Buy now. buy more. buy again
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Automated marketing is a key tool in managing shopping-cart abandonment. In this slide presentation from the WooConf 2014 event, Cyndie Shaffstall talks you though steps in developing and deploying automated drip and nurture campaigns.
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Buy now. buy more. buy again
- 1. Using automated drip and nurture marketing to lower abandonment, increase order size, and foster loyalty.
- 15. LinkedIn.com/in/cshaffstall Thank you… thank you very much… LinkedIn.com/in/cshaffstall
- 24. LinkedIn.com/in/cshaffstall Be chatty Get social Invade inboxes LinkedIn.com/in/cshaffstall
- 27. LinkedIn.com/in/cshaffstall It’s not too late LinkedIn.com/in/cshaffstall
- 28. LinkedIn.com/in/cshaffstall … double your order. LinkedIn.com/in/cshaffstall
- 36. LinkedIn.com/in/cshaffstall Focus on automationLinkedIn.com/in/cshaffstall
- 42. LinkedIn.com/in/cshaffstall — Janrain & Harris Interactive
Editor's Notes
- Previous speaker: Brennan What a great launchpad for my talking about Calls to Action — shorthand for how to get more money from your WooCommerce store. INTRODUCE CHUCK
- QUESTION: Let me ask a question, there are three possible responses, but you can raise your hand more than once: Site developers: ANSWER Marketers: ANSWER Shop owners: ANSWER
- Let me also share with you four stats I find hugely important. 1. Baymard Institute — a company who conducts original large-scale ecommerce research studies — says 68 of every 100 of our shoppers are leaving without completing their order.
- 2. That 68% equates to $4 billion — yes B as in Boy, that sucks — in merchandise left in shopping carts, says Business Intelligence, and online business magazine. 3. The good news: $2.5 billion — 63% — is potentially recoverable.
- DemandGen — who helps companies with their marketing automation — says companies who have successfully deployed lead-nurturing programs showed an average 20% increase in sales opportunities from these nurtured leads. QUESTION: How many of you know the difference between a feature and a benefit? ANSWER: Each of those four points is a statistic — a fact — a feature. The benefit to you is using what I show you today to convert more leads into customers and generate more revenue. How? With these three primary principles: Buy now. Buy more. Buy again.
- On the flip side: Abandoned shopping carts might be a lost sale but guess what? They are still a golden opportunity; low-hanging fruit; the customer with money to spend who has left the gate open for us to convince and cajole them into coming back. Who says so? Well, SeeWhy — a provider of behavioral target-marketing solutions — learned 75% of shoppers who abandon their cart said they had every intention of coming back to check out at some point in the future.
- But even if your shoppers don’t whip out their credit card right now, automated-marketing programs such as those I’ll talk about shortly have been found by Annuitas Group — a B2B demand-generation strategy firm — to create as much as a 451% increase in qualified leads. In other words, an increase in people who didn’t buy today, but who are prime candidates for buying tomorrow.
- Marketing automation isn’t just for adding oomph to your checkout, though. It’s even been shown to increase sales productivity (tasks performed by your sales team) — by something like 14.5% — and reduce marketing overhead (expenses of the company to tell their story) — by about 12%. These are numbers from the financial research company, Nucleus Research — so the interest in marketing automation goes well beyond the marketing department.
- Enough about what, let’s talk about how you can develop stellar calls to action such as Buy Now, Buy More, and Buy Again; and let’s do it with four broad strokes: 1. How to get to know your audience 2. How to market 3. How to convert 4. How to test, track, and tweak
- BROAD STROKE 1. HOW TO GET TO KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE QUESTION: Who in this room actually completed the exercise of defining personas before building your ecommerce website? STORY: How to create personas.
- STORY: How to create buckets
- BROAD STROKE 2: HOW TO MARKET There are three basic campaign styles: blast, drip, and nurture. Since we’re working on broad stroke 2, I’ll call these 2a: Blast, 2b: Drip, and 2c: Nurture. 2a. DEFINE BLAST Blast marketing has its place, but to achieve consistently improved engagement over time, you need automation.
