LET THE CA$H FLOW
A Guide Full Of Growth Tactics For Your eCommerce Store
VIRAL LOOPS & CONTACTPIGEON
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Let The Ca$h Flow
Table of contents A few words by the authors
2
So, what is this book about?
2
Acquisition
4
Signup forms
5
Improving the registration experience (thus, attract more sign ups)
5
Catch them before they fly away like a pigeon!
7
Viral & Referral Marketing Tactics
8
Classic Referral Campaign—inspired by Gilt
9
The eCommerce Loyalty—inspired by Nordstrom
11
Content Marketing
12
Famous Smoke Shop's cigar pairings
13
How to use Content Marketing to boost your sales
16
How to create a Lead Magnet
17
Content distribution
18
Converting visitors to customers
21
Bad website performance
21
Target the right people
23
Eliminate distractions
25
Make purchasing a piece of cake
26
Wipe out abandoned purchases
26
Browse Abandonment
27
Cart Abandonment
28
How to setup abandonment campaigns
30
Improving Retention & Repeated Purchases
32
Retention through automated campaigns
34
Before You Go
36
VIRAL LOOPS & CONTACTPIGEON
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A few words by the authors We will start by doing a reality check. You downloaded our new book and now you’re reading these lines because your eCommerce doesn’t perform the way you expected: • You don’t have enough traffic. • Your conversion rate sucks. • Your customers don’t come back as often as you want. • The amount of $$ you use to drive your sales, matches or exceeds the $$ you make. Are we right? I’ve been there, and I know all the bad thoughts that come along with that kind of problem: • “I need to work more.” • “Maybe this is not the thing for me.” • “F*#k that, I can’t take this anymore.” Let us make it a bit clear for you: • You don’t need to work more. You need to think smarter and act faster. • All the events in your life, brought you here. This is THE thing for you! • You can take much more than you can imagine.
So, what is this book about? Throughout this very eBook, you will get a deeper understanding on what can make or break your eCommerce store. In addition to that, we’ll present you tools and how you can utilize them to take your store one step ahead of competition. ! Further inside, you’ll have the opportunity to learn the best ways to grow and retain a healthy contact list and traffic for your store. We’ll also teach you the art of increasing your conversion rate. Finally, we’ll get through on the why’s and how’s you should increase your long-term customer value through continuous nurturing and engagement of your existing customers.
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Acquisition
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Acquisition This is the first step of your sales funnel and consists of all the channels you use to drive eyeballs to your store. There’s a great misconception about this step, as most fellas out there believe that the broader your funnel is, the more sales you’ll get. Imagine if Supreme clothing was targeting 40 year old construction engineers and housewives along with young rich kids that like Kanye West and Tyler The Creator. The CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) would be disastrous. " YOU DON’T NEED MORE PEOPLE VISITING YOUR STORE. YOU NEED MORE OF THE RIGHT PEOPLE. Click to tweet You have to understand that acquisition and branding are holding hands like Murad Osmann and Natalia Zakharova.
If you know your customer persona you should treat your branding accordingly. In case you want to learn more about branding you can follow Ignyte’s blog.
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But this is not a book about branding. You are here to learn how to bring in more customers, right? Currently there are 5 organic methods you can use to boost the way you acquire customers: 1. Signup forms 2. Viral & Referral Marketing 3. Content Marketing 4. Social Media 5. SEO I have to say that although each of the aforementioned ways can stand alone, it’s better for you to combine them for maximum results.
Signup forms I don’t know if I need to try to explain why building a prospect list is vital. People like Noah Kagan & Neil Patel already expressed their opinion on this subject. But, I will give you some clues: 1. You can create a personal bond with people (and that’s a #1 priority) 2. It allows you to share with them things relative to your brand that might interest them (more bonding) 3. You are be able to provide them with hot deals—which should be relative to their buying habits 4. You can reduce your cart abandonment rate 5. In comparison to Social Media (which is just rented land), email marketing is a channel you own and control So, how do you get people to sign up? First, you’re going to need a sign up button (duh!). Chances are you’re using an eCommerce platform like Woo Commerce, Shopify, Magento or BigCommerce, which all include the option to put one on your store. Improving the registration experience (thus, attract more sign ups) Adding a button doesn’t necessarily mean that people will rush to register until your servers melt.
