You can find this page under Interventions > Interventions in the IRP Admin left navigation menu.
You use this page to configure options for ‘intervening’ to engage a customer when they are on your website, primarily to move them closer to making a purchase but also to feel welcome on your website. This is one of the extremely powerful features of the IRP that can potentially help you to increase your online sales. Here are some of the key aspects of this feature:
- As with many other features in the IRP, you use the built-in HTML editor to create your interventions. You should aim to make them as well designed as possible and to be visually appealing to your site visitors.
- You can include automatically generated Vouchers and totally custom Mailing List Signup widgets to maximise the likelihood of purchases.
- You can also define minimum basket values, minimum basket stock levels and basket profit margins for each intervention.
- You can set up your interventions so that they will slide in from the top of the screen, from the bottom of the screen or pop up in the middle of the screen. Use the 'Add Separate CSS' section to create CSS styles to manipulate the appearance and placement of your interventions.
- You can create separate versions for your Desktop and Mobile sites, or you can use the same intervention for both Desktop and Mobile.
- You can choose how your intervention will be ‘triggered’. For example your pop-up might appear when a visitor moves off a specific page, when they have been inactive for a set period of time, when they first arrive on your site, when they return, when they complete a purchase and so forth.
- You can configure your interventions to apply only to logged-in customers, only to new customers or only to returning customers. You can also define that an intervention will not be displayed to customers who have placed over a certain number of orders. Another option is to define customer frequency for an intervention, for example only 1 in 3 customers who match the criteria for the intervention will see the intervention. This is important to help prevent customers from trying to guess how to trigger an intervention.
- You can create Advanced Targeting Rules by restricting Interventions to particular basket contents for specific Brands, Categories or Products, or only target customers who view specific pages.
- You can define different interventions for specific countries and languages. Potentially this can be a very powerful feature as it could result in increased international sales. If you have specific text in your interventions, make sure that you have the text translated professionally.
- You can preview exactly how Interventions will appear to site visitors — before you make the Interventions active.
- You can see at-a-glance statistics to understand how your Interventions are performing
Interventions.aspx page
The main Interventions.aspx page appears as follows:
You can use the Search bar to find any intervention in your system. If you expand Other Options under the Search bar, you can use the following filtering options:
- Active Status: Active, Inactive or Both.
- Platform: Any, Desktop, Mobile or Both.
- Popup Type: Slide From Top, Slide From Bottom or Popup.
- Triggers: Select any Trigger from the drop-down list or select 'Any'.
- Shipping Country: Select any Shipping Country from the drop-down list or select 'Any'.
The grid contains the following information:
- ID: This is the unique ID of an intervention, created automatically by IRP Admin when you first set up and save an intervention.
- Active: This indicates whether or not an intervention is active on the front end of your website. For anyone to see the intervention (assuming they meet the criteria that you have configured), an intervention must be active.
- Name: This is the name of the intervention, used for easy identification in the Admin.
- Type: This shows how the intervention will be displayed on the screen to visitors – Slide From Top, Slide From Bottom, or Popup.
- Triggers: This shows how the intervention will be triggered. For example this could be Move Off Page, Inactive On Page, Cold Region Activity, Leaving Specific Page, Completed Purchase, When Customer Returns, Active On Page, and so forth. See ‘Intervention Triggers’ below for more information.
- Platforms: This shows whether the intervention applies to Desktops, Mobiles or both.
- Freq: This shows how often the intervention is configured to be offered. For example, if set to 100% it will be offered to all customers that match the criteria; if set to 30%, it will be offered to approximately 1 in 3 customers who match the criteria.
- Voucher: This shows the amount of discount that is offered in an intervention, is vouchers are included. If no vouchers are included this will show ‘None’.
- Countries: This shows the country that an intervention applies to. If it applies to every country then ‘All Countries’ will be shown here.
- Pages: This shows the specific page that an intervention is targeted at, if applicable. If it applies to any page, this will show ‘All’.