- QUESTION: How many in this room currently use a fully automated-marketing program? ANSWER: Let’s come back to that question in a second. Let me tell you what Spider Trainers means by a fully automated-marketing program.
- 2b. DEFINE DRIP Drip marketing — like its namesake drip irrigation or perhaps more like an annoying leaky faucet — are outbound messages sent on a pre-determined schedule, with a pre-determined design reminding prospects, leads, subscribers, and customers of the relationship they have with the brand, your client’s company.
- 2c. DEFINE NURTURE/AUTO RESPONDER Nurture marketing is also a constant touch — but in response to an action or interaction on behalf of the lead or prospect. Events such as site visits, abandoned shopping carts, watched videos, clicked links in an email, social sharing, or a myriad other activities that you are monitoring and measuring are the impetus for sending a nurturing message. Nurture emails say thanks for doing that; now, here’s something else for you to do.
- BROAD STROKE 3: How to Convert QUESTION: An email or a postcard might be a bit short on space for truly convincing someone to buy — so where do we get more? ANSWER: Dedicated campaign landing pages Converting a visitor or cart abandoner to a customer usually takes time AND real estate. A generic product page or home page doesn’t give us the space or appropriate messaging we need for convincing and also makes difficult the process of monitoring and measuring. Dedicated landing pages make what was once a guessing game into pure science.
- When you need help converting the abandoner to a customer, sending the shopper back to their cart page may not be enough. You might need additional real estate for educating, convincing, and converting. We use three different types: Squeeze Landing Microsite Squeeze pages are single pages on your website with a single call to action — a CTA. Squeeze pages have no links to other pages in your site, none to your social networks, not a single contact link, and never shuttle visitors off to other websites. Think of a squeeze page as putting the squeeze on them to perform an action — what kind of action? Buy Now, Buy More, Buy Again.
- A landing page is similar to a squeeze page, but with a landing page you may have a few click options: Maybe two different offers, links to your blog or social accounts, or other places in your site to read more about the topic focus. Landing pages can be every bit as effective as squeeze pages — even though you might be dividing their attention — as long as you remember the most-important feature: a strong call to action and that all links on the page should support that same CTA.
- Microsites are four or five pages linked together like a very small website. If your site sells high-dollar cars or enterprise software, it may take more than a simple email reminder to get that all-elusive checkout. Perhaps you’ve found videos are the key, or downloaded demos, phone calls with a sales team, or something else. A microsite gives you ample real estate to educate, with dedicated pages for each type of engagement, while staying focused on the call to action.
- BROAD STROKE 4: Testing, tracking, and tweaking Apples and oranges is an appropriate visual for introducing this topic, but the scientific, anal-rententive title of this slide is: How to Shorten the Sales Cycle While Increasing Revenue. When you launch a campaign, you have to make a lot of guesses and guesses MIGHT help you improve engagement, but you don’t get smart really fast. So how do you hone in on real numbers meaningful to your client? Through A/B testing. (DISCUSS MVT) A/B testing is where you test thing A against thing B. Thing A and B might be different versions of a subject line, colored buttons, landing pages, offers, or just about anything. Don’t test a whole bunch of As against a whole bunch of Bs at the same time or you won’t know which A or B caused the lift in engagement. You can, of course, test A against B against C against D, an A/B test doesn’t necessarily have to be two versions, it could be as many as you choose. In many cases, the more versions you test, the faster you get smarter.
- A/B testing can tell you if you should name your company Cat Herders. If that doesn’t track well, try Spider Handlers. Still not tracking? Perhaps Spider Trainers …. What we’ve found through our own internal testing is we can A/B test everything: subject lines, titles, names, logos colors — That’s a feature. The benefit to us is, that we aid our customers in being in the 68% potentially re-engaging abandoners. I was very surprised to read a stat from Bryan Eisenberg, and online marketing pioneer, stating that most companies (61%) carry out less than five tests a month. We performs hundreds of tests… on everything that moves… and dozens of tests on things that don’t.
