A show of hands: who isn't already using email in their e-commerce environment?
Even if you raised your hand, chances are you're using at least one form of email communication on your e-commerce site; Payment Confirmation. Most payment processing platforms give the customer a receipt via pdf download, confirmation email, or print option.
The premise of this post is to offer some other ideas on how to use automated email in your e-commerce strategy. I encourage you to browse some of my best email marketing agnostic ideas, like those I covered in 7 Awesome Ways to Wow Your Customers Using Voice on Your e-commerce Site. Those are communications that could easily be sent by email, sms, or voice. They include:
O.K. the title of the post says 11 cool ways and I totally just listed 5 of 'em, but I've already covered how to leverage those using voice, and as is the case with multi channel marketing the concepts remain the same - only the vehicle changes. So hang on, let's stick with the payment confirmation email and see if we can't add some spice to it...
6. Payment Confirmation Email
I haven't met a person yet who doesn't expect to be given a payment receipt after a purchase whether online or in-store. In fact, it's one interaction that the customer needs and values. It's not optional, a receipt must be given.
The disadvantage of a paper receipt in-store is that the interaction ends as soon as the clerk slides the boring little ticket across the counter to the customer. Black and white, OCR text with nothing interesting on it at all.
The advantage of an email receipt is that it can be dynamic and leverage real-time data so that you can upsell and cross-sell more product to a customer who has already chosen to buy from you.
I'll go more in-depth on exactly HOW to do this in future blog posts. But in a nut-shell you can pull in the customer's past browsing data from your analytic provider, marry it with the customer's recent purchase data and show them products that relate to the purchased products and/or the categories for which they have shown an interest in. All within ExactTarget.
We have productized integrations with many analytic providers including Omniture, Google Analytics, Coremetrics, WebTrends and others.
Really, you can use cross-sell/upsell & product recommendations in EVERY email you send. Why not? Some of these next ideas you could easily mix and match into any of your sends.
7. Couponing / Live Offers
Did you know that ExactTarget can render 25 different coupon types including Codabar, UPC, EAN and MSI? Well we can.
Did you also know that we can manage your coupon redemption on a global or a per subscriber scale with data provided directly from your payment system? What that means is that we can make it impossible to redeem a coupon more than once if your concerned about sharing, OR, using our social network capabilities help make a single coupon viral.
8. CRM Integration
We have productized CRM integrations with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM that not only allow you to send to reports generated in the CRM platform but allow you to pull in real-time data from the CRM vendor at time-of-send. That means you can pull in purchase data or account data (past due invoices, CRM campaign data) and show content according based on the subscriber.
These integrations have exposed AMPScript functions that you can use directly in the content of your emails to CRUD your CRM data.
9. Follow Up Email Drip Campaigns
With ExactTarget, you can automatically send an email (with dynamic content, product upsells, coupons, etc) on a set number days AFTER a purchase or notable site event. Some ways to leverage this capability are to ask for product reviews, checkout feedback, or to offer a coupon or promo code to return to the site and buy something else.
10. Abandoned Shopping Cart
Another powerful automated email that your ExactTarget system can send on-the-fly is the time tested abandoned shopping cart email. It goes something like this: 'we noticed that you put the following items in your cart, but didn't checkout. Was there a problem with your checkout experience? Click here to finish your checkout with an additional 10% off all the products that were left in your cart.'
There's More
E-commerce sites are perfect candidates for black-belt database marketing because of the amount of transactional and behavioral data they collect. Do you have any ideas on how e-commerce sites can use email in their marketing strategies? Post them in the comments below or come chat with me at our Connections User Conference this fall.
Even if you raised your hand, chances are you're using at least one form of email communication on your e-commerce site; Payment Confirmation. Most payment processing platforms give the customer a receipt via pdf download, confirmation email, or print option.
The premise of this post is to offer some other ideas on how to use automated email in your e-commerce strategy. I encourage you to browse some of my best email marketing agnostic ideas, like those I covered in 7 Awesome Ways to Wow Your Customers Using Voice on Your e-commerce Site. Those are communications that could easily be sent by email, sms, or voice. They include:
- Send-to-a-Friend
- Dynamic Couponing (I'll revisit this one)
- Shipping Alerts
- Product In-Stock Notifications
- Subscription Renewal Reminders
O.K. the title of the post says 11 cool ways and I totally just listed 5 of 'em, but I've already covered how to leverage those using voice, and as is the case with multi channel marketing the concepts remain the same - only the vehicle changes. So hang on, let's stick with the payment confirmation email and see if we can't add some spice to it...
6. Payment Confirmation Email
I haven't met a person yet who doesn't expect to be given a payment receipt after a purchase whether online or in-store. In fact, it's one interaction that the customer needs and values. It's not optional, a receipt must be given.
The disadvantage of a paper receipt in-store is that the interaction ends as soon as the clerk slides the boring little ticket across the counter to the customer. Black and white, OCR text with nothing interesting on it at all.
The advantage of an email receipt is that it can be dynamic and leverage real-time data so that you can upsell and cross-sell more product to a customer who has already chosen to buy from you.
I'll go more in-depth on exactly HOW to do this in future blog posts. But in a nut-shell you can pull in the customer's past browsing data from your analytic provider, marry it with the customer's recent purchase data and show them products that relate to the purchased products and/or the categories for which they have shown an interest in. All within ExactTarget.
We have productized integrations with many analytic providers including Omniture, Google Analytics, Coremetrics, WebTrends and others.
Really, you can use cross-sell/upsell & product recommendations in EVERY email you send. Why not? Some of these next ideas you could easily mix and match into any of your sends.
7. Couponing / Live Offers
Did you know that ExactTarget can render 25 different coupon types including Codabar, UPC, EAN and MSI? Well we can.
Did you also know that we can manage your coupon redemption on a global or a per subscriber scale with data provided directly from your payment system? What that means is that we can make it impossible to redeem a coupon more than once if your concerned about sharing, OR, using our social network capabilities help make a single coupon viral.
8. CRM Integration
We have productized CRM integrations with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM that not only allow you to send to reports generated in the CRM platform but allow you to pull in real-time data from the CRM vendor at time-of-send. That means you can pull in purchase data or account data (past due invoices, CRM campaign data) and show content according based on the subscriber.
These integrations have exposed AMPScript functions that you can use directly in the content of your emails to CRUD your CRM data.
9. Follow Up Email Drip Campaigns
With ExactTarget, you can automatically send an email (with dynamic content, product upsells, coupons, etc) on a set number days AFTER a purchase or notable site event. Some ways to leverage this capability are to ask for product reviews, checkout feedback, or to offer a coupon or promo code to return to the site and buy something else.
10. Abandoned Shopping Cart
Another powerful automated email that your ExactTarget system can send on-the-fly is the time tested abandoned shopping cart email. It goes something like this: 'we noticed that you put the following items in your cart, but didn't checkout. Was there a problem with your checkout experience? Click here to finish your checkout with an additional 10% off all the products that were left in your cart.'
There's More
E-commerce sites are perfect candidates for black-belt database marketing because of the amount of transactional and behavioral data they collect. Do you have any ideas on how e-commerce sites can use email in their marketing strategies? Post them in the comments below or come chat with me at our Connections User Conference this fall.
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