Starting an online business with Shopify is easy, but how you can grow your business, sell your items is quite difficult. Meanwhile, there are successful businesses, we still meet a large number of Shopify websites that are getting troubles with abandoned carts, traffic, and so on. What is the secret of successful guys? How can they do that?
The answer will be revealed in this article.
The secret is the Web Push Notification app on the Shopify platform.
Let find out how the top 3 Shopify push notification apps can help you move your sale to the next level!
This Shopify push notification app not only recovers abandoned checkouts but also recover a large number of abandoned carts.
With the Wigzo app, it focuses on time because timing is vitally important. This is the difference that makes this app be on the best choice list for push notification. Customers tend to click to notices if it is the most frequent one they get. Furthers, one of the success secrets is sending the same notice at a different time of the day. It actually makes a huge difference in boosting sales.
Wigzo app can deliver your promotions to your customers at an appropriate time in their time zone. Also, you can set up campaigns that allow subscribers to receive notifications at the time they want when they subscribed to your store. Because these are the times when they are active and able to take immediate actions. As a result, this makes it more convenient for your subscribers to place orders with your store, and of course, your sales will be on the next level.
Wigzo push notification app also has a subscriber segmentation feature. It will automatically divide your subscribers into specific groups for a suitable campaign.
With this push app, you can simplify your marketing process with automation push notice functions such as abandoned cart reminders, shipping, welcome, sale-off, back in stock, and flash sales. Further, as it said, you will not be required to set up.
The reason why PushOwl is the high-rated push notification app on Shopify is the ability to connect with other top apps.
Besides, this push app can be integrated with Stamped.io, Loox Photo Reviews, Judge.me, In Stock Alerts, etc.
The pricing of PushOwl starts with Free, and you need to pay $19 per month if you want more expert functions.
In general, if you want to send push notifications to your customers, this Shopify push notification app is a good choice.
Recently Ecomfit has landed #2 of the Day on Product Hunt and has gathered over 1000 upvotes as of now. Ecomfit Better Web Push Notification will be your smart choice when mentioning the push app for Shopify.
With the main function is mobile and web push notifications, this is a simple and effective way to recover abandoned carts and bring back customers to your sites.
So if you want to recover abandoned carts, retarget specific customers, increase loyal subscribers, let select this push app!
SMS over call.. a new trend in the contemporary world but have you ever wondered, how it can be profitable for the eCommerce brand?
Not yet, Right?
So, take a look at the perks of SMS marketing for business growth:
66% of the audience prefer SMS over email/call as it is a convenient way to connect with customers, thus eCommerce brands opting for “call-to-messaging deflection” strategy can increase customer satisfaction and boost the overall performance of the business.
With the right approach, text messaging can help the brand sell more as SMS has a 98% open rate and 36% CTR on average.
Outclass personalized SMS experience can offer 55% of the audience to happily buy more products.
SMS as a Cost and Time-saving partner
SMS marketing, compared to any other channel is low-priced and is one of the most efficient channels to communicate with customers.
A well-designed and planned bulk SMS campaign can help eCommerce brands to stay ahead of their competitors by sending a message to the targeted audience at a single time, which will be cost-effective and time-saving.
Due to this promotional, transactional, OTP, all the messages are shared via SMS because of low- cost investment of the brand and high response rate of the audience.
Unique SMS keyword for audience
The keyword in SMS Marketing is a unique short-code that comes with an offer or benefits for the customer. For a better approach to the audience, avoid using special characters or more than one word in the keyword as it might confuse the audience. It is best advised to keep the keywords simple, easy, and short.
Example: When the audience receives the keyword on SMS such as “TEXTSHOES to 252525 to receive a monthly discount alert before others” it will be easier to understand.
The audience will respond to SMS with “TEXTSHOES” to 252525, then you will immediately share an exclusive discount code on shoes to the audience that they can apply to their next purchase.
Curtail cart abandonment rates
SMS marketing for eCommerce is a highly responsive channel for cart abandonment reminders, compared to any other channel such as email. It reminds the audience about the items they have abandoned in the cart and encourages them to return to checkout.
For a prompt response, share the URL link in SMS to direct the audience to the cart to complete the purchase.
Example: “Hey!! It looks like you forgot something in Cart. Buy it before it’s sold out”
Notify the audience about relevant events
As we know, the Audience generally reads text messages within 3 minutes after receiving the SMS notifications, thus the best channel to notify the audience about all the events is SMS.
