Communication is at the heart of e-Commerce and community. Those were the words of Hewlett-Packard former CEO, Meg Whitman. And in today’s complex B2C e-Commerce environment, she’s not wrong. In order to make the best of all the traffic you’re driving to your online site, companies need to make an effort to understand their consumer base, encourage relationship-building and deliver content and product offerings that are aligned to their consumer’s interests. But what does this mean exactly and how can it be achieved?
Well, here’s another quote for you. Data, Data, Data! I can’t make bricks without clay. You can thank Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for that one. The success of your webstore hinges on three things, great products, good data and most importantly, having the right tools at your disposal to make use of that data. Whether you’re in B2B or B2C e-Commerce, that requires a marketing automation tool kit to keep on top of all the data at your fingertips. Now here at Spotler we know a thing or two about marketing automation (Shameless plug in, I know) but we’re here to talk about the essential marketing programs that you need to be running in order to engage consumers effectively and ensure that you don’t miss out on any sales opportunities. So, without further ado, let’s break them down.
Welcome Programs
First contact. The warm greeting. In other words, make sure you get this right. A great welcome program is considered by most marketing professionals to be the most important feature of any automation strategy for one simple reason, this is your chance to present yourself and your services. You never get a second chance to make a good first impression and in e-Commerce it’s no different.
Your welcome program sets the benchmark for what your customers can expect going forward, you should be quick to introduce your services and any unique selling points that differentiate you from competitors. It’s also important to ask your customers for their preferences so you can tailor all of your communications to suit their areas of interest. Which brings us on to…..
Nurture Programs
Once your customer base registers their preferences, nurture programs represent your best opportunity to market to them effectively, turning those one-off purchases into repeat buyers. In your nurture programs, you need to be promoting category or product specific offerings based on your customer preferences and any insights you have on webstore interactions. Make sure to tailor any email campaigns to segmented audiences to drive further sales growth.
Cart Abandonment Programs
We’ve covered why it’s important to have cart abandonment campaigns in a previous blog but just in case you missed it, cart abandonment programs are a vital cornerstone to your e-Commerce growth. So vital, that if deployed correctly, they could help you recover as much as 63% of sales that would otherwise have been lost.
These types of programs represent an easy win for any marketer, in essence because much of the hard work is already done. Your lead has signalled buying intent by adding items to a cart but has left before being able to complete their checkout process. With a simple triggered campaign, you can nudge your visitors and get those deals over the line. Remember that cart abandonment programs are time sensitive so you’ll want to be sending out campaigns within 24 hours of your leads leaving their cart and make sure to include good calls to action in any follow-up to guarantee you close those sales.
Cross-sales and Loyalty Programs
Standing still is never an option in the world of e-Commerce and once you have a dedicated audience, you’ll want to make sure that you’re fulfilling all of their needs or else they’ll start looking at other sites. In order to achieve this, you need to incentivise your customers to stay with you and this can be achieved through your cross-sales and loyalty programs.
With your cross-sales program, you can introduce complementary product categories to previous customers based on their stated preferences and site interactions. As with your nurture programs, remember to stay customer-centric in all your campaigns, nobody wants to receive a promotion of a product category they’ve never looked at or have no legitimate interest in.
It’s not all about selling though, the overall e-Commerce customer experience for your buyers is just as important as any promotions you send them. Make sure to implement loyalty programs by awarding points for purchases or offer further incentives such as free shipping for bulk orders. Establishing tiered systems and reward programs for different customers based on their purchase history record is also a good way of separating who your loyal, repeat customers are from the less frequent one-off buyers.
Putting it all into practice
As with any automated marketing program, you’re going to want to make sure that you’re employing a data driven strategy in order to extract every possible insight into your consumer’s purchasing behaviours and activities. By implementing these marketing automation programs into your marketing roster, you’ll make sure that your customers distinguish you from other competitors and identify your site as the place to meet their needs. If you’d like to read more about B2C marketing automation in action, give our e-Commerce Brochure a browse and start adding all of these features to your marketing tool kit.
