Use Case #3: Recovering Abandoned Shopping Carts
Whether it’s due to poor UX or a penchant for comparison shopping, around 69% of shoppers will abandon their cart before purchasing (source: Dotmailer). In an effort to combat shopping cart abandonment rates, many ecommerce merchants look to marketing automation to encourage completed purchases – More specifically, cart recovery automated emails. It’s one of the most effective ways of getting users back into the purchase funnel.
Take this example: A prospective buyer visits your product page, adds a product to the cart, but does not complete the transaction. No more than 24 hours later, your marketing automation system sends a follow-up email with a snappy subject line and prominent product imagery, re-igniting their interest and prompting them to complete their purchase.
But it doesn’t stop there. In order to be even more effective in your cart recovery campaign, don’t be afraid to segment your send lists and create a drip campaign spanning 72 hours, tailoring the messaging for new and repeat customers. Through your marketing automation software, you can use browsing history to show what items users have previously looked at. You can also send discount codes to lure customers back into the shopping funnel. To combat promotion blindness, use your marketing automation software to detect if a certain user has received a coupon code within the past 6 months. Really, the personalization options are endless with marketing automation.
Cart abandonment email campaigns can benefit any online retailer or brand. By not implementing this tactic, statistics show that you may be missing out on as much as 10% of carts each month.
Use Case #4: Turning First-Time Buyers into Repeat Customers
One additional way to get the most out of your marketing automation system is to create and send follow-up, post-purchase email campaigns in order to incentivize product reviews and repeat purchases from first-time buyers.
Once a customer makes a purchase for the first time, the marketing automation system will send them a confirmation email including additional information about the product itself and customer service details.
3-5 days later, the marketing automation system will send another email to the buyer with information on some best uses for the product (this can be in the form of videos, blogs, other supplemental content). At this point in the post-purchase phase, you may also want to tie in additional offers for accessories and complementary products, guiding certain customers into a purchase path they may have not noticed otherwise.
One week later, the marketing automation system sends a final email regarding product satisfaction, actively soliciting feedback, ratings or reviews to establish ‘social proof’ on your site. To incentivize this action, you can tie in user-generated reviews to a loyalty program or discount. Alternatively, use this post-purchase email to promote your subscription service for products that need to be replenished.
With marketing automation, the dialogue doesn’t have to stop as soon as your customer hits “place order.” As described above, this use case is particularly effective in generating repeat customers, especially in retailing instances where different product offerings can work in conjunction with one another.
It’s unrealistic that any merchant running an online store has time in their day to manage any of these processes manually. That’s why a marketing automation software is a must if you plan to implement multiple lead nurturing, lead scoring, cart recovery, and post-purchase campaigns, among any other strategies that you find suitable for your business.
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