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There are certain things you can tweak to ensure success of this vital step in your customer’s journey. First of all, must make sure that your registration button is easy to find. I know it may sound obvious to you, but there are stores that don’t really seem to like this approach.
People usually expect this button to exist on the upper right corner of your website, so make it visible and keep the message clear. For example: “Create Account” As nobody really wants to waste time filling endless forms, you should keep your registration form, as short as possible. At this stage, you don’t really need people’s address/tel. number/birthday/marital status/eye colour or whatever nonsense some stores are asking people, establishing failure in converting visitors into prospects. Their email address, their password and first name are enough. " FIRST NAME, EMAIL & PASSWORD ARE ENOUGH TO REGISTER. GET MORE INFORMATION OF YOUR CUSTOMERS LATER ON. Click to tweet
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This approach is one of the foundations of marketing automation. Let’s say you have an apparel store for both men and women. The first step to market your products successfully is to learn the user’s gender. You can setup an automated email in ContactPigeon that will be sent after the registration asking them for more information with the angle of getting more personalized offers. Even better, you can gamify the experience by getting the data through a fun quiz. You get the point. The more you learn about your users, the more possible it becomes to land to their eyes products that they desire. We will take a more detailed look on that further down the book. In order to keep your registration forms even shorter, you can also add the ability to use social logins. At the moment we’re writing these lines, more than 10 million websites are using them! You have to keep in mind that most people are very keen on being distracted, that’s why you must make sure to remove all possible distractions on your registration page. Do people really need to see your navigation bar when they complete the signup form? Catch them before they fly away like a pigeon! Do you know what people are fond of doing apart from being distracted? Abandonment! It’s horrible and that’s why you have to use “horrible” counter-measures to fight it. Beautiful people, we know you hate pop-ups. The problem is not pop-ups; It’s how people use them. Right timing, copywrite and incentive are what makes some brands convert a ton of customers with pop-ups and build a massive email list. You can create an exit-intent pop-up, offering last minute offers or first subscription bonus. Like Sun of a Beach does by giving10% off if you subscribe to their list.
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If you don’t trust me, maybe some case studies about exit-intent pop-ups will help you make up your mind. We’ve been using that method for over two years now, scoring an astonishing 6% Conversion Rate (yes it’s astonishing if you think that 6 out of 100 people that were about to leave, and most probably never come back, finally registered).
Viral & Referral Marketing Tactics Why pay for new users, when you can reward your existing ones for bringing them? This is a marketing channel that giants like Airbnb and Jet.com leveraged to grow their customer base massively. In case you don’t know Jet.com, it’s one of the fastest growing eCommerce stores and acquired by Walmart for around $3 billion.
Airbnb Referral Page
Jet rewards for top referrers
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" UTILIZING REFERRAL CAMPAIGNS FOR YOUR ECOMMERCE, ENSURES THE ACTIVATION OF A NEW AND AFFORDABLE ACQUISITION STREAM. Click to tweet Possibilities are endless as you can reward your customers with different amount of discounts, depending on the number of new customers referred by them, or by giving them the opportunity to claim prizes from sweepstakes or contests based on the number of referral signups. Before getting your hands dirty, you should answer two questions: 1. For what kind of action do you want to reward your customers? 2. What is the reward you’re willing to give? There are 2 scenarios that can work for your store: Classic Referral Campaign—inspired by Gilt This campaign will help you acquire new customers and increase sales for your store. Here is how the flow works: 1.Person A invites person B. 2.Person B gets a discount coupon, say $20, for her first purchase. 3.Person A get the same discount after person B completes her first purchase.
People can invite their friends if they are already customers of yours, or just subscribed to your emailing list (e.g. through one of our widgets). This allows more people to send out invites and increase your viral factor. If you don’t want to spend time in designing a custom page for your referral campaign, you can use the Viral Loops chat-style widget in all your pages.
