In my last blog, I am going to look at e-commerce cart abandonment which is something we implemented at Protyre to help bring back users that left the website without purchasing. The significance of a good cart abandonment programme is very important and a great way to increase your websites conversion rates.
Any product that enters the shopping cart but never makes it through the transaction is considered to be abandoned by the shopper.
Consumer behaviour and the reasons for E-commerce cart abandonment:
Unexpected shipping costs
Having to create a new user account
Conducting research to buy later
Concerns about payment security
Website had errors/crashes
Payment was declined
The shopping cart abandonment rate is an important metric for e-commerce sites to keep track, because a high abandonment rate could signal a poor user experience or broken sales funnel. Reducing shopping cart abandonment leads directly to more sales and revenue, so optimising the checkout flow is a key one at Protyre. In a Statista Article from December 2021 looking at the shopping cart abandonment rate worldwide in 2021 it was suggested automotive had the highest abandonment rates out of all measured with an 89.11% abandonment rate (Statista, 2021) – this is the sector Protyre fits into so is very relevant to help benchmark our performance.
Protyre has a shopping cart abandonment rate of approximately 72% this is significantly below the industry average which is great to see. We have worked very hard to improve our user experience and this cart abandonment rate has dropped over the last few years with the improvements made in our checkout process, product pages and search results all helping to improve our conversion rates on the website. The key to a successful cart abandonment strategy is to increase the identification rate of your users, should a user abandon it is important to collect their email address so you can retarget them in your cart abandonment programme. Protyre has a cart abandonment identification rate of approximately 30% – increasing this number will help to identify many more potential users you can target and recover revenue from. We use lightboxes across the website to capture our users email addresses so we can target them.
I built the strategy behind the Protyre cart abandonment programme a number of years ago and we have used this very successfully in partnership with the software provider Pure360 who built the technology for this solution, which recovers over £600k per annum via the Protyre ecommerce website. We target our customers that have abandoned and been identified with a programme of three emails.
Email 1 – sent 15 mins after the user abandons the website.
Email 2 – sent 24 hours after the user abandoned the website (consumers are creatures of habit and shop online at the same times)
Email 3 – Final email sent 3 days after the user first abandoned the website (with a promotional offer).
*If the customer returns to the Protyre website and purchases in between receiving any of these cart abandonment emails we will not send out the further email. We know from analysis completed that the majority of customers that return to purchase will do this after receiving Email 1 and within the first 24 hours of abandoning.
Conclusion
In today’s eCommerce industry, shopping cart and checkout abandonment are all too common consumer behaviours among online shoppers. As a result of this it is very important any retailer makes abandonment reduction a primary goal in any digital marketing strategy. I cant recommend a good cart abandonment programme enough to help improve your websites performance.
Thanks for reading! I hope you have found my own experiences interesting and how I have related these subjects to my job role. Please leave a comment, I would love to get your thoughts.
In this next blog, I am going to look at behavioural targeting, what this is and how it impacts my role at Protyre. Behavioural targeting refers to presenting people with advertisements based on their internet use (Salomon et al. (2019, pp.184). Behavioural targeting allows you to segment your audience based on their interests as exhibited in their online behaviour so is very much linked to the consumers behaviour. By gathering data, segmenting and targeting your audiences by behaviour you are able to significantly increase your conversion rates and sales while also increasing customer loyalty. It also enables you as a marketer to get more relevant and detailed targeting out of your ad campaigns. In this example we looked at the Google and Facebook ad campaign strategy at Protyre which uses behavioural targeting to capture new visitors and conversions for Protyre.co.uk.
Google Similar Audiences
Google offers behavioural targeting advertising campaigns via its Lookalike audiences in Google – lookalike audiences is a concept that was first introduced by the Facebooks advertising tool. Google stores a mass amount of data on its users that it has collected across the internet, including how they interact and it looks at this data to help you find new customers for your campaign that you have not yet targeted, you are also to add your own customer data to the platform by uploading your customers email addresses why you have permission. By connecting lookalike audiences to Google display ads and search campaigns you can boost your impressions, clicks and conversions significantly and expand your target audience. It’s a simple method to find new customers that are likely to engage with your ads and help you generate more sales. This process works very well for Protyre and we are able to expand our customer targeting to drive more sales via the protyre website.
