James Critchley

About James Critchley

Top ten tweaks to increase ecommerce conversions

Many online retailers remain obsessed with growing overall site traffic, at the expense of increasing conversion rates from existing customers.

Research shows that for every £100 retailers spend getting customers to a website, only £1 goes into converting them.

This can be counter productive: the cost of acquiring new traffic is increasing exponentially. Actually it makes much more sense to convert the 97% of customers that visit your site and abandon before making a purchase.

What often prevents retailers from concentrating on conversions is the perception that creating a conversion strategy is complex and time consuming.

However, by making a few, simple changes to your site or digital marketing strategy you can greatly increase conversions. 

Three quick tips for optimising email marketing

After years of studying the online purchasing journey, I have a theory that when making an important purchase shoppers draw up a shortlist of four desirable items and/or four retailers to buy them from.  

In her book, The Art of Choosing, Professor Lyengar reveals that too much choice renders us overwhelmed to the point of indecision – so it makes sense that we would limit our choices in order to make the decision process simpler for ourselves.

Think about the last time you made a considered purchase, such as a car, new phone or mortgage. How many different items and retailers made your shortlist?

How to successfully engage customers when remarketing

In a post on this site recently, I  looked at some of the top UK ecommerce retailers and evaluated how well they implement remarketing tactics, such as cart recovery.

In doing so I signed up to an account for each of these companies, as is the norm, loaded a basket with goods, abandoned it and then waited to see what happened. 

Since carrying out that experiment I’ve been receiving marketing emails, with varying degrees of regularity, and it got me thinking. Both cart recovery emails and wider email marketing work fantastically well for retailers when properly implemented.

So why do some retailers email me almost every day, whilst others sent hardly any?