What if I told you that the personal approach you can offer in your physical stores can be applied to your online store as well? The difference would be that you could do this with thousands of people at once. All thanks to well thought e-mail automation.
Let’s leave our online store for a second. Imagine you own a physical store. What do you do after a visitor comes in?
You approach him and try to start a conversation. You ask what it is he is looking for, what are his needs and expectations. You show him various products and options on how to solve his problem. In the end you try to persuade the visitor to buy the product. If you succeed, both parties are happy. If you don’t succeed at first, you might give him your business card for him to remember you when he’s looking for products elsewhere.
After he becomes your customer, you might offer him a special discount for his next purchase in the future or offer him a membership card with which he can get more special offers from you. Either way, your goal is for him to come back and become your loyal customer.
After a while, you will know each other after all your meetings at your store. You will offer your customer products based on his previous purchases or on other things you may have got to know about him.
This is what e-mail automation is trying to achieve in your online store. Effective, wide-ranged, but personalized communications through special touchpoints in all the stages of the customer’s lifecycle.
While sending a general newsletter, we are saying “Look everyone, this is what we’ve got”, but in automation, we cay “we have noticed you are interested in this. Want to get the best deal? And how about this product as well?”
This article is not about concrete steps on how to set up your campaigns through one of many e-mail marketing tools. I will try to show you the bigger picture about how the customer lifecycle works and how e-mail work within it.
Which software to choose?
There is a wide variety of options to choose from on the market. It mostly depends on the size of your database, your monthly traffic and generated revenue.
Basic solutions to start with automation:
Advanced solutions for small to mid-sized companies:
High-end solutions for complete customer management. These tools are called Customer Data Platforms (CDP’s):
Three phases of shopping process in e-commerce
Your usual website visit can be split into three stages, just like at the physical store. There are many names for these stages around, depending on your marketing religion. In this article I will refer to them as browsing, decision making and buying.
What should be your goal in each stage? Which campaign to send in order to achieve it?
Phase 1: Browsing
Visitor wants to get to know more about your products and find out whether this store can fulfill his needs and expectations. You should have two goals
Main goal: move your visitor into decision making phase
Secondary goal: Get contact information in case your visitor hasn’t reached phase 2. You will now have a channel where you can communicate with him directly and try to convert him later. This is where subscribers are born.
Oh and also, gather data. As much data as you can use actually. Find out how he got to the website, how much time he spent, which products he browsed, whether or not he added something to his cart etc. When you have the e-mail address, you can use all this data to personalize your next e-mail touchpoint. Because after you get an e-mail, all these anonymized data which were represented only by cookie ID are now aligned with a unique person’s e-mail address.
It’s just like at the physical store. After someone comes in, most of the time you might get “oh thanks, i’m just browsing”. Never mind, others will be more interested. And that’s the point of reaching out.
In e-commerce, this is what pop-ups are used for. They try to gain an e-mail address or other useful info about the visitor. You may also ask about which product category he is interested in or how much money he is willing to spend on a product. These data can be used for segmentation later. There are many factors which determine the conversion rate of such pop-ups depending on design, copy or offered benefits.
In my experience, conversion rates of subscribe pop-ups can vary mostly based on the offer presented:
- Basic newsletter option without added benefit: 1 to 3 %
- Discount coupons: 3 to 7 %
- Combined with other creative concepts: 7% and more
Figuring out which benefit to offer should always be subject to cost/benefit analysis. How much margin am I willing to give up to boost my database and sales? With higher discounts come higher conversion rates and more database growth for future activities. But keep in mind that these new sales should generate more profit than lower amounts of sales with higher profit margin. You can choose to sacrifice part of your profit margin to build a strong database, but this should not be a permanent strategy.
Phase 2: Decision making
Main goal: Make a purchase
Great! Visitor just gave you his e-mail and you managed to spark a conversation. Now it’s your opportunity to persuade your new subscriber to make a purchase at your store.
Now you can approach your subscriber with a personalized offer. These 3 campaigns are most effective and should be part of every automation strategy:
Welcome scenario
This automation introduces our new subscriber to our portfolio, mentions all the benefits and options to help convert subscribers into customers. In the first e-mail, he should receive his bonus that he applied for while entering his e-mail on the website.
In the following days, there can be more personalized touchpoints based on other data he provided us with and based on his activity on the website.
What to expect?
- 40 to 60 % open your welcome e-mail
- 25 to 50 % go to website
- 5 to 20 % make an immediate purchase
This means that if there are 1 000 news monthly subscribers, anywhere from 5 to 60 people will make an immediate purchase. With an average order amount of 40$, your welcome scenario could then make you 200 – 2 400$ every month based on many factors such as incentive, seasonality, copywriting or design.
