Conversions 800% Higher

[Linda Buquet]

This new data published by WebSideStory was intended to drive home the importance of building customer loyalty online. Customer loyalty is, of course, important to etailers and it's a well known fact that repeat visitors convert better than 1st time visitors, however I don't think I've ever seen these numbers published by industry before. We are accustomed to seeing 2% average conversion rates, but take a look at the conversion rates below, the numbers are staggering! Repeat visitors convert at an amazing 23% in the electronics category.

So what does this data mean for affiliates? It means that cookie length is especially important (in spite of what some merchants say) and in certain industries more than others. Merchants with short cookies always counter that most of their sales happen right away. If I were an affiliate it would also make me think even more about content and quality. The more you get customers returning to your site and the more you build trust the more likely they will be to buy. But the purchase is actually done on the merchant site - so maybe this is part of the reason so many affiliates have had high success bidding on merchant brands with merchants that still allow it. Brand name bidding increases the chance that you are setting a cookie on a repeat visitor with a higher chance of buying. Here's the story from WebSideStory.
<blockquote><a target="_new" href="http://www.websidestory.com/company/news-events/press-releases/view-release.html?id=337">
Repeat Visitors 8 Times More Likely To Make A Purchase Online Than New Visitors, According To WebSideStory</a> - "During the first three months of 2006, repeat visitors to business-to-consumer e-commerce sites had a conversion rate of 12.61 percent, compared to just 1.55 percent for new visitors... Customer loyalty is particularly important in the computers and electronics category, where repeat visitors were nearly 16 times more likely to make a purchase than new visitors with conversion rates of 23.12 percent and 1.49 percent respectively. By comparison, visitor loyalty was less important for shoppers at apparel sites, where the conversion rate for repeat visitors (7.56 percent) outranked the conversion rate for new visitors (1.37 percent) by less than 6 times."</blockquote>

What else can affiliates do to leverage the huge conversion rate increase that's seen from repeat visits?

 

[shelly99]

One way would be to completely boycott campaigns which do not offer atleast a 30 day cookie. I have heard that if a person does not return to the site within 7 days of their first visit, it is unlikely they ever will. But since most sales would not neccessarily mean the visitor will buy by the second time, a 7 day cookie would not be very useful either. A boycott would be a pretty stressful thing to implement, since the world of affiliates is so huge, but a small start is better than no start at all.

Shelly

 

[Linda Buquet]

True, although I think affiliates just don't join short cookie merchants if there are other programs in the space that are offering longer cookies.

BTW, I think almost all our merchants have cookies longer than 90 days and many are one year and some are even more than that.

I was just wanting to brainstorm about other things affiliates have control over. For instance doing product reviews or merchant reviews or comparison shopping sites in order to grab and cookie more of the visitors that have already been to a retailer several times and are further along in the shopping cycle ready to buy.