Utilizing marketing automation empowers businesses to keep in touch with contacts while they move from considering a purchase to making one; it also helps keep in touch to re-engage customers after a purchase. Utilizing site tracking and deep data integrations, you can create a seamless shopping experience, complete with gentle reminders, by using a few simple automations.
We’ll introduce some of the preliminary setup needed to create these helpful automations that will address: abandoned carts, a contact reaching a goal of making a purchase, and a cross-sell/up-sell incentive campaign for customers.
Getting Started
When preparing to engage meaningfully with potential and actual customers, site tracking is key. Site tracking enables you to record all actions that a contact takes on your web assets, including third-party tools.
You can monitor what pages they have or haven’t visited, where they were referred from, what device they use to visit your site, and how many times they’ve visited a site or a particular page. You can learn more about what site tracking does and how to set it up in our Guide to Site Tracking. (For the quick start guide, you can visit our Help Center documentation.)
Additionally, you can leverage our Deep Data integrations. ActiveCampaign’s Deep Data enables you to integrate your online shopping cart data fully within the ActiveCampaign environment. You can learn more about what Deep Data does and how to set it up in our Guide to Deep Data 101.
The following guide will share powerful automations with the assumption that you have enabled site tracking for your site, and completed your deep data integration.
Abandoned Cart
As discussed in our blog, abandoned carts are a prime target for reclaiming lost revenue for online merchants. Reaching out to potential customers after they’ve added items to, and then abandoned a cart, with the items they were considering and/or related items, is a powerful moment to reach out.
For more information on how to configure ActiveCampaign and your online store, follow along with the integration steps in this guide.
Now in ActiveCampaign, you can leverage the integration to respond to an abandoned cart in several ways. The automation will begin with a trigger of a contact reaching your unique shopping cart URL.
For our example, we will use a Shopify Deep Data integration. After waiting for a pre-determined amount of time (35 minutes in our example), the automation will check to see if the contact has earned the tag “shopify-customer,” which would mean they completed their purchase. If they do not have this tag, the cart will be assumed abandoned.
As seen in the image above, any contact who visits the shopping cart page, and has not earned a customer tag within 35 minutes, will be sent an email reminding them to complete their purchase.
Note: You may want to split test different timing, but current best practices indicate that a quicker email response is key in capturing lost revenue.
If you create specialized particular pages for your specialized products, you can also reach out with more information about that item. Simply create an automation that applies a tag to anyone who visits a particular page.
By using these types of simple automations to tag your contacts with the products they browse, you can create emails with conditional content that speaks to their interests. Check out our Guide to Conditional Content for more information.
Customer Reaches a Purchase Goal
A straightforward goal for an online store is a customer making a purchase. You can learn more about creating data points with your marketing goals in our guide.
Utilizing the same automation as above for abandoned carts, we can add a goal state for people who complete a purchase, as opposed to just ending the automation.
Now that we’ve created a customer goal, we can see metrics around completion, and we can create new automations that begin with this goal. This will enable you to create campaigns that are relevant to a customer. For example, after someone makes a purchase, you can follow up and ask for a product review.
This automation begins with customers who have reached the goal in our Abandoned Cart automation, and become a customer with a tag. After they accomplish their purchase, the automation will send an email asking for them to submit a product review. After a wait state of 2 days, and using an If/Else, the automation will split customers down two paths: contacts who clicked the review link, and those who did not.
Anyone who clicked the link will reach the new goal of Reviewed Product. Those that did not will receive a reminder email, asking them to submit a review again.
You may find that including an incentive for a future purchase may inspire people to leave a review on a product they’ve already bought. You may want to try a split test if you’re curious to see how your customers respond, while remaining conservative about how big a discount you hand out.
Cross-Selling and Up-selling Automation
Our last automation will begin with the customer tag being applied. After a contact converts to a customer, putting them in a new automation that will suggest additional products may be a simple way to increase revenue.
After a contact becomes a customer, the automation will wait one week before sending a cross-selling email. Using conditional content, you can personalize your email to show whatever product they have not purchased.
After a brief 2-day wait step, the automation will check to see if the cross-selling email was opened. If it was, the automation will end, in order to avoid sending too many emails. If it was not opened, the automation will re-send the email one more time.
You can use a similar tactic to create an upselling automation, asking if a contact enjoys their product and would like to add additional items. You may want to consider incentivizing this group with discounts or other perks, because they are proven customers with a real dollar value.
Summary
Using ActiveCampaign and it’s many tools, from site tracking, to deep data, and conditional content, empowers digital marketers to collect data and respond and react to their contacts accordingly, throughout the sales process. While it may take some time and effort to get your shop situated in both platforms, it is well worth the time invested. Automations enable you to interact with your contacts as quickly as you would like while they’re at the point that they are closest to pulling the trigger and making a purchase.
How do you manage your contacts to ensure you don’t lose revenue at the shopping cart? What campaigns have proven most useful in your follow-up? Let us know in the comments below.
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