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Posts Tagged ‘Conversion Rate’

Runa’s new service looks to turn web surfers into sales

Last year, e-commerce retailers spend $21 billion, or 15 percent of their revenues, in online marketing to drive traffic to their websites. The end result — a dismal 2-3 percent conversion rate between visitors and sales.

Mountain View startup Runa, a provider of revenue growth and profit maximization solutions, is looking to help e-commerce retailers to change low conversion rates with the launch of their new conversion marketing solution. The new web application focuses on converting web traffic into sales while shoppers are still on the website. By determining a consumer’s buying intent, Runa helps to deliver more effective personalized sale price incentives in real-time.

Here’s an example of how an e-commerce site might use Runa: Say you’re shopping online and you decide to choose a new table for your kitchen. As you proceed to checkout, you suddenly decide you want to shop around. As you click to leave the site, a real-time pop-up appears offering you a $60 discount if you agree to buy the item now. By agreeing, the $60 is taken off your total price at checkout. A demo on the site refers to this as a “cart abandonment campaign.”

Runa works closely with the e-commerce retailers to determine goals and what they call “business rules.” These rules are pre-determined by the retailer to decide the individualized pricing each type of consumer will receive. Individualized pricing can take several forms including discounts, free shipping, buy one and get one free specials or no tax.

Conversion marketing is not a new concept. Companies like Omniture, who provide rich data to customers on consumer behaviors, and RichRelevance, specializing in product personalization and relevance, are helping e-commerce retailers find ways to increase sales (there are a number of other companies with similar goals, too). Both companies lack the real-time benefits but are valuable in compiling data over time to help campaign efficiency.

Not convinced? Runa service is offered on a pay-for-performance basis which means that e-commerce retailers don’t have to fork out any up-front costs making it a low risk option if they are looking to jack up sales just in time for the holidays.

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DeepDyve launches rental service for scientific research

A startup called DeepDyve has already unveiled a search engine that it says beats Google’s for finding research information. But its plans go further than search — chief executive Bill Park says the company also wants to reach a new audience for academic research, today launching what he calls “an iTunes or Netflix for research”

The business model for an scientific, medical, or technical journal is all about selling your product to a big academic institution, like Harvard or Stanford, Park said. That means they’re not selling to a huge potential audience, the 50 million “knowledge workers,” a large portion of whom need to read a few technical articles every week as part of their job, or to stay on top of their field. But these technical websites charge around $30 for a single article, often not providing anything more than a short abstract before you make a decision, so most of these workers either give up or ask for a copy from someone they know with a subscription.

As evidence that this is happening, Park says that only 0.2. percent of visitors to these journal websites actually make a purchase, which is a pretty dismal conversion rate.

With the DeepDyve’s rental service, on the other hand, you can use DeepDyve search (whose main strength is searching for entire phrases or large chunks of text) to find the article you want, preview the article, then you get access to it for a limited period of time. Pricing starts at 99 cents per article, which lets you read the article for 24 hours, and goes up to a “gold plan” of $19.99 per month, which lets you read unlimited articles for an unlimited period of time.

The Menlo Park, Calif. company has already made deals many academic publishers, leading to a database of 30 million articles at launch. These publishers realize that this is something that expands, rather than competes with, their business model, Park says.

DeepDyve has raised $9 million from angel investors, and is looking to raise $5 million in its first institutional funding round.

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ASUS Eee Top ET2002T and ET2203T touchscreen all-in-ones land in October

Looks like we’ve got ourselves another Windows 7 launch, folks. The Eee Top ET2002 and ET2203, which have graced these pages with their touchscreens before, have ironed out an all-too-familiar launch date (October 22nd) and some fairly competitive Europe prices, weighing in at £559 and £819, respectively. That’s roughly $893 and $1,312 US, but usually the UK to US conversion on these is dramatically less than the true conversion rate (though we feel rather bad for the folks in the UK, in our own patronizing, American sort of way). Either way we’re happy to see NVIDIA ION popping up again, and the whole concept of a low-end touchscreen PC is certainly intriguing with Windows 7 along for the ride.

Filed under: Desktops

ASUS Eee Top ET2002T and ET2203T touchscreen all-in-ones land in October originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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