In last month’s blog we went through the top ways to get your website ready for the traditional craziness of quarter 4 in eCommerce (if you missed it have a read HERE). As you know if you have been following us for a bit we believe that your eCommerce store is an ecosystem and every single touchpoint your business has with someone forms a part of that ecosystem. Your website is at the eCommerce store’s core then it is surrounded by your email strategy, organic SEO, Google ads, Facebook ads, and organic social media and all the other things!
If you are at the beginning of your eCommerce journey with a brand new spanking store after your website the first thing you should do is get your email strategy on point. If you are an established or existing eCommerce store this is your little reminder to up your automatic email game.
When we say emails in relation to eComm we think these can be broken down into two major camps – the Flows or Automatic emails (these ones happen when a specific action by someone occurs) and your campaign, newsletter or broadcast emails (this one requires you to set them up for every single send out).
While we believe that an ongoing campaign/newsletter strategy is one you should have in place to continually educate your amazing subscribers what we want to focus on here is the automatic flow emails!
We acknowledge that these can be a daunting task to setup and configure – but trust us they are worth it! Here are some of the reasons why we think you should bite the bullet and make sure you have these set up and ready to go for quarter 4:
- Lots of work to set up but when set up they run on autopilot – even while you sleep
- Able to make tweaks and test things easily to improve outcomes
- Easily reengage customers
- Remind customers to restock as they run out
- Recover abandoned carts without thought
- Upsell to customers depending on what they have previously purchased
This may not seem like super compelling reasons why, but think about it – the average cart abandonment rate for eCommerce is between 70 to 85% (stat taken from Shopify). Imagine being able to put an email on autopilot to help you convert some of these abandoned carts into purchases. Or, what about being able to reengage past customers that haven’t been active on your website for a bit and reminding them that you are there with some of your fave products that they will find useful. Or what about reminding people to restock as they get close to running out of your amazing products?
Email automations are a great way to have things just happen without you having to remember to do something, a great way to generate income without having to complete extra work on top of your already crazy workload.
This is great in theory but what are the MUST have automations you should put in place to get the most out of your Quarter 4 traffic increases? These are our no brainer must implement automatic flows for eCommerce stores.
- Signup Form (with incentive) – delayed popup form is our go to with a teaser
- Abandoned Cart Flow
- Welcome Flow
- Reengagement and/or Restock Flow
- List Cleaning Flow – remove inactive subscribers so you don’t have to pay for them
These flows help every other aspect of your ecosystem perform better. Some extras that you can implement to help your eComm store ecosystem perform even better are:
- Post Purchase Thank You Flow
- Upsell/Cross Sell Flow
- Happy Birthday Flow
- Browse Abandonment Flow
- First Purchase Anniversary Flow
- Back In Stock Flows
You can combine any and all of these and all of the triggers and splits and tests inside each of these automations will be unique to you and your eCommerce store. There are a lot of things to tweak within each flow as well – what is the trigger, what should you be cross selling on how long should you wait – get the idea?
To make sure you can make the most of the extra quarter 4 traffic and visitors to your site make sure you set up (for a new business) our top essentials or tweak and optimise these (for an existing configuration).
If you are looking for an eCommerce email solutions then we highly recommend Klaviyo – especially if you are on Shopify. As always if you need help with any of this or you want us to do it for you just let us know!
Sa & The Site Unicorn Team