The Academy of Marketing Automation reopens. In the previous lesson, I showed you how to build the foundations of a functioning and profitable online store with a functional set of essential tools. I elaborated on how to make use of a CRM and behavioral profiling and why they are important, develop a database, and outlined the most basic and effective, communication method: email marketing. Time to take another step and start earning! Lesson 2: Build Revenue.
Website Recommendations
Let me tell you a joke:
A young guy from Texas moves to California and goes to a big department store looking for a job. The manager says, “Do you have any sales experience?” The kid says, “Yeah, I was a salesman back home in Texas.” The boss liked the kid, so he gave him the job.“You start tomorrow. I’ll come down after we close and see how you did.”
His first day on the job was rough, but he got through it. After the store was locked up, the boss came down.
“How many sales did you make today?”
Kid says,: “One.”
Boss says: “Just one? Our sales people average 20 or 30 sales a day.How much was the sale for?”
Kid says: “$201,237.64.
Boss says: “201,237.64?? What the heck did you sell?”
Kid says, “First I sold him a small fish hook. Then I sold him a medium fish hook. Then I sold him a larger fish hook. Then I sold him a new fishing rod. Then I asked him where he was going fishing, and he said down at the coast, so I told him he was going to need a boat; we went down to the boat department, and I sold him that twin engine Chris Craft. Then he said he didn’t think his Mercedes would pull it, so I took him down to the automotive department and sold him an Escalade.”
The boss said, “A guy came in here to buy a fish hook, and you sold him a boat and truck?”
Kid says, “No, he came in here to buy a box of tampons for his wife, and I said, your weekend’s shot, you might as well go fishing.”
Even though this is a purely fictional situation, the story of a Texan clerk perfectly illustrates the power of a recommendation mechanism. The key is to recognize your prospect’s needs. It’s logical – to recommend something to someone, you need to know more or less what products they are interested in. Then you can show them in a visible place on the website and highlight their usefulness. It works so well because people tend to take shortcuts whenever they can. Simply clicking an offer is much easier than going through the entire catalog. Showing people the items they browsed during their last visit linked to relevant subpages is a great shortcut as it saves their time. Directly reminding people what they like is a great way to increase the number of transactions and improve customer engagement, and as a consequence, visibly affect your online store’s income.
Learn more about Website recommendations, or…
Try them out yourself for 14 days, for free.
Dynamic Emails
Communicating with customers via the email channel is moving toward 1-to-1 conversation and personalized messages. One of the most powerful tools available in marketing automation platforms platforms is dynamic email. As many as 78% of marketers consider dynamic emails to be the most prospective solution. They increase click through rates by 400% and conversions by 300%.
The concept of dynamic emails is simple. The point is to follow customers’ needs and communicate with them at the exact moment when a properly formulated offer is the answer for that need. For example, if a person looks at a vinyl record with classical music, then I would most likely assume that she’s interested in such discs, rather than, for example, Kylie Minogue’s MP3s. An extra hint for me is that this person is researching vinyls right now, so I can safely assume, she needs it right now, not for example in six months. Therefore, the correct response would be to send that person an email containing an offer for the discs she browsed, shortly after the visit during which no purchase was made.
This approach follows the basic principles of crafting marketing messages, i.e. delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. It positively affects the number of transactions if you send them. Using dynamic emails instead of spraying your audience with mass email. Out of 100 000 contacts, maybe 100 people would be interested in this offer. Wouldn’t it be better to send a message to each of those people with the article they saw recently, soon after the visit. Profit: sales increase, as customers return to your store and make a purchase there.
Learn how to implement dynamic emails and…
Try Dynamic Emails for 14 days, for free
Recover Abandoned Carts
A common pattern in online shopping is that people sometimes add items to their shopping cart but never finish the transaction. This is not a rare phenomenon – nearly 70% of started transactions end up like this. The reasons for abandoning items in the cart are many. According to Business Insider, these include:
- overpriced shipping,
- not being ready to buy but wanting to get an idea of total cost,
- using the cart as a wishlist,
- value of the shopping cart too low to get free shipping.
There is also a common distraction.
Experts of the already mentioned Business Insider claim that up to 63% of carts can be recovered! And one of the most important tools for this purpose is a plain email.
The user-friendly wizard allows you easily to create a message in which you refer to a recent visit of a particular contact in the store. The items in this message can be added dynamically straight from the shopping cart. The icing on the cake: add a little incentive, psychological or financial that will convince your almost-a-customer that they should complete the deal. And it’s not just about a discount – discounts can make customers addicted very easily, so they will later abandon their carts just to pay a little bit less than normally. Your secret weapons here are items that at some point aroused so much interest of a person that she thought of buying them. It really works! Such messages have 193% higher OR, 439% higher CTR, and 621% higher conversion (Case Study C21 Be Brave) than regular emails.
Learn how to recover the abandoned cart and then…
Follow