- Offers: This shows the number of times that an intervention has been displayed on your website.
- Take-up: This shows the percentage of interventions that result in orders versus the total number accepted.
- Orders: This shows the total value of orders that have been placed as a result of the offers contained in each intervention. You can click this value to navigate to the Orders page with the intervention filter applied automatically for the relevant intervention.
- Preview: Click this button to see the intervention on our website (without it being added to the statistics).
- View: Click this button to see the key statistics for the intervention. This opens a lightbox where you can see the following information:
- Triggers
- Countries
- Frequency
- Take-up
- Orders
- Conversion Rate
- Value of Orders
- The rendered HTML/CSS of the intervention
- A breakdown of the criteria for the intervention
- A link to edit the intervention
- A link to preview the intervention on the front end
- Copy: Click this button to make a copy of the intervention. This is extremely useful when you want to configure many interventions with only slight differences between them as you will not have to create each one from the beginning each time — you will just need to change the relevant aspects of each intervention.
- Edit: Click this button to make changes to an intervention. For more information see the How To Add or Edit an Intervention topic in this section.
Intervention Triggers
You could think of intervention Triggers as reasons for performing an intervention. This differs from intervention Criteria, which determine whether the intervention is applicable to the customer at all (see the How To Add or Edit an Intervention topic in this section for more details about Criteria). The following types of Trigger are available:
- Customer Views Page
This is a straightforward and useful intervention that you can use for several purposes, perhaps simply to display when a customer first arrives on your site or after they have been active for a configurable period of time. As with other interventions, you can include vouchers and configure specific Criteria for the intervention. The intervention will be triggered after the trigger delay time that you configure.
- Cursor Moved Off Page
This intervention will fire when the customer moves their cursor off the page. This is a good intervention for including money-off or percentage-off vouchers.
- Customer Inactive On Page
This will fire when a customer is inactive (for the minimum time on the page (as configured by the setting ‘Trigger Delay’). This is ideal for directing customers to information pages that will be useful to them depending on where they are on your site, or to chat with sales/support staff.
- When Customer Returns
This intervention will be triggered when a customer returns to the site after the specified number of minutes. This will be useful particularly for mobile devices if a customer reloads the page after a period of time when they have been absent (for example when a tab is reloaded on a mobile browser).
- Customer Leaves Specific Page (next page load)
This intervention will be triggered when a customer leaves the specified page to view another on your site. You can choose specific pages and add them as the included pages for the intervention. The intervention will then display on the next page. This can be used to ask if there is a reason for abandoning a purchase, or to offer voucher incentives to continue with a purchase.
- Customer Completes Purchase
This intervention will be triggered when a customer places an order and IRP DeepAgent detects that they are unlikely to make a repeat purchase (less than 50% – if prediction is enabled). This trigger will be useful when trying to increase the number of returning customers on your site.
- Drop in Purchase Likelihood (page load)
(Available only if Prediction is enabled via the IRP Trading Terminal.) A drop in purchase likelihood is determined by IRP DeepAgent. Offering an intervention for this trigger will improve the chances of the customer continuing with a purchase after they take an action which often results in a lost sale. This intervention is triggered when the page loads after a statistically significant likelihood drop has been detected.
- Cold Region Activity
This will fire when a customer is active in a cold region of the page (as determined by generated heat maps – if available). The length of time they must be in a cold region can be set using the 'Trigger Delay' setting. This requires heat maps to be generated for the given page and is ideal for prompting customers to continue with their purchase when their activity is unusual.