Notifying the customer about events such as ongoing discount or sale, confirmation of the order, shipment, order out-for delivery, order delivered, and many others in eCommerce SMS marketing keep the customer engaged. It creates a seamless purchase journey for the audience by notifying them about each stage of the order.
On the other hand, it also helps an eCommerce brand to build loyal and satisfied customers which leads to cut-down inbound time-draining order queries and enhances customer retention rate.
Example: Notifying customers from “Hey there? Your order having 2 items has been confirmed” to “Your product is out for delivery and will reach you before 6 pm” will not only make customers upbeat but will also reduce unnecessary interaction of customers with the support team regarding order related queries.
Implementing SMS Customer Support
SMS marketing is the easiest and yet the powerful channel to conduct two – way conversation between brand and audience.
Contemporary Audiences are choosing texts over phone conversations for customer support to save their time, thus implementing SMS customer support for the audience will be more profitable for the eCommerce brand. It can help the customer to get a prompt response on their query, as text messaging has a reputation for being more accurate and instant than a call or email.
SMS customer support enhances your relationship with customers by being available on their preferred channel (SMS) which increases customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Feedback for upgrading
SMS surveys help a brand to evaluate customer reviews about the product and services to improve the company action plan.
Following up with customers for feedback, once they have received the product can provide real-time information to the brand about customer opinion on services or product. It enables the marketers to understand customer product preferences, customer contentment, discover the areas of improvement and accordingly rectify them.
It is generally suggested that feedback should be taken after every purchase to engage the customer and make them feel their opinion matters.
Example: “Hey Maria! Thank you for shopping with us. To serve you better please share your review with us. 1. Excellent 😊 2. Good 😊 3. Average ☹ 4. Bad ☹”
SMS as Future market trend
SMS marketing is a popular channel among all the marketers for its hassle-free reach to the audience, incredible customer engagement, and dynamic conversion rate which ultimately profit the business.
According to a study, 75% of millennials would rather text than talk on the phone as the phone calls are time-consuming. Unlike other channels, SMS is a better and flexible platform to provide orders related to ongoing sale updates to millennials as they are never without their phone. The response rate of the Millennials on sales and discounts on messages will be higher and that will enhance the business revenue of the eCommerce brand.
If personalized messages are shared with the audiences of all generations (GEN X – GEN Z) and are satisfied with the service and customer support of a brand then it increases customer acceptance towards future SMS for the same business which gives a better opportunity to the brand for exceptional future marketing.
Wigzo is a Shopify App that provides Analytics & Marketing Automation to track, analyze and personalize your entire marketing including email, web push notifications, Facebook messenger, Onpage Notifications, behavioral pop-ups, SMS and builds customer Journeys from a single dashboard.
It helps you grow your subscriber base by deploying behavioral popups, capturing email, and running drip sequences using visual flow builder. It also uses on-page notifications to nudge customers to take the next action and gauge success in terms of revenue generated and carts recovered.
It offers deep Shopify integration and uses predefined segments to automate your marketing campaigns.
Wigzo integrates with SendGrid, Twilio, Elastic Mail, Active Campaign, Facebook, Google Analytics, and many more.
In recent years, Omnisend has been known for offering one of the most sophisticated omnichannel marketing solutions in the market. It means that you can add SMS marketing, Facebook, and Google retargeting ads, push notifications, Messenger, and other channels into one smooth communication flow with your segmented audience.
On top of that, at Omnisend, you will find dynamic gamification elements, interactive signup forms, landing pages. This platform provides sales reports from every single campaign which isn’t common in other email service providers. Click maps and in-depth reports for email campaigns and automation are all there so you can make the best decisions from your data.
Klaviyo is one of the most comprehensive tools in the market nowadays. Like Omnisend, this platform offers an entire suite of tools necessary for email marketing, starting with signup forms, robust segmentation, and email campaigns, ending with marketing automation across different channels.
However, if you are used to email editors like Omnisend, Mailerlite, or Mailchimp, Klaviyo’s email editor might look a bit bizarre. For example, instead of building a column into an existing content block, you have to add a pre-split block and then edit it. Adding products and designing the email is pretty easy, though.
With Klaviyo, you can build advanced marketing automation flows. At the beginning of 2020, this platform introduced SMS marketing.
Campaign Monitor is another good Shopify option on this best email marketing list. This platform has a great set of features. Here, you can find pretty good segmentation and personalization that will help you employ your customer data in an actionable way.
