SAMPLE ECOMMERCE TECH STACK AND AUTOMATION STARTER PACK

When you first dive into the world of ecommerce automation, the list of things you “could” automate is long—and intimidating:

• Tripwire campaigns
• Upsells and cross-sells
• Abandoned cart emails and automations
• Winback campaigns
• Bounceback campaigns
• Automations triggered based on average order value
• Automations triggered based on the lifetime spend of a customer
• Automations triggered by specific product pairings and categories
• Order confirmation, fulfillment and tracking
• Product interest intent signal automations

Automation can get complicated quickly, and some of the intricate parts of automation can accelerate sales.

At the same time, some types of automation are more critical because more of your customers see them, and they have a bigger effect on sales.

This starter pack shows you how to get started quickly. Your store’s set up. Now it’s time to connect the other ecommerce tools and set up your quick-win ecommerce automations.

We’re giving you a solid foundation, but if you want more, here’s how you find the best parts of your business to automate.

How do people find your store? Do they…

• Find an influencer posting about your product and swipe up?
• Search for your product category and find your website on Google?
• Hear glowing reviews from their friends, who are already your customers?

Ideally, it’s all 3 (plus 100 more). But if you really needed to nail down the most important channel for your business, what would you choose?

Your answer helps you uncover the areas to focus your attention. Here are some of the most common areas we see people focus on to grow their ecommerce stores.

To find new customers, top ecommerce stores use:

• Instagram influencer campaigns, especially micro-influencers, that drive to a landing page
• Facebook/Instagram ad campaigns (often using our Facebook Custom Audiences feature) that target key audiences with great creative
• Product pages that rank for the most important searches in their product category
• Word-of-mouth and customer referral campaigns that aren’t left to chance, where existing customers are automatically prompted to refer their friends

A customer is likely to look for information after hearing about you but before going through checkout. Here’s where you should focus next:

• Potential customers look for product information, price, shipping, and other questions on your website
• They look across third-party sites to find reviews of your product or business
• They look at competitors and comparison shop to find great deals

During the checkout process, they:

• Look for FAQs on your website
• Search around for coupon codes
• Go through your checkout flow and “add to cart” functionality
• Use on-site chat to ask questions

Listing out every customer touchpoint can be tiring, but it helps you find moments you can optimize. Every customer goes through your checkout flow, so make sure it’s easy to use. Every customer hits “add to cart,” so you should have automations in case they abandon those carts. These are small, tactical efforts, but can return a lot of value.

If you want the most bang for your buck, think where automation will have the biggest impact.

1. The moment just before someone makes a purchase decision
2. The moment just after someone makes a purchase decision

This starter pack gives you automations for both. Here’s why we’re giving you these specific automations.

It’s hard to convince someone to buy from scratch. But if they’re already thinking about a purchase, it’s easier to nudge them towards buying from you. That’s why the moments before a purchase decision are so impactful. A quiet little nudge in the right direction can be the difference between a sale or no sale. This starter pack has 2 automations that target the moments before a purchase decision:

• An ecommerce welcome series with a tripwire product
• A 3-step, optimized abandoned cart automation

Why these 2? An ecommerce welcome series is for people who joined your email list but haven’t bought anything yet. They’re people who are interested enough to learn more but might not actually buy anything unless you send them an offer. “Tripwire” automations are designed to get people to pull out their wallets. They send an automated email series that offers a low-priced product, often at a discount. The idea is that once someone buys from you once, they’re more likely to do it again, especially if they have the option to save their payment information.

Think about that: every new email signup immediately gets a great offer that could turn them into a customer. Before, these people weren’t getting any messages, so every sales is a bonus. Abandoned cart automations are the real deal. According to the Baynard Institute, 69% of online shopping carts are abandoned. People add items to their cart, then click away—whether they got distracted, went to a competitor, or just changed their mind—and you lose the sale.

The beautiful thing about abandoned carts is that you know exactly what product they’re interested in! You could never manually email every person that abandons a cart, but an automation like ours takes care of that for you, and can recover sales that would otherwise slip away.

Abandoned cart automations aren’t a secret, but the one we’ve included in this starter pack goes a step farther. With 3 steps (across multiple channels) instead of the typical single email, each message is tailored to take a different approach toward winning the sale.

When’s the absolute best time to push for sale? Right after a sale! After someone buys from you, they have momentum. They’re ready to buy, (they just proved that), so if you can make the right upsell or cross-sell offer, you might just get them to order again.

What if they didn’t buy? That’s a good moment, too.

If you know someone was thinking about making a purchase (say, because they added something to their cart but didn’t buy), you have an opportunity to make them a better offer. Sometimes that means related products, sometimes it means offering a coupon. Here are the 2 automations included in the starter pack for this impact moment:

• Follow up with your new customer, and offer a related product
• Offer a coupon after a potential customer leaves without buying

Why these two? Following up with a new customer is a quick way to get another sale. You know that your products go well together, so all you have to do is show your customers! One of the great benefits of this automation is that it increases the value of every new customer. That means when you get a new customer, you can expect them to spend more, which also means that you can afford to spend more on advertising and marketing in order to get new customers.

One way to get new customers is to offer a coupon to missed customers. Why didn’t a customer buy? There are a number of reasons, but immediately after a missed sale is a great moment to follow up. If you can win back the customer, you have the opportunity to start a longer-term relationship with them (not to mention the actual initial sale).

There’s one more impact moment: customers who have purchased in the past but stopped buying. It’s impractical to manually email every person 2 months after they buy from you. But if a customer liked you in the past, it’s not crazy to think that they might want to buy from you again. They could have gotten busy, forgotten about you, or not had another product in mind to buy. That’s why the final automation recipe in this starter pack is a 60-day winback automation.

This automation automatically follows up with your customers if they go 60 days without making a purchase. Offer your most popular product or a great coupon deal to get more from the people who you already know are interested in your business.

That’s why these are the highest impact moments to target with your ecommerce marketing. Make sure to check out ActiveCampaign’s starter pack to get started.