Today, Experian CheetahMail released “The remarketing Report: Benchmark data and analysis on connecting web behavior to email marketing.” This white paper delves into the details of deploying emails based on website browser behaviors, and reveals some surprising results along the way.

As most of us would expect, abandoned cart messages pull higher open, click and transaction rates than standard promotional messages. However, marketers might be surprised to learn that cart abandoners respond differently to triggered emails that leverage web analytics data. A few specific notes on browsers versus abandoners include:

• Emails sent to cart abandoners (those who have placed an item in their shopping cart but have not converted) with an incentivized offer only pull $0.09 more in revenue per email than those emails that do not contain an offer.
• Meanwhile, customers that only browsed products but did not add any items to their cart (i.e. ‘browsers’) are much more likely to respond to an incentivized email offer.

This report confirms that email marketers don’t need a special remarketing offer to convert abandoners into buyers. This is a positive development for the email industry in that we don’t effectively encourage our customers to abandon their carts with the hope of receiving a discount email at the end of the process.

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We’re honored to have a special guest blogger contributing to our site today: Chris Parkin from Omniture! Read on to hear Chris’ thoughts about the power of email and web analytics integrations.

Email marketing continues to be a mainstay in online advertising, but a few trends are forcing marketers to be more disciplined in the way they reach their customers.

Consider the following:

• Your customers are bombarded with an incredible amount of information every day. They have access to innumerable information sources and an unprecedented amount of flexibility in the ways they connect to these resources. Some estimates suggest that the number of emails delivered annually is approaching 62 trillion messages. To put this into perspective, an estimated 1.2 billion people have Internet access in the world. Therefore, the average Internet user will receive 142 emails every day (including weekends). Also, other forms of digital messaging media are continuing to proliferate. One estimate indicates that 81.2 million text messages will be sent to U.S. mobile phone subscribers this year.
• Expectations have changed too. Your customers expect an experience that speaks to them individually – messaging to their basic demographic or market segment is not enough.

So what do these trends mean for the email marketer? Relevance is more critical today than ever.

Two of the best ways to make your messages more relevant is to incorporate timeliness or behavioral data into your campaigns. Fortunately for marketers, integrating web analytics data into email campaigns is an easy way to make messages both timely and relevant. Many of today’s winning email campaigns are using web analytics data to engage customers by reminding them of a product they recently abandoned on a website, or introducing them to additional benefits of a product they just purchased.

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Sending email based on web analytics data is a topic we’ve already covered on this site in some detail. As most email marketers know by now, web analytics data can be used in abandoned shopping cart campaigns (ReMarketing), browser behavior campaigns, and other targeted campaigns. But to me, the most important aspect of these campaigns is how the data is being used and what the net effect is on the subscriber base.

Here’s my real-life example that illustrates the issues surrounding web analytics/email integration:

I am a frequent shopper of the online retailer Amazon.com, where I have purchased books, electronics, and baby items exclusively. Last week, however, I received an extremely targeted and somewhat perplexing email promoting Amazon.com’s variety of gourmet and specialty meat selections. Wild Boar 10 Rib Rack anyone?, asked the email. The first line of the message was “As someone who has shown an interest in gourmet meat…”

What? Gourmet meat? Me? From Amazon.com? Huh?

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In the June 30th eMarketer article entitled “The Sad Tale of Abandon Carts,” a strong case is made for the value of abandoned cart emails. These ReMarketing messages have proven for some time to increase email engagement rates and drive higher revenue per email by 50% or more (compared to standard promotional email).

The eMarketer study cites high shipping costs as the top reason why consumers abandon their shopping carts, as well as the desire to comparison shop, a lack of money, and wanting to search for a coupon.

These findings reinforce my rationale for frequently encouraging clients to create abandon cart campaigns. As I see it, ReMarketing should be a key part of almost any businesses’ email lifecycle program, helping maximize potential revenue during checkout.

When it comes to ReMarketing, there are a few critical rules to remember:

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With social media trending towards character limitations, layout restrictions, and quicker feedback times, it seems that URL shortening services such as Bit.ly and TinyURL are becoming more and more ubiquitous every day.

So what exactly is URL shortening? In a nutshell, these services convert long web addresses into short, easy-to-use URLs that are convenient for sharing. If you’ve ever used Facebook’s status update tool or Twitter’s microblogging service, chances are you have come into contact with a link referring to a URL shortening service.

While I have yet to come across an email campaign that links to a shortened URL, I’d imagine that some email marketers will soon begin coordinating the links in their emails with the links distributed via Twitter and Facebook (to maintain consistency across channels). I also foresee email marketing messages occasionally incorporating tweets and status updates into the body of the email, which means that some URL-shortened links could be distributed via email.

So what should you know about URL shortening services before you incorporate them into your emails?

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