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Viral Loops Widget
At the heart of the referral campaign concept are the rewards that you will offer to your super fans that bring referred purchases to you: the reward for referrer and the reward for the invitee, to encourage their first purchase at your store. You can offer two types of rewards: 1. Fixed amount off, say, $10 off 2. Percentage discount, say, 20% off Your customers will be able to refer many friends to your store. You could, if you wish, set an upper limit to the amount of coupons you want them to get through the referral campaign. We recommend you leave this to “unlimited.�
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The eCommerce Loyalty—inspired by Nordstrom Your customers gather points by participating in your campaign with repeated purchases, by leaving reviews or inviting their friends. Points add up and when a milestone is reached, say 500 points, they get converted to a discount coupon code. Customers can share their unique referral link through the Viral Loops widget that they see embedded in your store. People that follow referral links back to your store can get a coupon code for a discount towards their first purchase (“Invitee reward”). When they purchase, their referrer wins points. Points can also be awarded for repeated purchases from the same customer. For example, they can win 100 points for every purchase over €50. Or 200 points for every purchase over €50 that’s within a week or month from their last purchase—this helps you increase frequency of purchase. The same customer can win points when these actions are done by their referred friends —“referred purchases”. For example, they can win 50 points every time one of their referred friends makes a purchase over €50. And so on #
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Content Marketing Well, this is one of our favorite topics. We don’t trust paid advertising and hell, we don’t trust salesmen. We’re consumer first, so we trust the emotions that products inspire. Guess what a regular #everybodydoesit Facebook ad or “newsletter” does not provide; It surely provides information about the specs and the price of a product, but it doesn’t give something really important. EMOTION. " ADS & NEWSLETTERS WITH NO INSANE VALUE AND COPY DO NOT CONVERT BECAUSE THEY LACK EMOTION. Click to tweet Ever wondered why GoPro has so many passionate customers? The 4K & full HD video quality in a tiny package is just the tip of the iceberg. GoPro became what it is because of its user-generated content. Content that even inspired people to start a sport or just get out on the road and record life.
GoPro Instagram Account
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That’s what content marketing is about. Offering the chance to your customers to experience your products not on a physical level, but rather on an emotional level. " CONTENT MARKETING IS ABOUT GIVING THE CHANCE TO YOUR CUSTOMERS TO EXPERIENCE YOUR PRODUCTS ON AN EMOTIONAL LEVEL. Click to tweet Let’s see 3 examples of e-Commerce stores that nail content marketing: Famous Smoke Shop's cigar pairings
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Famous Smoke Shop created "a hilarious guide" to cigar and spirit (or beer) pairings! • Site visitors select a spirit, such as rum or tequila, or a beer. • They then choose an activity, like "trying to pace yourself to stay sober" and the site presents a cigar to fit the situation. • On the recommended cigar pages, the visitors not only get reviews and information about the pairings, but also a call to action to purchase specific cigars from the site! This guide works because Famous Smoke Shop found a way to make the pairings fun and, of course, conversion oriented.
Nordstrom men's suit guide
Nordstrom developed an online "How to buy a suit" guide that is featured front and center on its men's suit page.
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As Jason Seeba, CMO of the eCommerce technology company BloomReach says: "This guide is excellent, helping a man pick the perfect cut to fit his style and then presenting him with personalized shopping recommendations.�
Duck Brand Duck Brand's site emphasizes "creativity, adventure, and tape", along with a home DIY section that offers video tutorials, projects and how-to articles, Also, they recently sent two friends to six destinations in a Volkswagen van, posting vlogs from their adventures at locations such as Mount Baker and Portland. They nailed turning an everyday product into stories using content to create emotional connections to their brand.