Facebook Lookalike Audiences with Behavioural Targeting
Similar to Google, Facebook Advertising looks at the people who followed your business’ profile to get a feel for your target audience. Then, it would create a lookalike audience of people with similar profiles, interests and other attributes. One of the main benefits of Facebook ads is the ability to target a particular group of users. At Protyre we serve Facebook ads to our existing customers to book MOTs. As we know there MOT due date, we are able to start serving them with an ad up to 6 weeks before there MOT due date, the idea being that they will see the ad many times on an impression basis and it starts to put the MOT into their thinking and they book their MOT a head of the expiry date. This behavioural targeting works very well, and we are able to upload lists of our customer s email addresses to match them. As the majority of the UK now has a Facebook account, the match rate is very high. We are then able to take this one step further and look for lookalike audiences, so users that have a similar demographic behaviour – this is very good for build prospects lists of customers to target. A couple of example adverts run are below.
Retargeting
This is when an advertiser shows ads multiple times across different websites. Retargeting is effective as it often takes multiple times of seeing a brand before someone buys, so keeping your product in the shop window is very important and re-engaging with audiences that have already shown an interest in your brand is key to getting the sale. Building visibility of the brand, products and services is very important. At Protyre we use retargeting to help bring our users back to the Protyre website, we do this by partnering with the Google Display Network (GDN) to show our adverts once the user has been to Protyre.co.uk and abandoned. We are effectively following them around the internet and our advertising banners can feature on up to 2 million websites, videos and apps where Google Ads can appear. There is a cost to us running this as a form of advertising but the costs are normally based on a cost per 1,000 impressions rather then per click like Google Adwords and so it can be a more cost effective way of advertising and a good way of re-engaging with your prospective customers.
Example of a Protyre retargeting advert below. This display advert targets user that have visited protyre looking for an MOT or service and is displayed across the Google Display Network.
Conclusion
If your looking to understand your audience better and their behaviours and want to grow your customers, then behavioural targeting is a great way of generating new visitors and conversions from your website at an acceptable cost per sale with a positive return on investment.
Thanks for reading! I hope you have found my own experiences interesting and how I have related these subjects to my job role. Please leave a comment, I would love to get your thoughts.
In the week 4 workshop we looked at the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator and the concept behind this.
The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), is used to help individuals understand their own communication preference and how they interact with others. Having an understanding of what MBTI is can help you to adapt your interpersonal approach to different situations and audiences.
Common Uses for MBTI include:
Developing yourself
Working with teams
Understanding stress reactions
Career Development
Problem Solving
MBTI looks at an individual’s preference not their capability. The purpose of MBTI is to raise awareness of your own preference and recognise where the other styles could add value. MBTI uses four scales to talk about preference, each with two opposing preferences. These are called the four dimensions of type.
(Imperial College London)
My Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Results
As part of the workshop we were required to do our own MBTI test, we used a free equivalent to the MBTI – 16Personalities.com who offer a free Personality test.
We were required to answer a set of questions as honestly as possible to learn how our personality type influences many areas of our life – answering each question how much you strongly agree or disagree with the statement. The test categorised myself as a logistician.
Strengths of a Logistician
Honest and Direct
Strong Willed and Dutiful
Very Responsible
Calm and Practical
Jack of all traders
Weakness of a Logistician
Stubborn
Insensitive
Always by the book
Often unreasonably blame themselves
Logisticians you may know:
Conclusion
Having reviewed my results, I would say that this is a very accurate reflection of my personality type. Logisticians are known for their reliability and hard work and driven by creating and maintaining a secure stable environment for themselves and their loved ones. I may decide to revisit this test in a few months time, to see how my personality type has changed.
Thanks for reading! I hope you have found my own experiences interesting and how I have related these subjects to my job role. Please leave a comment, I would love to get your thoughts.
In my third blog post, I am going to look at marketing segmentation strategies. The segmentation concept was first developed by Smith (1957) and group consumers together by their needs. To get the best return on investment from your marketing budget it is important to make sure you know your target audience. A market segmentation strategy organises your customers into demographic, geographic, geo-demographic, psychographics or behavioural segments.
Demographic
This is the most common form of segmentation. Customers are structured by popular traits such as:
Age
Gender
Income Occupation
Marital Status
Social Class
Religion
Education
Geographic
Customers can be split by their geographic location and where the consumer lives. For example:
Region
County
Geo-demographic
This combines both geographic and demographic information to create a more developed profile of the consumer. It is based on the idea that people who live in the same housing estates or streets may have similar incomes, lifestyles, etc.
