The scenario: A customer gets all the way through your site, products in basket, then at the last second, decides to do a 180, and leaves your store. Why do you think this is? 

Shopping Cart Abandonment is a problem for retailers across the board, and is a key concern to consider when it comes to marketing your eCommerce site. 

Naturally, you want your website to perform an element of data capture, which is crucial to forging meaningful long-term relationship with your customer.Unfortunately most new customers want to avoid a registration process and checkout as quickly as possible.  So how can retailers encourage more registrations without deterring customers?

Follow Up 

Follow a transaction by sending your new customer an order number and thank them for making their purchase. Ask the proactive, time-saving question “Would you like to save your details for next time?”  No mention of registering, just a focus on saving the customer valuable time in future.Give clear benefits of creating an 

account (faster and easier shopping, order tracking, ratings and reviews). Go at step further and pre-populatel the first name, surname and email address field with the customers details they provided a few minutes earlier. Simply ask the customer to choose a password and enter it twice for validation. At this point, keep the customer focused on the benefits of providing a password, by being selective in your choice of words - 'Save my details’ rather than ‘Create an account’ or ‘Proceed to registration’.  

Simple Checkout

Customers want to make their purchase, and move on.  Don't make them jump through hoops to spend their money with you. Provide only two options at the start of checkout – login and checkout. Don’t mention registration and account creation until the order confirmation page - even then you don't need to use the word 'register'.Ensure your checkout forms follow form best practice, therefore reducing potential usability issues for customers.Clearly promote the benefits of registering.

Avoid Distractions 

Make the process as simple as possible – remember the one key piece of additional information they need to provide is a password. Save asking visitors to choose a range of marketing preferences until they have registered, and then make it easy and intuitive for them to choose how they would like to receive marketing communication from you.

If you remove as many potential distractions as possible and don't force new customers to make a decision before they have completed their purchase, you are on the right track to a seamless transaction process, and building those crucial relationships in order to encourage repeat custom.

Coca Cola saw phenomenal results this week when they joined an online discussion using Twitter’s “promoted tweets”.

Where the usual number of visitors to click on a regular ad is around 0.02%, Coke saw impressive stats with an engagement rate of 6%.

Twitter first introduced the new advertising system in April, allowing companies such as Starbucks and Sony Pictures to pay to display their postings on pages of search results for popular topics. Disney Pixar became the first company to buy an ad within its “trending topic” section just last week.

Unlike search results, this form of sponsorship appears on the main page Twitter users see when they are logged into the service, at the bottom of the user-generated list of the 10 most popular talking points on the site.

Coke tweeted messages congratulating the England and US teams, linked to videos on YouTube and invited people to celebrate their teams’ success.

Naturally, many advertisers are now excited about the potential of social networks to promote word-of-mouth recommendations of their products.Using social networks as a business tool allows great opportunities to establish relationships with consumers that can’t be achieved through TV and press.

Great site designers do everything they can to make their sites engaging and prevent traffic doing a U-turn. Here are five ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

1. Capture Attention with a Visual Site Map

Most web sites usually start simple but get pretty complex before long. They are a maze of pages, sections and links that leave users looking at the site map in order to find what they’re looking for. You can make their job a lot easier with a visual site map.

A visual site map is a pictorial representation of a web site and when you click on a part of that picture, a small display pops up describing what is in this section of the web site. For example, a home furniture web site may have a site map showing the various parts of a home, and clicking the living room would pop up a description of living room furniture section.

Visual site maps are vivid, memorable and easy to use compared to traditional site maps.

2. Enhance Engagement with Related Actions Suggestions

If you know the way people use your site, you probably know where they will go next. For example, someone that looks up pricing will likely go to the buy page. In other words, you can anticipate related actions from a given point. Use this knowledge of user intention and make it easy for the user to find the related pages quickly.

A Related Action Suggestion is an interactive element on your web page which suggests pathways to related pages. This can include a video, image or text with audio that optionally educates a user, helping him or her find parts of a site he or she may not be aware of.