Campaign Monitor has a great visual journey designer that builds automation workflows. Although it isn’t perfect for advanced triggers, the most common marketing automation can definitely be launched.
However, Campaign Monitor doesn’t offer any additional channels to email. So you won’t be able to send an SMS or include retargeting into your communication workflows. This platform is only for email marketing. If you feel like not being ready for more relevant omnichannel marketing, this tool may be your choice.
This platform represents advanced marketing. ActiveCampaign can provide you with CRM functionality: it enables you to manage sales funnels and customer databases on top of email marketing.
Also, ActiveCampaign is another platform ready-to-send text messages for you and connect with customer Facebook audiences.
One of the best things about this platform is that it works well if you need multiple domains to manage. As you don’t directly connect one domain to ActiveCampaign, you can choose which domain to assign your campaigns to.
Although ActiveCampaign provides its clients with great support, be ready to spend some time learning how the platform with all its in-depth functionality works.
Have you ever sent an email to clients only to get no response? Did they even open it? Or open it just to delete it? Maybe you don’t even know where your campaigns are going wrong. Have no fear, ourEmail Marketingtips are here.
I wanted to share with you 15 tips to improve your email marketing so that you can increase your sales.
Value your list. Protect it; connect with it; add value to it; grow it. I’ve seen so many businesses that simply don’t collect names and emails effectively, or they debase the list simply by not emailing out to it frequently enough (see Tip 12 below.)
Start capturing/gathering your list today. Centralize your list to one place. This means you need the right platform, which brings me to tip 3.
Pick the right email platform for your company. Balance complexity with power. There is a cost to switching platforms that is many times the cost of the service. Choose wisely. We and our business coaching clients use everything from the inexpensive and simple to use Mail Chimp and Constant Contact to the serious and robust Infusionsoft or Hubspot.
Test and find your most effective email format(s). (E.g. Text vs HTML. Short vs long form. Etc.)
Make your email mobile/small screen friendly. This means you have to review your emails on a small screen before you send them out.
Test your messages before you send them on multiple browsers and readers. Have a trusted checklist to review things like: do all links work? Are the landing pages set up and tested? Spelling and grammar? Did the fulfillment part of your funnel work to get the person the right things if she responded? Etc.
Have a second set of eyes review your email. If this isn’t possible, step away from your email for an hour and then revisit it fresh.
If you’re working with a new list or with a new format or email element, start with a subset of your list first (e.g. your Gmail or yahoo emails) to make sure there aren’t any issues with deliverability or formatting. This one tip will save you so much heartache; I’ve had emails going out to 100,000 people get stopped cold because of something we could have fixed if we had only eaten our own cooking on this tip.
Invest in your subject line. This is the headline for your email. Avoid gimmicks and tricks. They may work once, but they erode trust and debase most brands. In fact, A/B testing your subject line is easy (just divide your list in two and track open rate, click-through rate, and purchase/conversion rate on the landing page by subject line A vs B. All other parts of the emails are the same, just a different subject line.) This lets you use email to build your best version of sales scripting to use on your website, offline marketing collateral, and even in your live salesperson scripting.
Have your email come from one specific person, and go to one specific recipient. Don’t write to crowds, and don’t write from committees or departments or companies. Give us a face, and look your reader in the eyes and connect. Write to one person.
Send your first email now! The single biggest email marketing mistake we observe clients make is waiting to send any email until they have it “perfect”. Don’t wait until you have “enough” emails on your list.
The clock is ticking. Your email opt-ins degrade, like an unstable ticking bomb. Make sure you email them as soon as possible to reset the clock. You need them to remember who you are and why they want to read your message.
Make your emails valuable. This can be a key insight, a touching story, a special offer, or anything else that is relevant to your business and your audience. What do you talk with your prospects and customers about when you’re with them in person? What do they care about? How do you touch their lives? This is the core of your email messaging.
Make sure all key images are “clickable” and all videos have a “play” button.
If an email (or email campaign) was successful, re-use it. At the very least send it to all those people who didn’t open it the first time. And recycle it back to your non-buying prospects a second and third time down the road after an appropriate interval.
Google Analytics is a fantastic tool, that has tons of data. So why look for alternative tools? The most apparent reasons are: Google analytics is a tool for experts. You need to know how to use it to get the most out of it. It takes training, interest, time, and experience to get valuable and actionable findings out of it.
