In our previous blog we learned that content, personalization and a proper strategy can help in fetching much-needed engagement in your ecommerce email marketing endeavor. This time we will delve into the aspects of customer behavior, automation and evaluation.
Send emails to customers based on their behavior
Customers' actions can vary widely, from making purchases to abandoning their carts. Track these behavior patterns and send emails accordingly to strengthen your customer relationships or initiate purchases.
Let's look at two behavior-based emails you can send out:
Post-purchase emails - Sending emails to express gratitude after your customers have made purchases might sound a bit cliched. However, the actual objective is to generate more revenue via either upselling or cross-selling. Make sure to include product suggestions and enticing product images to drive customers toward the desired actions.
Abandoned cart emails - Customers often enter your ecommerce store and leave without buying anything despite selecting products. However, a gentle nudge or reminder—with sufficient personalization—can help initiate such purchases.
Send emails to inactive contacts
Re-engaging with customers who have backed out in the middle of a transaction is an uphill battle that many email marketers have to deal with frequently.
Simply email those customers to bring them back to the main mailing lists—but be careful while crafting these emails. Let's try and understand the two major types of emails under this category:
Back-in-stock emails - Check your customers' previous buying behaviors and gauge their preferences. Update them when items they previously expressed interest in come back in stock. A timely update might bring them back to your store.
Price-drop emails - A product's price can also be a deterring factor for your customers. Analyze your store's reports and try to capitalize on this situation. Inform your customers immediately when there is a drop in the price of their favorite products. This can prove to be effective and have immediate results.
Tread carefully while contacting your inactive contacts; any arbitrary move you make here can land your emails in their spam folders.
Use pop-up forms to understand your customers better
Including a pop-up form in your ecommerce website is definitely a foolproof method of fetching information from visitors. Below are four ways to make these forms appear on your website:
- As soon as the customer enters the website
- As soon as the customer is about to exit the website
- When the customer scrolls to a certain point on the website
- After the customer has spent a certain amount of time on the website
Including the appropriate fields in the form is just as important as positioning it strategically. Fields like email address and first name are essential, but try also to include unique fields like date of birth or phone number—this way you can send them personalized content like birthday messages, and through other channels like SMS campaigns.
Set up ecommerce-based workflows
Workflows are handy for creating customer experiences and journeys based on behavioral patterns. They can use each customer's data and interaction history to help you build a proper funnel for them.
Purchase follow-ups and simple cart abandonment emails are the most frequently created ecommerce-related workflow series. You can also create thank-you series, cross-sell and upsell series, welcome series, and much more.
Workflows offer you a wider range of functionalities; just as you can allow new customers to enter a workflow after signing up, you can also let old, inactive contacts enter by configuring a requisite mailing list.
Let's look at a sample workflow journey, wherein you as an ecommerce store owner are trying to maximize customer purchases during a seasonal sale among your new and existing customers:
- Choose a list-based trigger and let both old and new contacts enter the workflow.
- Send them your first email announcing a special sale.
- Include a time-based option to determine the engagement the email generated using the criteria "Clicked on any link".
- Based on the level of engagement, let the inactive contacts exit the workflows.
- Active contacts can eventually get a special discount based on their previous interactions.
- Thank the contacts with a final email and move them to a special list, and keep the inactive contacts in the old list.
Workflows provide you with the flexibility you need to create highly personalized and behavior-centric marketing experiences for your customers.
Reports
Your ecommerce store reports provide clarity regarding the success of your marketing strategies. They show your store's revenue, impressions, engagement, and other important metrics. Apart from these basic metrics, you can also track the number of times you've successfully converted abandoned carts into purchases.
Another notable trait of store reports is that they also detail the products that are most often recommended to your customers with the help of AI.
With so much activity and data automatically evaluated and categorized, you can easily track the mistakes you make in your email marketing strategies so that you can make the necessary changes and reflect them in your future ROI.
Excellent Article. Yes, Abandoned cart emails and post purchase emails are great marketing strategy if we used properly. One of my recent e-commerce project I did these 2 things, after implementing we got few successful sales. And price-drop emails and popup up also great ideas that I need to implement. Thanks for your information post. Keep posting the informative article. Kudos to Zoho Team.