Browse Abandonment is a powerful behavior-based solution that allows you to connect with customers who've shown interest in your brand by visiting your website. In a typical Browse Abandonment campaign, you send friendly and helpful messages to a customer after they've visited a specific product page. You would most likely feature that product in the email as well. But, what about the people that browse your site and never land on a specific product page? By leveraging page browse abandonment, you could potentially reach thousands or even millions of additional contacts. The important point to remember is that these people are already engaged with your brand. Read below to learn more about including these contacts in your campaign.
How many page browsers do you have?
Before targeting page-browsers, you should first take a look at the number of contacts that actually fall into that category.
Navigate to Authoring > Conductor Conversations.
Locate your Shopping Cart/Browse Abandonment conversation.
Select the Visual Analytics tab.
Select a date range and click Update.
Locate the Page and Product Browse Abandon Trigger Steps.
💡 You can select any date range you'd like, because the purpose of this exercise is simply to compare page browse abandons to product browse abandons. However, we recommend you look at least a one-month time period.
As you can see in the above example, 2.67 million contacts have visited the website within the selected timeframe and are not being marketed to because they never reached a product page. But, why are so many people leaving before they reach a product page? The answer varies, but oftentimes it's because the website contains a lot of pages to navigate through before reaching the product page; In other words, your products may be buried. Whatever the case, the good news is that you can reach these contacts.
Content Ideas
Keeping in mind that you are essentially targeting "everyone" by reaching out to this group, it's best to keep your messages relatively general. Some ideas for crafting your first page browse abandonment email include:
The Customer Service Approach: This type of email might start out with a subject line or heading "How can we help you?" Remaining friendly and inviting is key to success with this approach.
Suggest Top Products: Since at this point you don't know what these customers were looking for, you can take the opportunity to suggest your best sellers, again remaining friendly and inviting.
Target Audience by Page Browsed: If you'd like to learn more about targeting different audience based on the page they last browsed, read Targeting Specific Audiences Using Page Browse Abandonment.
Predictive Content: Serve up relevant content from your blog or other articles to bring the subscriber back to the site.
To get started marketing to your abandoning page-browsers, you can add a single message in your page browse thread, or even set up a two- or three-message series.
In your Shopping Cart/Browse Abandonment conversation, locate the Page Browse thread. It is typically positioned at the top of the conversation.
⚠️ If you do not have a page browse thread or the step is not in full color please reach out to [email protected] to ensure you have the data to power the campaign.
Add a Wait Step after your Trigger Step.
Next, add a Message Step.
Add a final Wait Step.
Click on the message step and add the message you designed.
Need help? Follow this guide.
Add any additional steps that fit your logic. E.g. an additional message.
Once you have finalized your thread, click Publish so page browsers can begin receiving messages.
Limit How Often Contacts Receive Page Browse Messages
Sending an email to a contact every time they visit your site may become overwhelming. Limiting how often a contact is eligible to receive these messages can help prevent unsubscribes as well.
Create the Profile Fields
The profile field will track when the contact last received a page browse message.
Ensure you are on the list associated with your page browse campaign.
Navigate to Contacts > Email Contacts Profile Fields.
Select Abandonment or a similarly named group.
Add a new segment field and call it "Last-Page-Browse-Message-Date"
Select the data type Date (mm/dd/yyyy).
Click the Save icon.
Set the Date in Conductor
In this section, an action step in Conductor will fill the date profile field just created in a contact's profile.
Navigate to Authoring > Conductor Conversations.
Open the Abandonment conversation by clicking on the name.
Add an Action Step after the Trigger Step.
In the Action Step settings:
Rename the step Last Page Browse Date
Choose the action type Update Segment Field With Date Step Entered.
Select the field you created for page browse date.
Leave the radio button selection at "to the date the contact entered the step."
Click Update.
Create an Exit Thread
If your campaign already contains an exit thread you can skip these steps. An exit thread removes contacts who should not receive messages because they meet some criteria you specify.
Click the green plus sign at the bottom of the conversation.
Name your Trigger Step "Exit Thread" and select the no events required checkbox.
Add a two week Wait Step.
Move Recent Browsers
Now you can move recent browsers from the page browse thread into the exit thread so they do not get a message.
Add a Goto Step after the Action Step in the page browse thread.
In the Goto Step settings rename the step "Recent Page Browser"
In the Goto tab, click on the wait step in the exit thread.
Next, click the Segment Filter tab.
Click New Filter.
Select the segment type Profile Fields Groups.
Select the group where you saved your profile field.
Select the Last Page Browse Date field you created earlier.
Select the operator Is After.
Using the offset, choose how often a contact should be able to enter the page browse. E.g. 14 days.
Click Update.
Click Update again.
Once you have finalized your messages and logic, click Publish.