Everyone who wasn’t converted by the welcome scenario can now be targeted in other automations.
Abandoned cart
If visitor hasn’t completed their purchase but showed interest in a particular product, we can use this info to try to convert him into customer.
Adding products to your cart and then not completing your purchase is a very common occurence in e-commerce. About 40-60 % of all carts are left abandoned without completing the purchase.
These abandoned carts can then be sent as a reminder to your subscribers inbox couple hours after leaving the website, notifying them about their abandoned products. You can also use follow-up e-mails to offer discount on desired products, recommend similar products or answer some questions that a subscriber might have before completing his purchase.
What to expect?
- 25 to 50 % opens the e-mail
- 20 to 40 % clicks through
- 10 to 20 % completes their purchase
This means out of 1 000 subscribers receiving abandoned cart e-mails, anywhere between 5 to 40 people may complete a purchase. With an average order of 40$, expected monthly revenue should be between 200 – 1 600$.
Abandoned visit
This campaign should have the most monthly sends out of all three. It is used as kind of e-mail retargeting, similar to those retargeting campaign and Google and Facebook. For any subscriber that was active on your website without adding anything to his cart, this scenario looks at viewed products, categories and other content and categorize it into different content variations based on these activities.
Were you looking at our new hoodies collection? Great, here is more info about our selection of hoodies and why they are so awesome. We may also show you your last viewed product to let you continue where you left. This way, every e-mail will be relevant for any given subscriber.
What to expect?
- 20 to 40 % opens the e-mail
- 10 to 30 % clicks through
- 5 to 15 % completes their purchase
This means out of 1 000 subscribers receiving abandoned visit e-mails, anywhere between 1 to 18 people may complete a purchase. With an average order of 40$, expected monthly revenue should be between 40 – 720$.
Phase 3: Buying
Main: Nurture your new customer
Congratulations, you have a new customer! It is now time for you to deliver on your promises and offer the best possible product/service. It is known that retaining an existing customer is multiple times cheaper than acquiring a new one. That is why we don’t stop our communication with customers after their purchase, but try to bring even more value for their future shopping experience with us. The most common practice is delivering retention campaigns.
Retention campaign
Scenario which is triggered with a completed purchase. It waits a certain period of time after which it tries to motivate a customer to make another purchase.
You can personalize content in many different ways. You can adjust your offer based on many metrics scoring the value of your customer, such as how many orders he has already made, or how much he spent on his last purchase etc.
You can expect less monthly delivered e-mails from this campaign, since it only targets customers, who have recently made a purchase. But if they had a positive experience with your products, you can expect to have high engagement with these e-mails.
What to expect?
- 30 to 50 % opens the e-mail
- 10 to 30 % clicks through
- 10 to 20 % completes their purchase
This means out of 1 000 subscribers receiving retention e-mails, anywhere between 3 to 30 people may complete a purchase. With an average order of 40$, expected monthly revenue should be between 120 – 1 200$.
Quick overview of basic automations you can use
To finish this article, I include a table with 4 most common automations to start with at every stage of the customer lifecycle. If you are starting with automations from scratch, I recommend you progress from top left to top right and then from top to bottom to add more depth into your communication.
| Browsing | Decision making | Buying |
| Newsletter subscription Offer an opportunity for a better deal in exchange for an e-mail address | Welcome scenario Welcome your new subscriber, introduce him to your brand and convert him to a customer. | Retention scenario Thank your customer for the recent purchase and offer a bonus for the next one. |
| Browser notifications Allow flash notification on new deals and promotions | Abandoned cart Save products that have been left in shopping cart to increase your conversions | Birthday campaign Happy birthday! If you know your customer’s birthday, it never hurts to send a small present. 🙂 |
| Notification pop-ups Notify your visitor about new content and products straight on your website | Abandoned visit Follow-up on a recent website visit with a personalized e-mail. | Purchase anniversary It has been a year since you’re with us. How about celebrating it with this special offer! |
| Zero-party data collection Collect additional data about your visitor’s preferences through interactive forms. | Re-engagement Offer a special bonus to contacts that have been inactive for a while. | Win-back scenario Reach out to past customer’s with special offers to not lose them completely. |
And you know what is the best thing about automated campaigns? Once you set them up, you don’t have to interfere and they will generate results without any extra effort. Your only job will be to analyse their performance and make adjustments on the go.
If this article inspired you to give automations a go, my job here is done. If you’d like any guidance on your journey with automations and e-mail marketing in general, feel free to get in touch. I will gladly help. 🙂