3. Create Curiosity Using Page Peel Banners

You can often organise a message in two or maybe three layers. The first is something you would like to say to everybody that visits your web page. The second is something you would like to say to those who are interested. The third is to those who are really interested.

Peel-away banners work great in these situations. A well-designed peel-away banner can have attractive images, messages and even music that plays when the banner loads or when the user peels away the top banner to reveal what’s underneath. It is customary for the top right corner of the banner to appear in animation which suggests that you can drag it and peel it away. That's the teaser.

4. Build Credibility with a Quotes Flicker

In the age of instant credibility, you must verify the message on your website with customer testimonials, recommendations, reviews and other types of quotes. For best results, a quote should be short, story-like, easy to read, and preferably accompanied by a picture of the person providing the quote.

A single quote creates a lot of authenticity. If you have several customer quotes, even better. A good way to render multiple quotes is to make a playlist of sorts and render the quotes one by one. Depending on the section of your website, or seasonal merchandising focus, you may choose a different set of quotes. This not only adds variety to the site, but also focuses the right message to the right audience.

5. Build a Sense of Urgency and Drive Action

A web site is about driving user action. People will act if there is a sense of urgency: a deal that is only until the end of the month, a deadline for enrolling in an event, a special that lasts for only 24 hours and so forth. Highlight the urgency with a countdown timer that shows the days remaining and drive action by popping up additional media. The media could be a video, an image or text with audio, designed to issue a call to action.

SeeWhy has released an eBook which looks at how the top 10 converting e-commerce sites convert almost 10 times as many visitors into customers than the typical site — 23% vs. 2.3%.

You may be surprised to hear than the strategies employed by these top-converting sites don't necessarily reflect conventional wisdom of how to increase conversions. Those who studied the sites, were admittedly expecting to find short shopping cart processes, guest checkouts, and highly tuned websites focused around getting the sale. But they didn’t…

Instead, they found companies focused on lifetime customer value, choosing to offer shoppers a superior shopping experience to make it more likely they’ll purchase from them again. In fact companies were willing to sacrifice a small proportion of initial sales in order to capture user data. Because once captured, they use details very effectively to remarket to website visitors, driving highly qualified buyers with intent to their sites.

Conventional ideas emphasise the importance of SEO, streamlined conversion and reducing the steps to the shopping cart in order to optimise your conversion rate. But the top 10 conversion leaders don't care about one night stands; they want long term relationships.

This is why they convert about 10 times as many visitors as the average ecommerce site. Their secret, quite simply, is to focus on long-term relationships with customers.

So should we throw out this conventional wisdom? There’s probably no need to be that drastic. Instead, a better strategy would be to build upon that conventional wisdom with strategies that are successful for these other sites. There’s nothing stopping you having a long-term commitment and one-night stands.

A new study has revealed that 73% of women are now active social media users and engage at least once a week with popular social media platforms.

BlogHer and iVillage, who conducted the survey, found that women rely heavily on both blogs and message boards when seeking advice and recommendations especially when looking for information to help with the purchase of new products. In fact the twenty million users who visit the BlogHer Network favour blogs over every other media source.

The findings show that even as the scale of overall social media usage continues to grow, blogs still continue to be a highly reliable resource for all women online.
So if your business relies on female customers or visitors, then regular blog posts full of helpful advice will allow you to build a relationship with your target market and allow you to be seen as experts in your field.

The survey also mentions the importance of product information so try including a reviews and a ratings system for your products. This way you’ll be far more likely to increase your conversion rate and build the amount of regular customers.

Other highlights from the study include:

• Among the iVillage community, 73 percent say they are sharing topics on message boards/forums that they would not share on social networks. Of those, relationships (61%), health (45%) and work-related (39%) issues were the main topics they would not share on social networks.
• Message boards/forums are second only to conversations with friends and family as the preferred source of product purchasing information for iVillage users.