Many business owners prefer to spend as much time improving their business and as little time possible doing data analytics. This is where the alternative comes in. We have found the 5 best alternatives to Google Analytics.
Wigzo is an all in one analytics & marketing automation app that helps you to track, analyze and personalize your entire marketing process including email, push notifications, Facebook messenger, behavioral pop-ups, SMS marketing and you can build entire customer journeys from a single dashboard.
The core features of Wigzo are:
Detailed reports
Realtime insights on engagement strategies
Record and analyze the actions of individual users on the website and mobile app
Find out what people are searching for on your site
Lucky Orange is a visitor optimization tool that can be used for usability analysis. The tool lets you understand visitor behavior via a set of features:
Real-Time Analytics
Visitor Recordings
Heatmaps
Polling
Chat System
Form Analytics.
As you might have noticed, Lucky Orange and Hotjar have almost identical features. Lucky Orange was fist on the marked, has a lower price.
Web-stat is one of the oldest players in the web analytics market. They have been around since 1997. They provide a solution that tracks your users in real-time. Their features include:
Real-time analytics
Track all visitors
Geo-customization
Event tracking
It is a more technical tool, and the design could do with a brush-up. However it is feature-rich, so if you like data and need to track your traffic in real-time, then it could be a tool for you.
Web push notifications can present an enormous opportunity for marketers to connect with their target audience — if they are used effectively. Statistics show that they have an 80% market reach, based on the number of browsers supporting web push, with click-through rates typically seven times higher than email marketing, and opening rates 50% higher than email too.
However, the use of web push notification still has people divided. Some users like receiving useful, informative updates about a company they subscribe to; others find that it ends up negatively impacting their overall user experience if a company fails to use them correctly.
So, how can you navigate this fine line as a webmaster and effectively communicate with users who visit your site? In this guide, we are going to take an in-depth look at web push notifications, and look at the most effective ways you can optimize them to increase customer engagement with your brand.
It is important to remember that there are different types of notifications users can receive. For example, ‘web push notifications’ and ‘push notifications’ are not referring to the exact same thing. Let’s quickly go over defining them:
Web notifications: are notifications that the user only receives if they have that web page open in their browser
Web push notifications: users subscribe to receive notification updates in real-time on their browser via desktop or mobile with no need to download and install an application. A web push code is installed on your website without needing an app.
Mobile app push notifications: sends notifications through a mobile app to users, which appears on a user’s mobile via the lock screen, banner, or status bar. It is possible to send these to users if they have installed your mobile app and chosen to opt-in to receive messages. These are sent to users via code that has been installed on your app.
In-app push notifications: these notifications appear while a person is using the app, typically providing advice to help improve the user’s experience.
Types of Web Push Notifications
Broadly speaking, web push notifications will fit into one of the following kinds of web push notifications:
Trigger-based web push notifications: These are notifications that are sent to the user and are based on the previous actions performed by the user on any site. For example, these are commonly used for abandoned shopping carts.
Alert-based web push notifications: Aims to inform the user of a specific event or update
Segment based web push notifications: These are messages sent based on a subscriber’s certain characteristics, such as their purchasing behavior or geographical location.
Looking further into web push notifications, these messages typically fall into one of these categories:
Promotional: These notifications aim to promote special offers or price drops to drive conversions, such as, “Our biggest ever sales start this weekend.”
Educational: The aim is to educate users about your products or services such as, “Don’t miss out on the conference of a lifetime.”
Transactional: Transactions related to the company, such as purchase, shipping, and delivery. For example, “Your order is on its way.”
Lifecycle: This may be to welcome new or returning users to the site. For example, “Our welcome gift to you – free delivery.”
The Elements of a Successful Web Push Notification Strategy
Simply creating web push notifications does not automatically make them an excellent marketing tool. To create a successful web push notification strategy, you need to carefully craft the message you want to send out beforehand. Here are some of the most common factors that make a web push notification strategy great.
Timing is Important
Don’t make the common error of sending web push notifications that do not take into consideration your subscriber’s timezone. Make sure you understand where your subscribers are located and schedule notifications based on the time zones they reside in, to ensure you reach them when they are active on their devices.
Equally, consider that some types of notifications will work better at certain times of the day. For example, in research carried out by VWO Engage, the time people prefer receiving them is in the morning (38.66%) or at the weekend (38.38%). Test out the best times for your audience segment to see what works best.
Compelling Content is Key
Always keep in mind your target audience when crafting your web push notification content. Keep it clear and concise, and avoid using jargon at all costs. The message should be persuasive and clearly indicate what the message is about and why users would benefit from clicking on it.