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How to use Content Marketing to boost your sales Producing content is like building a door that visitors use in order to enter your store’s universe. Your content, whether it’s a blog post, a video or just a Facebook post, should give people the incentive to take action. Actions can be direct or indirect to your goals. Direct means that people will make a purchase and indirect that visitors will turn into leads for further nurturing. Asking people to purchase immediately has the same probability to work as asking a model on the road to go on a date with you. " ASKING PEOPLE TO PURCHASE IMMEDIATELY HAS THE SAME PROBABILITY TO WORK AS ASKING A MODEL ON THE ROAD TO GO ON A DATE WITH YOU. Click to tweet So, now that we brainwashed you to trust indirect conversions, you probably wonder how to get those leads. LEAD MAGNETS is the term you’re looking for $ So what is a lead magnet? Here’s an awesome definition from digitalmarketer.com: Lead Magnet – noun – an irresistible bribe offering a specific chunk of value to a prospect in exchange for their contact information. Apart from getting new leads, lead magnets can act as an excellent first step on learning more information about your existing leads and run better email campaigns. Anything related to your business could serve as a lead magnet, as long as it solves a customer problem. And as Sujan Patel, growth and content marketing expert, puts it: " CREATE CONTENT SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER THAN YOUR BEST COMPETITOR—SUJAN PATEL Click to tweet
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Some common examples: • Coupon codes • Free shipping • Guides • Daily Promotions • Free gifts or giveaways • Participation in contests
✌ Pro Tip: Don’t forget that people are lazy and constantly in a rush! If they can read or watch something later, they will prefer it that way. Give them the opportunity to do so, by packing the content for them. Chances are that eventually they will never make use of it, but you will have their email. YOU WIN!
How to create a Lead Magnet The easy way (and the cheapest) is to use whatever piece of content you already have, that performed really well. If it’s an article, turn it in an eBook. If it’s a video, turn into an article, and so on. This is the infinite loop of content repurposing. You have to keep in mind that providing exclusive content as a lead magnet will probably perform better; so if you have the resources we’d advise you to invest in it. Now, in order to get people’s emails you obviously need a signup form. You should place that form on a dedicated landing page. That way it would be easier for people to understand what they are getting—like we did with this eBook & We’ll not go in detail on why building dedicated landing pages are important from an SEO perspective, but we’ll just say that it gets easier for your content to be included in other people’s blogs. Actually, it’s a great way to get more backlinks to your site and improve your rankings. What are you waiting for?
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Content distribution Crafting content and promoting it are two art-forms, completely irrelevant to each other. You, mate, have to master both. “But I’m not a writer!” “I only know how to write!” If you don’t know what works on distribution, you can’t adjust your writing style, and you can’t really distribute content if you don’t have a deep understanding on what the content is really about. So, let’s see some popular distribution channels: • Email • Social Media • Communities and forums • Paid Advertising Email You should treat your email lists well. Email marketing still works (believe it or not)! And especially for eCommerce stores it can be the channel with the highest ROI (Return On Investment). You have to make sure that all your contacts are segmented and scored in order to run super personalized campaigns based on those segments. You need to deliver the right content to the people who actually care about it! " IF CONTENT IS KING, THEN CONTEXT IS THE FORCE. Click to tweet
Social Media Your social media accounts act like a window for the world to take a look on your brand and culture. When trying to distribute content on social platforms, you should really spend some time into adjusting this content to the aesthetic of each platform.
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You have to understand that people use each platform for completely different reasons, and that’s why your content should be adjusted accordingly. One of the fastest growing social media networks for eCommerce is Instagram. If you want to become an Insta ninja, follow Zach Benson, Jonathan Chan and Justin Wu— the best Instagram growth hackers out there. ' Communities Using communities just to distribute your content, might be the worst kind of tactic as it can destroy your credibility among the people that exist there. Communities and forums are being created to provide value, that’s why you should really engage and keep your branded posts on the 1/10 of your overall posting. Answer, ask questions and always provide value! It might take long but it really pays off eventually. Currently, one of the best growth tactics is to build a Facebook Group and share insanely actionable tactics, like Josh Fechter does with Badass Marketers & Founders (BAMF) Traffic & Copy of Vin Clancy and Charlie Price is another great marketing community.
