By Michael Bower

As their name implies, customer lifecycle emails are sent out during the ‘lifetime’ of the customer – not his natural lifespan, but the period for which he is a customer, or a prospective one. You may already be sending out welcome emails when they sign up, transactional emails like order confirmation and shipping notifications, and even marketing email in the form of newsletters. What you are probably not doing is sending out other types of emails that have the potential to increase sales, such as educational/informational emails centered around one of your products/services.

1. Shopping cart abandonment emails

If you are not sending them out yet, you should – 67.45% of all shoppers on e-commerce sites abandon their carts before checkout. The frequently cited reasons are ‘Website crashed’ and ‘Website timed out’. While these are technical factors that you may have no control over, you could win them back with shopping cart abandonment emails. These save them the hassle of not having to select the same items all over again and add them to their shopping cart. Interestingly, 44.1% of all shopping cart abandonment emails are opened and read. For some, it is the final price that is preventing them from making a purchase. They might have been enticed by the offer price, but shipping and taxes may have pushed it to an unacceptable level. A discount is all it takes to get them to complete the purchase.

2. Personalized emails

Notice how many eCommerce kings are using “Recommended For You” sections on their site? These add a personal element to return shoppers and translate perfectly into lifecycle emails. They should contain information regarding related products to your customer’s search and purchase habits. If your customers have had a great shopping experience with you, they are more than likely to buy from you again. Sometimes they just don’t know that you have that other product they’ve been looking for. A small nudge in the right direction does a lot more than a shot in the dark with general products.

3. Customer re-engagement emails

If there are customers who have purchased from your site, but it has been some time since their last purchase, you could win them back with emails that tell them they are valued customers. Emails with “Hello, how are you?” in the subject line with a personal message in the body mentioning how they haven’t shopped with you recently can prove effective in bringing these customers back. Add coupons and attractive discounts that compel them to make their next purchase. Try not to include product images or specific product discounts in the email body for personal re-engagement emails. These tend to de-personalize the first message. But general coupons with simple imagery can work well to add return incentive in a personal email.

4. How to do it correctly

The first step is to get the tone of the email right. This is best learned from experience, as what may work for one customer base may not work for another. You need to manually write emails to your customers using a variety of styles and see which ones work the best, or rather, which styles are the most suited for the types of emails mentioned above. A good trick to start writing personal emails to start testing what works better is by imagining the customer you’re writing to. Start with a name and determine little things about them that help you imagine who they are. By doing this, you’ll unintentionally write much more relationally and have a better chance of coming across as personal. Try multiple styles with separate customer blocks and test which ones have better results.

Now that you know what strikes a chord with your customers, you need to come up with email templates that still sound like they were written by a real person. These can then be programmed into an email software. You could have one that handles all your mailing, or you could choose specific software for certain types of emails.

5. The shortcut: email software

It’s really good to work through all of the above steps yourself, but that doesn’t make the tools I’m about to list any less helpful in the execution. Here are some of my favorite options for lifecycle email software:

Carthook

Carthook is an email software that specializes in cart abandonment emails. It’s a one-trick pony, and it does that trick exceptionally well.

Windsor Circle

Geared towards customer retention, Windsor Circle is a platform for sending out re-engagement emails. The cost of acquiring a new customer works out to be five times as retaining one, and so it makes financial sense to get you existing customers to buy from you again. For three of their clients, Windsor Circle manages to deliver revenues of $1.03 per email.

MailChimp

It can be used for all types of emails, including welcome emails and transactional emails. They have added product recommendations and shopping cart abandonment emails to their repertoire of features, and that makes MailChimp all the more attractive as a one-stop solution for all your needs.

Custora

This software suite takes care of all your emailing requirements. Custora makes sense when you have at least 200,000 email list subscribers already.

Drip

Drip does more than send out marketing email. It studies which visitors are most engrossed with the content on your pages, identifies them as the strongest possible leads, and then sends out email. This intelligent approach has landed their clients many new customers, and the lightweight software comes at a tenth of the price of comparable products.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is built specifically for e-commerce sites. Klaviyo’s email templates are responsive. More and more people are accessing the internet on their mobile devices, and the number of mobile-only internet users has exceeded the number of PC-only internet users. Make sure that when your emails are sent, the ‘From’ email address is something that recipients can respond to. It should appear to have been sent from the account of a real person, not something like ‘sales@company.com’ or ‘care@company.com’. It only puts customers off when they read ‘This is a system-generated email, please do not reply’. You could even try adding ‘Sent from my iPhone’ at the end to give it a personal feel, as long as the emails sound like they were written specifically for the recipient.