Use Personalized Suggestions
The personalized approach is vitally important, as it can help to foster brand loyalty amongst subscribers and boost reaction rates by four times as much (source: Accengage). This approach works well amongst your less engaged subscribers, too, as you can send personalized follow-up messages to them.
Do make sure the message is relevant to the user, and be sure to make the most of customization and segmentation features available through web push notifications providers.
Segmentation allows you to send specific notifications to the right segment, and with average click-through rates of those targeted campaigns being 1.5 to 2 times higher than results without them (source: Gravitec) it is definitely worth it.
Create a Sense of Urgency
Do create action-oriented content, as this will increase the likelihood of conversions, but create a sense of scarcity or urgency when doing so. For example, you should give subscribers a limited amount of time for action to be taken — you would rather have them visit site the site now and invest rather than put it off until later and forget.
Don’t forget that CTA buttons improve campaign results by approximately 40% (source: Gravitec).
Do Not Inundate Subscribers with Messages
Don’t send too many web push notifications to your users, as this can lead them to start tuning out of notifications you send, or even worse, it will cause them to opt-out entirely. 62.75% of subscribers and 73.47% of users polled by VWO Engage said that too many notifications would be crossing the line into spam.
Avoid Sending Too Few Notifications
While the exact frequency will depend on your audience and industry, make sure your subscribers are adequately engaging with your brand. If you send too few notifications, subscribers may forget why they subscribed to you in the first place and may opt-out.
To avoid this, make sure you fully understand your buyer persona, their lifestyles, and their needs so you can determine how often notifications should be sent for maximum levels of engagement.
Use Rich Push Notifications
Rich push notifications allow marketers to convey their message through images, emojis, audio, GIFs, or video and can be successful in incentivizing users to engage with content. Data collected by Forrester reveals that only 8% of marketers use rich push notifications, yet research by Airship shows the huge opportunity for driving engagement to your site — they can increase direct open rates by 56%.
Use Emojis with Caution
Emojis can be effective in increasing CTR for web push notifications, but your industry will largely determine how successful these will be, so think carefully as to how you use them.
Data carried out by Clever Tap revealed that recreational industries are those who saw the biggest decline in CTR by adding emojis were entertainment and events (54%), travel and hospitality (12%), and health and fitness (4%).
Conversely, and perhaps surprisingly, the top 3 industries that saw an increase in CTR when using emojis were business and finance (128%) retail (111%), and the utilities and services sectors (115%).
Conclusion
Web push notifications still remain a largely untapped marketing channel, but this may present an excellent opportunity for your brand to use them to stand out from competitors if you use them in an efficient manner.
Accounting for more than $3.5 trillion sales worldwide, e-commerce continues to grow year after year. With lower barriers to entry, it’s hardly a game of few anymore.
With new competition added every day, it’s only those who go the extra mile for their customers that manage to stand out in the crowd. And, unsurprisingly, it’s the same brands who succeed at turning their visitors into first-time buyers and customers into brand evangelists—regardless of the competition.
What’s their secret to achieving more revenue and higher conversions every year? That’s what we looked into. As a result, we found 13 effective e-commerce marketing strategies any e-tailer can use to improve their conversions in 2020 and beyond.
Best E-Commerce Marketing Strategies for 2020
1. Collect Super-Targeted Leads with Quizzes
Getting personal details during signup, without hurting conversion rates, is a challenge for many marketers. You need to give prospects a compelling reason to share more information, besides their email address.
One way to do that is with lead generation quizzes.
Taking several forms, ranging from “Which Starbucks drink are you?” to personal style finders, lead generation quizzes are one of the best ways of collecting segmented ToFu leads.
One of my favorite quiz examples comes from Care/of, the vitamin subscription service:
When you visit the company’s homepage, Care/of, first, invites you to take their quiz with a direct call-to-action (CTA).
Notice the first question Care/of asks you in this quiz (after your first name):
By asking how knowledgeable and convinced you are about their product line, Care/of assesses where you are in your buyer’s journey, and adjusts your results accordingly.
If you say you’re skeptical about vitamins, you see this screen…
…whereas they greet informed prospects with this message:
After answering a few questions about your age, location, preferences, and goals, Care/of asks for your email in the middle of the quiz.
Notice how they give you a valid reason to submit your email address by saying, “So we can save your answers.”
