Avoid 3 Common Technology Traps and Boost Conversions

Technology is your friend.

That's what marketers say after they employ a largely tech-driven tactic that provides some lift. Unfortunately, that's rarely the end of the story. Often, things that look simple — e.g., implementing pop-ups to capture email addresses for remarketing or enabling promo codes — can have unintended consequences. If you don't think through the usability impact or downstream conversion effect, technology-driven improvements will often cause tough-to-diagnose pains down the line.

Therefore, it's better to be prepared. When implementing one of these tactics, it's better to think through implementation pitfalls before execution, start small, and test your way in. Here are a few areas where you have to be especially careful:

1. The pop-over trap: Look, pop-ups can work. They can work really well. It's actually because they have so much potential that a lot of marketers overextend how pop-ups are supposed to be used.

The problem starts when marketers use pop-ups to get email addresses very early on, usually through a discount or featured product campaign. This is, of course, a technology play. If you have the email address associated to a visit, you can do a range of interesting things:

• ensure visitors can come back to a cart without starting over, if they get that far; and/or
• remarket to a person if he or she leaves the site without completing a transaction.

Those are both nice to have in the bag — after the visitor does some actual visiting. The problem with how this tactic is being used is that the pop-ups usually launch within two seconds of the visit. That's before the visitor has had to make sense of the navigation or scan the content to see if what he or she needs is available.

There are two key issues here. The first one is about attention to the task. When someone is considering whether your site has what they need, the last thing you want to do is get in the way and call attention to something else. The second one is segmentation and personalization. Two seconds in, you rarely have enough information to create a compelling offer.