Paid Advertising Before proceeding on spending tons of money on vague targeting, you should really investigate the potential of each platform. My personal favourite paid advertising tactic is remarketing. We usually run paid campaigns only to people that landed on our blog in the past, prompting them to come back. It’s cheaper and acts as an opportunity to land again and again to sets of eyeballs that may be interested! Another great idea is to utilise Facebook Videos as it’s 10x cheaper than normal ads. " VIDEO IS THE SMARTEST & CHEAPEST FACEBOOK GROWTH HACK IN 2017—JOSH FECHTER Click to tweet
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Conversion
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Converting visitors to customers We had to the opportunity to work with quite a few eCommerce stores the last 3 years. Most of them thought that their main problem was that they didn’t have enough traffic. Yes, traffic is important. But, what happens when you have 100K monthly visitors and only 0.5% of them actually buy something? There are two things you can do to solve this problem: 1. Acquire more visitors (hope you have the budget) 2. Optimize your Conversion Rate—hmmm, this sounds more affordable In our experience, there are 6 common scenarios that can demolish conversion rates: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Bad site performance Awful targeting Too many distractions Low customers retention rate Purchasing process is hard High Abandonment Rate
Bad website performance Allow me to explain; You have to make sure that your site performs the way it’s supposed to, in all browsers and devices. • Does it take a lot of time to load? People will leave. (btw, 3 seconds is a LOT) • Does it have the slightest bug? People will bounce mate! So, how can you spot and fix these conversion killers? Well, for your site speed you can start by: • • • • •
Choosing the right hosting company Optimizing your images Making use of browser caching Compressing your site code Optimizing your styles (CSS) and scripts (JS)
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Some of the above may sound technical, but if you use a popular CMS, like WooCommerce, Magento, etc. you can install several plugins to get the job done. You can take a look at these articles, as they offer a more sophisticated approach to the particular subject: 15 Tips to Speed Up Your Website • How to Improve Your Page Load Speed by 70.39% in 45 Minutes • 10 Ways to Speed Up Your Website – and Improve Conversion by 7% • 5 Easy Ways to Help Reduce Your Website’s Page Loading Speed • Get rid of bugs! ( You have to find in which browser and device your website underperforms. To do so, open up your Google Analytics and go to Audience Technology Browser & OS report.
Bear in mind, you must search at one device category at a time—use segmentation for Desktop Only, Mobile Only and Tablet Only. Drill down to a specific browser version (e.g. Firefox 36.0, 35.0 etc.) and look for browsers that seem to convert less than others.
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So, if for example Firefox 36.0 & Firefox 27.0 convert at 4.5% and Firefox 35.0 converts at 1.22%, it's possible that version 35.0 has some cross-browser issues. We would recommend to add the performance of each browser separately in a spreadsheet. The next step is to discover how the number of conversions would be if Firefox 35.0 (converting currently at 1.22%) converted as Firefox 36.0 or Firefox 27.0 (currently converting at 4.5%). This is a smart way to prioritize your efforts on fixing the bugs according to the conversion rate optimisation expert, Peep Laja of ConversionXL. Now that you know where to search for the issues, it’s time to find them. For this, it's not required to have a ton of devices with every browser version installed. Thanks to services like BrowserStack, CrossBrowserTesting and Browserling these otherwise annoying tasks become a piece of cake. Note the bugs down and start with fixing them (or you can give them to a developer). If you want to get more ideas about how to boost your conversions GrowthRocks has published a great read: Conversion Rate Optimization: Do or Die!