- Free Shipping
You use this Trigger Type to fire an Intervention when a customer almost qualifies for Free Shipping. This has the potential to boost your AOV and revenues. For example, consider that a Free Shipping Rule has been set up for a Shipping Method which is applicable to baskets with a value greater than £30. When an Intervention is active with Free Shipping as its trigger and a threshold percentage of 70%, any customers who can use the Shipping Method with the Free Shipping Rule will be targeted for intervention when they add items to their basket totalling 70% or more of the Free Shipping Rule boundary, in this example £21 (70% of £30). The Intervention will not be triggered if the customer exceeds the Free Shipping Rule boundary and so already qualifies for the rule. Note that this type of Intervention is fired only for 'Value'-restricted Shipping Rules (and Shipping Rules with 'No Restriction') and not 'Weight' or 'Value & Weight' restricted Shipping Rules. The InterventionsEdit.aspx page will display an error message if you are editing a 'Free Shipping' intervention that is targeting countries that do not currently have Free Shipping Rules set up, or if the Free Shipping rules that are set up are not 'value only' (that is, they are reliant only on weight conditions). The countries affected are listed within the error message and include links to the ShippingRules.aspx page with filtering for that country applied.
General tips on Interventions
There are lots of ideas you could think of to include in your interventions in order to induce visitors to purchase. Having a great design and graphics is always important. The messaging that you use should also be as effective as possible. In general it’s a good idea to include your USPs and trust messaging (Lowest Prices, Fast Delivery, The Number One Retailer in the UK, Our Customers Love Us (Trustpilot), Massive Product Range, Secure Website, Flexible Returns, etc.).
For inactivity scenarios you could offer help, a pointer to customer support or live chat. If you have site help configured that could also be useful, as would FAQs. You could also include product recommendations. As with all the interventions you can also offer a voucher.
For visitors moving off a page you can alert them with an offer voucher and some arresting messaging (‘We want to give you 10% OFF!’, ‘WANT A FREE - ?’, ‘Get 10% off your order RIGHT NOW!’).
In general you could also consider showing people recommendations (‘DON’T MISS OUT ON THESE GREAT OFFERS’, ‘Have a look at these great recommendations we have for you’) or letting them know about upcoming sales or events (‘DON’T FORGET our BIG SALE starting 1st March!’).
You may also want to encourage customers to follow you on social media (‘Follow us on Facebook and get 10% OFF’, ‘LIKE US AND GET 20% OFF YOUR ORDER’) or to sign up to your newsletter (‘BE THE FIRST TO KNOW — Sign up to receive the latest news and offers’).
Finally, you could also consider ways to help improve your site when using interventions. For example, ‘Please let us know why you are leaving and help us to improve our site’, ‘Please rate our site’, ‘Please let us know what you think about our site!’ and so forth.
These are only general suggestions. With the aid of first-class graphic design and strong messaging, your interventions could help you realise a significant uplift in sales.
Notes regarding Interventions
When configuring an intervention, be aware that:
- For ‘Slide From Bottom’ interventions, you may need to check that the
z-index
declaration in the .support-popup
class in the Website CSS Stylesheet or the Trade CSS Stylesheet is not set to always display the popup at the front, otherwise this might obscure part of your intervention. This class is used by the ‘Send Us A Message’ Live Support popup.
- Consider the possible impact on site performance in terms of page load times. The interventions can function without the Prediction feature being switched on, although some of the triggers will not then be available. By themselves, interventions should not have much impact on performance. Prediction when coupled with interventions may impact on performance in terms of load times, so you should monitor your site speed if you have both enabled at the same time.
- Note that, in order to prevent search engines from indexing IRP Interventions, Interventions are not rendered for crawlers.
Manually triggering Interventions
You can trigger IRP Interventions manually for a customer when viewing them using the Real Time Insights functionality in the IRP Trading Terminal. You can trigger any active Intervention for a customer, regardless of whether the criteria applies to them or not. You can trigger any number of Interventions for a customer, but only one can display at a time.
Once an Intervention has been manually triggered, it functions in the same way as a normal intervention. Manually-triggered Interventions can display while a customer is viewing a page (i.e. they don't need to view another page in order for the Intervention to appear).
You trigger manual Interventions by clicking the 'Intervene' button on the RealTimeInsightsCustomer.aspx page (if you have purchased the Real Time Insights module).