- Drip and nurture campaigns — even when not creating the lift you want — add value in other areas too. They enable you to measure interest and engagement over time through engagement tracking and lead scoring. DEFINE EMAIL ENGAGEMENT TRACKING DEFINE LEAD SCORING EXAMPLE Lead scores enable you to focus on those who’ve shown the most interest and who represent the easiest conversion. Low lead scoring constituents are relegated to a drip campaign specifically for cart abandoners with low scores (low interest levels).
- EMAIL METRICS VISITOR METRICS DEFINE Google Analytics DEFINE URL builder (with conversion pages) Of course, monitoring opens, clicks, visits, and such aren’t useful if you do not take the time to analyze your results. A/B testing results shouldn’t just sit in a spreadsheet, they should be pushed upstream to have a positive impact on future campaigns. Using the URL builder for your landing pages and Google Analytics to track visits are a great start in measuring the effectiveness of combined efforts from your campaign. QUESTION: So back to my original question: How many of you have executed a fully automated marketing campaign that: Identified your audience Deployed automated marketing messages Used landing pages to convert And included end-to-end testing, tracking, and tweaking?
- Not to leave you hanging, let’s talk for a bit more on HOW you use automated marketing: Well… Newsletters are good drip-marketing events, but so are weekly email sale notices, flash-sale announcements, invitations, social-network posts and photos, direct-mail events, and so much more. The marketing vehicle is not the important factor; it’s the constant touch, the gentle nudge, the niggling reminder.
- Nurturing emails, for me are even easier. Remember, we are acknowledging something the shopper has done and now we’re suggesting they do something else. OK, you started your cart but we think you forgot something. Get back over here and pay us! When you nurture, include generalized messaging relevant to the members of this bucket, but also include nudges in the form of: Pictures of the item they selected Reviews or testimonials from other shoppers Links to a guarantee, refund, or privacy policy And most importantly, strong call to action directing them back to the site
- According to Listrak — makers of an online marketing automation application — initial nurturing emails, sent just three hours after the shopper abandons their cart, averaged a 40% open rate and a 20% click-through rate. Back to that $4 billion in abandoned shopping carts. If you can gain a 20% lift — $80,000,000 — wouldn’t you want your share of that?
- Keep up the pace with your nurturing emails, don’t let too much time pass, say a day or two. Maybe something along the lines of, “It’s never to late to finish your purchase…” Remarketing is when you show an ad or message to someone who has previously visited your site. According to another stat from SeeWhy, abandoners spend on average 55% more when remarketed — and yes, your nurture campaign is one form of remarketing.
- If you still haven’t won them over, try a short series of escalating offers… Double their order with a buy one, get one offer….
- …or perhaps you can parlay free shipping into a windfall. According to CouponCabin.com, an online coupon site, their survey showed that 73% of U.S. adults are more likely to shop online at sites where free shipping is offered.
- This might well increase the size of their order too. According to a Compete Online Shopper Survey, 93% of respondents said free shipping would encourage them to BUY MORE. The sidebar here is tracking results so you can determine the tipping point for most shoppers, then using this level or type of offer to lead future campaigns.
- If you’re able, include a last-chance offer near the end of your nurture campaign. This sense of urgency is very effective at motivating shoppers to complete their purchase. If you’re not able to offer discounts, don’t let that deter you from engaging in nurture marketing. Instead of offers, link to pages in your site for testimonials, how-to videos, case studies, and the like, but here again make sure you are tracking clicks.
- Put a bow on your campaign with a come-back soon message and then shuttle them off to a drip campaign specifically tailored for cart abandoners. Remember, drip campaigns are a series of reminders to keep you top of mind when a lead, prospect, or customer enters the buying phase. Both drip and nurture campaigns should be laden with gentle reminders of their past relationship with you — whether or not they ever completed their cart.
