2 Data-Driven Email Marketing Automation to Uplift e-Commerce Retention
According to a Marketo study, almost 50% of companies that invested in marketing automation achieved a return on investment within the first 2 to 6 months, while 76% of companies achieved a return within the first 7 to 12 months.
Once you understand your customer behaviour, you can focus your energies on the right ones. Personalize your communication, show appreciation on special occasions and, more importantly, give them a reason to choose you over a competitor.
How do you retain existing customers and attract new ones keeping up with all the other aspects involved in running a business?
Automation can answer to this question, because it lets you:
- Roll out a loyalty programs
- Keep your customer data up-to-date
- Track your customers’ purchase behavior and engagement
- Identify your top customers (and reward them accordingly!)
- Collect and act on customer feedback
- Create a better, more personal customer experience
👉 All these points will be discussed here one per article in details. If you want to keep informed, consider to subscribe to newsletter (I don't spam, or using your email to sell you something! I'll send you only updates when an article is published).
🥸 Why should you bother with segmentation?
Segmentation helps you tailor your marketing efforts to each category or subset of your audience.
More specifically, it helps you:
- Deliver targeted communication that resonates much better with a specific customer segment;
- You can try and test your pricing options;
- Keep much attention to your profitable customers (contribute to 80% of your revenue);
- You can double down your PPC Campaigns, Paid Social Campaigns, etc.;
- Enables you to create upsell and cross-sell campaigns with more impact on the business;
- Allows you to create a more lasting and profitable relationship for your company and customers.
Is it enough? 😂 If you have never thought before about segmenting your customer base, I'm pretty much confident that you are now considering starting.
Read here how to segment your customer base applying RFM analysis to your business just right away.
Roll out a Gamified Loyalty Program 🥳
Make your customers happy to choose much more than your competitors
Customer retention never matters than now! Why?
- It costs 5x more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one
- 20% of your customers account for 60% of your sales
- You have a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer, compared to a 5-20% chance with a new customer
In this guide, I’ll cover 4 areas of business that can be automatized to increase repeat purchases.
Aside from focusing on these 4 areas, I'll share some automation recipes you can import and use on your e-commerce.
- Reward best customers through loyalty programs
- Recover most important customers
1 - Reward your best customers with loyalty programs 🥇
Loyals and Champions are your best choice for this automation
Why you should care about your loyal customers? Here there are some insights about
- 4 times as likely to refer to their friends
- 5 times as likely to buy from you again
- 7 times as likely to try new products
More customer loyalty means more repeat purchases and more new customers.
You can start thinking add an automation that consider to create a "scoring value ladder" for building out a point-based or tiered loyalty program.
Consider applying a Gamification Concept to a retention program.
Your loyalty program members can pass a measurable milestone, like money spent or purchases made. If the customer has purchased, he earned some points; if he isn't a member of your loyalty program, send him an email that he earned points and invite him to sign up for the program. You'll reward him based on his target when he achieves certain score steps.
It calculates the score in the following way to deliver a scoring based on purchasing amount that considers some of RFM customer segments.
I'm considering rewarding my customers on 3 KPIs: frequency, recency and monetary value.
| Segment | Trigger |
|---|---|
| Frequent Buyers | When purchased at least 2 times in the last 2 months with AOV 80€ |
| Loyals | When purchased at least 3 times in the last 2 months with AOV 88€ |
| Champions | When purchased at least 4 times in the last 2 months with AOV 96€ |
In this "game" I ruled the rewards based on a specific AOV (Average Order Value) and its increment of 10% and 20% for Loyals and Champions. Moreover, based on my customer base insights, I'm considering that the best way to increase sales is a repeating sales 2 months timespan based.
Between 1 or 2 weeks at the deadline of the timespan, I'll give them some incentives to build up an order of that AOV based on Machine Learning recommendations.
Get the base Marketing Automation "Loyalty Program" from Active Campaign website:
2 - Recover the most important customers 🎁
Don't let past customers fade onto oblivion.
Here you need to concentrate on understanding how to reactivate "Can't lose" or "Inactive" customer segments. They're a sort of zombie customers and the goal here is to re-engage them to interact with your email content and buy from your online store again.
Creating re-engagement campaigns: create a Win-Back campaign email after X weeks/months of inactivity.
- Send an email X months after their last interaction with your company, and track their activities (open rate, CTR, etc.) to understand their engagement.
- Send your follow-up emails using an automation email campaign that’s usually an email every X/2 months.
- Send your last email when lapsed customers have historically become completely disengaged after X/3 months.
Analyzing Can't Lose and Inactive segments, you can extract the average months that they don't interact with your e-commerce.