Target the right people At the introduction of this book, we outlined an example with the New York-based brand Supreme. But let’s give you another one. What if Goodbye Bread, one of the coolest fashion brands, was targeting women 45-65 who love opera? You can’t really expect to sell to teenagers looking for creeper shoes, by landing them to your vague shoe category. Not everyone belongs to your funnel. ¯\_(ϑ)_/¯
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People know what they are looking for when buying online (maybe not the exact product, but they have an idea), so you should give them what they want without allowing them to waste time. Most eCommerce owners and marketers assume that from the moment someone lands on their store, they are ready to buy and that the reason their Conversion Rate looks like ) , is that there is something wrong with the store itself. The quality of your acquisition channels is critical. Making sure the right person lands on your store increases the chances for that person to buy. So, how you do that? • Build themed Landing Pages • Create more content around your products • Level up your Email Marketing • Use remarketing the right way and use Facebook videos In order to get the insight needed in order to build the right campaign, you have to give a detailed look on your existing customers. Look for demographics, common interests, and behaviours.
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Who are they? What’s their age? What do they like to purchase? What is the path your best customers follow on your site?
Eliminate distractions Most people are very keen on being distracted. You have to ask yourself on which pages you don’t want your visitors to have the slightest interruption. Easy answer: Start from your Checkout page. Get rid of anything that can get visitors out of the checkout page. This includes: • Navigation Menu • Search Bar • Showcase of other Products • Footer By excluding the navigation menu and search bar, all irrelevant distractions are eliminated and this allows the consumer to focus on making the purchase. That way you can also highlight other important information like delivery details and customer service contact details. In addition, security messages get more exposure, offering emotional security. Also, that way it's made clear to visitors in which step of the checkout process they are and how many steps they have left to complete the transaction.
ASOS checkout page
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Make purchasing a piece of cake Let’s think consumer-wise for a minute. What makes a perfect online purchase? Why people buy stuff online even if the same brand’s physical store is located 10m from their apartment? The answer is TIME! Convenience. “Time is money” is more relative than ever before. You don’t want to waste your customer's time. The first step of doing so is to create an amazing navigation menu. If I’m looking for a red shirt, I want to be looking at it in seconds! Now that I found my soon-to-be favourite red shirt, I want to add it to my cart. Is the “Add to Cart” button in the right place? And what does the “right place” mean after all? The right place is everywhere your customers’ eyes land. Your button should be always visible. Whether the visitor looks at the pictures of the product or scrolls down to read the specs.
Wipe out abandoned purchases Browse and Cart abandonment are a HUGE chapter on Conversion Rate Optimization. Just think that browse abandonment applies to approximately 93% of visitors. " BROWSE ABANDONMENT ON YOUR ECOMMERCE STORE APPLIES TO APPROXIMATELY 93% OF VISITORS. Click to tweet Since you’ve invested so much time and money to bring these visitors to your store, it’s really a shame to lose them just like that.
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Below, we will examine what you can do on such occasions. Note that in order to proceed you will need those people’s email addresses. Browse Abandonment Browse Abandonment occurs when a visitor leaves the site after browsing products without placing items into the shopping cart. Your goal is to make these people come back and complete the purchase they abandoned or continue on browsing through your offerings. Some interesting facts about abandonment campaigns: 38% open rate, 10% clicks, 0.8% conversion to sales. Rates change by retail sector. A trigger for your campaign could be that the user browsed the same product or product category more than once, or made a direct search of the product. Often people browse a product once and drop off. We would not recommend to include such a behaviour in your “triggers,” as it’s not indicative of consumer interest. Keep in mind that you should respond to abandonment soon, and follow up accordingly. Best practice suggests within the day after, with subsequent messages within the week if no visitor has returned. The way you have to communicate your message depends on the reason, and type of abandonment. Let’s see the most effective ways to gain the trust of the user and convince them to make the purchase: • Deliver the photo of the product front and center. This will act as a reminder of their interest and can be delivered either via social remarketing or email campaign. • Include additional best sellers. Just because the user didn’t feel like buying a certain product, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have another product that might fit their needs. • Use any real-time inventory data. Imagine the user coming back to buy the product, just to find out that it’s out stock. Bummer. • Leverage other customer reviews on the product. If others recommend a product, it’s more possibly for someone to buy. Social proof is one of the best psychology hacks.
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• Provide relevant educational topics. People are almost never sure of their choices. Sometimes all they need is to feel that their choice is supported by a third person. It’s your duty to help them make the final choice.
