Win Back eCommerce Customers with the Right Email Flows

Finding it Easy to Get Customers to Your Site but Hard to Get them to Actually Make a Purchase? It May Be Time to Up Your Email Strategies

There’s a lot going on in the world of eCommerce these days. While it might be nice to think that all you have to do is get your products online and the customers will come, the reality is that the art of attracting and retaining customers is a lot more nuanced than that.

The good news is there are a lot of resources at your disposal when it comes to upping your eCommerce marketing game and improving your customer lifetime value (CLV) stats. One of these tools is email blasts.

Regardless of how you personally feel about marketing emails popping up in your inbox, the stats don’t lie: According to Campaign Monitor, “For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $44 in ROI” and over three quarters of that ROI “comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns.” Similarly, stats from Custora (in assessing 2015 holiday data) suggest that about 20 percent of transactions completed on your eCommerce site may be driven by email (“making it the second largest channel after organic search”).

Here, we’ll talk about cart abandonment and post-purchase triggered campaigns—they’re typically easy to set up and can have great results.

Cart Abandonment Emails

Cart abandonment emails are sent to users who have added items to a cart then bounced from the site after completing a portion of the checkout process. For most companies, this is a huge area of opportunity; after all, according to BigCommerce, “More than 70% of your shoppers will abandon carts at checkout.”

Sending these customers a quick reminder of their intent to purchase can help you regain some of the revenue you may have otherwise missed out on. According to eCommerce marketing automation company Barilliance, over 18 percent of users who clicked through emails triggered by abandoned carts went on and completed a purchase.

The best news? Any good eCommerce platform worth its salt will have cart abandonment emails as a native feature that can be easily toggled on and off. BigCommerce, for example, makes it easy to both activate and customize abandoned cart emails to suit your company’s marketing objectives and branding, encouraging conversions and keeping the customer engaged via a personalized email experience.

Customer Win-Back Campaigns

Investing in your current customers to increase CLV comes at a much cheaper price than investing in customer acquisition. According to Invesp, “It costs five times as much to attract a new customer, than to keep an existing one,” and “The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60–70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5–20%.” Existing customers also tend to spend more money per purchase, and “Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.” Further, email marketing is the single most effective tactic when it comes to customer retention and digital marketing strategy.

So, how do you nurture further purchases out of your existing customer base (rather than having them remain one-hit wonders)? Customer win-back email campaigns are a great place to start.

Most email automation platforms will have features in place that allow you to trigger email campaigns once a customer has made a purchase. You can then send a chain of follow-up emails that encourage customers to come back for more.

For example, if you sell consumable products, it may be a good idea to set up an automated email flow that reminds customers to come back to your site and restock their supply. Or, if they purchased from a certain product category, you may wish to remind them of complementary products or best sellers.

Whatever path you choose, automated follow ups are a great way of reminding customers that you still exist—and you still sell awesome products that you know they’ll be interested in.

More Tips for Sending Effective Email Blasts

• Make them memorable and on-brand. Remind customers how awesome you are; it’s never a bad idea to stylize your emails to feature on-brand imagery and messaging. Keep your copy clean and succinct, and if you offer things like free shipping or product customizations, remind your customers of these great features.
• Make them responsive. According to data collected by Return Path, 55 percent of marketing emails are “opened on a mobile device.” If your eCommerce emails don’t look good on mobile, expect your conversion rate to take a hit as users may be inclined to send the message straight to the trash bin.
• Make them personal. Most email marketing automation services and eCommerce platforms will allow you to customize your emails so that personalized customer details (like first name, purchased items, etc.) can be included in the body of the email.
• Make them feature an offer your customers can’t refuse. As Tessa pointed out recently in a post on cart abandonment, well over half of customers abandon carts in the first place because of final price. While you may not want to send out a cart abandonment or post-purchase email blast with a coupon attached right away, offering a discount somewhere down the line in your nurture campaigns may be an effective way of netting you that sale when nothing else will. According to statistics provided by Shopify, eCommerce stores that offer an “active discount code are 8x more likely to make a sale.” Use A/B testing to determine which kind of code works best for you, whether it’s a buy-one-get-one-free offer, a free shipping code, or a cart-level discount.  

We’ve Got Digital Marketing Strategies for eCommerce Websites on Lock

If all of the above feels a little overwhelming to you—or your team just doesn’t have the time to set up and manage ongoing eCommerce marketing campaigns—never fear. At efelle, we’ve been in the business of creating exceptional, results-driven online marketing strategies for well over a decade. Our team of experts can assess areas of opportunity and help you bring these strategies to life. Making the most of automation isn’t just great for your bottom line, it also helps your team rest easy at night. For more info, contact our team at 206.384.4909 or reach out via our online contact form.