Your website provides you with real estate for validating claims and educating customers and should be a critical part of every marketing campaign, yet so many marketers toss up a landing page and call it a day. With eCommerce supplanting more and more brick and mortar stores, it may be time for you to re-evaluate your drip and nurture approach.
eCommerce has become easier, more affordable, and created opportunities for more businesses and more kinds of businesses. Applications such as Cart66, Magento, OpenCart, and WooCommerce enable businesses of all sizes to provide an online shopping experience for their customers like never before. Unfortunately, it is not build it and they will come. Like much of the rest of our business, it’s build it, market it like crazy, hope they will come, and beg them to come back. That’s where drip and nurture marketing take the stage.
Drip campaigns are predesigned campaigns sent on predetermined schedule to a general audience — your newsletter is a great example. Nurture campaigns are often called auto-responder campaigns and they are sent in response to an action or interaction with your campaign or site — think of your thank you for subscribing confirmation email. The subscriber filled out a form and due to that action, you automatically acknowledge her action and thank her. Perhaps in two weeks, you will send her another email, but you might also automatically enroll her in your newsletter campaign.
Many of today’s shopping carts have auto-responder capabilities built in. When an order is placed, a confirmation is sent. When a shopping cart is abandoned, a reminder is sent. When an order is shipped, a notification is sent. All of these are nurturing messages and all good ideas, but let’s take your campaign a step further.
In November, I will be presenting at the WooConf event in San Francisco [LINK] http://conf.woocommerce.com/[/LINK]. This event is primarily for developers of the WooCommerce shopping cart for WordPress, but also draws a fair number of marketers. In my talk, I will focus on what I see as the top three concerns for an online store: Buy Now, Buy More, and Buy Again. That is: sell a product, upsell and cross-sell other products, and build a relationship resulting in return customers. I achieve these goals with drip and nurture campaigns.
Your first email is designed to introduce your store — invite visitors and entice them to make the initial purchase. This is neither a drip or nurture campaign, but more probably a single blast email. For the purpose of my example, depending upon how the blast is received, you will net those who are engaged and those who are not — more specifically identified as the passive (clicked but did not buy) and the active (clicked and purchased). These two groups now represent the members of the drip and nurture campaigns.
For the passively interested, start them out with a drip campaign designed specifically to find the trigger that turns their passive interest into active participation (buying). A newsletter is probably a bit too slow for this group, so think more about a weekly specials email. Offering various products and discounts through A/B and multi-variant testing, you should be able to identify key influencers. Drip campaigns should be designed with a single theme enabling you to keep development costs down and in a manner enabling you to make on-the-fly updates and announce specials. Our drip members are the Buy Now group. We want to figure out what it takes to get them to buy now.
For the more actively interested, let’s nurture their behavior. They have clicked and are in the process of making a purchase, so how can we encourage them to either increase the value of the purchase or add other products to increase the value of their cart? This is the Buy More group.
If they have started a cart, but not checked out, reminder emails keep the conversation active and presents the ideal time to introduce other products complementary to those items in their cart. You can use the tried and true, “other people who bought this item also bought,” or offer links to reviews and case studies. This is where your website real estate becomes so valuable — and why we will not launch an automated campaign that does not have adequate website support. Point these recipients to stories, videos, or other documents helpful to the education and conversion processes.
For those who have checked out — great! you won a new customer — but don’t let too much time pass before you reengage them and remind them of other must-have items in your store. Learn from what they purchased and offer other items in the same category or similar category. This is our Buy Again group and personalization is key here (as it is with the Buy More group). Emails should be very specific and speak directly the items they’ve purchased. You might also ask them to provide a review of the product, if your site supports this.
If you’re ready to start selling online, it’s a great time to do so. Software for ecommerce is inexpensive and flexible — you can customize to meet nearly any need. While your store is important, the ease of use paramount, and stability critical, don’t forget to turn an evaluating eye to your marketing and messaging. Both are likely in need of a few tweaks here and there to help achieve Buy Now, Buy More, and Buy Again.