Cart Abandonment This is by far the most common scenario happening on an eCommerce store. A user adds a product on their shopping cart and then doesn’t checkout. This might be happening for one of the following reasons: 1. After adding shipping costs and taxes to the total, people get frustrated. You can deal with this by providing free shipping for purchases that exceed a certain amount of money. Also, you can display all the prices including taxes. 2. Customers don’t feel their transactions are safe. First of all, you have to make sure that all transactions are safe indeed (one scammed customer is enough to destroy your reputation). Then, you should provide some security proof, like banners from the security service you use etc. 3. People conduct pricing research after they added their product into the cart. The only thing you can do is to make sure that your prices are competitive—or that you provide some extras that your competition doesn’t. 4. You don’t provide variety of payment methods. 5. The lack of more than one shipping method. Standard mail delivery can really kill the momentum for some customers. Try adding some express delivery option for them. 6. Your payment option is not mobile friendly. Unless you’re running on a mobile app, you have to make sure that people can actually pay from their mobile device.
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Cart abandonment campaigns are by far the most popular as they take place, nearly, at the bottom of the funnel. They have been proven to be very effective as shoppers are close to the conversion, and all it takes is just some gentle nudge to push them to checkout. A great Cart Abandonment campaign consists of 3 things: 1. Context—you obviously have to inform people what they’ve left in their cart. 2. Copy—“you forgot to buy your ITEM” doesn’t works. You have to make both your subject and email body appealing. 3. Creative—although a plain-text email might do the job, adding a suitable photograph can act as an emotional trigger. BlackMilk Clothing found the perfect balance: Some nice-to-have features for your campaigns: • Offering discounts—You must be thoughtful about this as it may work as a double edged dagger. If people realize you offer a discount every time they abandon their cart, they will start doing it on every transaction. • HTML emails—That kind of emails are able to create a WOW moment for the customer as they breathe out an air of perfectionism and exclusivity. The cons are that they are usually very expensive and also they might not be displayed right in all email clients. GIFs also work like charm. &
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• Item reservation—You can encourage your customers to go through checkout by guaranteeing that you’ll hold the items for them for a limited amount time. How to setup abandonment campaigns Now let’s take a look at the basic elements of how you can build some abandonment campaigns using ContactPigeon. * I’m not going to get into heavy details, as ContactPigeon already has step-by-step setup guides: • Browse Abandonment Reminder Campaign • Cart Abandonment Campaign For both campaigns, all it takes is 5 simple steps: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Create a new scenario Select the desired campaign type Set the timeframe in which the campaign should be triggered Insert the code into a dynamic campaign Set up the automation campaign
You’re all set! #
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Retention
Let The Ca$h Flow
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Improving Retention & Repeated Purchases On an interview we held at GrowthRocks Blog with Dan Wolchonok, he made things pretty clear: “If you don’t have good retention, nothing else matters.” " IF YOU DON’T HAVE GOOD RETENTION, NOTHING ELSE MATTERS.—DAN WOLCHONOK Click to tweet
According to Hubspot, on an average eCommerce store, 8% of the traffic is generating 40% of the revenue. Guess what’s that 8%. " ON AN AVERAGE ECOMMERCE STORE 8% OF THE TRAFFIC IS GENERATING 40% OF THE REVENUE —HUBSPOT Click to tweet
People that purchased from you 2 or more times. !
Satisfied customers are more likely to buy again from you. This practically means that focusing more on bringing these people back again is cheaper than acquiring new customers. “But how do I achieve that?”
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You can start by providing ASTONISHING CUSTOMER SERVICE. Be there 24/7. Answer all questions and offer your help. You can even get them a pizza + —like Rackspace did with their Fanatical Support. Another strong incentive is by providing exclusive offers/discounts. Personally, I like reward programs which, in a nutshell, means rewarding existing customers for taking specific actions (e.g. making a purchase or inviting a friend) by using a point system.
UO Rewards by Urban Outfitters
You can easily build a rewards/loyalty program for your store using Viral Loops for eCommerce.