Psychographics
Psychographic or lifestyle segmentation target customers based on their hobbies and interests. This segmentation strategy fits most niche markets.
Interests
Social Status
Personality Type
Attitudes, Opinions and Values
Behavioural
Behavioural segmentation is a new type of segmentation that has come more to the forefront following the emergence of the digital age. This type of segmentation takes into account the information collected through customer data reports, surveys and marketing trends.
Protyre Segmentation
We are fortunate at Protyre to have developed a database of customers that now exceeds 1.5 million customers, this has been built over several years. It would not be feasible and beneficial to target all of these customers with the same offers and promotions as customers life stage and requirements are different. To combat this, we completed an exercise where we have taken the database of customers and segmented this into eight different sub groups of similar types of customers and created eight different personas to represent our customers and there behaviours – this enables us to identify our target audience and what their habits are. By using the right targeted marketing communications to each of these persona segments we have an opportunity to drive additional sales into the business, retain more customers and gain market share, by making sure we market the correct products, to the correct customers when they are in market to purchase – this is key to returning a positive return on investment from our marketing activity. The idea of the marketing database is to maximise revenue opportunity, we have created a model with distinct segments and audience profiles. This has enabled us to define key characteristics of each audience segment to improve the alignment of our Protyre offers. The Protyre database has been split up using geodemographic classification using the Experian mosaic system analysing customers at an individual household level – using electoral roll and censor information the customers have been matched to the mosaic profiling.
RFM Modelling – taking our targeting one step further
Given we have the transactional data of these customers, we are also able to overlay their transactional data which allows us to start to work out what the average spend is for each of the segments generated and their behaviours – this is done using a type of behavioural segmentation we call RFM Modelling to allow us to analysis customer value. The R stands for Recency – how recent has the customer purchased from Protyre. Frequency – how often do they purchase (maybe they have multiple cars in the same household) and Monetary Value – how much do they spend. All of this allows us to segment our database, accordingly, create personas from these different segments of customers and identify where we are best spending our marketing budget to drive a good return on investment.
One of the segments we have created from the marketing database is called “End of the Road” – by overlaying the geodemographic data with the transactional data of these customers we have learnt a number of key attributes for these customers. The customers we have grouped into this segment are likely to have young families or are singles. Living in the more affordable areas of the city on lower income. Typically working an unskilled or semi-skilled job and reliant on their car for work and running their young families around. Critically for Protyre this group of customers drives 7 – 10 year old vehicles. This is important to Protyre as these vehicles will require a lot of maintenance due to the older age and this is an ideal target market and a profitable target segment for us. For example, new vehicles don’t normally need much maintenance, as an example a new car isn’t due its first MOT until it is 3 years old, so Protyre is not in the market of maintaining the newer vehicles – this segment is in market for annual MOTs and annual service so it is perfect for Protyre.
Thanks for reading! I hope you have found my own experiences interesting and how I have related these subjects to my job role. Please leave a comment, I would love to get your thoughts.
In my second blog, I am going to look at how digital technologies have impacted marketing strategies and in particular the tyre industry that I work in. The advancement in digital technologies has had a massive impact on consumer buyer behaviour allowing marketing strategies to be more customised and better targeted to the consumer. The traditional customer when buying a tyre would have walked into their local garage and ordered over the counter with no idea of what it would cost to replace their tyres which can be very daunting. Whereas today many of Protyre’s customers start by looking at the website – protyre.co.uk. The advances we have seen in technology now allow consumers to find out more information about the products and services they are interested in, including pricing from the comfort of their own homes. With thousands of tyres available using a simple vehicle registration search it makes it easier for consumers to find the tyres they need, showing the availability for fitting and a fully fitted price (with no hidden extras).