Crafting a customer lifecycle email timeline takes work and time to perfect, but I think it’s the best customer-to-sales retention method out there and well worth the time and effort to setup. Let us know if you have any lifecycle email secrets that have changed the way you sell and don’t hesitate to call us if you want to talk to us about setting up a strategy that works best for you.

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By Michael Bower

Non-Stripe Backdrop

Stripe’s been in the general business news a lot recently since they’re getting ready for IPO. I’m not interested in discussing their valuation but rather an interesting feature they quietly released a couple months ago.

Back in September “Stripe Relay” was announced as a new way to add ecommerce into mobile apps and services. As launch partner, Twitter demonstrated a “Buy” button using Stripe Relay.

Stripe Relay screenshot

I thought about blogging about Stripe Relay back in September, but felt reluctant to do so.

Maybe a better word is cautious. After all, social commerce isn’t anything new. As a store owner you’ll probably remember the mad rush back in 2010 to figure out a way to do ecommerce on Facebook…but it never took off.

Putting products for sale on Facebook pages just kind of kills it, feels forced and awkward (if you have a Facebook store page and it’s doing great, more power to you. I’m talking about the general trend).

Shopping Mode

It’s a universal truth that people who aren’t in “shopping mode” don’t want to be sold to. Just remember the last time somebody somehow called you on your cel phone about “the latest Visa and MasterCard negotiated rates” when you were in a meeting.

I’ve been mulling it over, and the reason I’m excited about Stripe Relay is there might be a way here to allow merchants to get around the “shopping mode” mental roadblock.

Here’s my theory: with Stripe Relay, the purchase is not an interruption — it’s inline with the rest of the social media experience. Contrast this to the scenario from 5 years ago, the encouragement to “come to our Facebook store” couldn’t possibly feel natural because it was by definition an intrusion.

Starbucks at Church

Maybe this is why I have always felt weird about those churches that have a Starbucks inside them. Some of you know what I’m talking about — it’s a Starbucks literally inside the church. At church but need a coffee? It feels commercial, feels disconnected, feels like I’m at least semi-leaving the church experience to go into the retail experience and then come back out into the church experience.

Thought experiment: Imagine the coffee magically appeared in the pews, unobtrusively so it can be ignored if desired. This would be a profound improvement on the church Starbucks experience. Okay, that felt sacrilegious. Scratch the church analogy but hopefully you get the point.

Let me try to picture this a different (better!) way. Think about when you go out with friends to do something other than shopping. You may have paid for an activity or bought a drink in order to add to the social experience. But nothing is more frustrating than getting taken away from time with friends to deal with something about the payment for the meal / round of golf / whatever.

For further thought…

To me, Stripe Relay is interesting because the user never feels they’re having to transition into shopping mode…they stay in social mode. The option of buying is added with literally zero friction. It’s a “no UI” purchase experience.

And that’s as far as my thinking has gone. What do you think? Am I right about why Stripe Relay could be awesome?

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By Michael Bower

Not all customers want to be delighted!

This thought hit me while I was putting together a new (and undoubtedly awesome) email course on how to optimize your Magneto site.

Picture your favorite places to get gas, buy prescriptions and lug groceries…the BEST stores of their kind you can remember. As you think of when you transact at these locations, I’d be willing to bet you’re not feeling delighted. Calling them your “favorites” might even seem like a stretch.

If you’re like most people, you go to these common stores not because you’re delighted with them but for another reason entirely: CONVENIENCE.

Convenience is one out of many alternative motivations to delight that drive purchasing. Purchasing motivations seem to correlate by industry:

What do all these have in common? In each case, when the motivator is delivered well, the purchaser experiences satisfaction.

Here are a few things I think are true about purchasing satisfaction:

1. Satisfaction looks wildly different to different audiences. It takes some genius to satisfy many types of people at the same time.  This is one reason many businesses that do well in a single niche market fail to make an impression when expanding.

2. Satisfaction can grow or wane over time. In some cases, the value delivery just has to maintain a consistent level (think McDonalds). In other types of scenarios, the value delivery must continually increase (think movies). What would we think of a director with “consistent” movies?

3. Satisfaction doesn’t necessarily result from the first purchase (especially if this isn’t a “delightey” business we’re talking about). But satisfaction has to grow over time in order for the purchaser to feel positive and refer others.

What do you think? Does satisfaction really drive purchasing? What can you do to deliver consistently increasing value to your customers?