Since you’re almost halfway through the questions, you do as they say, without much thinking.
Once you complete this comprehensive quiz, Care/of directs you to a personalized landing page with your name, results, and research-backed product recommendations.
On it, Care/of explains which supplements you should take, along with reasons, rather than hard-selling you if you’re not ready to buy.
Now that the company knows a lot about you, they can remarket to you with paid ads and email marketing, using highly personalized recommendations and incentives.
2. Offer Gift Guides (Year Round)
The holiday shopping season is the perfect opportunity to boost e-commerce sales and promote giftable products. With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas, the holiday season is a highly profitable period for e-commerce marketers.
Many online stores create holiday gift guides for Christmas, New Year’s, or Valentine’s Day to suggest relevant gift ideas to their visitors. But why stop there while every day is a good day to give gifts?
Instead of waiting for highly competitive shopping days, you can suggest gift ideas all year round and guide your visitors into making meaningful purchases.
Check out this on-site gift guide example by Ban.do:
Notice how the company categorizes different gift options by “our faves, gifts under $25, gifts under $50.” Ban.do also lets you refine your choices using the filters on the left and find the perfect gift you’ve been looking for.
This is a great gift guide example because it’s easy-to-navigate, and it helps visitors with their gift search.
Email marketing is another channel you can use to distribute your gift guides all year round.
The company sends out their holiday gift guide via an email that leads you to their website.
When you scroll further down in the email, you can see how they categorize their gift guides and know what to expect.
If you want to take it one step further, you can make excuses to celebrate the little things in life and create your own holidays. It’s a good way to bond with your future (and existing) customers and promote your products throughout the year.
3. Convert Empty Shopping Carts
In an ideal scenario, prospects would likely land on your homepage, click a category, and from there, go to a product page before moving onto checkout.
But in the real world, the buyer’s journey isn’t linear.
When a ToFu stage prospect ends up on an under-optimized page, such as 404 pages a sold-out product page, it often becomes the endpoint of their journey.
Few e-commerce brands consider this, but Vinomofo is an exception.
When you click the shopping cart icon and go to your basket page without adding any items, this is what you see:
The company greets you with an assertive message that reads, “We can only assume that’s because you haven’t seen our awesome deals yet” and recommends products that are currently on sale.
Also, notice how they create social proof by highlighting the number of customers they have and the number of bottles they sold.
Following the recommendations comes a CTA button that takes you back to their homepage, in case you’re looking for something other than these deals.
It’s a brilliant strategy for guiding visitors in the right direction and bringing otherwise-lost ToFu leads back on track.
If you want to convert empty carts without completely overdoing your checkout process, you can create a product recommendation popup that shows on your cart URL:
Like what you see? Load this high-converting template in our editor and customize it to the look and feel of your business.
Action Items
Write a humorous or assertive empty cart page copy.
Add social proof by mentioning your happy customers or, even better, include customer testimonials.
Create a website popup showcasing your most popular products and show it to visitors with empty carts.
4. Turn One-Time Purchases into Subscriptions
You’re likely familiar with the effectiveness of upselling and what it can do for your revenue.
Many online stores already use upselling and cross-selling to boost their average order value, but only a few experiments with finding new ways to maximize it further.
MeUndies is an exception.
If you visit one of their product pages, you see two pricing options: regular price and member price.
Here’s how it looks more closely:
When you’re about to buy one of its products, MeUndies offers you a membership upgrade and a better price. While doing that, they highlight the obvious benefit of membership (save 22%) and contrast it with a one-time purchase ($14/month).
If you’re not a MeUndies subscriber, you pass on an exclusive member price, and that sounds too good to overlook.
Another brilliant example comes from Beardbrand:
When you visit a Beardbrand product page, you see two options: one-time purchase vs. auto-restock & save. (Notice how the second option is bolded and capitalized.)
Upgrading to a Beardbrand subscription not only means saving money but also includes free shipping. Tempting, isn’t it?
For me, marketing automation is one of the most exciting recent MarTech developments, because it gives so many opportunities to help businesses deliver more relevant communications to their audience.
The key is to understand that you can use marketing automation across the entire customer lifecycle. It’s not a solution that’s just suitable for the top, middle or the bottom of your conversion funnel.
Marketers often forget that, but just as you can use marketing automation to build awareness and generate leads, you can also use it to boost revenue from your existing customers.
This visual shows the many different options from prospect to customer.