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Retention through automated campaigns We’ve already covered the importance of retention for your store in the chapters above, so we’ll just mention a quick recap. “A returning customer is worth significantly more, given how much a typical eCommerce store spends to acquire new customers vs. retaining long term relationships with existing customers.” So, what type of automated campaign can you leverage to keep people coming back and buying from you? Repurchase Reminders If, for example, your store sell liquids for vaping fellas, you can send them an email based on their previous purchase, the time it will take until they will need to buy their liquids again. Based on the same criteria you can send a campaign including a special offer considering their most preferred product with an addition of other relative products. Setting up a repurchase campaign is much easier than it might sound! Birthday & Anniversary Offers It’s a sure thing that you know when a customer made her first purchase from your store. It’s also very possible that you know their birthday. These sets of data might act as an opportunity to make them an offer they can’t refuse. (‘Godfather’ quoting never gets old). , On “your anniversary” you can offer them an irresistible discount on some products that belongs to their spectrum of interest. On their birthday you can offer them a specific gift when they make a new purchase. We’re gonna use the Vaping Store example again. You can offer a 50% off for all vaping liquids on “your anniversary” and you can give them (for free) one bottle of liquid for their next purchase.
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Possibilities are only limited by your imagination (and budget of course)! New Products & Hot Deals We think it’s pretty straightforward, so instead of telling you what to do, we’ll will just tell you what not to! Please, don’t send every new product or deal to everyone. Trust us, women are not interested in men’s pyjamas (unless it’s father’s day, which then is a good idea). This kind of campaigns should be as targeted as possible. That way you ensure more people will engage, keep unsubscribe rate low and increase the chances for new purchases.
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Before You Go HOORAY!
If you are reading these lines, it means that you really enjoyed what you read! If you just skipped all the chapters then it’s your loss pal. There are some really awesome things to learn in the previous pages. If you knew all the above just shoot us an email and we’d be more than happy to share with some of the advanced growth hacks for eCommerce—new book coming. We hope you enjoyed reading our book and learned things you crave to test yourself. We don’t mean to keep you more here—you have to start creating—so we’ll just close this book by saying this: “No matter how small you start or how tired you feel, keep on hustling like a champ ‘cause you deserve the result you are fighting for. GODSPEED” Viral Loops X ContactPigeon
This book was crafted with true love from Apostle and Joyce.
Apostle Mengoulis Grandcontent Flash at Viral Loops
Joyce Qian Strategy & Growth at ContactPigeon
Savvas, George, Sober and Dimitris from Viral Loops contributed—from adding emojis to getting the best music for inspiration. Last, many kudos to our brothers and sisters in GrowthRocks who support us every single day. .
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Viral Loops is an all-in-one viral and referral marketing platform helping businesses acquire more customers through word of mouth sales.
ContactPigeon revolutionizes email marketing and turns the one size fits all email campaigns, to perfectly timed personalized messages.
Our campaign templates are inspired by the most impactful referral programs from companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, Urban Outfitters and Monzo.
We build customer profiles and let you use our unified platform (Email marketing + CRM + Analytics + Remarketing) to not only automate the process of creating and distributing beautiful messages (emails and in-site content), but also dynamically react to both customer behaviors and catalog changes in seconds. All that is needed is a single piece of JavaScript and the desire to evolve.
eCommerce owners and marketers can build referral programs, prelaunch campaigns, viral sweepstakes, and loyalty campaigns which can be integrated in any website or mobile app in minutes through our code snippet, eCommerce plugins or API. Brick and mortar stores and retailers can also use Viral Loops to drive foot traffic from their website to their physical store with our Online To Offline Referral template. On the data layer, Viral Loops offers the ViralGraph which tracks and optimizes how people affect each other regarding their purchase behaviour. Learn more at www.viral-loops.com
We deliver millions of messages every day and we take pride into knowing that our clients rely on our analytics engine to process millions of real time events, to build rich visitor profiles and scale their data-driven marketing. Send less messages but make more money, that's our promise. Learn more at www.contactpigeon.com