By using new technologies, marketers can collect and analyse increasingly complex data on consumers, buying patterns and personal characteristics, and quickly analyse and use this information for targeting smaller and increasingly more focused groups of consumers. (Schiffman,2012). At Protyre we are able to collect customer data when they are using our website and use personalisation in surfacing the consumer with specific products when we feel they are likely to purchase them – segmenting our website visitors accordingly. For example, where we have identified a customer who is looking for an MOT to purchase, because they have landed on our website from a paid search campaign around MOTs, we are able to show them promotions across the website that are relevant to MOTs. Not just on the landing page they click through to but we can also personalise the promotions they see on the home page Vs a customer we have identified as looking for a tyre. It is more important then ever that the products and services we offer provide the right benefits and value making sure they are positioned the most effectively to the consumer, to give them the best chance to be purchased. Using tools such as Google Analytics, we are able to track the conversion rate of all these advertising campaigns and optimise them to a cost per sale target – from our digital performance at Protyre we aim for a £10 cost per sale as an acceptable return on investment.
Digital technologies have also opened up a new market around price comparison websites, in the automotive industry there are now many providers offering price comparison, whether that be for tyres, mots or vehicle servicing. It is therefore important as a retail to offer more competitively priced products and more choice to secure the sale from the competitor. Protyre uses third parties like this to further increase its market share and sell more tyre units. We work with may third parties such as Blackcircles.com. Asdatyres.co.uk and Whocanfixmycar.com to increase our sales opportunity. Using the advances in digital technology, we can provide these retailers with real time – live pricing, stock availability and customer appointment information.
Email Marketing
The advances in digital technology have allowed acquisition campaigns such as email marketing to become a key channel in driving sales at Protyre. Using an email service provider called Pure360, We are able to personalise our email marketing, adapting it to the needs of our database of customers pushing our key messages and products. Despite the growth of mobile messengers and chat apps, email is still an integral part of our daily life. Email users is set to grow to 4.6 billions users in 2025. (Statista,2021) – example Protyre email campaign below.
Mobile First
Over the past few years at Protyre we have seen a big shift in digital technology towards a mobile first world, traditionally customers would use a PC to search for tyres and with the advancement in technology mobiles have now become even more then important. With over 50% of Protyre’s digital traffic now coming from a mobile device, we have to optimise our user experience to work the best on a mobile device. Businesses can now trade soley on a mobile device with new technologies making connection and collaboration possible. It is reported that 62% of smartphone users have made a purchase online in the last six months (Forbes.com).
Thanks for reading! I hope you have found my own experiences interesting and how I have related these subjects to my job role. Please leave a comment, I would love to get your thoughts.
Bibliography:
SCHIFFMAN, L.G., L.L. KANUK and H. HANSEN, 2012. Consumer behaviour : a European outlook. Harlow, England: Prentice Hall (Accessed: 30th January 2022)
If you’ve not heard of Protyre before we are the retail arm of Micheldever Tyre Services, which is a tyre wholesaler that has been trading since 1972. Protyre sells directly to the consumer through 166 Protyre garages across the UK. As well as tyres we add value to our proposition by offering a number of additional services through our Protyre garages, including MOTs, brakes, alignments, car servicing and exhausts. The retail business is supported by a large ecommerce website protyre.co.uk its is my role to run the retail ecommerce website.
To offer the best services and products to our consumers it is important that we understand the consumers behaviour and the buying decisions they make when deciding to shop at Protyre. “The term consumer behaviour is defined as the behaviour that consumers display in search for, purchasing, using, evaluating and disposing of products and services that they expect will satisfy their needs. Consumer behaviour focuses on how individuals make decisions to spend their available resources (time, money, effort) on consumption of related items. “ (Schiffman, 2012)
The Five Stages of the Buying Decision Process
Need Recognition/Problem Solving
Information Search
Evaluation of Alternatives
Purchase Decision
Post Purchase Evaluation
Stage 1 – Problem Recognition
All products that we sell at Protyre are designed to meet the needs of our target audience i.e the customer. Car tyres and maintenance are not something that we purchase on an everyday basis, so the customer has to have a need for the product and problem recognition is important here, we cannot sell a product to someone who doesn’t need it, so the customer needs to be in market – there needs to be a consumer demand for the product. Have they got a flat tyre, are their tyres reaching the end of their life? A tyre can be seen as a distressed purchase and its not the sort of product customers normally take enjoyment from replacing. This process works exceptionally well for selling products such as MOTs, we are able to target this customer with an MOT reminder campaign and we will start targeting this segment approx. 6 weeks before there MOT due date. An MOT product has a defined expiry date and the product life cycle of an MOT is annually, it is a legal requirement to have an MOT on your vehicle – so there is a captive audience you have to have one it’s just a case of whether you go back to the same garage as previous or you look for an alternative. In summary what every product you purchase from Protyre there is a need.