Ways To Use Marketing Automation Across The Customer Lifecycle
1) Lookalike targeting for prospecting
Marketing automation works best when you already have site visitors and email subscribers to communicate with.
With Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter you can find audiences similar to your existing contacts and customers.
This way, you can grow your awareness among people that are likely to benefit from your offer, and you can drive more quality visits to your site.
2) Automated prompts with content to encourage interaction
When you attract new audiences to your site through inbound marketing techniques like blogging, Google Ads, or social media, encouraging your audience to interact and stay on the site is a challenge.
Many blogs have bounce rates of more than 70%, but through adding relevant content and signposts we can reduce this and encourage more interaction.
Here we can use automation to recommend further interaction based on the content they may be reading – like on a blog, for example:
Next or related articles based on what they’re currently reading
Prompts to sign up for email updates when a user scrolls through to a certain part of the page
Prompts to read a related guide or report when a user interacts with the page for a given amount of time
Prompts to offer a webinar or free consultation when a user is about to leave your page
Here’s an example of how Smart Insights is promoting its RACE system on their blog.
3) Landing pages to profile your audience
Once you have attracted site visitors with your content or other offers, you need to create a landing page to profile your audience and add them to your list.
Of course, how you craft the headline, copy, images and individual fields form page will make a huge difference to the sign-up conversions. This is where another form of automation, AB testing of different versions, will come in handy.
Here’s a simple landing page you could use to offer an ebook or another digital product.
4) Welcome sequence
The next step in the lifecycle is often a huge missed opportunity! When someone is added to your list as a new subscriber, your first email to them can be seen as the most important email you send to a prospect or customer.
Here you’ll have the highest levels of attention and, if you get it right, you should be getting open rates of even up to 80% and click-through rates around 20% according to this data from the GetResponse Email Benchmarks report.
But don’t stop with a single email! By crafting multiple, well-branded emails in a welcome sequence rather than the simple autoresponse, you can tell the story of what your brand can offer subscribers and give different options to engage the audience.
The data you below supports this idea, as longer email series still manages to generate higher engagement rates than what you’d normally see with a simple newsletter.
5) Dynamic content for personalization
When you’re working on your welcome sequence, dynamic content, which is another marketing automation technique, can come to your aid.
We know that if you mention someone by name or another personal attribute it will engage them more. For example, here Wedding Wire makes use of a witty form of personalization in a subject line:
This example is in the subject line, but the technique can be used in the body of an email, too. For example, in the Smart Insights Welcome sequence, we call out to different roles like ‘marketing managers’ or ‘digital marketing managers’ with relevant planning advice for them.
If you want your WooCommerce store to benefit from text marketing’s 45% conversion rates, read this article.
For years, e-commerce stores got away with this. Sure, it was inefficient, but the economics still worked.
Now there are too many well-funded direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands playing fast and loose with their marketing budgets. As a result, customer acquisition costs have reached a point where they’ve outpaced customer lifetime value (LTV).
You’re likely reading this because you’re searching for a WooCommerce SMS marketing solution. So, you already have an inkling that text marketing is a great way to reach an engaged audience. You’re also probably well aware of the challenges facing e-commerce marketers.
While you should be dubious of money-making silver bullets, with SMS conversions rates as high as 45%, texting is a cost-effective way to acquire customers.
Why Is Text Marketing So Effective?
People subscribe to receive your texts, your message is guaranteed to reach an audience genuinely interested in what you have to offer. It goes a long way to explain the high engagement and conversion rates businesses see when they send personalized SMS campaigns.
What SMS Messages Should You Send to Your WooCommerce Customers?
Here are some examples of how your WooCommerce store can use texting.
1. Offer SMS Customer Service
Many e-commerce stores use texting to answer more complicated customer questions that require a human response.
Text messages have a reputation for being more instant and personal than emails or webchat, so companies usually make themselves only available to answer questions for a select number of hours a week.
Take a look at this example from Versed, a leading skincare retailer. They offer a hotline that customers can text in for questions:
2. Send SMS Order Notifications
The reason why people like SMS over any other source of communication is that it requires no extra effort and doesn’t disturb their daily routine.
3. Launch Products
You can also use SMS to launch products. If you have a VIP program, consider giving them early access and/or allowing them to pre-order the product.
This can also be an organic way for you to spread the word, as VIPs may naturally share how much they like the product with others in your customer base.
4. Collect Reviews
E-commerce customers are a clever lot: they know that all the shiny adjectives you’ve put into your product descriptions are there to provoke a sale.
