Today, we’re featuring a guest post from Dan Greenberg of Skipify.
When a customer makes a decision to purchase something, you have a very brief window of time where that decision is fresh in their mind. The longer you wait, and the more distractions that get in the way, the lower likelihood the purchase will happen.
Brick-and-mortar retailers have known this for a long time, and employ a number of sophisticated strategies aimed at making purchases easier for customers, including impulse buy items, strategic positioning of priority items, and in-store checkout efficiency solutions.
Buying online should be easy, but barriers stand in the way for customers
Online retail has brought the promise of efficient and quick purchases that don’t require the customer to make a commitment to getting to your retail location. Essentially, online transactions should create that “impulse buy” environment consistently since the barrier to purchase is so low. But, a number of factors can interfere with that promise, including, customers’ lack of trust in online security, customers’ lack of trust in online privacy, long load times and uncertainty, frustration with account creation, and/or login experiences, and it may reset those customer expectations.
Basically, what this means is that we are now operating in a world where the customer expects so much in terms of user experience and ease of transaction, that any deviation from that interrupts the purchase process and leads to decreased sales efficiency.
For years, online merchants have been singularly focused on improving the efficiency of the purchase funnel, by honing in on the right targeting and improving efficiency in the first-party web purchase experience for the user. These improvements have helped, but they are now table stakes and it is tough to gain a comparative advantage against competitors, because many of these solutions have been commoditized.
How to improve purchase efficiency for your clients
This is where Skipify can help. Instead of continually trying to optimize how you bring customers to your commerce site, Skipify, along with our partner, Cheetah Digital by Marigold , allows, you, the merchant, to bring the purchase right to the customer, and cut down on all of the extra time, distractions, and waiting that inevitably decrease the likelihood of converting sales.
Skipify takes the shopping experience that you are used to on your site, and puts it directly in the email. This means that the step in your purchase funnel that likely sees the highest percentage drop-off no longer exists. Before Skipify, a small percentage of customers who opened an email would click through and actually land on your commerce site. With Skipify, every customer who opens an email is now shopping!
Skipify works seamlessly with Cheetah Digital by Marigold so that you can send emails to the same segments and operate business as usual. The only thing that changes is that Skipify converts standard emails into shoppable, and dynamic user experiences and allows you to send them directly from the Cheetah Digital by Marigold Platform.
For every customer that interacts with your brand on your commerce site, there are many more who interact with you via email and never have the opportunity to purchase. Your email audiences are often your most loyal customers, and they are used to seeing you and interacting with you in email, but don’t always want to wait for their device to load, make sure they are logged in, and enter all of their information. So instead of asking them to come to you, you can now bring the shopping experience directly to them.
If you’d like to learn more, Skipify’s CEO, Ryth Martin, goes more in-depth to the integration with Cheetah Digital by Marigold in the podcast, Uncaged Wisdom. You can listen to it here.