- As an example: If you have a pet store … Do not have a bucket for people who own spiders. Why not? Because what would you buy a spider? You can then use text and images of the animal relevant to the members of that bucket. In this way you can subtly speak to each group in a manner more personal. It will make them feel as though you care specifically about their interests and this increases the likelihood they will come back to your site to buy now, buy more, and buy again.
- If after a week or two of nurturing emails you still haven’t seen hide nor hair of the shopper, 29% of site visitors return up to four weeks after their first visit.
- Getting to know your audience Marketing Converting Testing, tracking, tweaking It’s time now to draft the steps and workflow of your nurture campaign — identify the lead’s, prospect’s, or customer’s actions to which you will respond and then develop the messages to be triggered by these events. What tool you use for deployment, will depend upon your and the customer’s quest for knowledge and need for automation. Be prepared. Drafting can be the toughest step. I have spent three times as long creating a campaign workflow as I spent developing the content and templates — and it’s my primary job.
- For us, and for many of our clients, we need not just email automation, but also email analytics (opens, click, etc.), anonymous site visitor analytics (like what Google Analytics provides — more on that later), known site visitor analytics, a leads manager for the sales team (CRM), auto-notifications and tasks, and agency management. For other clients, we’ve used WooCommerce email templates with programmable deployment schedules and found them to be perfectly adequate. When you’re trying to learn why people abandon their cart at your site and what it takes to get them back, time is of the essence. Choose the tool that will give you the analytics you need on the schedule you demand.
- If you’re challenged by the planning stage, put yourself in the shopper’s shoes — go back to your personas. This is why I actually create an entire notebook — I use it for and improve it with every campaign and as I add to the website.
- Be clear in telling all visitors and shoppers what you want them to do. Use VERBS (action words — you want to get them to take action) and buttons labeled with Get, Buy, Find, Shop, Order, Review, Purchase, and other immediate action words.
- If you are sending drip and nurture messaging, give ample consideration to the call to action (CTA). The primary focus of your drip and nurture campaigns is to get them to purchase (Buy Now), increase the size of their cart (Buy More), and come back for more (Buy Again). Make sure your CTA conveys this and is relevant to their position in the buying cycle.
- According to all SmallBizTrends.com — an online publication for small business owners — an estimated 70% of small businesses with a B2B website lack a proper call to action. Don’t be a statistic. Tell your recipients exactly what they should do and how to get it done: Click to Buy Now. Click to Buy More. Click to Buy Again.
- While the CTA is the most important component of our campaign, second runner up is personalization. With an abandoned cart you have unique insight into lots of personalization gems: name, address, items in the cart, and perhaps even more. High-value data such as gender, income, business size, number of employees, are good examples. If you are not collecting unique data, consider starting. As developers, you can add high-value, required fields to a cart and the more data you have, the more personalized the message you can create. Of course, you can get carried away and ask for too much information and when you do, you run the very real risk of causing abandonment. Tread lightly, but make every step count.
- Janrain & Harris Interactive — makers of a customer profile management platform — says 77% of online shoppers become frustrated when websites (and presumably also marketing) content do not acknowledge their interests. QUESTION: How many times have I asked you a question in this presentation? In the same way I’m being personal with you, you need to be personal with your audience. Ask them questions, learn from them, use that information to tailor their experience.
- With your automated campaigns and analytics results in your arsenal, you’re now ready to make some minor (or major) tweaks to your fully automated marketing campaign. Check your process from end to end — you may need to go all the way back to drafting steps, redesigning emails, or rewriting content. Go back to personas, if needed. Don’t be timid about scrapping most or all of your campaign. It will be worth the effort as your client enjoys more orders, bigger orders and repeat orders. Tweak it until it’s right, then rinse and repeat.