Stage 2 – Information Search
The second of the five stages that make up the Buyer Decision Process is information search. Once the customer has identified a need for one of Protyre’s products they are likely to search for information about the product and try to find the best possible option. Relying on internal and external factors as well as their past experiences with Protyre. In the information stage internal searches refers to the consumers own memory or recollection of a product, have they purchased a particular tyre from Protyre before, were they happy with the product or dissatisfied? In this stage of the process the customer can often guided by their own personal experience with Protyre. If it was good last time, then they are likely a retained customer. An external search is conducted when the customer has no prior knowledge about a product and they browse through online resources, such as Google or even look at reviews for social proofing to help them make a decision. At Protyre we aim to give the user the information they want. A good tool for this is the telephone, we generate thousands of calls each month into the business from prospective customers with questions about certain products this is an example of external research and is down to our sales team to provide clarity on any questions asked and close the sale.
Stage 3 – Evaluation of Alternatives
Evaluation of alternatives is the third stage in the Consumer Buying Decision process. Consumers will evaluate all of the products they are interested in purchasing and whether they have the defined attributes to deliver the benefits they need. An example of a tyre would be whether it was being used for winter driving, for example if you were driving abroad you would need a tyre that is winter approved and features the snow and ice icon. The consumer may look at alternative products available from many of Protyre’s competitors. The consumer can spend significant time in the comparative process reviewing the various prices for the same products, warranties offered by each competitor to help resolve the problem. Buying a tyre can be a confusing and expensive purchase. The customer could simply be persuaded to choose between one alternative or the next by what promotions are run by each brand or what discount code is available, what the availability of the tyre is, how quickly can it be fit – remember tyres are a distressed purchase your normally buying one because there is a need and its urgent. This could play a significant factor when evaluating alternatives in the buying decision process.
Stage 4 – Purchase Decision
The penultimate stage in the Buying Decision Process is the purchase decision and when the purchase actually takes place. During this process the consumer will decide from who they will buy, having taken into account all of the other factors we have already covered. The biggest factor for Protyre’s customers is price and availability. Getting the tyre at the best price Vs our competitors and having them available for fitting asap. At Protyre we are very fortunate to be part of a large organisation which stocks of over 2 million tyres available from 15 warehouses across the UK, so if the tyres are not available for immediate fitting, they, can usually be delivered into the garage for fitting the next day. The Protyre website is a good example of this, with its first available fitting date displayed on all tyre search results as shown in the below screenshot.
Stage 5 – Post Purchase Evaluation
The final stage of the Buyer Decision Making process is the Post purchase evaluation, where the customer assess whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied with their purchase and whether it met their expectations, exceeded them or was disappointing. How the customer feels about their purchase and the service they received. At Protyre it is important to us that the customer has the best experience during the purchase process and one they have purchased the product whether that be when visiting one of our garages or using our retail website protyre.co.uk. Did the customer receive a good service in the garage, were the tyres fitted quickly and how were the staff when the customer visited the garage. Finally, once the customer has left the garage what are their thoughts on the performance of the tyre – did it perform as expected or exceed expectation? There are a number of questions that we at Protyre try to answer, so we can improve the customers buying experience for both new and existing customers. It is essential that the customer goes away believing they have had the best experience, and this sits with our company slogan and values – Protyre are The local garage you can trust. This is very important to us as the perception from a garage is the service levels are poor – we are trying to change this perception. We will regularly engage with our customers to make sure that they have had the best experience and will send out weekly NPS emails to the previous weeks customers, the scores and feedback from these surveys help drive our in garage performance, help drive change and help us shape our standard operating procedures. We have collected over 44,000 positive Trustpilot reviews and over 97,000 Feefo reviews. We are able to control whether the customer is satisfied or dissatisfied using this review platforms and we promote these great customer satisfaction scores across our website, marketing collateral and social media channels. By controlling the post purchase evaluation stage it helps Protyre to retain more life-long customers.
Thanks for reading! I hope you have found my own experiences interesting and how I have related the Buyer Decision Making process to my job role. Please leave a comment, I would love to get your thoughts.
Protyre – Buy Tyres online, Book MOTs, Car Servicing & Fitting: Same Day Fitting. [online] Available at: https://www.protyre.co.uk. (Accessed: 21st January 2022)
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