You are probably familiar with the scenario. Your website analytics software is showing you a number of anonymous visitors to your eCommerce website and provides details of the product pages they are visiting. The problem is you don’t know who the visitors are unless they identify themselves by submitting their contact information, by making a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter.
However, the data show that the majority of website visitors leave without making a purchase. Unless you can capture their email address it’s hard to reach out and try to convert this visitor into a paying customer. Once they’ve left your site the lead is gone.
Capturing the email addresses of visitors to your website is one of the best ways to try and build a relationship and nurture sales from people who have visited your website but not yet bought from you. However many of the tactics websites often use to try and capture emails can sometimes negatively affect the user experience for visitors who are not ready to share their details with you
As digital marketing expert Neil Patel says:
So today we are going to talk about another way to capture the details of eCommerce website visitors in a way that feels more natural and engaging for the shopper. It’s via an interaction with a guided selling tool that personalizes the shopping experience. It delivers a more personal and human touch that consumers often miss when shopping online.
What is guided selling?
Guided selling is a process that helps shoppers narrow down product selections based on their preferences, increasing conversions and decreasing returns.
An eCommerce product finder helps a website user locate the right goods by asking questions. Because guided selling tools are interactive, they may collect valuable information about the visitor and what they are looking for. This interactive nature makes guided selling tools a good way to capture details you can use in marketing campaigns. A good analogy would be to think about the interactions a shopper has with a sales rep in a retail store. There is an interaction between the two where the shopper can ask questions and provide information on what they are looking for, and the sales rep can use that to provide personalized recommendations.
How does guided selling help you capture emails?
One of the great benefits of guided selling is that it depends on the user interacting with the tool. When the user initiates the process they are ready to engage and unlike pop-up ads, it doesn’t interrupt them browsing your site and make them want to click the back button.
Adding a capture form at the end of your content is proven to be more effective and is less intrusive. However, the problem with this approach is that your content has to be engaging enough for the visitor to get to the end or they won’t see the email capture form at all.
Capturing a user's email via a guided selling tool has a couple of advantages in this regard. The first is that the user is already engaged. They are interacting with the tool and inputting their answers to narrow down the product solution to fit their requirements.
The second advantage is that the timing of presenting the email capture is much more natural. Once the user has completed the form an offer can be made to provide a personalized product selection for the user once they enter their email address. This incentivizes the user to provide their details as they are getting something useful in return. Recommendations can also be sent to the user’s email address so they can keep them for the future as a reminder when they are ready to buy. This approach can help to convert more users into buyers immediately, but also gives you a chance to nurture those not ready to buy right away.
What other data can guided selling tools capture?
With a traditional email pop-up form the user typically enters their name and email address. The forms have to be deliberately simple to encourage users to complete them. Additional information can also be gathered through website behavior (second-party data).
Guides are much better at collecting non-generic information. The strength of guides is to collect information directly from the user (zero party data), that would be hard to gather without asking them. Learning things about the user such as what activities they will be doing, and the environments they spend time in.
With a product finder, this data can then be combined into a customer profile with their email. Having a more complete customer profile allows eCommerce brands to create much more tailored and personalized follow-up communications and offers for consumers, resulting in better engagement and an increase in sales. 
When compared to a mass and non-personalized email campaign generated from traditional email capture methods it's clear which one is more effective.
A study by email automation company Mailchimp conducted in 2018 showed that the average email open rate is 20.81%. However, another study by Yes Lifecycle Marketing conducted in 2019 found that if you personalize your emails, you can begin to see the huge impact that personalization in marketing can have. Personalized email subject lines generate 50% higher open rates helping you reach more consumers with your messaging.
So, a great email marketing tip would be to customize your greeting and subject line to include individual names and you could try personalizing your emails with the relevant details you find from the product guide tool such as the product category, or topic of interest.
As an example imagine a protein powder and supplement brand. They offer a huge variety of powders, bars, accessories, drink shakers, and more. The product finder helps narrow down the category to powders, and then the user chooses which type of powder for weight gain, weight loss, muscle building, meal replacement, and so on. Now you know what exact category they are interested in and perhaps even details such as what flavors they prefer. You can now create a much more appealing follow-up when you reach out and email them.
Why is email capture important for eCommerce?
According to the Direct Marketing Association, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42. Of course, other methods of retargeting consumers on Facebook and other social channels or on search engines also have a positive impact on sales.
With a large number of visitors to your site not making a purchase, retargeting is one of the most effective ways to convert a percentage of this traffic into paying customers.
In Dialogtrail you can follow the personas in the user card and connect them to different CRM tools, and also use them for market research. This information can help to fuel your marketing team with insights from the product finder. This means you can easily retarget the customer via newsletters, ads on social sites, email campaigns, and more. Because the Dialogtrail user profile cards get tagged with the product features the customer was looking at, you can highly personalize the retargeting messages to them.
Even product buyers and merchandisers at your company can benefit from the product finder data, they can follow the customer throughout the guide and see what they are buying. As a result, they can make smarter product purchases for the eCommerce website in the future.
Data collection policies
As you would expect, all collection of email and personal data via the guided selling tools requires consent from the end-user (consumer) and correct agreements between the third-party supplier (such as Dialogtrail) and the eCommerce store owner. This is presented simply as an opt-in for the consumer.
About Dialogtrail
Dialogtrail is a lightweight product finder that can be designed to fit your brand style with no coding required. Products can be uploaded and connected to the software and then automatically update in real-time as you adjust your inventory.
Our guided selling tool enables brands to deliver more personalized shopping experiences, and complete more sales. Find out more about our product finder software or contact us for a product demo today!