what’s in the cart.

By seeing what your customer has in the cart, you an offer relevant up-sells and cross-sells. For example, if a customer has added $40 worth of bedsheets to their cart, you might want to offer them some matching pillowcases.

This logic applies as much to who not to target. If your shopper has only added a few dollars’ worth of product to their account, they might not yet be done with their decision-making. Better to wait until they’re further invested before you try to push them a little further.

2. Limit choice 

Making it easy to add a new product to the cart without getting distracted is key to effective up-sell and cross-sell. The best way to do so is to limit choices (avoiding analysis paralysis), making those choices completely relevant to what you know that customer to be engaged with.

For a great example, we go back to Skyn Iceland. One of the brand’s best-selling products is its Hydro Cool Firming Eye Gels, which has a complementary product in its Brightening Eye Serum. By targeting customers who had already added the gels to cart, Skyn Iceland was able to effectively upsell the Serum with little disruption to the journey:

Skyn Iceland average order value onsite remarketing

The campaign’s success drove nearly 15% extra average order value.

3. Stretch to an incentive 

While not every onsite remarketing campaign requires incentives in order to be effective, there’s a time and place for them. If you have an existing incentive on your site for shoppers who spend over a certain amount, onsite remarketing campaigns can be an effective way of leveraging them.

The below example from Hylete shows this in action. The clothing brand offered discounts to its customers depending on how many products they purchased: the more products, the bigger the discount. In this case, it used a progress bar that showed shoppers how far they’d qualified and what potential there was to gain bigger incentives. It led to a near 5% increase in average order value:

Hylete average order onsite remarketing campaign

You can learn much more about increasing average order value with our dedicated guide to upsell.

Lead generation

In the wake of new privacy laws such as GDPR, many marketers are frantically trying to find new ways to replenish their email databases. Onsite remarketing is a major channel to do this. Yieldify data for 2018 shows just how much marketers have used it to increase their lead generation efforts:

Yieldify onsite remarketing lead generation 2018

So how do you do it? Here are a few things to keep in mind…

1. Wait 

Everyone has an experience of a pop-up appearing on-screen to ask you to sign-up a mere second after landing. That’s liking asking someone for their phone number before you’ve even said ‘hello’.

Our experience tells us that it’s much more effective to allow your visitor to explore your site a little before asking them to hand over their valuable data.

b) Offer value 

It’s not uncommon to offer a discount in exchange for signing up for a newsletter – this can work well, as shown by High Street TV.

The brand used a Double Notification campaign, offering target visitors the opportunity to receive a 5% discount on their first order in exchange for submitting their email address. Once the user had submitted their email address, the second Notification appeared with a Dynamic Coupon code.

High Street TV lead generation onsite remarketing campaign

This strategy achieved the dual goals of the campaign: capture more leads ahead of GDPR’s staging date and encourage conversion on first orders. It outperformed industry benchmarks with respect to both: the campaign increased conversion rates by 8.6% and collected nearly 20,000 leads.

You can learn much more about how to use your website to generate new leads in this in-depth guide to lead capture.

Conclusions

By virtue of its speed and agility, onsite remarketing is one of the easiest ways to quickly make your customer journey more relevant and effective. It’s also much more than that – it’s one of the few ways to react in real-time to customer behavior. This makes it a powerful element of personalization that can turn a simple website into a high-achieving one almost overnight.

If you’re ready to start on your onsite remarketing journey, you can get a free Yieldify demo by applying here. We can help show you what other sites like yours have done and what you might be able to achieve with yours.

Product update: new tools to react to engagement levels

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Treating your visitors differently depending on whether they’re hyper-engaged or losing interest is vital – this forms the core theme of this month’s Yieldify Conversion Platform product updates.

Our brand new scroll trigger and inactivity trigger help you target your campaigns according to how engaged your visitor is in that moment – whether they’re on the verge of drifting away or showing signs of high intent.

Read on to find out more about how you can use these to optimize your customer journey.