That’s why adding customer reviews and feedback to your product pages can help you increase sales. And you can grab your customers’ attention by sending feedback requests directly to their mobile device.
5. Send Promotions
Promotional texts are the bread and butter of most WooCommerce store’s text marketing strategy.
With SMS marketing, you can create a unique SMS keyword that your subscribers can text in to receive a discount code. When your subscribers text this keyword, they’ll immediately receive an exclusive discount code that they can apply to their next purchase.
If you’re new to marketing automation, choosing the best marketing automation tools for your eCommerce could be an overwhelming and intimidating process. Long gone are the days when your decision was limited to the top ten leading tools out there.
To help you navigate this extremely crowded landscape and design your marketing strategy, we put together this practical guide on selecting the right marketing automation software for your online business.
The Importance of Implementing an Effective Marketing Automation Strategy
Better return on investment (ROI) — increase in revenue and average order size.
Time savings
Improved targeting of messaging.
Increase in qualified leads generated by the marketing campaigns.
Example Uses of Automation in Digital Marketing Campaigns
There is a myriad of ways that marketing automation enables you to be more effective and produce a higher ROI on your efforts.
Use cross-channel messages to target potential customers. Some people are more likely to engage with your brand on social media versus email. Marketing automation tools allow you to have an effective customer communication across different channels.
Run precise A/B test experiments. With marketing automation tools, you can easily measure which campaign yields the best result and double down on it.
Boost your email marketing engagement by sending follow-up emails to unengaged subscribers.
Increase customer lifetime value through up-sells and cross-sells with relevant products personalized for each recipient.
Revive old leads with re-engagement campaigns.
Streamline your sales processes and align marketing and sales team more effectively with the use of all-in-one marketing automation systems that provide you with access to marketing tools and CRM features.
Schedule social media posts and campaigns ahead of time
Marketing automation is so ubiquitous today that you’re probably using at least one marketing automation tool already without calling it like that. With so many tools available, it might be hard to decide what exactly do you need.
To help you with that process, we’ve put ten easy tips.
1. Start with your business model
Your business model and processes are greatly going to impact your marketing automation needs. Do you run a B2C or B2B business? Is your business software as a service (SaaS), a mobile app, eCommerce, marketplace, or a service? What does your selling process look like — do you rely on a product-led, self-serve onboarding or you have a traditional high-touch sales model?
There isn’t a single perfect solution that caters to all types of businesses. By understanding your business model, your acquisition processes, and your customer persona, you can make more knowledgeable decisions when selecting your marketing automation toolset.
2. Identify the stage of your business that needs the most attention
Based on the business model and maturity of your company, you may experience challenges at different stages of your marketing funnel. Do you have difficulties attracting traffic to your website? Do you manage to convert that traffic to qualified leads and those leads to customers? What is your average customer lifetime value, and for how long do you retain your customers?
If you struggle with attracting eyeballs to your product or service, you might need to look into a search engine optimization (SEO) platform like Ahrefs or MOZ to help you increase your organic traffic. Maybe you’d want to boost your social media presence and engage better your loyal audience by scheduling regular posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and CoSchedule.
To convert that website traffic to leads, you could A/b test different landing pages and forms with a robust landing page builder tool like Leadpages or Unbounce.
3. All-in-one Vs. best-of-breed marketing automation platforms
Marketing automation platforms come in two general forms: all-in-one suites or best-of-breed tools.
Which one you decide to go with depends on your personal preference, your marketing needs, and your budget.
Best-of-breed tools focus on providing the most robust and sophisticated solutions to a single feature or set of features. For example, Mailchimp helps you with email marketing automation, Buffer with social media, and Ahrefs with improving your search rankings.
There’s a third category of marketing automation products that help you orchestrate and automate tasks between other tools: Zapier, Autopilot, and Encharge.io are a few of them.
4. Consider your budget
Last but not least, you need to consider your monthly budget allowance for marketing automation software. Using the right set of tools is crucial, but what makes a good tool great is the marketer using it. That’s why you need to carefully decide how much you want to spend on these products.
Big platforms like HubSpot, Eloqua, and Market tend to get extremely expensive if you use their full set of features. Fortunately, most of them offer their suite as separate products, so you can subscribe only to the features that you need.
Best-in-class software products like Buffer, Leadpages, SEMrush, etc. are usually most cost-effective, but you might need to use a few of them to cover all of your marketing needs.
Personalization 