Hitting the IceCREAMberg – Segment 86% of your website visitors you were never able to target before | Blog SALESmanago – Customer Engagement Platform for impact-hungry eCommerce marketing teams

Picture an iceberg. But not the looming danger kind. This is an IceCREAMberg. Made of all the goodies eCommerce marketers can dream of. This part, above the water line, is the part you have access to. But this is just 14% of it all. This is your customer base. The rest, a whopping 86%, is, sadly, beyond your reach. What a frustration. If only you’d have a Spotlight, to uncover these previously hidden rewards…

The IceCREAMberg

This hidden 86% of visitors are the people who stay logged out for the duration of their sessions on your website. This number only reflects SALESmanago customers whose data is based on their already advanced marketing automation campaigns. For the majority of marketers that number is even higher with an average website seeing 97% to 98% of its traffic from anonymous visitors.

85% of online shoppers stay logged out for the duration of their session. (Forbes)
69.57% of online shopping carts are abandoned. (Baymard Institute)
80% of customers are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences. (Epsilon))

Besides:

96% of incognito shoppers and eCommerce users are omitted in the marketing communication process, making them an untapped part of the website audience
12% of all eCommerce purchases are anonymous, creating a false notion that anonymous users don’t spend money
Anonymous users are 58% more likely to make a purchase within their first week of engaging with a brand, as compared to identified users
Using just one marketing channel to engage anonymous users can lead to a 5.3X rise in the likelihood of buying by this group of customers
Anonymous web users are 8.4X more likely to create an account if, within their first month of interacting with the brand, they were approached with engaging messaging

So let’s first find out who exactly are these anonymous visitors, and how they differ from the unique ones.

Anonymous vs Unique

Consider the distinction between ‘unique visitors’ and ‘anonymous users’ within the realm of website analytics.

Unique visitors refer to individuals who access a website or application within a specified timeframe, typically monthly or quarterly. Each visitor is counted only once during this period, regardless of how many times they return.

On the other hand, anonymous users never give you any marketing consent. Sometimes they even intentionally conceal their identities by employing methods such as using private browsing modes, VPNs to mask IP addresses, or regularly clearing cookies. When these anonymous users revisit a website, they are often treated as new unique visitors, despite having visited before.

It’s crucial to recognize that while anonymous users may not reveal their identities, their interactions with a website can still be meaningful. They may browse pages, click on advertisements, or engage in other activities that contribute to the site’s overall performance and revenue generation.

And now, they can also be addressed with something more, than spray-and-pray marketing tactics.

The IceCREAMberg – what you can and what you can’t

You can easily address the 14% of your visitors with a myriad of features and tactics because their profiles are already in your database. They are your identified customers. Most of the functionalities of Martech systems are centered around them. This is the kingdom of zero-party data, hyper-personalization, deep behavioral segmentation, and 360-degree customer profiles – the realm of real-deal marketing, not only driving sales but also nourishing loyalty and meaningful relationships.

The unseen 86% below the water, on the other hand, is not.

This is the realm of paleolithic marketing practices, where you swim blindfolded, not being able to conclude practically anything, besides wondering, where did all your sales opportunities go.

So you do the only thing you can do, as an eCommerce marketer in this situation, in 2024. You send them mass Web Push notifications. Blind shooting is all you’re left with like it’s 1994 again… BC!

And it would be okay, to some extent, if this wasn’t 86% of your website’s visitors. You must understand that:

All the sophisticated strategies and tactics, all the tools martech has been providing you with for decades, skyrocketed the effects of your marketing efforts – but only for the 14% of people who interact with your brand online. Everyone else, the vast majority, sees your brand and offers like they would in 1994, only on high-resolution screens.

What does SPOTLIGHT have to do with anything?

Why is it that 86% of your visitors do not create an account on your website? Try to put yourself in their shoes. Do you have an account on every eCommerce site you use, even if visited frequently? Probably not. After all, how many various accounts can you conveniently have, or how many of them offer enough worthwhile benefits to convince you?

The sites you have an account on, are probably the ones that have engaged with you enough to persuade you that it will be more beneficial to have an account.

Engagement is a key factor here. But how can you engage someone, who decided to keep their identity to themselves, with your default, non-personalized branding, products, prices, and interfaces

You can engage with anonymous visitors with Web Push notifications, however, they are rarely successful due to a lack of personalization capabilities… But don’t fret! There is a way to identify anonymous users and their behavior on your website using Spotlight.

It is an innovative tool that helps you to understand, segment, and personalize website communication with anonymous visitors. Thanks to the deep behavioral understanding of your hidden customers, you can gain insights into their needs, easily reach them, and tailor individualized engagement on your website, converting them into loyal customers.

What do you gain- the way we see it

Anonymous visitors, when highly engaged with more tailored content, are more likely to finally share their email addresses, becoming your identified customers, and becoming a part of your growing database.

Precise messages will also be more effective, thus more likely to increase sales and their value, and keep customers, even if still anonymous, close to your brand.
Spotlight will also enable you to analyze anonymous visitors’ activity to gain valuable marketing insights, track the effectiveness of your efforts, and make data-driven decisions.

Unless…

So you learned that the majority of your website’s visitors are anonymous. You tried to improve on your messaging, created a new special offer and displayed web push notifications with discounts for all of your Clients. But what if you did everything in your power to create a compelling experience, and the visitors still remain anonymous?

It’s not for the lack of trying. But you can’t blame them either. Are you not afterall an anonymous visitor yourself on many websites? Even with great and engaging ideas and big discounts, sometimes, it’s just not enough to convince people to become a customer or to abandon their safety online measures.

Did you subscribe to our newsletter or requested a demo? 😉 If not, should we feel offended and give up on engaging you with the most valuable content we have? Absolutely not! And so shouldn’t you with your visitors.

You might’ve tried everything and nothing worked. In the worst-case scenario, the iceberg of anonymous visitors might stay anonymous despite your efforts. Don’t give up on them! You don’t need to push for the conversion of all of them. Thanks to Spotlight you might target anonymous contacts and tailor communication driving sales and developing brand loyalty despite their hidden status.

Wrapping Up:

Standard Anonymous Contact targeting methods are usually just blind-shooting, hoping to reach the target. They are often mass-directed toward all website visitors with a 90s-like strategy and no personalization in mind.

Regardless of whether you see Spotlight as a way to expand your identified customer database with converted anonymous visitors, or use it to provide highly effective strategies for sophisticated segmentation and tailored communication – previously unseen in the eCommerce marketing landscape – we help you become future-proof. Let’s enable you to reach the remaining 86% of your visitors and conquer the iceCREAMberg! 🍦