Scroll trigger

There’s plenty of debate about whether your landing pages should be short and sweet or long and detailed. In reality, there’s no secret sauce. Whichever option you go for, you’re very likely to have good, relevant content and CTAs that sit after the fold – this is why we’ve launched our new scroll trigger.

This is all about the opportunity to haul in the user who’s scrolled far enough to show real engagement with the content on your page – it means you can avoid hitting less-engaged visitors too early in their journey and focus on those who have shown real intent.

How it works: You set your campaign to trigger when a user can see a particular page element on the screen. For example, this could be an add-to-cart button. It works with all campaign types (such as Notifications or Bars).

When to use it: Here are just a couple of great examples of scroll trigger use:

  • Trigger a campaign to show similar and related products if a user is has become interested in a product page.
  • Show Dynamic Social Proof of a product once a user starts to scroll down to find out more about it 
  • Engage first-time users and encourage them to sign up to your mailing list once they show continued interest by scrolling down to the bottom of your category pages

Yieldify Scroll trigger in action

Inactivity trigger

At the other end of the engagement spectrum, there are those users who have started to become inactive. They might have gotten confused and lost on the page, distracted or simply bored. Ironically, on some occasions, they might have become inactive because they’re just so engaged with your content – but you’ll be able to judge this by context.

How it works: Your campaign will trigger when a user becomes inactive on your site for a defined period of time without scrolling, clicking or mouse movements. Like the scroll trigger, it works for all campaign types.

When to use it: Inactivity triggers are exceptionally useful across all kinds of scenarios, but here are a few we’ve seen most commonly:

  • Trigger a campaign if a user stalls on a particular step of the purchase funnel and stops entering their information
  • Engage first-time users and encourage them to sign up to your mailing list when their attention on the blog drifts 
  • Engage users with relevant campaigns when they spend a long time interested in a particular product or article 

Both of these triggers are available to all Yieldify Conversion Platform users – simply log into the platform and start using them today!

Not using the Yieldify Conversion Platform yet?

The best way to find out how these features (and many more) can work for you is to book a free demo with one of our customer journey optimization experts.

Yieldify and Student Beans Join Forces

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With Generation Z on track to become the biggest consumer group in the next two years, with a spending power of an estimated $404 billion in the US alone, it’s little surprise that an increasing number of retailers and brands are turning their attention towards the lucrative student market in a bid to curate a new generation of loyal customers.

With that in mind, we’re excited to announce a brand new partnership with Student Beans, the world’s leading student loyalty network.

Student Beans works with over 500 brands across the world to help them run their own student discount programs using award-winning student verification technology via websites, apps and stores.

It works by allowing students to view valuable student discounts, while its app offers location-specific deals. Student Beans then takes on the work of verifying student status through email confirmations, which means that partner brands can offer gated programs with no added effort. Its technology can now verify 163 million students students in over 50 countries.

By joining forces, we’re enabling our joint customers to combine our award-winning CJO solutions with Student Beans’ technology to deliver targeted messages and offers to student shoppers at the perfect moment in their journey. It’s a great opportunity to derive even better return on both solutions, with no extra investment and no extra work.  

Here’s how it works

Thanks to Yieldify’s expertise in e-commerce optimization, joint customers can drive more enrollment in student programs by using Yieldify to deliver targeted onsite messaging to drive more sign-ups, which are then verified by Student Beans.

Further down the funnel, Yieldify can deliver targeted student-focused messaging through Notifications and Overlays, helping increase conversions and average order value on the road to greater loyalty.

The best thing about it? It’s up-and-running in days and won’t cost any extra to joint customers. Yieldify and Student Beans take on all technology integration processes, and clients can usually implement integrated solutions within 24 hours.

To mark the start of the new partnership, we’ll both be exhibiting at PerformanceIN Live, the affiliate and performance marketing conference that takes place in London on October 15th and 16th. Yieldify will present ‘CRO is Dead: Mapping the future with Customer Journey Optimisation’ on the first day of the event at 10.20am on the Marin Dome Stage.